The winter storm finds me
watching the trees swaying
against a gray and moving sky.
I feel the Buddha's thought,
if what he experienced
could be called a thought,
as the trees swayed
...continuous, elegant, flowing....
The raw beauty of it rendered
on the canvas of no-mind.
...being and presence and timelessness...
cold and wind, winter and death
and beauty all here....
I watch them sway like they did
when the mastodons roamed the north
and men wore skins.
Such a small glimmer of focused awareness are we
amid the turbulence and tumble of existence.
Identified with our names
our jobs, our bodies, our personalities
and our memories
we go blind almost all the time.
Surely, those many centuries ago,
Buddha watched other trees in a storm
and felt the same benediction and blessing
as I am feeling here.
I know his thought
and I feel his joy for a moment.
But he turned and walked away into the rain,
and chose to advance, openly, towards his death.
And he gave up every fiction and every pose.
He chose to meet existence in the raw
and found the roll of God's thunder
while we sleep
and barely feel the breeze.
gallagher
16 dec 87
Newport Beach
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —