It was raining and raining – big, heavy, enthusiastic rain - and I was sitting inside enjoying the miracle of it by running attention over awareness to notice all the places I could hear rain falling and water dripping from where I was sitting.
It was an experience of feeling joyful and full and alive. Nothing missing, nothing needed, nothing to need. Being out of the conversation in conditioned mind, the experience of attention on awareness: awareness of the breath moving the body, warmth in the hara, life force tickling upwards through the chest. A feeling of being alive. An experience of deep full timeless joy, the experience that Everything is the Buddha.
In gasshō
Anna
Twenty dependable lights
The surge and softening and softening and softening and surge of the rain
The white wall
The row of small intervaled dropped-in pools underneath the Meditation Hall roof
All these indentations of water
The is-it-a-rhythm-is-it-not-a-rhythm of the water dropping from the corner
The rain-created stream that sounds its new presence from the bottom of the hill
The soft slow fall of the foot on the Meditation Hall floor. Soft knitted heel placed near soft knitted toe.
The soft brown bird hopping on the mini promontory over the path
The dog shaking off water in a hummingbird wing infinity sign, ears horizontal
The small piles of pine needles that have been carried together to point the same way by the water running down the path. Water-bundled, water-gathered
The sheltering hand for the Buddha in the rain.
Note: “Twenty dependable lights” is what is written on the small folded pockets of matches that we use to light the oil lamps and incense in the Meditation Hall at the Monastery. Then there are the dependable lights of the oil lamps lit in the Hall when it is dark and the practitioners who show up for each sit.
The sheltering hand for the Buddha in the rain is an image from the film about Zen patriarch Dōgen. A young girl is being shown how to sit with hands in the cosmic mudra; right hand underneath the left, cradling it. The teacher tells her that she is holding the Buddha in her hands. The girl moves her right hand out from under the left and turns it over to be a cover, a shelter. Why are you doing that, asks the teacher? Because it is raining, she replies.