April 2025 Musings

Four: Catching the Ox
I seize it with a terrific struggle.
Its great will and power are inexhaustible.
It charges to the high plateau far above the cloud-mists,
Or in an impenetrable ravine it stands.
 
 
 
Today I sought the company of a cherry blossom tree. I’d driven past her a number of times this past week and marveled at her exquisite form. But Martha had been at my elbow, insisting that time at the feet of divinity adorned in pink, however gorgeous, had to wait! Friday dawned with Mary in ascendence, allowing me to set out for a rendezvous with florescence.
 
The cherry blossom does not disappoint. In fact, she is surrounded by a bevy of resplendent beauties, plum trees, apple trees, several forms of cherry trees, magnolias, dogwoods, crabapples. At their feet, ablaze in glory, are azaleas, tulips, rhododendrons, flowering gems of every hue. Someone has thoughtfully placed a bench here and I sit down to drink in this brilliant pageant of spring expression. 
 
A few minutes of enchantment are all I am allowed.
 
The committee organizing the plant sale arrives at the garden to set up in the patch of grass behind me. A child wails. A dogwalker chastises a barking dog. A cyclist playing loud music rattles past on the sidewalk. A car horn heralds a caravan of vehicles rushing by. This paradise, it turns out, abuts a main thoroughfare. I sit, trying to recapture the magic of the moment but the spell is fractured. Buddha Nature, so close a moment ago, is rapidly receding to the high plateau, far above the cloud-mists. The reality of a morning in Beauty pales in comparison to the one in my imagination. Resigned, I leave my bench and head to the car, only to be stopped by a towering maple of Asian origin. She is quietly elegant, adorned in a canopy of tiny white flowers set amidst clusters of crimson-maroon leaves, atop a bark of such complex patterning that only Intelligence could have designed it. I sit down on a slab of rock, lean against her solid magnificence and turn my face to the sun. The noise of the traffic, the conversation of the committee, the child, the dog recede to the periphery of conscious awareness. The ox is back! I sink into stillness, flooded with golden light, scented with lilac and bursting with birdsong. Each time I open my eyes, red leaves, white flowers and blue sky dance in my vision. Pure bliss! Reality transcends imagination and the teaching of the fourth verse blossoms as insight.
 
Divinity can be a drive-by experience, a glimmer of gorgeous pink witnessed from behind the wheel of a car. It is also possible to make one’s way to a park for a close encounter. But if one’s park bench is at street level, even at close proximity to the wild sweetness of a cherry blossom tree, Buddha Nature can still feel impenetrable. At this level of perception, the universe of the mind is more familiar. There is a susceptibility to the undercurrent of habit energy that anchors the attention to the surface level of phenomena. It takes a dedicated sitting practice, sometimes years on the cushion, to cultivate the facility to plumb the depths of stillness below the stream of consciousness, and rest there, in the midst of the changing flux of life. At this deeper level of perception, the cherry blossom shimmers as the beautiful clarity of Awareness and the siren call of the contents of the mind (the urge to check whether the dryer is on) is barely perceptible. The more time on the cushion one invests in developing intimacy with the depths of the ravine, the less impenetrable the Silence is at street level. (We still may have to move a few feet further into the park!) The lesson from this morning of bliss for this practitioner is that Beauty isn’t a place one visits in spring when the cherry blossom is in bloom. Beauty is an internal experience, a function of depth perception, accessible in each moment by a redirect of attention.
 
A sitting practice develops the ability to center attention in the Ground of Being, to come from this core of stillness and take refuge in it when the turbulence of thinking patterns threatens to obscure the depths. It isn’t that the strata of the mind are to be eschewed and the ground of Being is to be coveted. Practice simply invites us to open to being more than the habituated “me” of mentation. The experience of Being, lived by Life, perpetually in touch with Beauty, is qualitatively different from being carried by the current of existence, out of touch with the depths. 
 
And so we sit…
On a cushion
Or a park bench..
And practice directing attention.
Awareness expands…
The cherry blossom flowers and bows in homage
A dazzling reflection of the Essence within.
 
Gasshō
ashwini