ALERT STILLNESS

[Continuing] 

The present one

Fear of the unknown, does it not at times stir us to deny the unknown…? Plato said, avoid the pretense of wisdom [of knowing.]

A God we already know much about, is a God we do not necessarily need to have with us. The present one is unnecessary, unwelcomed by the wise.

[Note from The Spiral-Bound notebook]

Whatever he thought, it was. Out on the quiet waters, surrounded by morning mist, he entered it as prayer.

Being was effortless, no news to anyone. In through the nose it comes with life, and if not – no life, no thought or anything thinkable. Even unthinkable.

Anyone present, maybe watching from the shoreline or flying overhead, would see him at intervals paddling the kayak, then letting it glide for long stretches at a time while he sat perfectly still, hands on his lap, his eyes closed.

Clouds of thoughts and thoughts of clouds stir through the air. They are strewn, they are swollen and gray at times, they cry their tears for only a moment making their spring drip drop first on the dock, then upon all the surface of the waters.

You might extend yourself and reach to enter and know the sense of its reality from within your own blood and bones and hands and feet.

So you would wait and breathe more allowing the current to take the craft with you inside it right along on the breezes, counting ripples on the water, readjusting your Cabelas fishing cap.

There in your place you first dreamt of only now you rest.

You give yourself completely to the presence of the Cardinals chasing one another through the treetops. You gaze and breathe, your heart lying open to the source, Love Alive, the fountain of life and you only know this through your senses in glimpses; a glimmering patchwork of light through the trees at the surface here or their, the hawk spun sunward through the dune grass, and yes, the lawnmower, the faintest trace of a semi hollering down the interstate a good 20 miles away.

You give yourself to the knowing of the present one; gazing, breathing, as would a lover between kisses.

You practice alert stillness. Presence to presence. The world is alive. You are alive within it.

You see yourself already speaking to a group about communion… Not thinking about it…

Experiencing it as fully as you are able as an embodied creature.

The animal breathes beneath their naval… utterly without thought… and stays and stays… and who is the most brilliant? The one who creates the sensual doorways into the ineffable reverberations of creaturely ecstasy or the one who provides so abundantly that which craves and is inherently so needful of being known, seen, smelled, touched and tasted?

A scattering of sparrows giggle from brush to brush at the waters edge.

Let there be a garden.

Looking deeply into every aspect of life, the world around us becomes an apparent Eden.

You touch the water and bring it to your lips.

A bright glare of Golden feather shoots out from a stand of dead red pine across the lake.

You search with your binoculars the far shoreline and set a goal for yourself and get paddling toward it. The cold air surges through your lungs and as your heart rate thumps harder you can feel the surge of power promised by the purveyors of prednisone and your old friend Anthony. You press yourself forward to paddle even a little faster and the energy is feeling fantastic. You feel an occasional splash on your forearms and face.

Maybe an Eagles nest, let’s find out.

As you reach the midway point of this fairly large lake there is a sense of smallness to your being that suddenly grips your abdominals with an uncomfortable twist of fear. The waters beneath you must be so deep and so cold.

The wind blows and the chop is becoming noticeably higher. And there are things you know and remember very suddenly.

I still have to get all the way back. Am I shifting to the left from all of this paddling with gusto? I think I'm shifting.

This is not the place to tip over.

LOST MATERIAL

(Continued)

It killed him. It just absolutely killed him. He couldn't even sleep he was so angry.

The discovery happened after he returned from his time away for those few days. It's what unfolded and how things went throughout the weekend that held the key, he now believed, for solving the great mystery.

Upon arriving home he opened the apartment door, put some bags down on the floor and through his keys down onto the end table.

Zoe was already disappearing into the far reaches and becoming reoriented to the home space. From Jerry's all the way home she had much to say about what it's like to try to have a retreat in close proximity to an uncivilized potbellied pig.

Yes Zoe, I hear you but please…

What on earth had happened to those pages!? It was absolutely ridiculous.

The pages were gone. Completely missing. Not a shred or trailing chad or crinkled tear in evidence after they had clearly been torn directly and completely free from the steel spiral binding. But by who? And when?

Shortly after settling in to the apartment that night, simply at random, flipping back in the spiral notebook had revealed the clear and present absence of a handful of pages precisely where he knew he had written at length of a specific experience, a story that had come to life in the midst of his epiphanal adventure that night upon first unveiling the Poppy. The visions, the dreams in red unfurling ornately all around him, how they felt so revelatory, these spiritual encounters that had poured forth such an ineffable loving lifeblood, filling him with such profound divine turbulence and passion and beauty.  

Somehow it had come out of him, yet he did not know how.

Right now, however, it was a certainty.

One of them. One very specific and dear to his heart was gone.

Locating the missing piece could only happen by reassembling the events of the few previous days. They had been good ones, indeed.

As he had planned, he would spend the first night out on his own. He needed the solitude and would look forward to recharging before having to "show up" as fully as he could for his old friend, the artist who had given him the photograph of the Poppy.

Her invitation, though it still seemed out of the blue and perhaps mildly fraught with possible tensions, was something he had accepted. So after a day to himself he would make his way over and spend time catching up with her and hiking the deep wilds of the pristine forests shouldering the western slopes of the Kitaroo range, an edenic environment she was lucky enough to call home.

But for the first night out he had booked a room at Shender 's fishing lodge just outside of Beaumont and pulled the Subaru Forrester into the gravel parking lot there just after midnight.

As Martha, the camp host, had mentioned on the phone, his key could be found in a small box just outside the door and he could feel free to let himself in at any time as the front desk and restaurant closed at 10. Breakfast was served from 6 to 9 and included a full buffet and an unending stack of hotcakes no matter what else you liked best.

At the cashiers register they sold Shender's T-shirts and blueberry syrup and hats, some limited fishing tackle, night crawlers, bug spray and essential canned goods and milk by the court from the dairy down the street.

He didn't want to leave the breakfast table as he sat there for a long while simply enjoying his coffee, watching some of the other folks walk through the entryway to discover the stuffed bear above the broad fireplace where hickory smoke lingered blithely into the room giving the whole sun shone space a spirit of welcome. The image he sketched into his notebook was entitled MORNING BLESSING.  As he finished the quick sketch, he smiled and craved an outside cigarette to complete the worship.

The air was crisp on the water.

It took only a few moments to breathe deeply and find his center and fall softly into conscious embodiment, an indwelling right there in his own warm skin and bones, inside one of the finest kayaks he'd ever rented in his life.

The ducks were flying free above him. He thought for sure they knew it as he pushed away with a crisp clatter of his paddle. A bright yellow fin of light sharply prattling at the edges of the cold and burbling waters of Fall Lake.

And then, amidst late morning fog… the loons.

The silence.