Friday 8 August 2008

Strong colours, strong light


Strong light and shadow on everything, flowers emerging from the bushes like spotlighted jewels. Deep green in the shady gardens and along the lane between the trees, then coming out into wide, intense sunlight, blue sky and golden, prickly hay as the path slopes up across the fields.

Strong light on the countryside a pleasure; strong light on me not so easy to take - quickly sweaty and burning, but not so much that as the light on responses, thoughts, habits; in the long hours of quiet, the seeing myself and the 'ouch. I do that. yes'.

Buddhism is a psychological method, a patient feeling into the self, not in order to be self-obsessed, but in order to breath beyond the self, to see that self and all the rest are not different - all you have to do is be, stop flinching.

Stop the inner chatter. Go into the moment. And it grows more and more intense. Beautiful. Frightening. But if you stay with it, the fear dissolves.

2 comments:

Dale said...

Wow. I don't think I've ever seen the Buddhist path summed up better or more succinctly than that: "Stop flinching."

Zhoen said...

(o)