Photo courtesy of: ‘river-1343731_1280’, by rihaij – Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/en/river-reed-elbe-river-bend-1343731/
I remember just gazing at a river, streaming currents and eddies… I was both focusing and un-focusing, listening to the rush and flow, breathing the moistened air, and feeling an inward swell of breath, circulating, and the dribble and drift merging of my own river of time and space… thus confronting not-knowing, which then invited the question… What is river?
“Practice seeing without relying on the eyes. In interacting with others, practice understanding what is being said without relying on the words…
The models that govern ordinary knowledge are conducted by thoughts. As thoughts stream through our minds, we sort them in various ways. Some thoughts are available as tools. Others take over our awareness completely, so that we fall into the world that they create… If knowledge is differently available, thoughts do not have to take on the task of constructing the known. We are free to experience thoughts as events unfolding in time.
When thoughts unfold from one to the next, inviting us to lose ourselves in the endless progression of their content, the world becomes linear. But in the time of thinking, other dimensions are available. There is the arising of the thought, the activity of thinking, the transition between thoughts, the one who is thinking. The depth of these added dimensions can become a doorway into an unexpected realm.â€
….‘Dynamics of Time and Space,’ by Tarthang Tulku, p.151-2
CURRENT WORDS
By Ken Mckeon
I’ve no claim to the river,
No man does, no woman,
This one is itself,
A rush of water outside the great cities,
It carves the grasslands,
And it finds, as it makes its course,
The lift of a rocky bed,
It humps up, it spills down,
It’s a surge, a whelming pour,
And we ride it to the edge,
Willingly, unwillingly,
Finally there is no choice at all,
It brooks no hesitation, this river,
It quickens us out beyond ourselves,
The slide does, and we yell out
Its bubbling banter,
All the noise, the whoops, the laughter,
Everything is youthful, stunning, loud,
It’s all ourselves, we know, we are, its truth,
And we are wrong,
The current is other
Than we are bound to be,
It’s sourced forever
By the teeming skies, the melting snows,
It is off to the sea for just as long as well,
Ruffling surf, rising swells, depths unknown,
And the two-
The budding freshet, the ageless close-
Hold a congress of wonder
Well beyond ourselves,
We, the pale frail rippling leaves,
Turned aside by an eddy,
Left idling on some bank,
Parched to dust there by the sun.
