Mandala

 2006/

I follow the Nada, inward past stands of poplar and thorn-apple. Crickets chirp in the cloister, in the early evening, when I return from the lake. Enveloped in a silence so palpable it devours me, I prepare a simple meal. Fresh cheese, cider, an onion. Later I will sweep. And each stroke of my broom is etched so clearly against the adamantine walls of my awareness that it is an explosion of sound and movement like swans in the rushes, flying upward against the stillness, almost painful in its presumptuous lucidity—startling, hallucinogenic, and strangely tinged with violence. Death comes to me here. Shy, but unafraid. She passes with a smile, and I bow to her. We were lovers once.

A visitor from the village comes by with fresh eggs. Wrinkled and toothless, god in her old eyes. Once I would have though such eyes had seen too much. But no longer. When reverie ceases we are scoured clean like bleached driftwood. Nothing remains to us, not even the silence and the emptiness. Eventually not even sleep will offer escape from ourselves. The silence will follow us even into our dreams. And we dream--of waking. Eventually even humility falls away. Some will go mad, then. Some embrace the wind, and some will return to their lives forever changed by that which rests eternal.

Nothing special. Nothing spiritual. Just the divine in all of its stark and searing inexorability—rhythmic and merciless and infinitely loving.