Fallen Tree

We all know everything is always changing even when it doesn’t look like it. In the physical world, we can see the changes happening everywhere around us. As we live in a big and bustling cities like Los Angeles, it seems like there’s a new building being built on every block, and I can’t often remember what was there before even though I’ve undoubtedly passed by hundreds of times. Not to mention that we’re all aging at the same pace, our lives change all the time. Things happen — good or bad, job changes, people move, they get injured, sick or die. Besides, as we get to see with our mindfulness, our feelings and thoughts are constantly passing through our human experiences as well.

Yet, there are places that seems like things stay the same. The woods I like to visit in the mountains, for instance, feels solid. Some of the local species of pine trees have been standing there hundreds of years seemingly still and invincible. It feels comforting to walk in there to be surrounded by those tall trees where I feel cradled.

The reality is the drought we’ve had in California in the recent years did affect many of those trees. Many of them started turning brown over the last few years. And the matriarch tree (as I call it) of this wood, a huge Ponderosa pine, we guess to be more than 200 years old, also started to turn brown a few years ago though I don’t know for sure if the drought was the direct cause. I’ve watched it gradually lose its needles while standing majestically. Then one night during one of the recent winter storms, we discovered some of the tallest branches had fallen to the ground. It literally took my breath away to see. Now these branches lay on the ground embraced by the chaparral and other trees as they start the decaying process and become a part of the landscape on the ground level.

The point is I’m very much aware of my own aging as well as internal changes while I watch the world change around me at all levels. No matter what happens in my own life, in my neighborhood or my woods, or the world as a whole, I cannot judge these changes one way or the other because I don’t know where these changes lead to. Of course, I resist some changes because it can be scary, but the secret is it can be liberating.

Deeper, Still Deeper

​No word can speak
the heart’s emptiness,
or its fullness.
No thought can think
its vast mystery.
Yet, listen!
this very moment
whispers its presence.

​

Eternally awake,
we appear asleep,
until a birdsong,
a temple bell, a baby’s cry,
a falling leaf, a candle flame,
or a single wordless gaze
from Silence awakens
sweet remembrance.

​

Suddenly, time and the timeless,
space and no space,
presence and absence collapse
into a single flowing
called Now,
where there are no distinctions
yet the uniqueness of each thing
reveals its mysterious Source.

​

Strangely, there is no fear
but no sense of safety, either;
no doubt, yet no one
who is certain.
Direct experience
arises without interpretation,
and returns without grasping,
falling back to zero.

​

You long to know the heart’s mystery.
The Mystery moves your longing.
Enough words.
Let Silence take you
where the mind cannot tread,
deeper, still deeper,
until nothing is left
but Mystery.

© Dorothy Hunt