Winter

Simply being alive

The beauty of winter light. The trees mostly bare now. The pond frozen over. A Great Blue Heron stepping carefully on the ice, watching for movement below the frozen surface, ready to strike. Strings of migrating birds crossing the sky. Early darkness.

Sometimes I am bursting with joy at the beauty everywhere. At another moment, feeling caught in a dark, sticky, uneasy depression, which feels like a substantial “thing” that has overtaken me. I feel myself searching for a cure, which only tightens the imaginary knots. And then, out of the blue, the question arises, “Is it possible for this to end completely right now?” Instantly, there is an awareness of how I am holding on to this darkness and to the story of being stuck in it, and in that recognition, there is suddenly the possibility of simply letting it go. Like magic, the darkness is gone. Everything feels light and luminous again, empty of substance and solidity, free.

Who asked that question? Who answered it? Who was holding on? Who let go?

It all emerged unbidden. The ever-changing weather, inside and outside, one whole undivided happening. Here-Now, in this open aware presence, there is no “me” apart from this flow of experiencing, no need for curative fantasies, no urge to find religious, metaphysical or spiritual explanations, no need to know how it all works—whether it is fundamentally mind or matter, or what either of those words even means, because when scientists look for matter or meditators look for mind, both come up empty-handed. There is simply being alive. Just this.

And right here in this alive emptiness—empty of answers and beliefs—is the freedom to simply be this aliveness, just as it is. Open. Empty. Free. Spacious. All-inclusive.

Nothing to do or not do. Listening to the rhythmic whooshing sounds of the trucks and cars traveling on the nearby interstate, drinking a cup of hot tea, typing words with a single index finger, as I do, amazed at the vastness of the universe in every direction, whether cosmic or microscopic, all of it right here, in every drop of this vast, holographic, fractal display.

Without the thought of separation, there is no controller and nothing separate to be controlled. There is no somebody to have or not have free will. There is no-thing to be born or to die. There is simply unbound, undivided flow, never departing from this present immediacy, going nowhere, endlessly changing shape, endlessly unfolding, periodically vanishing back into the germinal darkness of deep sleep or death, only to emerge again in ever-fresh ways.

This magical show is full of love and loss, joy and heartache, darkness and light, great kindness and immense suffering, tenderness and brutality, the agony and the ecstasy. And at the very core of everything, closer than close, most intimate, there is the stillness where all the sound and fury stops, where there is simply this unnameable, infinitely subtle openness.

Awake and alive, boundless and free, utterly ungraspable and infinitely precious.

We can sense that this openness, this unconditional love is the deepest truth of our being. This aware presence allows everything to be just as it is and clings to nothing, instantaneously liberating everything.

As you walk the
Spiritual path
It widens
Not narrows
Until one day
It broadens
To a point
Where
There is no
Path left at all.

– Wayne Liquorman

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Love to all…