158: It was on the mountain that I learned to do nothing...

It was on the mountain that I learned to do nothing. The nothing that is nothing to people living in cities and towns; the everything that is sometimes called, “spacing out.” I sit at the window and watch the impact craters of the rain. The puddles they conspire to form and the brief streams that will lead then off this mountain and inevitably to the oceans and to the sky. Here I sit and watch the grass grow, and to me this is doing something, this is everything. I call it paying attention. I do this for a day or two, sometimes, and wonder why I never did this before I came here. It is all too obvious, but so inconceivable now I’m away from those reasons and they are banished from my life. Water falls from the sky and we fail to comprehend the miracle.

Don’t listen to this if you want something to happen. Nothing happens. If is one of life’s secrets. This illusion of direction of time. The significance of events, of happenings, are placed by ourselves, by our cluttered minds. Time is a kind of sphere we cannot comprehend, where things bump into each other and gradually things are revealed.

There are times when I can go days without speaking, but I can not but help to communicate everything – none of us can. Everything we do is expression. Silence. What is silence? It is the ignoring all of the ambient nothing trying to communicate its existence to us. How light escapes the underneath of rain clouds. Tapestries of light and dark animated to shape and form. Absorbing the purples and the solidity of the hills across the valley. Graying the lake.

No matter what else I intend to be doing, I am always finding myself looking to the mountains.

It was here I learned how to be quiet. Quiet is different from silent. Silence is an apparent absence. Quiet is a comfortableness, a blending and a respecting of the space around you. I learned how to be quiet here. The value of words is the exchange of, of, of what? What are the limitations? I barely have begun to find them, feeling out their invisible perimeter. And at the same time, they are nothing, they are empty. I look out at the whole of the visible world from my porch, and take in the mass of life extending to the horizon . The wholeness engulfs me, amazes me, and reduces me to a humble huddling awe – and the words I add to it and inflict on it are empty of even the smallest part of its greatness, and there is so much more than the so little I see. So how can these shadows say anything? But at the same time, they fill us with the emotions felt by a speck of life from 200 years ago, now long past dust. Thoughts like these keep my mind going in circles for days trying to figure out what is what until I realize I am trying to define and know and set what can not be known, set, or defined. It’s best, sometimes, to leave these thoughts to themselves, and to let them continue to live in their flux, and get back to chopping wood or whatever else needs to get done. My mind wants to be clear when doing things like that. I need to put such conceptions to rest before I approach the Zen of sweeping my floor or chopping wood, stacking wood. If your mind isn’t empty, you couldn’t possibly do these things correctly. The mind empties, expands out, and dissipates into nothingness, leaving the body to act without conception, the nature of the action replacing thought making repetition and boredom impossible. In these times, friction, momentum, force – they all take care of themselves. All these somehow uniting into a process that produces firewood or dust piles. You bring the wood in and the dust piles out, and thus entropy is appeased for a brief time.

Then the pine needles stir because of a breeze and the whole miraculousness of the world rushes back in and the mind spontaneously condenses, and everything is incredible again instead of just being. The branches sway and the trees bend and suddenly you are back thinking of some old love story. I don’t know how it happens. These sudden reminders know no reason or because. Somehow they link despite time and space and suddenly you are making love in some old apartment, and crying at remembering how you loved and gave yourself up to the passion as the leaves give themselves to the wind. Life is strange; life is strange; how many times will I say it, love is strange. I watch the squirrels and birds from my window as I write, and none of these words make them behave differently, not at all, not if I opened the window and read them out loud. They are so much more used to my voice than I am now. Everything is related. All things exist in a huge sphere and bump into each other from time to time.

Read back, read forward, re-read this page. How could you deny it to be true with all this proof?

©2010 by Jonathan Neske

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