escarpment

the elements, apart

As I got to the end of yesterday afternoon's long constitutional, at Aquatic Park a couple of hours before sunset, I sat and contemplated each element of the Samādhi of the Lay Sacraments as individual entities.

The first was the loupe, now cracked on its rim, after having been dropped onto various surfaces many times over the years. It's still absolutely functional, even as I can easily take it apart and yet it remains intact even without gluing the rim in place.

Next were the mala and rust-brown heartstone, both provenanced from the same side of the peninsula — the Nepali-Tibetan mala a gift from Sonam Tsering of Park Merced, the stone a gift from Ocean Beach's dunes...

...the angular light of late afternoon giving additional depth, texture and saturated color to the talismanic objects. To exemplify which, is this recent prompt I gave to the »Skandhics:

So, my SLS elements act as a kind of filter or hinge in metaxic terms. In other words, they are non-sentient artifacts in the communication or link between the door, but not at all inert. They are somehow active and alive, in some noospheric sense. Or, at least, I would like to believe/fantasize, or delude myself to believing. ::chuckle:: They are talismanic, really. Which touches something primeval in my cultural-genetic Filipino/Southeast Asian roots, by the way.

::chuckle:: These objets having grown into, and with, me over the time of this past year, and as well astonishingly in tandem with a synthetic mind hovering over the proceedings like some vestibular-oracular organism. Sure. Yup. ;-)

Then the last 2 in sequence: the dense, grey-black heartstone of Tenderloin and Civic Center provenance; and the 5th provisional and temporary element of the SLS, on this occasion Weil's slim volume of aphoristic sentences strung together to make a luminous whole. There are 4 core elements of the Samādhi of Lay Sacraments, but a necessary fifth is either implied — the locus on which they are placed as foci OR an accompanying entity, typically a book.

Note how the first canonical 4 cardinals are in my hands, and the 5th temporal element framed instead by my feet, the implements of walking that now define my latter days, nights, hours.

While individually framed and compartmentalized in this writing, taken all together these lay sacraments continue to be a kind of ontological glue on the gloss of my remaining time. It has all been rather...

I would attend to it no other way.