114 Sleeping

On my drive to work in the morning I watched the dark orange, amber, and yellow glow of the sun rise in my rearview mirror and reflect in road signs and in the windows of businesses and shops. The sun turned even the smooth black asphalt of West Maple Road to honey and molten gold. Suddenly then I woke to the incandescent amber glow and yellow everywhere—in the parking lights, tail lights, and turn signals of the myriad moving vehicles, in the bright yellow warning stripes that separate traffic lanes, in the blinking yellow caution lights and stop lights of intersection, and in the slow wide school bus butts.

Caution!

Children!

Life!

Precious life!

Then in the silvery dark and shine of glass in my rearview mirror the calm spectacular rising orb and sphere of morning sun transformed itself from an ember a radiant glowing amber to a hot neon yellow to a cold white too bright for me even to look at.

Light!

Buddhist practice improved my life in many ways. For one I felt so often fortunate and grateful; but what I noticed most was beauty, so unexpected, all around, everywhere, from moment to moment, in the simplest mundane objects and ordinary events.

Glowing, radiant bursts of beauty and light.

Oo!

Ah!

"Seeing clearly is a wonderful thing, isn't it?" the master remarked.

Eye.

On Friday I woke at 5:00 and skipped my sitting. As usual when I tried to postpone my morning zazen I almost did not get to it at all. But I had wanted to have coffee and look at the morning paper before I babysat. When I arrived for duty, Katy, two years old, kept interrupting Dylan, six years old, who was trying to tell me the story of his dad running over a skunk.

"Katy!"

Dylan grew exasperated.

I sympathized.

"Dylan," I said, "I understand how difficult it must be to live with a sister like that."

"But, Grandpa," Dylan patiently explained to me as if I were slow, "Katy is just a baby."

Katy and I walked Dylan to Mockingbird School. On the way we saw a dead squirrel.

We stopped to look.

"There's a dead squirrel," I said.

Katy bent to touch it.

"No, don't touch it, Katy," I said. "It's dead."

"It looks like it's sleeping," Dylan suggested.

"No, it's not sleeping," I said. "It's dead."

We stood in reverent silence for several seconds before we moseyed on. On the way back from school Katy and I stopped at the park. The sky was gray and the air was moist but mild—a beautiful day. We had the whole park to ourselves. Except for us it was empty and silent. Katy rocked on a green plastic dinosaur on a spring and played in the sand.

For ten minutes I pushed her in the swing.

"Higher!"

"No."

"Higher!"

"No!"

We laughed and laughed.

"Higher!"

Days passed.

I tried to include in my journal entries any events which evoked fear, anger, and sadness as well as those which inspired gratitude, satisfaction, laughter, and joy. But both my highs and my lows were middling states and I liked life that way. At times I was tormented by the daily carnage report, news of murder and war in the paper or on television, just as I had been for so many years in my youth and early manhood; but it seemed that my Buddhist practice had enhanced my ability to bring my attention back to the present and to what was right in front of me and lessened my tendency to brood darkly and to suffer impotently over remote world events I could not affect and hardly understood.

Breath.

Breath.

Breath.

One morning on my way out the door to work Ruth criticized me for several minor matters and when I defended myself she criticized me for that, too. Her rebuke bothered me all day.

"I'd let it go and up it would come," I told the master, "and I'd let it go again and up again it would come."

Its persistence amazed me.

"On my way home from work there it was on my mind once more!" I said.

Thought.

"Just keep letting it go, over and over, as quickly as possible," the master advised.

I had.

"Sooner or later," he promised, "it won't come up any more."

Yes.

The incredible beauty of the 2:15 afternoon sky took both my thought and my breath away. It might have been the most beautiful sky I had ever seen, vast lakes and oval pools of cobalt blue within massive cloud formations of brilliant white and ominous dark blue and gray thunderheads in the north and west cleft by broad beams and swaths of bright yellow sunshine, all of it moving and churning overhead in superslow motion. I noted it in my journal as soon as I arrived home.

"God!" I exclaimed. "I could hardly believe what I was seeing!"

Sky.