Читать книгу Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings On Awakening - Jan Inc. Frazier - Страница 8

Bow your head: incline it the way a horse does toward a proffered hand, so gladly. Put your head down, let the weight of it settle into the hands of the beloved.

The beloved is everywhere: the earth, the lap of your mother, your lover. Your own lap. The beloved is the side of a big warm dog stretched long. It is a patch of warm grass. It is a river, the skin of a pond.

It is your own difficult daily life.

There doesn’t need to be a struggle. How strangely this falls on the ears of the struggling world, but there doesn’t. The discrepancy between how it seems and how it really is — this is the measure of the difficulty of understanding. The expression on somebody’s face when you tell them that suffering is dispensable — the incredulity, or confusion, or maybe anger — makes it clear what an uphill battle this is. It is sad, the saddest thing in the world.

Put your head down, and don’t fall asleep. Just lie with your eyes closed and see if you can feel what it would feel like to have nothing weighing on you, to know that you would never again have to strain at anything, or worry, or wonder if you’ll ever be happy. See if you can feel what relief there would be if you knew, absolutely knew, that the rest of your life would be effortless. That all was radically well, and would be, even though bad things would keep happening. That somehow, for the rest of forever, you would be soft and peaceful and laughing inside, no matter what hand you were dealt. Feel it, feel it. You owe this to yourself. If you never let yourself sink into the deliciousness of what seems so impossible, how will longing ever get a chance to start up?

This is not a fairy tale. This possible thing is as real as a tree, as real as politics, as the roots that hold the tree to the ground, as real as the newspaper and its stories. It is as real as the Red Sox, as the price of gas, as a fight with your in-laws, as real as a tuition bill, as real as a staph infection. It is as real as a tombstone, as a melting glacier, as the skin on the neck of a horse, real as hot steaming pavement. What do I need to do to get this across? It is as real as gravity, as the orbits of the planets, as lightning, as photosynthesis, as grime in a bathtub, as a car accident, real as the crown of a bloody baby’s head pressing against its mother’s tearing flesh.

The truth is, it is more real than these things, and yet it is hardly seen, hardly felt, let alone directly known.

It is emptiness. It is nothing, but it is everything, it is all, and these are just words. What good are they? Will they make a bridge across which feet can walk? Will they make a trapdoor through which a body can drop? A soft place for a head to sink to?

How maddening it is for one to want this, to know it is there, it is real, and yet it cannot be found. How I want to lay my coat over every mud puddle, lace my fingers into a stirrup to hoist a tired foot over the wall, how I want to operate on every pair of eyes to make them finally see, to see what is right in front of them, of us all, everywhere and always. How I want to put my hands on every single head and gently turn it, direct the attention toward this, this, and nothing but this. There is nothing else to look for, nothing else to care about, nothing else to believe in.

Bow your head, bare your neck to what you might think is a blade getting ready to come down on it, but no. It is rain, a soft sprinkle of rain. Or is it tears? Of course there will be tears. How could we not cry, in the recognition of this?

It is not so awfully hard. Truly. Once you know this, you will marvel that you ever could have supposed it was otherwise.

Life is short.