WAITING

WAITING – FROM THE JOURNALS

In comments on her FB post about good growing from a bad year, my friend Hasty said I have to write for her.  The challenge made, it is answered with something from long ago.  “Waiting” is from an old journal.  From the names mentioned, it must have been the Winter of 1980-81, a time of change having happened, happening, and more to come.  One relationship greatly changed by divorce and another newly discovered with its path unknown.  A business unlikely to survive a disastrous season of recession, but I not ready to surrender to that.  Little did I know when writing how much change, relocation, and realignment the next few years would bring, but the winds of change were blowing and blowing hard.  As I often have at such times, I’d been reading Lao Tsu and his words strongly influenced the piece.

There is the theme of waiting:

There is the action of water:

And, there is the Valley Spirit, Yin, the receptive principle.

It could so easily have been a Winter of Discontent.  I suppose I wrote this – what? A poem?  A meditation?  I don’t know.  Does it matter? – to find a way for it to be something more than that.  It was and is whatever then and whatever now.

WAITING

Waiting —– Letting openness be

All this thinking
All this reading
All this doing
All this planning
All this fantasizing
All this whatever…..

Just toys for mind and ego to keep it occupied while ………

Waiting happens.

Waiting for Joan
Waiting for Elizabeth
Waiting for a teacher
Waiting for “enlightenment”

Just things for ego to say
He is waiting for
While in truth………

Waiting is.

So, here is a practice

In all the doings
In all the traveling
In all the working
In all the serving
In all the studying…………

To remember that……….

I am waiting.

For what is waiting, simply waiting, but openness?

As the womb waits for impregnation
As the Earth waits for seed and rain
As emptiness waits for filling up.

This is the female part, Yin, the valley spirit.

Be aware of this
Let it permeate
All the doing.

Wu Wei!

Ignorance is
Deathly
Solid
Impenetrable

Wisdom is
Clear
Alive
Open
Void

So, this process……..

Opening the solid

Changing
Density
Hardness
Rigidity

To
Open space
Softness
Flexibility

Somewhere in deep, solid stone,
Water finds its Way.
Slowly
With a timeless patience
The fluid and formless
Creates space.
The receptive hollowness of Cave.

Slowly, gently    Life
Soft
Wet
Curious
As lichens, grasses, shrubs, and trees
Crumbles mountains into soil.

And ignorance becomes
the food and foundation
Of wisdom.

And so, I see my path,
Not as the headlong rush of power,
Without the shattering force.

No!

My path is of this kind…….
Slow
Gentle
Patient
With changes
Almost imperceptible
But persistent
And continuous.

Resistance is there.

But that rock is of the Earth.
It waits
Upon
The trickling of water
The probing of roots.
It supports
It nourishes
And there is no conflict.

Reflecting on this I find myself thinking how little I trust “breakthroughs,” having seen people have the same ones over and over again without really changing.  I think many occasions that people describe as breakthroughs really are times of discovering how far we have traveled when we had not noticed we were moving and growing.

The words of a song by
Jefferson Airplane come to me:

 And this, from The Moody Blues:

I thinks that’s enough for now.  May you all become more and better than you have yet imagined.