Perfect Ease…

Photo courtesy of: ‘maple leaf’ by Samuel Grado – Flickr
http://tinyurl.com/l6yrjlg

Rinpoche reveals something important about the ‘ease‘ that lets ‘knowing expand beyond its perimeters’ in ‘Keys of Knowledge’…

“Perfect ease is not an ordinary part of our mindset; it may take some practice. Until we fully understand ourselves. We may have a feeling we are not enough—not strong enough, not good enough, not whole within ourselves. This can lead us to turn outside ourselves for ways to manage this feeling of being inadequate or incomplete. We may look for leisure time, companionship, possessions or accomplishments in order to support ourselves.

As long as we sense a lack, we will need to respond to this need within ourselves with kindness, and deliberately cultivate our confidence and self-esteem. This is work we can do right now, without needing to wait for deep insight into ourselves: all it requires is a shift in emphasis from getting things to cultivating the beauty of our juncture, our unique moment in time.

If we know how to take care of ourselves, then there is a chance we can open to others. Then caring could carry on, spread widely into the world, so that others, too, could make themselves at ease.” p.142-3

In cultivating our unique moment in time… it’s possible for the clarity of morning light to hit like a thunderbolt… color and form striking the heart sudden and direct. What was a narrow focus on experience instantaneously opens to the bursting, brimming, suffused, expanse… the heart of time and space… fully known…

MAPLE
By Ken McKeon

The maple we call Birthday,
Light and dripping,
Slivered with raindrops,
Later morning mist sheathed,
Its burgundy, the felt

Coloring we know,
The many stranded leaf play,
The parted fingerings,
Why they’re branch bound somewhere,

It’s quite hard to see exactly,
One would have to ease, to fall
Into the leaf walled,
The air born,
Spacious caverned
Shadowed open blooms
Of open morning light itself,

Why there in the clear moist particles,
The stilled brush of living light bequeaths
Ease to the eye, the heart,
And one knows
The sky’s loom,
The breath and being held here,
Roofed, ceilinged, cupped within

A halved wooden cask,
This deeply lilting tree,
The cello played as silence,

Now heard on the deck,
Late morning, mid April,
The stately gifting presence
Of this Springtime day.