104 Beauty

In my journal I wrote often about the weather and often about the sky—the beautiful sky. Not all of my entries were sappy or bland. I wrote about family and friends and colleagues, illnesses, deaths, divorces, transitions, about my experiences and interactions at the temple, and I wrote about the master, but mainly I wrote about my students, my teaching, and my job. Before I started journaling, I told the master, I thought my journal would be about thoughts and feelings that arise in meditation. In my daily life, I added, I thought about my brother's separation from his wife and my concern for his two daughters; and I thought about my students and the problems they related in their papers. I knew that fragments of these concerns did arise in meditation, I explained, but they seemed to float away and dissolve when I returned to my breath. When I got up from my cushion I didn't really remember any of the specific thoughts and feelings that had surfaced in zazen.

"They seem to have evaporated," I said.

The master inquired.

"How important are these thoughts then really?"

I mentioned that I had not experienced any of the painful psychic events I read about in the accounts of some meditators, guilt, remorse, shame, grief, terror, panic, dread, nor any of the ecstasy, euphoria, and bliss described in others. Nor had I any interest in these mental states. I wondered if in meditation unusual or unexpected mental formations might arise.

None had.

To my observations the master responded: "Perhaps none ever will—but they might."

Many days my entry began with a description of my early morning drive to work. On my drive west on Maple Road, I saw dawn in my rearview mirror, an unearthly baby blue sky smeared with rippled stripes and streaks of clouds baby pink, an amazing neon amber, and orange. The empty snowfields between Eagle Run and Elkhorn were still unsullied, pure and bluish white, glowing dimly and strangely in the early light. On another day in mid February the morning sky was a pale milky blue on my way west to work, the perfect circle of white moon mysteriously suspended high over the white snow and glowing dimly through the wisps and streaks of thin cloud like a frost-white light bulb, and a translucent ghost of white low fog hovering in the valleys and vales all so still and beautiful it took my breath away.

Oh!

The new housing developments and apartment complexes, pale pastel earth tones, beige, light green, tan, cream, pale rose, pale yellow, set far back from the road on West Maple, looked like tiny Monopoly gameboard houses and hotels, doll houses, playthings, ephemeral and delicate. From my own moving vehicle at 50 mph, among the white fog, white cloud, white moon, white snow, white houses, I watched the blinking red and amber tail lights and turn signals of other drivers, the stream of cold white headlights moving eastward on my left also at 50 mph, and all around me like a permanent Christmas the street lights and commercial neon green, red, yellow, lavender, blue, and pink. One morning sky in front of me had been a dim blue gray. In my rearview mirror I could see the lavender dawn slowly spreading to amber. The endless string of oncoming cars seemed again to crawl forward in superslow motion, laboriously, from the distant horizon in the west to the distant east behind me. I was reminded of a phrase I had read long ago in an anthology of Hindu theology: transmigratory existence. Each day we loaded ourselves into our vehicles and traveled across the material plane from point to point and then each evening we loaded ourselves into them again and returned once more to the point from which we started. The cars and trucks crawled on. Their pairs of cold white headlights, two by two by two by two, passed silently on my left. To most of these descriptions the master offered no response.

Just this:

"This beauty is all around us when we see clearly."

One morning when I left home for the temple a soft, gentle, light snow was falling, dusting the cars and streets with white powder. By late afternoon an inch of snow had fallen so I shoveled the patio, driveway, and sidewalk. It took me forty-five minutes. There was so much I liked about shoveling snow, the immersion in whiteness, the tiny flakes of white fluff still falling gently as I worked, the clank and growl of the metal shovel on concrete, the gradual uncovering in orderly rectangles, the white puff and cloud of my warm breath, the exercise, the purposeful labor, the clear, definite conclusion when the job was done, the sense of accomplishment. When I finished, it was nearly dusk and the dying light and darkening sky had turned the pure white newfallen snow the familiar but mysterious unearthly blue.

All this I recorded.

His reply:

"How about just shoveling?"