[Photos: “Life Story in Wood, #2 (Color and Black-and-White),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

This week, whiskey river tossed me a lovely poem which engendered a cascade of thought. And because cascades of almost anything — especially thought — are better when shared with (off-loaded onto?) others, I thought I’d give it some air here today:

Rare Moment

A clear choice
is so sweet. Not
reluctant complicity but
real resistance
to spring.
Joy-to-bursting,
or none. Grief,
not gradients.
Someone essential.
Someone not.
A good, dark
strike-through
versus
weighing everything
at the end of each day.
Look, a cat killed a cardinal
on an emerald lawn.
For so many reasons
it shouldn’t have been
beautiful.
But that’s also the kind of book
I like best.

(Lia Purpura [source])

This poem reminds me of a passage I’ve cited here before:

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear…

You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.

(Alan Watts [source])

The desire for extremes — for definitive answers instead of bet-hedging throat clearings, for a black-and-white world to relieve us of the shades-of-gray (or worse: full-color) panorama of the real world — well, it’s understandable. “Sometimes, Dr. Freud,” so goes an old joke, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Nuance is exhausting.

But the secret to real peace, for me anyhow, lies in accepting that one thing is seldom if ever just one thing — not even that one thing. When our attention snags on a cat, a cardinal, or a lawn (and pace Lia Purpura, whose work I dearly love), to the exclusion of anything else, we’re agreeing to let ourselves be conned by the way the world hides parts of itself within itself. We agree to favor the macro over the micro.

A convention, it is — a convenience — because who can possibly make sense of, even live in a universe of hissing subatomic particles and invisible forces?

A conversation between The Missus and me sometimes starts like this: she’ll be sitting alongside of me, or at the other end of a sofa; she’ll be reading, or working a puzzle, or something similarly absorbing. As for me, I may also have a book or laptop at hand, but I’m not looking down at it: I’m just kinda staring, at nothing at all — into a corner of the room, out a window, at a blank TV screen…

Suddenly I’ll hear The Missus’s voice: What? she says. Huh? I reply. She clarifies:What are you doing?

There’s almost never anything going on between my ears at the moment. I can’t presume to say I’m “in tune with the cosmos,” let alone approaching nirvana, or even simply “meditating” as such. But when the spell is suddenly broken, I suddenly become aware that — for a moment, at least — I didn’t exist apart from everything else. I wasn’t attending to anything. I wasn’t preferring Thing A over Thing B, was making no decisions or plans, wasn’t thinking or imagining. Not at all… And during that time, there were no shades of gray, no colors, no blacks-and-whites.

Of course, now I’m of an age when — for all I know — I’ve actually just experienced and been rescued from the consequences of a mini-stroke, or maybe a mini-fugue state (if there is such a thing). (Haha. Sort of.)

But in terms of its impact on me, such a moment always gives me a sort of peace — by reminding me, not in so many words or in any words at all, that there is no “me” apart from The Missus or the sofa we’re on or a tree dying out on the lawn or a cat stalking a cardinal (or the cardinal so stalked). In such a state — which is to say, in reality — I have no reasons to be angry or envious, proud or ashamed, friendly or reserved. I’m not wanting anything, I’m not even lacking anything. All of which says: I’m doing just fine, despite doing absolutely nothing.

Which brings me to one more literary offering, without comment:

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

(Robert Frost [source])