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Message |
| Posted By: |
UT |
| Date: |
24-Dec-2002-23:32:32 |
| Subject: |
Walking Through Santa Fe On A Snowy Evening |
On Christmas Eve in Santa Fe, one of the traditions is the Canyon Road Walk. Canyon Road and Asequia Madre are two of the oldest streets in this old town, and the residents -- mny of them famous artists -- go to great lengths to construct beautiful mandalas of luminarias (small brown paper bags with candles in them). Then several thousand people come out at sunset and walk along together, singing Christmas Carols and drinking free mulled cider provided by the shopkeepers and the residents and being more friendly than they've been all year and just digging the ecstasy of it all.
So I'm sitting here at the computer checking my email and my newsgroups one last time before I go to dinner and then to Canyon Road, and on one of the newsgroups someone's started a thread on samadhi. And I start to read it and at first it's rancorous because everybody's got their own idea of exactly what this state that lies beyond ideas is. But then a couple of folks wax poetic, and come up with cool metaphors, fingers pointing at the moon, as it were.
This inspires me, and for some reason I find myself telling the story of a walk I took some years ago in a park in Westchester County, one of the places we used to go with Rama. It was a nice, forested park -- lots of animals, birds, crickets, frogs in mating season, that sorta thing. And I was just walking along by mysef, doing a kind of Zen walking meditation, really digging the silence of the place, when at a construction site across the road someone set off a stick of dynamite.
All of a sudden there really *was* silence. And the first thing I realized was that it really hadn't been silent before when I was walking along appreciating the silence. There had been birds, crickets, frogs...lots of sounds. But with the blast the birds suddenly stopped singing, the crickets stopped chirping, even the frogs paused in mid-mating ritual for a few moments. It was just SILENT.
And the second thing that I realized is that this deeper silence had been there all along. I just hadn't noticed it because I had grown used to the singing and the chirping and the croaking. The silence didn't *mind* that I hadn't noticed it before. It was just silence. It had been there before I noticed it and it would be there after the animal symphony started up again. But it really was neat to notice it, even if only for a few moments.
And I hit the POST button and sent the thought winging its way across cyberspace and then realized that I was sitting there at the computer with an enormous smile on my face, because I could hear the silence again. And as crowded and noisy as it gets on Canyon Road tonight, I know that I'll hear it there, too.
Merry Christmas to all.
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