The early morning corridor was like pitch as I walked through memory to the room at the front of our house. Winter in Preston brings darkness which gathers around the day like our ancestors around illuminating fire. The night moves in, closer and longer with each rotation of the earth. Spinning on its tilted axis. Shy of the sun for those in the North. For a while.
My hand reaches towards where my body remembers the door to be. I notice a slim outline of something soft and translucent around its usually invisible edges. Contact, and my hand becomes the door and we open. Stepping into the room it is no longer dark. Lancing through the tall window a subtle and brilliant light reorders my sense of space. At diagonals to what I thought to be vertical it lies on the wall with surpassing beauty.
The repeating up and down ribs of the radiator, so formal in their pattern, were made playful as the moonbeam waved across their undulating surface. This is where I sit every morning. On a black cushion. Facing a white radiator. Up close. Eyes open.
I had forgotten that for a few long nights fading to mornings each year, when the galaxy and sun and earth and moon and weather and window and I align, I witness this.
Fragments-of-blind-art – Gavin-Birchall
High contrast but revealing in a different way. Not the glaring, bright and magnificent light of the sun. Gentler. Permissive. More invitation than insistence. I fold onto the cushion and sit. Waiting for my inner self to sit as well. Thoughts cloud my mind but the moonlight remains undimmed. I settle. Then I hear the words ‘Don’t mistake the finger for the moon’ and at that moment the moonlight disappeared. Not gradually. Suddenly.
I carried on sitting and it came back. Gradually. Not suddenly. There, and not, for a while, as the clouds in the sky passed between us. It is interesting how, when we wait with patience, we are often shown what is helpful for us.
Dōgen Zenji, 1200 – 1253, was a Japanese Zen master who often used metaphors of the moon in his teaching. I have come across what he left for us at numerous times but in a sporadic way. I have not read his great works. Yet. However I now have a copy of them. Actually, I have been carefully researching and collecting what could be called a Zen library over recent months. I am not a Zen Buddhist or even a Buddhist. I have not taken Jukai, but Buddhists might recognise their ways in how I try to live.
Sudden-silvering – Gavin-Birchall
My experiences have brought me to notice a single, shared, common experience that is expressed by individuals and groups of people in their own ways as they live their lives. I am interested in those ways. I am fascinated by those ways. Their variety, their beauty, their significance and that which I might learn from them if I pay attention with curiosity and humility.
Exploring deeply a tradition that resonates seems worthwhile too and it does not feel like a constraint. So, alongside my daily sitting practice, the Zen library has precipitated in our home. Back into the narrow history of early Indian sutras, through migration to China and then Japan and finally to expansive Western expressions. It will take me years to read. Walking this path, to know a little of how each ancestor ‘pointed their finger towards the moon’ is travelling without moving and I know enough to appreciate that it leads to the present. Yet it feels good to do, so that I can forget the journey altogether.
The arrival of numerous books has a physical impact on a place. The small room where I practice and work and play and write had no suitable shelf space. So the library brought about a reorganisation. Of space as well as activity. Tables, a sofa bed, some shelves, a piano, a mat and cushion, numerous plants. All newly arranged and rearranged in configurations that didn’t feel balanced. Then laying some box shelving on its side along the length of a wall and,,, resolution.
Which might be an end to a story but everything changes when anything changes. My desk which used to face the window now faces away from the window. In video calls I now have my back to the light, resulting in a strange halo effect which places my body in silhouette. The window has a cream coloured blind so I tried pulling this down. It helps a little and switches the contrast so that people elsewhere can see my expressions. They seem to appreciate that.
As happens for me, I start to see what feels like an unnecessarily drab blind behind me while on calls. Turning off self-view isn’t sufficient, so it comes to mind that I could paint on the blind.
I wonder about what to paint. A particular image arises that I could adapt. An old painting by Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and artist, Hakuin Ekaku, 1685 – 1768. ‘Two blind men crossing a log bridge’ is a simple and devastating, black ink affair.
This was the idea for some days. Until I realised it would be regressive and almost diametrically oppose that which it sought to represent. Which is funny in the context. Whatever came to appear on the blind is of this time, of this world, of my experience. It must be alive today if it is to be at all. This is the way and true to the way.
So, I waited a little more. The days past. The nights grew longer. The idea drifted away on waves of experience and almost out of mind. Until I stepped into a moonlit room, when I remembered and became suddenly silvered. Until I sat on a cushion and let waves lap at the shore. Until I noticed that the aliveness of the moment, that moment, the one I experienced and experience always is vivid and may suit the blind.
Alive-today – Gavin-Birchall
I will read the library and forget the library. I will always try to remember that the words and images are useful for navigation but they are neither the path nor the experience. I will practice and I will notice, I will try to remember and that is it.
Don’t-be-pointing-to-the-moon – Gavin-Birchall