Out of the Ordinary

Picking up on Jack’s point: that “out of the ordinary” indicates point of origin as well as destination, I thought of another familiar phrase:

       Departing the familiar.

Sitting in a railway carriage as it pulls out from Charing Cross station (or Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Montreal) we depart the city and travel along tracks (that were forged in smelters and poured into moulds).  Traversing the fields, we view the cows, horses, crows, through the rectangular frame of our coach window.

Recognizing that lower is on a continuum with higher, we feel the padded seat beneath us, appreciate the landscape passing before our mind’s eye (the click-click-clicking of the wheels on the tracks, the ding-ding-dinging as children wave from cars parked at the crossings), the slow turning of Gaia on her axis, our Sun and solar system, the clouds of interstellar gas from which we and our home planet congealed so long ago.

 Travelling in a time that enables all this to dance before us and in us, abiding as a child of a space that allows all this to rise and fall, like waves rolling onto the beach of awareness, fathoming a sea in which all is knowing and knowable—we begin to merge into this buoyant realm and relax our desperate struggle to stay afloat on its surface.  Sinking into the lower we discover a higher view within the dancing wholeness of being.

About Michael Gray

I first started studying TSK in the mid 1980's and have since attended a number of retreats and workshops at the Nyingma Institute, in both TSK and Buddhist themes. I participated in the life-changing Human Development Training Program in 1991, and upon returning to Albuquerque co-founded an organization, Friends in Time (with a friend who has Lou Gehrig's Disease), which continues to serve people with similiar disabilities. I contributed an essay to "A New Way of Being"--the last one in the book--in which I describe how learning to honor who I have been has broadened and deepened my openness to present experience. I live in New Mexico with my wife and two sons.
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1 Response to Out of the Ordinary

  1. David Filippone says:

    Just stunning Michael. Your words created a read-out that seemed to become a logos in which a new vista arose, with full-on emotional underpinning, a world-stream in the act of streaming. Captivating, it was new, but familiar too, my life and yours…
    Well said brother.

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