A salt doll and Chopin's Nocturne

a meditation-poem into the miracle of ordinary days.

So close you can’t see it
So subtle your mind can’t understand it.
So simple you can’t believe it.
So good you can’t accept it.
~ Verse from the Shanghai Kagyū tradition.

Strong winds move within you.
This heart, quiet and overflowing.
This wonder of small sensations.
Breeze on skin, sound of fridge, scent of peach.
Us lovers need nothing but this loving.

A world opens that can’t be named.
This presence, closer than close.
This breath felt, and no one breathing.
A universe unfolds in incomprehensible beauty.
Just this what is and it is us but not us.

Grace stirs the salt doll so it may melt in water.
This body merely a tremor, atoms and waves.
We listen to questions and listen to answers.
We speak what we hear without anyone speaking.
You laugh and it’s us laughing, sacred singularity.

Beauty then! Beauty for the sake of beauty.
We see what can’t be seen, innocence in being.
Stillness of a spider, the tender soft of mosses.
The ten thousand jewels created and destroyed.
This that ever is so gladly pours itself forth.

Ridiculously alive, the infinite gratitudes of freedom.
How you love this essence that you know yet can’t know.
The gold ring appears briefly, but gold remains and is.
Ivy on a window sill, the smell of wool, and strangers
Talking on a bus, Chopin’s Nocturne, colors on one canvas.

Equal the thoughts, sensations, and perceptions.
Equal the images and stories, and stunningly diverse.
Astonishing the gift of living, being awareness, this bliss.
Mystery of worlds within worlds, places within places.
We so deeply inhabit the miracle of our ordinary days.

(photo credit: heather wilde | unsplash)