“Rotten grass becomes fireflies”

腐草為螢 — Kusaretaru kusa hotaru to naru

I have to sit. The breath is too short. It is that balance of inner competition: as the pump strain subsides, the pump failure moves forward. This keeps the walks short and the lifting light.

I had watched my father only as spectator. Though now long gone, he possesses me. I am an occupied host. My memories of him remind: his body’s decay, at seventy, and now of our shared struggle. Different paths; our eyes share the retreating world before us. He is not empathetic nor sympathetic, just always smiling. “Do you know me any better now?”

I scoff at myself. Not a mirror image but mirroring the decline he too lived. He continued collapsing at a pace that today’s skilled interventionists have slowed for me. Medications have improved, with demonstrable gains. Yet, the fraction of blood pumped will only decrease. I don’t want to hurry it.

At the core though I think he took joy at seeing my mother’s face. Her walk to his chair-side with soup he called “dishwater.” A smoker through the war into his own Big One. The bypass sustaining a receding health. He had a demand for salt. Recovering any possible taste of life’s former freedoms. My mother, exasperated, left the salt shaker at his side. Love cannot stop the harms one does to self.

luciferase splays

fireflies shine ‘bove grass decay

photon splashes bright

I pick up pieces and puzzle myself into some semblance of rational. I try not to repeat the errors. Effort on the wrong object of attention. Perhaps if he had been able to rest on her eyes and smile. Objections to broth. Attachment to self. Attention to the rot. He could see it. His life passing breathless from bed to chair would deny all warmth. The embers that were not children: Love for the youth she remembered. Some days her light would hold. With hands held tightly they would dissolve into tears.

lingering, without point

separation anchors seat

expanse revealed

I just want to be “OK.” Without all the divisions. It’s not about loving yourself. You can’t put that pressure on anyone. The breath shortens either way. The chair moved a few steps nearer. Narcissus bending closer to the clear pool. Straining to “love yourself,” emboldens the reflection’s detail. Seen in memory’s fun house mirror, are we sure of what is loved? Breath duration does not improve with the chair brought closer. The effort is accommodated.

Just live toward being OK.

It is within the action, the conduct, that one finds the inseparable. “Love yourself” installs a measuring partition (loved / not-loved). Too easily flips into self-indulgence — the endless spa-and-makeover loop, the silliest thing I’ve ever seen, and I lived it. “Live to being OK” sets no such partition. It is the lower, truer floor. There is nothing to compare. A door to equality. Without compulsion, coercion. Voluntary. “I do not have to be better than what I am right now.” No matter the condition the true floor: “I don’t have to act this way again, and again.”

loving myself hard

i buy another mirror

to check that i do

Steadiness is found in the zen koan. It is not a word puzzle to solve and then move on. The sound of one hand clapping is thunderous for some. For others? It is just a tinkle from the bowl. Mandala built on the cushion. Mandala sand scraped into the river.

“I put her down,” acknowledges one who has picked her up. “Why do you still carry her?” Is that deflection or an inquiry into the status of shared practice? Or a bon mot moment. “Your inner turmoil. My outer completion.” Or perhaps just one-up-manship. A harsh critique of the junior. A Jesuit truth table?

When accused unjustly, “Is that so.” The wheel of sharp weapons returning? The poisonous food found in the peacocks’ garden? Or sitting with steadiness. “I am OK.” The child is not mine. Today I take care of the child. The child that was not mine, is now taken away. Today I prepare one less meal. Confusion and nonconfusion are the same. Unmodified, you wash the bowl.

Direct Bodhicaryāvatāra: rather than paving the whole world in leather, wear sandals — guard the mind, not the ground.

The monk admits the bloodied samurai. Head taken by blade-of-grass or Katana? Samurai crazed? Samurai sane? The monk allows no distinction.

The conduct of one’s life expresses it all: never parted from sorrowless bliss free from bias, attachment, and fierce emotion. Naked awareness settling evenly, not objectified into loveable or not.

Simultaneously insane now reaching a point of potential sanity. Nothing to love about himself, the samurai pauses. “Teach me the dharma.” A plea for another path? An excuse to continue the old? The conduct is the key. Hand eager at the hilt. Steadied by the resolve of a monk in practice of realization who remains silent. Pull the sword is the response of the old. Be as unmoved as the monk — is this the new path? The conduct matters, the words, not so much. Sañjīva is the monk; the miracle the same. Decapitation is trivial.

hand on the cold hilt

the monk’s breath does not quicken

awaits one firefly

There are old tales. Fashionable koans. Western culture has its own.

The inner, when unrecognized, is engaged as a linear tangle — hard to enter, hard to navigate — and at its center a minotaur: the unconscious, a maze of internal struggles that destroys you and eats you alive. Bull “head-id” conduct. Theseus the therapist arrives to engage and to kill it. The superego that binds it all. Ariadne’s thread ordering chaos.

Theseus raises the black. Reneges on the white. Triumphant return under false flag. Seizes the throne. New order commanded. A continuation of tribute reforms. Oedipus without the blindness. Patricide of foible or design.

Models linger: refreshed and renewed. Different perspective. Different preferred result. But they are the rot that feeds.

the rot becomes light

fireflies rise from the spent grass

no climbing higher

the true floor holds my short breath

both host and ghost: OK