a stormy Christmas day
At noon, a break in the rain. Bundled up and with an umbrella in case of the downpouring's return, I ventured out a couple blocks to the Fort Mason Community Garden, Sebald ensconced somewhere safe in my jacket's voluminous inner pocket, along with my samādhi of the lay sacraments. Yet again, I listened to the Nepali Sanskrit rendition of the Heart Sutra, singing and chanting along to it with nearing fealty to its words and spirits.
A ringing dream earlier this morning, at the last REM period; it will be one of those 'dark matter' or 'dark energy' dreams, those which paradoxically cast light. As long as I can remember it, that is. Even now, a couple hours later, it is dissipating into the fragmentary. There was a man and a woman, both amalgams of people I once knew and had loved, each in their own way. Towards the end of the dream a choice, made along a body of water.
I've written about this along other Christmastides (on TFR, LND)... but this day has — for the past 21 years since my mother died — been a bruise of memory, a mirror and shadow image to the bright sash of the Milky Way above a moonless night in upcountry Maui, and in Kahikinui. There the tracks of ancient Hawaiians along the lavascape near the ocean whispering stories hardly anyone in living memory remembers.
I embrace a lingering pain, residue of the hurt of years... six and a half decades' worth of years; but as well, an abiding and centerless aloha, an agapé towards all beings, sentient or otherwise. The cairns of a'a rocks I had set on the slopes of that piece of heaven in Waiohuli a manifestation of that love for the wordless, of time writ in the substrate of stone.
Once upon a time, a boy crawled out onto the corrugated tin roof outside his window, a rolled-up banig held under his arm, his other hand clutching a book gifted him by a friend that Christmas day. And, spreading the mat on the still-day-warm roof began to read, while the rains stayed away for a while, the monsoon still incipient. Later, in the evening, candlelight would suffice for the words to be flickeringly seen, held in memory, loved.
