Photo: ‘Passing On’ by cocoparisienne – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/v47mpxl
SPACE BETWEEN…
In the poem, Ken speaks of the ‘in-betweens’, that get to him… and I thought of my own glimpses through the myriad of myopic interpretations, judgments, and assumptions… momentary clearings… perforations in the fabrications of my own design… Then I remembered this quote from the ‘Space Arising’ practice… Instead of thoughts leading to thoughts like balls of yarn… there’s an alternative…
“Activating and expanding the awareness… Ordinarily we think of awareness as operating on appearance, reading out the qualities and perceptions of what appears. Now we could imagine this dynamic reversed. The ground of undifferentiated appearance radiates outward, reading IN the specific qualities that we identify as existing. THOUGHTS TAKE FORM OUT OF AWAKENED AWARENESS AND THE GROUND OF MIND.
…’Dynamics of Time and Space,’ by Tarthang Tulku, p. 282-3
IN PASSING
by Ken McKeon
Still, late January sky,
That’s cool,
I’m down with the day,
With its grey tones, light rain, distant cries,
Crows and sirens,
It’s all the silences, the in-betweens, that get to me,
Anxious riffs of forehead aching weigh on in,
And as they fall away,
My eyes smile into
A pleasing quality of lightness.
And my throat gulps truth
In the moist alertness of a minor note,
So where’s the aching now?
Where’s the fretting?
Have they followed the grey bound muted
airline traffic present in the skies?
Have they gone that far out of sight?
It could well be…
And now unexpected sunlight lights up the room,
Everything is showing up and passing on,
I’ll ride that thought within
The galactic formulations of my mind,
They’ve become an evaporating planetary display
Of the far forever,
And now
They’re the dust I am in touch with on this day,
They’re a memory of where I’m bound to go
When I pass away.
