Racing Against The Cloud

Watchman, tell us of the night.
------------------------------------

Do you want to know what I hear? I hear the unheard.

Ssu-Hsin
*****************
Hello Frosty
*****************
Any serious imaginative thinker, any serious creative thinker must inevitably face the primal source of everything. The true thinker must listen to the silence, seek the invisible and know the word which is neither written nor spoken. All the music of the world, all the buildings of the world, all the forests surround it. It may be known but can it be understood? Any awareness is gained only through metaphor, parable or fable. It moves through our lives and never touches us. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is what is between the tip of the brush and the canvas, between the pianist's finger and the key It is what is between the words and the notes.

Most people see a cloud. A very few, the daring, consecrated thinkers, see a Shekinah of spirituality in the temple.

In the Aesop fable of the race between the tortoise and the hare where the tortoise wins because the hare stopped to rest, we are amused by the obvious lessons: don't stop to rest just because you are way ahead and never underestimate your opponent. And we leave it at that.

But Aesop was a brilliant man. There are questions in that story that aren't easily answered. Why did the tortoise enter the race in the first place when he was clearly not going to win it? What kept him going? And the most important question of all. What grabbed hold of the hare and made him stop. That's a question that has no easy answer. One can make up human answers, laziness, exhaustion, pride, self indulgence. None of them work, because they are all labels, excuses, justifications for the real reason to hang itself on. That is the invisible culprit that will run and ruin our lives if we aren't aware of it's presence.

It doesn't have a name. You can't kick it, punch it or stick a knife in it. It has no shape but will assume many. It likes to pretend it's the voice of God.

The other day I was talking with a few people and they mentioned a woman in this town who smothered her two children and tried to kill herself. She survived, her children did not. I said "Oh, that poor woman." Someone said scornfully "Poor woman? What about the children?" I said that it was tragic about the children but when that woman finally gets a clear head what remorse is she going to have to face for the rest of her life and how will she ever identify what it was that grabbed hold of her to make her do such a desperate act. Someone will give it a reason, but it will only be a label.

The primal sorce of everything is a benevolent power. It does not cause people to lose or murder, but when it is absent, when it is not sought and listened to, when it is not acknowledged and believe in, true sight becomes a cloud and darkness takes over.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up