Life is sublime
For a short while the rain was pouring. But now all has been quiet. The birds are rejoicing the coolness of the air, sounding their music in the distance, aloof and light with joy. Even the trees are dancing with the breeze. The butterfly has come out, and without the rain, it now roams about in its patternless routine. The wet ground gives out a sense of freshness, and that freshness lives on the skin, in one’s breath, in the gray and clouded sky. Rain has the quality of cleansing. It is not like fire that burns, but more gentle, nurturing, giving. Now the breeze has stopped, the trees and their leaves stand still, so absolutely still that one wonders if they are meditating. There is tremendous energy in stillness, that silent potential, quite like the quiet before the storm, that is capable of explosive creation. When facing and listening to such stillness, the mind also tends to become still. And when it is still, no worries enter it, no fear bothers it. The mind then is truly happy, in bliss, moving with every existence in a dance so total and harmonious that friction seems like nothing but a made-up dream.
Leisure. When do we have leisure? The birds are leisurely. They feed and maintain their nests, but beyond physical survival, what else is there to maintain? For the human mind, there seems to be so many yearnings, contradictory and complicated, and then the mind proclaims that life is too complex for it deal with. Is life actually complex, or has the human mind made it so? The psychological structures of the human being have produced our religions, rituals of life, rules to follow, morality to obey, pursuits to find meaning and happiness. If all we want is to be happy, then what’s wrong with leisure? What’s wrong with the space of silence and quietness that empties the mind of its sorrows and anxieties? Isn’t that the happiness that we seek? Being conditioned to seek happiness elsewhere, and hence filling our minds with tasks and ideas, we forget that happiness isn’t found. It is something which happens like the wind that comes through a window during a hot summer day: uninvited. And when we do expect that cool breeze to come through, all we feel is the grueling disappointment of waiting. Wait no more. Return to leisure. Let go of expectations. Truly experience life without the burden of worry and fear. Then happiness is that very dance of life. It is in the very movement of the leaves, in the songs of the afternoon birds, in the rise and fall of our senses, the vibrations on our skin. Seek and we shall find impermanence waiting to be destroyed. When the seeking stops, the eternal reveals itself. Then all hope drops, along with all the despair, because life is without either, beyond space and time, the ungraspable light that simply is. Being has no worry. Life is sublime.
Cover photo by Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash
