Burma – 3 week silent retreat in 13th century monastery

Persian-blue-headed birds…
Small emerald-bellied ones…
The plain mouse brown one
I love just as much…

Ecstatic fragility of butterfly
Chatter and scatter of squirrels
Warm ground
Sun-baked dogs
Red-bucket sun-warmed-water bath
Fleeting pleasure and graspings of curry
sticky black rice
Sweet milky morning tea
In small white cup
With small white saucer
Line-dried clean white shirt
One of two
Along with two brown longyi’s.
One night,
A few drops of rain?
Like a dream

Low drone of monk”s early morning chanting
Refuges and precepts
Absorbings of this buddha dhamma land
Offerings as if from it’s very pores
Candy pink and orange Nuns
in the evening
Even little ones
Filing in
On brown wide feet
Silent and slow
As peace
Bowing Chanting
Chanting chanting chanting chanting
Filling all space all time
Taking refuge:
Awakeness, truth, community
Vowing morality and non-harming
Bowing
Filing out
Feet floating
Saint-like smooth heads shining
otherworldly devotion love joy

The days pour forward
We begin to “move like we are under water”
Like molasses we flow in and out and around
This dhamma dance of silent surrender
Until there are no days or nights, mornings or evenings ….just a being carried….a oneness with seemless ever-present flow…

Steven says…”walk until you become a stranger to yourself”

I walk and sit and walk and sit
Wash and eat and walk and sit
Watch cycles of moons suns stars
Settings and risings
Ever-changing reflective light and shadow of
River running
wanings and waxings of
Body’s elemental nature,
fire, earth air water
mental moods like weather systems….hating, envy, greed
despair, comparing, rapture, tranquility, insecurity, impatience
anxiety, fear, panic, joy, love, gratitude, peace, equanimity
attachment, aversion, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, resistance, boredom, longing, clinging
All
just
non-personal arisings and passings
Watching and noting until
My feet and sandals become
“Strangers to me”
teeth and knees and bladder just doing their thing
Not me, not mine…

I walk and sit until
No one arrives
At the door to my room
enters
seems it must belong to someone long past….
Whose shirt? whose tangle of covers?
Whose sash?, towel? hand-scratched notes?
Whose glasses? Hat?
Whose father’s watch
silently tapping time?
On whose chair? Beside whose bed?
And who lies down for their afternoon nap….

And who sees the silent early morning scene
Siloette of monk sweeping
backlit by golden rosy temple sunrise
It is both no time and it could be any time
It doesn’t exist anywhere
in particular…
Like a stage set
That could be stepped behind….

Whose primitive grinding tool-like teeth connected to whose skull…ahhh this body has death already in it….
Who experiences this chewing, this arising existing and passing of pleasant taste sense-door experience….who sees it’s fleeting nature….it’s unreliability…it’s tendency to fall away…to not offer up lasting happiness…who understands the pointlessness of seeking this kind of transitory happiness…who feels a deeper more satisfying kind of happiness at seeing and understanding this…this a sweeter dhamma pleasure as it has in it the possiblity of freedom from suffering….the taste of freedom from endlessly seeking insubstantial undependable kinds of happinesses….seen is the possiblity of the peace of no longer investing eggs in these bottomless baskets…

And the question then arises:
What is it that does not have within it’s nature…
the nature to fall away?