Zen and the monk: part three

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 girls 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 played my silver sax 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 my 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 walked 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 guitar and dancing in the moon, 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 moving 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?

But 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 questions 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 a 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, 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.
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 as if my soul was trying to escape or get somewhere.

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. 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 a lifetime; the 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 around 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? “

Images from Pixabay

part one https://steemit.com/wisdom/@wales/zen-and-the-monk

part two https://steemit.com/zen/@wales/running-through-sand

Part four https://steemit.com/meditation/@wales/until-i-go-home-again