Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence by Paul Weiss

Author:Paul Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POE000000 Poetry / General
Publisher: North Atlantic Books

Just Sitting

It is the beauty of just sitting

that the great sorrow, the great failure

that breaks and illuminates our lives,

stretches before us like a lover waiting to be

made love to, or like one of the great cats,

whose purr sounds like a rumble from the heart

of the world and says, “Dance with us.”

And the great failure burns with the fire of

ecstatic being, and the rains come

from over the mesa, across infinite space.

Commentary: “Just Sitting”

Just sitting—zazen—is the essential zen practice. And with this title, this should be the shortest commentary in the book. But on the occasion of this poem, I had sat down very heavy-hearted, with an unspecific sense of sadness, failure, and separation. I found myself simply remaining present for the sensations, and even embracing them with relish, you might say, as if sitting down to a great feast. So here begins a long exploration of what is ultimately about just being here, albeit with welcoming awareness. Sitting is not a rarified practice, but a way of being present for what is. And, as I said earlier, when we embrace reality with empty arms, then reality embraces back.

The mind-body is subject to a wide spread of mental/emotional states and energies. The mind conventionally associates these states with the idea that we are feeling more or less “good” or “bad.” Right at the middle of this scale of states we may have the state of either “I’m feeling okay” or “I’m feeling a little off.” Along the okay scale we may progress to “I’m feeling really good,” or even to “transcendently blissful.” On the “off” side of the scale we may discern the sensations of minor or acute discomfort, disturbance, worry, and profound unhappiness or despair. We may feel simple well-being, harmony, completeness; or we may feel that a general fault line is running through—and has been running through—our lives.

We further attach a panoply of mental stories to these states that either assign causes for these states or consequences of these states; and that furthermore evaluate, praise, or blame external circumstances or ourselves. The simple and intimate awareness of the state itself is immediately lost in, or confused with, the story; and that story consequently defines our experience or our identity. These states are naturally so powerfully engaging of the mind that it is normally difficult not to define ourselves through them—and through the stories we create around them—and to thus further stimulate these energy states accordingly.

Emotions arise out of a deep fund of life energy; and these energies and emotions are a vital part of our biology and an expression of organic needs. They may direct the organism to certain kinds of activity, whether ultimately functional or dysfunctional. We have the brain/body capacity to naturally resolve these fluid emotional states and to bring them into integrated harmony with the life of the body; but the skills required to integrate these states go largely untaught, so instead we create stories around these states that give them a life of their own.

When we

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