12.9.22

Eating meditation this morning after struggling to get out of bed. The winter time makes me feel as if sleep is a childhood pool I can't seem to pull myself up and out of. I tried to do as Thay has told us to; to eat my food and not my thoughts. Non-stop radio of the mind. To eat like a free person. I remember standing up in the meditation hall in the hidden mountain and announcing to everybody that I loved my vegetables. I meant it. We had all eaten together on the ground in silence, all hundred something of us, with the breeze drifting through the opened doors. The sound of chewing, of pausing, of consideration and then trying not to consider so much. Are people made of words? I stopped eating to write. Am I made of words? And this city, made of people bridging to each other, just barely touching, brushing past each other always, these synapses made of words and stories. I wonder if I have the courage to use my own intelligence. 

The story as it always is. The raft is not the shore. Back to eating. Resisting embellishment, flourish, performance. Considering this always: am I made of pain? And what is the pain made of? 

My stomach hurts from trying to eat all these thoughts, mouth open, and then firmly closed. Two nights ago I wrote to ____. Dear ____, I wrote, it is not easy to practice in the city. 

I've begun to think there must be a beginning, middle, end again, that the sentence can't break for a breath where it needs to, that it can't sound like a beginning, at the end. That it must ---

to completion, 

watching you, and myself, 

entering such a strange 

opening, 

a hand, or a palm, 

opening itself like a wave 

beginning with pain, 

and never forgetting it,