dance me hom

ZEN AND THE MONK. Monk: Everyone grows old, but tonight I saw the love in your eyes
That spread across the sky of my life like silver gold,
Cutting from the stream bed into my heart...
And this was written in the dream
Like a sky that can never come back
Or one that never left;
This is not about you
Nor me
It is just the love in…
That spark in the heart
Something shining
That can never be said
I think I will stop listening now and go open the big doors. I hear someone knocking.
And then the monk opened the big doors to a stranger who was knocking just then... The stranger woman had been knocking until the doors were opened... The monk who opened the doors asked the one handed clapping question to the stranger... Who upon hearing it gave a bird impression... and was immediately let in... Later, the monk said to the stranger: “you must be a Zen master to answer the question so promptly.” The stranger replied. “I have been doing this for so long I know all the answers to all the questions and yours was easy to answer.”
Monk: When are you planning on going?
Zen: How can I say? Where is going anyway?
Monk: Will they let you go there, this place you are going to? And why would anyone want to go there?
Zen: I will have to let you know where it is as I go there but I can say it is a place few have chosen to journey to.
Monk: Oh...I thought it was a place.
Zen: Misunderstanding?
Monk: Yes.
Zen: Ok, no problem.
Monk: I don't know what people talk about; maybe it is still yesterday where you came from and news travels slowly to here, out of date before it gets here; who knows? Are the winds strong there? Do they move mountains in their ferocity?
Zen: Could be messages no one has ever heard coming in.
Monk: Sometimes they come in out of order or days later.
Zen: Me too.
Monk: Never mind. Things change.
Zen: Are you listening?
Monk: About what? Oh! Every day, as much as I can.
Zen: Such is the way.
Monk: Must have been yesterday; a thing unheard of, a lark maybe, or noise. Can you imagine it? And to sit so quietly, not a word lost.
Then a mist comes and takes it all away. A poet would say it another way I am sure. And when the curtain comes down will you hear the calling of your name? Or the drop into the ocean of it all? And now the surrender and many books to read into tomorrow. I do so hope you’re following all of this and not shaking your head, for the full moon up there hears all we say.
Zen: Up? Yes, this is a good beginning we are having.
Monk: Oh. Good. Let me know how you do it, I lost myself there long ago.
Zen: My mind goes inside and out lots of times.
Monk: Is it a trick do you think? Where we can play life.
Zen: It was as if I were reading from the Tao.
Monk: And?
Zen: So, my mind is in a very deep place.
Monk: “Deep. Hmm.”
Zen: You sound like it's very late here.
Monk: I sound like a lot of things; but are you happy?
Zen: “I don't know much of anything. I just keep asking more questions. Happiness I think will find me when I am ready.”
Monk: Maybe you’re tired and should go to bed.
Zen: I should. But I have….Have you heard the latest news?
Monk: I can't help you on the question of current affairs. I only know the answer to one question and I forget what it is; maybe if I pay more attention.
Zen: Why do you bother?
Monk: It's who I am. Why do you bother?
Zen: I think when I grow up I will become a thief in the night and raid the fridges of the train workers and see what they have. They say you can hear thinking, can you?”
Monk: I am thinking something. Can you hear?
Zen: The question is too huge for me. Ask me another.
Monk: Am doing a poem
Am a poem
Doing a poem:
Everyone grows old,
But tonight I saw the love in your eyes
That spread across the sky of my life
Like silver gold cutting from the stream bed into my heart...
Zen: “I can hear you.”
Monk: “This is why you came here, to see if we can hear each other’s thoughts?”
Zen: “Yes. I want you to record what I think and feel as I journey on. Will you?”
Monk: “Yes, but it will cost you a big bag of gold. The temple roof needs fixing.”
Zen: “That will not be a problem, but could you not have asked from the universe for this gold and envisioned it turning up?”
Monk: “I did. Thank you for coming.”
Zen: “Oh, I see. Well it is a metaphysical journey to the afterlife or the spirit world if you like, and I will be going on into the unexplored realms as a real journey so if I become lost there then it will be hard for me to find my way back. There will only be my heart to guide me, and also you of course as companion. You will be kept busy recording. Are you up to it?”
Monk: “I am prepared. I knew you were coming a long time ago and so have made myself ready.”
Zen: “As you receive my thoughts and feelings I want you to record them, all of them no matter what. I will be praying a lot too.”
Monk: “Tell me some more so that I can become attuned to you.”
Zen: “I will tell you of how I got here: Crossing another border one time we sat by the ocean and played word games as the sea swelled around the rocks. S was the letter. After we ran out of words my companion said to me: “No one has ever gone so long before with so much fun in this game.” Later, we went looking for a toilet and found a locked privy. My companion pooped outside as I stood guard. Then we went back and danced to the music Arabia.
That night we found an allotment of cold love by a dark house, and pulled up frozen, dirty vegetables, ate them in a small shed. Shared love on sacks, and then like a single grain of dust we slept in the pitch black wrapped around each other. A frozen dawn saw us walking onwards
RUNNING THROUGH SAND. Zen: “When the world leaked out, a little bit went this way and a little bit went that way. Nothing could be found any place where it should be. Time was what you could make it, and if you could make it, it just ran out between your fingers like sand. You couldn’t get anywhere, for there was nowhere to stand, upside down was out, and in was over there squeezing to push on somewhere else between a colour and an indisposition that was slipping and sliding round and round. Light was cracking like ice. Black was like tar then dissolving into tyre tracks that led nowhere.
All looked like something, but was only an illusion, a swirling mist metamorphosing to sound in and out of the static. I ran for it on the ice cricking and cracking under me; sped round a corner that was there, then, just when I wanted a straight line flight plan. I bumped into a man walking his dog. It was my friend with my dog from another lifetime, coming back from that lifetime on an errand that was long forgotten. The lid was off, nothing was what it seemed. The sky was huge and moving, it pulled us up the hill. We forded a stream that hissed beneath us. Came to a reflection, found it was our very own selves, looking back at us; a mirror we shared but couldn’t understand.
So we moved on into a very dark place, couldn’t see anything. We turned around, tried to find a way back. Ghostly lights confused us. The dog ran off and couldn’t be found. It all looked the same, images that wavered but had no substance. A clock was still ticking, but was meaningless in the place we’d come to. The infusion was a timeless moment that could not be caught as both sides of the circle stared at each other forever. We walked through the sentinels on tiptoe, so careful not to disturb them, and made it to another situation that suddenly came at us, an apparition that gave us both a shock. It just suddenly popped up right in front of us, some gargoyle visage of frightening proportions. We ran from that one too down a long road that was dusty and hot and dead empty. Behind us we knew there was something we didn’t want to be around so we kept on running. For days we ran and wore out our shoes and our clothes were in rags.
We came to the next town but there were no buses and the train didn’t stop there anymore. We hung about the graveyard for a few hours to acclimatise ourselves to all that was going down about us. We got restless after the fifteenth body was lowered below so we decided to carry on.”
Monk: “Where was this place? Tell me so I can avoid it!
Zen: “It is a place hardly remembered, a dream; past the withered fields; the mud flats are criss-crossed and deep, with fissures and you’ll wobble around on them as you walk along, wondering how far you’d sink if you fell through. Further on, you come to the first heap of old junk, as If left there by party goers from some titanic party; lost stuff from lost people forgotten, not even hungry anymore. It is all like some crazy garden made by people who don’t care and had no use for it from the start, abandoned, even as they made it. It feels like a place no-one should go to. There is little or no love there; and if you scatter your thoughts about and drop a layer of tears, the dried mud will absorb it all and give back nothing. I’m sure that if anything were to sprout there, it would be the most withered weed that no amount of sun could help.
It is the bone dry place I passed through to get here. A place that has no sign-posts, just used dusty thoughts to stumble over that others have discarded before me on their way through the desert.
Monk: “Thank you for telling me about this place. Can it be avoided do you think?”
Zen: “I would have avoided it if I had found another way. It was my way, the one I took to get here. Others have taken this way, but I think there are other ways. There are three deserts; one is the desert of the mind but your heart’s compass can take you through that one. One desert is of the heart and no-one but yourself can get you through that one. The other desert is the physical one and you need a guide for that one as the way is long and it is easy to become lost and perish in the sands.”
Monk: “Please carry on with your tale.”
Zen: “My journey through that desert, the physical one was long and arduous but my companion was my guide and saw me through to a beautiful ocean where we found a magnificent old hotel beside the ocean and further on was a crazy looking city.
In a garden of song by a statue of a naked young lady was a maze. At the entrance to the maze sat a circular poet who told me the way to go. He said: soon I will become drowsy and lay down to sleep, and a dream would come to me and show me the next step of the journey. I thanked him and went to find a place to rest.
We stopped for dinner near the beautiful abandoned hotel that had many rooms, but my companion left me and went off to pick daisies from the grass beside the ocean. As I pulled out a sandwich, a drunk on the ocean that was at the front of the hotel almost fell off his boat. He looked around to see if anyone had seen him. I looked down at my food as he went off in a huff puffing his cigarette. Left his bottle behind. In the hot sun I began to get tired so I sat under a tree for a while. Felt a spectacular abandon I became lost to.
I dreamed of a room full of lonely prisoners, all strangers who couldn’t find a way out? In a quiet spot a warrior sat by himself waiting with patience, observing, not believing the despair, ready to do what is needed; and when the time comes to escape acts with no doubt and goes straight for the exit. Nothing is lost in the capture; all is gained in the freedom. Patience is a warrior’s friend. Wisdom comes from that experience.
I awoke from this dream to find my companion tying a garland of flowers around my neck. I laughed and pulled her into my arms. We decided to move into the abandoned hotel for a while and rest from our long journey. I tried to make sense of the dream, but felt a note of resistance to what it meant for me. It is strange that is was abandoned as I had been told it was a beautiful palace.
We camped out in one of the rooms. I didn’t see my companion much during the day as she would be off exploring the other rooms and would come back with tales of a room’s past. One day, a week into our stay there she came into our room wearing an expression of deep thought.
“I have to tell you,” she began. “The gravity of ships is so sad. There is a room here at the end of the hall that used to be a room made of dreams that once saw ships off to sea, where people used to look out of gabled windows as the century turned and watch life passing by. Those same windows now rotting and falling out. It’s the most beautiful room with its quiet and sad magic, still proud, raising towers and spires of stories from the dust of its legend.”
“You sound like a poet,” I said. She just laughed and walked off somewhere taking with her the sound of a lonely old room giving off one last sigh.
There was a phone in one of the rooms I didn’t use much, and whenever I passed the door, it would ring. The only other time it would ring was when I was in the bath, but I never answered it from there. It was always someone out there who was lost, calling me up. I’d tell them how to get there. Sometimes I would see a flare far off, and then the phone would ring and I would say: ‘keep going.’ Then they would arrive tired and thirsty and I would show them to one of the rooms.
When one crawled out of the desert just about dead, their tongue like a dried fig rolled in ashes, they didn’t know they’d come to an oasis at first. But after a cool drink was poured down their throat they revived.
Monk: “This seems to be a long tale you are telling. It is time for tea. Come and help me in the kitchen to boil some water and chop some vegetables for dinner. You can carry on with your story there.
Zen: It would be my pleasure. As each day went by and their eyes became unstuck, they could see more. They found there was far more there than they could have dreamed of, and in fact they discovered treasures that had stood for so long and were untouched and seemed to have been left just for them, and in fact they were, but how this could be I can’t say, but beggars can’t be choosers, especially thirsty ones.
One morning a woman traveller unwrapped a present that revealed her secret self, that self she’d travelled across her whole life to find. There were many secrets in that hotel.
THE MAKING OF A GOOD PARTY. So there I was in the hallway one day of the hotel shared by many. I was Sunday, sundown maybe never and a bottle of wine or two, well so the story goes.
An emptiness prevailed over the totality of my failure to find my one true love, for I was my one true love and I felt my failure complete.
After I was completely dead, two young lovers walked into the emptiness filled with a ghost and an undug garden. They were overjoyed and made many plans for how it would be. My dust was on the stairs and they trod in it as they went up and down.
The night of the party there was a howl and a bottle smashed against a wall. The ghost still had a shiver left in her. So she danced at the party, and later fell over completely drunk as a full moon climbed the sky.
My mortality hit me like a stone when I awoke the next morning and a terrible aloneness was with me and followed me all down the day with the wings of the reaper.
Night came a crescent moon in a black sky, and cold, cold. High above in the darkness a black crow cawed. It was an old crow and had forgotten many things. It had even forgotten where it was, yet it cawed an age old secret, another thing from the forgotten past. The crow was high up, well above fear saying: “I am a wisp of wind flying.”
And listening to the crow as it cawed I sat and sang my life song on a red chair in a room full of ghouls. As I played, I heard the darkness, but my silver song was bright. I played and played in a place inside myself all that I was. I heard the black crow caw, an old crow in a place somewhere forgotten, perhaps an angel that rose to the night as the sound of a silver saxophone soared.
Yes I have been to the depths and looked from its desolate windows and I was filled with despair. I lived there for a thousand years but I didn’t like it so I moved away. And I suppose really that’s why I am here in this monastery half way up a mountain.”
Monk: “You’re most welcome.”
Monk: “It’s always good to listen to an interesting story. It seems that while you have been telling your story we have made dinner and it is ready and I hardly remember making it. Let’s sit and eat, I want to hear more. Let’s go up to the rooftop and see the sunset and you can tell me something about what it was like outside of the hotel.”
Zen: “OK. At the front of the hotel is an ocean so wide you can’t see the other side. To the right is desert further than you can walk without a lot of water. Behind is more desert with these mountains in the far distance. And to the left is a ghost city, but people must live there because you can hear them sometimes. I would walk through the city in the deepening gloom with the ravaging cry of lost ones from the shadows as a cold desolate wind blew through me. Erratic clouds seemed to ravenously devour the sky as tall buildings gothically displaced my wandering sense of equilibrium. It was a strange place.”
Monk: “Were you not afraid?”
Zen: “I was careful, but not afraid? I felt at home for it was a mirror of how I felt inside. It was a place of sundown surreal and I was immune, or maybe I was a stray other sundown in it all. Who cares? I could not even remember my name between the buckets of doom. I had given up asking for a hand to pull me back while I was sinking. I had not been able to find what I was looking for and round and round it all went just to win another round of love. And yes I struggled against the strange language of it all, until I could find relief.”
Monk: “Tell me some more of this city you wandered in after dark.”
Zen: “Where the tide turns in a moment of peace I came across a puppet man, playing a mandolin, accepting pennies from the crowd, gypsy dancing, scarecrow pulling up pants, looking like hewn driftwood. All the crowd a sea, a wave, surging around his feet. Someone singing a dream a small sorrow, an acceptance.
Time was a movement of moments in the breeze of a child of life playing a bittersweet song. He was always there at that spot and always had the same crowd around him. I stood in the shadows to listen for the music he played soothed my soul.
Every night at the same time he would play for one hour then pack up and go. As he shuffled past me he would glance at my face hidden in the shadows of the shop doorway I stood in, and as I looked into his eyes I would find myself falling into a deep place. Had he captured my soul? And then he would be gone and I would come to myself, alone and look around.
Up above a crane soared like a terrible lizard, and flags flew from towers of scaffolding long abandoned. I walked down long avenues of impenetrable shops that cast their desertion like a dark wave that naïve youths penetrated brandishing their amour on the lonely pavement. It was just another night in the city and like so many nights before I was going nowhere. I was lost in the wrong place. How many ways in? How many ways down?
Someone in a raincoat in the rain under a street light. Waiting, to knock on a door. Any door. But who can find an open door on a night like this? These question would go through my mind as I walked along in the dark city.
I was well hidden in myself but I thought she would see me, the one I searched for, the one I never found. I am here, I said. Where are you? But the night only played its blues as I sat by myself in the corner of a crowd with faces that animated then disseminated through the smoky haze and the beer.
Long children stood by the bar and discussed their aspirations. Other inebrious inspirations glanced in eyes from faces unworldly.
I saw her, someone in the crowd in her ragged jeans, voluptuous vest, standing on clogs, wearing a nose ear-ring, desolate long hair, smoking a cigarette and looking demure as she pressed against her girl-friend while finishing her beer with her big round eyes ignoring my sighs, and then walking off into the night with her friends.
I saw her breasts and touched them tentatively; her lips kissed mine; her fingers brushed shyly through my hair; we fell in love and were joined and had the best of all love could offer and for the rest of our days we were happy together.
I decided then to go home. Another night lost. I walked past an oasis and saw they had a sale on and a terrible din was perpetuated by a hunger seen vociferously from some cheap oblivion.
And then further along the road a red light was portraying an expensive hand-out for the forsaken; some wealthy dropping got what he came for.
The city is a place of shadows and passing lights and irreconcilable lovers with dreams flung to be dragged through the gutters overseen by the irrepressible on high. The denizens of the deep don’t sleep, and I saw them all as I walked home.
Later, in bed, I listened to the languorous rain twirl every path of least resistance with a sound that sent me to sleep.
DOUBT. Every day I would ask the same questions: Am I stuck in this strange hotel of disbelief? Where am I coming from? I asked this every day; and where am I? I couldn’t say, but I heard cries all the time to echo me some such pictures of beauty lost in the dust.
People came to my door every day. Some to ask and some just to smoke, but I told them to go away, my friends too. I could not spare a moment for that. They would ask me what was in my heart, but I could not say. I am no one’s servant but my own.
So I ran down the days, to find myself, once again where spiders wear perfume and ghosts dance in the night. To ask, who am I? What am I? This that walks this under tables crushed full of something that can’t be said? That one's a smoke break, and this one’s a lifetime full of rice fields burnt and empty of dinner. Join the party below to get drunk, and stay that way forever like some bird across the lakes, a heaven, in a form, another plate of food amongst the best that is given in the gravity of dreams. They say all is under control, but the earth is burning. And I would know what is in my heart for it to be so?”
Monk: “You know, I sometimes think I can see a city in the far distance. When the heat of the sun shimmers over the sand, but this city you describe sounds like a hellish place to me. I don’t feel I would like to visit such a place.”
Zen: “The city is a mirage, it changes as you look at it by how you are feeling. Sometimes it is not there. Other times it is a hellish beast of burden to be carried with back bent in an ocean of doubt. And what can be built in this place that has no love? What do I care about building? The sea in waves washes away the castles of sand, and there are more waves than sand, though each comes alone. So much sea for a grain to become one.
You see, in thoughts I am fragments blown and imprisoned by concepts and definitions that only point to what I am not. And as it all passes, I find my life, like minestrone, captures me in this longing that should I ever be more than this, what I have always been, an invisible one, passing through searching for the one, that glad tide that walks the winds, then I would be the sun-dance in the eye, the secret behind every lover’s lips, that elusive kiss in passion’s abandon that smiles behind the eyes of the mystical cry in the forlorn place of my lostness. It will be in the moment that passes me by and makes me search for the heart I long for until we find each other in life’s sweet abandon.
Monk: “Some people live their whole lives in a very small place. They swim in waters of familiarity and never feel to the boundaries pressing. How could they ever escape if they don’t know they are in a prison? And even when they are told, there seems not to be any light of belief in their eyes. And so they carry on the treadmill of the next thought that leads them ever round in circles of their days until life is utterly spent and that last breath comes and they are no more.
What could break this spell? What could touch the heart of such so asleep in their dream to spark a flash of awakening? Pain, trauma, the dark night of the soul, love, or love’s loss? The bread and butter of our lives feeding us such murmuring satisfaction in the dream/mist where the next thing to appear is what our dulled thoughts conjure, limited to the narrow world that has sucked us into itself of our consumer beliefs of status and religious programming, all slaves to the elite without mercy that came here first and own and rule all. Where is the freedom? “
DUST THOUGHTS ON THE STEPPING STONE ROAD. Zen: “Yes indeed, where is the freedom? It is a clue to your life to stand by the ocean and look in, to realise the hugeness, and the smallness are in you, and that there is no distance between the two, where even the monkeys of thought can hardly come; a sailboat of love in the peaceful swell of bliss sailing there beyond the thoughts, where from the secret hidden depths where one wanders in flights of abandon with whispers of the mystery, searching for where it is hidden; to look for it in the passion places of the heart, even the blood deeds of the mind, where the wingless angels of old thoughts grey the mist in the hope of time through nights of a dark dream. To not have any dust thoughts for this, that near perfect to wander in it all.
What can I say? I want to go home, past those tides that pull too much their desire to sway. Through all the long corridors of stuff to have walked down through the long years, with that beauty following so near.
I am thrown a bone of love, and like a hungry dog I pounce yet find an empty shadow, that wind to sway the trees asleep in rustic dreams of passion’s purpose in the sleeping blackness beneath that glory. And to find a note on the path, by a table of abundance, in some another country to pass through, to read there is something more. Let not the life escape in lack then where the charming stars in their splendour beseech to rise once more.
But what can I take with me when I go? To have left so much behind, so much lost.
To have swum in so many oceans just to drown in that beauty until I am covered by the dust, so much dust to love.
There was love in that place I cannot remember. And it was there too in the hole I was lost in for so long. The flights through all those dark places of abandon. So many flights to some another place, so many places to find that love.
And now I have found the answer was closer all the time, that if there is a food for kings it is this where the longing mystery is a perfect grace inside, not to be hidden but to hear the song of joy and know that comforting grace with this yearning to explore something lovely, something that feels good. To hear the music of the friend, gathered good memories of beautiful places and so many images to remind of things to cherish:

Posted 10 Years Ago