The Green Mountains Are Always Walking

Reflections take two forms: images that appear in a mirror or a shiny surface and thoughts or images that appear in our mind. I find it interesting that we think of thoughts as reflections. They do, in some sort, reflect things: situations, experiences, phenomena, landscapes, sensations, excerpts, prophecies, judgments, interpretations, speculations. Things that exist, and things that do not exist.

Dividing things that exist from things that don’t exist isn’t as easy as it might seem. Once anything gets into your nervous system and begins knocking around in your brain it can seem pretty real. If you feel, for example, that someone has injured you unfairly with a comment or brush off or cold shoulder the emotion can be quite real. But is it real? Or is it a misinterpretation? And even if it’s an accurate reading of a presumed friend treating you like an asshole what does it matter? It might feel like they stabbed you in the gut but they didn’t and if you look down you’ll see that none of your intestines are falling out and there’s no blood just an untucked shirt and a gravy stain.

There’s no mirror in my brain. The images in my mind don’t have the same value as the images reflected in the bathroom or bedroom mirrors. Those images are mundane. My face, the bed, a basket overflowing with bills and letters.

The images in my brain are an erratic flow of junk and butter and art and impressions. It’s the ruminations that cling. That keep circulating. That keep going around and around like clothes in a washing machine. And never resolve. Never reach an end. A conclusion. A consummation. A culmination. A denouement.

People call it closure. Closure is generally the feeling I’m hoping to find when I stretch out a thought and peer through its membranes and veins and bounce it against the wall and dribble it down the court and hold it and turn it around and draw it and bake it and delouse it and bowl it and branch it out in a jumble of moss and fungus.

They’re like unsolvable equations. Goldbach’s conjecture. The Collatz conjecture. The Hodge conjecture. The Riemann hypothesis. The election of Trump.

Men say women. Men can’t figure women out. And women can’t figure men out.

You never know what’s going to bubble up. As soon as you think you’ve got an answer, you’ve got people figured out, you know what motivates them to do this or that, a hole in the fabric appears and you fall through and discover a whole other universe you didn’t know existed. This happens to artists all the time and they love it. They begin creating holes to fall through.

The mind that sees into the impermanence of all things is enlightened. We can see this illustrated in a poem by the Japanese Buddhist priest Dōgen Zenji:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.

The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.

Although its light is wide and great,

The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.

The whole moon in one dewdrop on the grass.

We live in a world of reflections. They’re everywhere.

Enlightenment is harder to find. I don’t know what it is. It’s not a place or a time. It’s not a location. It’s not a string. It’s not a bingo game or a beating heart. It’s a strawberry. It’s a snowdrift packed against a door. It’s a range of mountains walking through the sky. It’s the sky walking on the ground. It’s the ground walking in the eye of a water buffalo. It’s a woman diving into the still waters of a river. A tug crossing the sound. People assembling in a room. A catalogue of bathroom fixtures. The raised gold letters of a wedding invitation. A neuro-ophthalmologist carefully examining the interaction between the eyes and the brain. Mark Rothko at work in 1961 rubbing a red corner with a rag dipped in turpentine. The edge softens and allows us to see through layers of paint. Water roaring down La Rue Molière. Howler monkeys leaping from tree to tree in Costa Rica. A man coughing in a movie theatre. Rope. Movement. Monterey Cypress leaning over the Pacific in Big Sur. Words in a paragraph. The flow induced by a sphere oscillating in a viscous fluid. It’s all these things. And none of these things.

How do I know what enlightenment is? I don’t. This is a disclaimer.

I wouldn’t know what enlightenment is if I tripped on it.

Shit! I just tripped on a cord and hit my head against the door. Am I enlightened? Not sure. But my head hurts.