B. …Playful and relaxed in each situation, practice taking immediate action, responding instantly and without reflection as mental events arise—like a fighter countering an opponent’s move.
Went to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD the other day to see an exhibit of Japan’s contemporary ceramic artists that draws on traditions begun thousands of years ago, as they create containers for the presentation of flowers. Inspired in part by Japan’s distinctive ikebana flower-arranging styles, I was struck by the beauty and depth of these contemporary ceramics and the aesthetics behind them. I thought of the vast field of relationships the exhibit encompassed.
It is an anomalous insight that the experience of loneliness can be enjoyed – aloneness with the ‘flavor‘ of pleasure. Wabi aesthetics are irregular, (one could say ‘the field’ favors the), rustic, tinged with sadness. Touring the exhibit in silence, and a sense of solitude within, even though I was with another, I felt at times taken over by, and luxuriating in, a ‘flavor‘ of pleasure and pain, loneliness and fullness, opposites that indeed are connected. I considered how my ‘field‘ of experience could contain these disparate flavors at the same time and yet be so evanescent, like a feather’s touch. The presence and depth of a moment experienced so fully, and lost in the blink of an eye. There was a sweet isolation, the gravity of opposites pushing and even pulling at each other. The presence of everything so fleeting and flowing as the ever present movement of change.
Sabi refers to the beauty of age and of experience, and favors objects that may be withered, and that show evidence of having been used by generations. I loosened my normal narrow-minded perspective on experience and considered this homage paid to age, and the past. I was reminded of the field and my usual myopic array of concerns that tend to consider a self as acting from the past, and in its own interest as a tendency to be avoided. I felt from the exhibit the respect for what has come before, and from where we’ve come, and the fleeting nature of all our creations, concerns, and meanings. I came away with an appreciation for balance, for homage to the past, and to a self that can be used in the service of the creation of beauty, and of service to others, not necessarily for mere selfish expansion.
The nature of an insight for me is a letting-go that results in ‘a dawning’, like what Rinpoche describes as Time collapsing near a Black Hole, where the usual conceptual tension gives way, and perception carries with it an opening within which new thoughts rise allowing new connections, associations and referrals that are not driven primarily by the gravity of past presuppositions, and contextual associations, but they are not excluded either.
So for me, the ‘feel of the field‘ of the experience of the Japanese ceramics exhibit was a moving relationship of the flow of joy and sadness, isolation and fullness allied with the objects related to my feelings, unfolding with the meanings of homage and transience, associated with the aesthetics of the walk-through experience, and so much more. :-)
