Sitting

I don't claim to be a poet, but here you go.

I sit and watch but flies buzz around my head. I let them. Knees creak and moan and I hear their complaint, but still I sit. Hunger sidelines some and thirst makes other rise up but Mara approaches me though my television and sitcoms, and I succumb.

Each time I sit I vow to be more resistant to him, to love my cushion as I honor my heart. Each time I sit, while sitting I am constant; yet the path to my zafu-home passes through illusion and distraction and I am pulled aside to waste.

The moon appears to wax and wane yet is always the same. It does not struggle to regain the sun’s reflection. I know the moon is cliché in Zen but here it gives me hope. It does not fight against the shadow of the Earth, yet every month it rises full again.

The more I am at home the more I will resist the pull to leave the homeward path. We call it practice for a reason and like an athlete I strive to improve my practice, but why? Do I practice to get somewhere, to become something?

I practice because practice is. In practice itself is all I need, because in it I become myself again. I was born a Buddha and knew impermanence and compassion and unsatisfactoriness and bliss; but when I grew up I put away childish things and lost myself along the way. I sit and reclaim the Way - I was and am.

Now I see through a clouded mirror but then I knew there was none. I do not sit to polish the mirror but to see that it’s not there. Only I am there and I am only a strand in the net. Only I am my strand of the net and its jewel.

No distraction the Lord of Lies can offer is more beautiful than the jewels of the net, reflected me as I am reflecting them. Illusion vanishes in the world-consuming glow of jewels reflecting jewels, beings relating to beings. Consummation.

Completion.

Beginning -

And End.

Alpha -

And Omega.

Sitting.