The Singing Bowl

Watch how the waves seem
to stay in the same place
though the water that makes them
is never the same, a fact
that thrills me again and again.
Who will take my place here
when my own water flows on?
Or will the wave disappear
as after a flood?
And who has come before me
making this wave I call my life?
How easily it changes the day
to know self as a drop
in the stream.

From In the Flow by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Just this morning, I sat on the couch in my living room and looked out the window at trees without leaves on this mid-February day. I have looked out on this view hundreds, thousands, of times. If I weren’t careful, it would be easy to think that it is always there, just as it is, but I know better. I know that no one moment is identical to the next. I know that everything, even the slowest moving things of the world, like trees, are ever changing. Nothing is static. Everything is ever-emerging, new all the time.

And as the outside, so the inside. The breath. How it comes and goes whether I think of it or not. And the thoughts in the head. How they come and go whether I want them to or not. The tight muscle here, the ache there. But that tightness and ache flow like a river.

Yes, it changes the day to know self as a drop in the ocean. And here is why: If I am a drop in the ocean, then I am the ocean. If I am a person in the body of this world, then I am this world.

Yet, there is something at the core of all this movement, this change, this undulating reality of the inner and outer worlds, that unrelentingly rings itself like a meditation bowl that hums out its tone forever after being struck once. I don’t know when I was struck, or why — perhaps it has always been so — but this whole life is that singing bowl vibrating itself into the shapes of the ones I love, of the ones I don’t, into the paths that open before me, and the obstacles that fall and block the way.

In the woods the other day, the dogs weaving in and out of the trees around me, the thought came, “This moment is not supposed to be any other way.” It stopped me in my tracks, the truth of it, the weight of it on my back, not as a burden but as a gift of time and space and gravity, placing me here, just here, and now, just now. A drop in this ocean.

Then up ahead a woman walked toward us, and the dogs approached and passed her on either side, scrambling on to the next scent. The woman screamed, and I called the dogs back to my side. She froze in place and stared at us. I asked her if she was alright, unsure of what had caused her fright. Her hands went to her head, shaking, as she said she had been attacked as a child, and she is sick and tired of how dogs are everywhere, how I was breaking the law. “They scared me,” she screamed.

I clipped the lead to the dog’s collars, not wanting to argue what I could not, and passed her. As I moved away, she called out, “You have ruined my walk. You have ruined my day.” I turned, and without thinking, my hand came up into a stop sign and I heard myself sound a deep “No.” Then I turned my hand over, in a gesture of giving and said, “I’m giving that back to you,” before I turned and walked away.

Like the dogs, I shook off the energy that had been generated between us all, and in its place a sadness crept in. Then a sort of wordless prayer for the woman, that she might soon be able to walk truly and open and free in the woods — dogs or no dogs, killers or no killers — instead of laboring along inside a frozen memory of fear and dread.

And then, again, the thought came: “This moment is not supposed to be any other way.” And this. And this. And this.