A non-duel with headlessness
Last night (and not for the first time) I was mindful while staring into the overlapping branches of a few trees. This complex shape, especially as a twilight black-on-blue siloutte, is unrepresentable in words or math—its dynamism leads to its definitionlessness.
Being in a mindful state—non-dualistic—I was ever more awed to discover that this indescribable complexity was in my head. Whatever topspin my years of mindfulness or my evening cocktails or the actual structure of the trees, branches, and pine needles in THE REAL WORLD had spun, the experience the cognitive part of me will woefully convey, was rich with visual and mental vibrancy in consciousness. As I write these words today, in nearly the same spot and look over my shoulder to the same scene in the late afternoon light, the same interplay of dendrite needles both obstructing and being obstructed by axon branches who make synaptic gaps with neuronal trunks both in front and behind.
Whatever consciousness is, whether information processing in the brain, a non-material semblance simultaneous to the material world, or an interference with consciousness in parallel computational universes, its intimacy offers a constant source of enchantments and charms. Breath it in now. Appreciate the subtle smell or a far off sound. See something common in a new way, with a focus on the far off or as a backdrop for what is near.
Take a break from labeling the stuff you see, feel, hear, and smell. Near my home is a busy road (33 sections south of the temple to be precise) whose road noise sounds like a strange stream. The snowcapped horizon of Mount Olympus has a “J” of green set against the grey-blue sky. I have a sense of a pinprick in the space I am making for this scene.
Pinecones fall from trees in consciousness, landing like these words, silent after they are read in the same experience they encounter a normal force. Unless, of course, they hit my tin gazebo or spark a shared experience across our ocean of subjective semblance, and reverberate, finding firmament in your head.
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