Roaring tinnitus this morning in my now blocked, deaf left ear. My experience of the world is now temporarily different and yet the open awareness of it remains clear and unchanged.
A solitary lamp illuminating the corner of the room. Ringing, hissing tinnitus; shrill, clean and precise.
I am very lucky to have a job in which I spend most of the time in a state of flow. No distracting, pointless, discursive inner monologue. Someway, somehow my usual identity of self falls away and ‘I’ cease to do the work but instead am the work.
This is neither special nor ordinary as these words are referring to that which defies all descriptions and labels.
The noise coming through the wall from next door is simply just that - sounds free to be sounds leaving no trace in awareness.
Each of us has our own story about death and grief but in the end that’s all they are. Distracting images and tall tales about everything but what is.
The fire again. Crackling and sputtering a fuss over damp logs. The dog is here, still but watchful. Dinner past, we sit in silence and read.
There is no Buddhism here, no Zen, no Advaita, no Dzogchen, no awakening, no enlightenment, no spirituality, no tradition, no duality or non duality. Just the cool brush of breeze through window, the exquisitely simple pain of loss and these words appearing out of nowhere.
The raw, unmediated pain of grief of an individual I support at work. There are few if no words that can meet such anguish. Simple unseparated presence of being is all one can bring in this moment. To hold, to allow whatever arises.
Birth, life and death are not personal
but we make them so
Who are we to claim them as our own?
These miracles of the universe are free
to come and go as they please
with the weather and the birds