Lightness of Being

My friend Ken has a serious illness. He spends a lot of time at medical facilities, it isn’t like he has much choice about it. What does one do while waiting? Idly page through magazines looking at pictures while preoccupied with anxieties over this and that, take furtive glances around at others, stair at the wall? What Ken does with waiting time could be a lesson to us all. While looking outward, he looks within. The light out there illuminates his interior, he conducts knowledge inwardly. He relies on his training and the words of his teacher…

“In an inward and improvised conducting, we may touch the lightness of being: a loosening in the body, in the head, in the mind – a lightness let loose everywhere.”
Dynamics of Time and Space, p 154

In Dr. Peri’s Waiting Room
By Ken McKeon

A large print hangs behind the couch
Of Dr. Peri’s waiting room, a Monet,
A depiction of a spare wintry scene,
Snow everywhere, the season obvious

Here in the outskirts of a small village
Where it must be morning, not a soul
Around, and only one sign of life,
A small dark bird perched on a fence rail

In the print’s lower left, and before its
Still body and within its open eyes,
The scene too opens to a grey glowing sky,
To light in the hills, light in the folding

In off the snowfields, drifts of light,
The soft inwardly born outwardly present,
Light spun light forms, these fresh blooms
Channeling light, even the chill and shadowy

Are found in the light of this still life,
And we come to see in the year’s last turn
All of winter alive, but the bird is probably
Not singing, its song on hold for spring.