Nothingness for Love

 

May 6

“As you proceed along the Way, you will attain a state of everydayness…
Why leave behind your proper place, which exists right in your own home, and wander aimlessly off to the dusty realms of other lands? If you make even a single misstep, you stray from the Great Way lying directly before you. . .
Form and substance are like dewdrops on the grass, destiny like the dart of lightning—vanishing in an instant, disappearing in a flash.” (p. 5, The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, trans. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe.)

The next section in The Heart of Dogen’s Shobogenzo tells of Dogen’s “pilgrimage in search of the Dharma in Japan and China” (p. 7). 

     This text and other recent readings open wandering amid the paradox:  A) the lifelong search for the Way, and Z) right alongside is realizing “the Great Way lying directly before.”  Of course, the answer is Love, God is Love. Here, there, everywhere, there’s only the One Love. But what a great mystery this makes in living it out!

     From life’s journey supported by fabulous readings, perhaps there’s come an absorbing of  “nothingness.” Accepting the mystery of love conjoins with my inability to say “I love” because love transcends my naming-containing it as if I could give love. And yet by getting lost/found in submission to the I/not-I, a possibility seems given for love-coming-through. God loves. With this realization, the not-I opens for a flow, like a space through which the wind is moving. 

     Also around 3:32AM, I note the movement through life’s journey by “not” (again, the theme of recent recent readings and posts).  Early on, a detour (an about-face?) happened in this life journey when forced to admit I’m not a preacher (despite Mother’s wish) yet I’m given (a thanks-for-trying prize) a devotion to rhetoric and a (different?) career path. Then drawn by love’s hand into the mytho-poetic but soon enough comes hard knock of not : Not belonging there and not a poet. Yet provided a surprise-gift of a dedication to teaching-story.  In addition, Fate decrees: Not a city dweller nor university professor but this propels to woodland stewardship in our cosmic ecosystem. 

May 6

Another no/not was to a dream design combining quantum storytelling with natural horsemanship. Instead a blog writer reading theology and musing in the middle of the night.

Way. No way. Dewdrop journey from
Fundamentalism but
Disillusion with hellfire conversions into
Relativity. Multiplicity. Philosophy &
Analytical psychology to
“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell; 
Mythopoetics with Robert Bly & Gioia to
Teaching Story— 
Poetry, especially Rumi—but not a poet so
Sweat lodge & “Day for Men” for twenty years…
Then to Sufi healing but not a healer. And
Confronted by the “Death of God”— 
Return to Jesus, theology of the cross.
From Existentialism to Oneness to
Emptiness & Nothingness. Thus
The Way. Is. no-way

May 7 dawning