before the spinning
"You eliminate an enormous amount of suffering by concentrating on the suffering that is actually present instead of creating more with your thinking. It is the difference between discomfort and torment," writes the Buddhist meditation teacher Larry Rosenberg.
Thousands of thoughts in a day.* Rapid-firing. Most of them unnoticed. Some of them become longer stories spinning themselves into labyrinths of, yes...suffering. Spinning into a world of worry, desire, drama that is not even present.
Who were we before we came up with all these thoughts? Anyways? What is and has always been true for us before we began to believe our opinions, before concepts of what should or shouldn't be, before disparities and discord? When I pause, quietly, I get it. I live the experience of my thoughts. Seldom do I live what is available and present now. But sometimes, in stillness, I do. We all do: I don't have to identify with all the thinking.
So it is not even that we have to control our thoughts. They come and go. They can be beautiful, useful. But what is at their source? How can I live in this original space, where all thinking is still possible, a way of being unencumbered? No need to define this space that allows presence, present. Just opening into it, relief.
Inspired by the theoretical physicist, and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, and just weeks after his death the poet and teacher Marie Howe wrote a poem that more than anything speaks to this. It inspired this post and follows below.
We may never know. It doesn't even matter. Just this. Is. "Home."
SINGULARITY by Marie Howe (after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home
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