WIND

A funny thing happened on the way to nirvana. As if it were the road to quantum mechanics, halfway there the rules changed, the map begun with proved all wrong, and I even lost track of who it was, exactly, doing the traveling, and why.

Nirvana, eventually it became apparent during many years of seeking it, is no sudden epiphany, or newfound ability to tap into mysterious powers or insights. My opinion is that the nirvana-seeking process is long and slow, with many setbacks along the way. Nirvana gradually reveals itself as the state of mind in which one identifies with the unity of all things so completely that -- at least in brief flashes of insight -- one discovers his or her own apartness, or isolation, to be pure illusion.

Lots of people have figured this out, and I'm not sure I'd have ever realized it if I hadn't been exposed to the idea from several sources. Some write about the insight in books or songs, others talk about it with their friends, but I think most just keep their mouths shut, knowing that even once the insight is achieved there's not much you can do about it. No matter how well you understand, you still end up as a spiritual awareness stuck inside an animal body that's slowly wearing out.

How I love the wind. Funny, but while thinking about all this a wave of intense nostalgia washes over me, and that's the thing I wish to say. Maybe it's because as I write this, the wind scoots pretty, white cumulus clouds across a blue sky, the wind shakes green bushes visible through the openings of the hut's pole walls, the wind carries to me the Melodious Blackbirds' liquid calls, and the motmots' funny, croaky one, and the odor of rich mud from yesterday's rain, and of moldering herbage, odors so redolent of life and process and, it seems to me, unity.

I'd like to be the wind, to flow in a vast, moist wave off the Caribbean bestowing fragrance of salt and fish onto Cancún then over Pisté and Chichén Itzá absorbing odors of mud, of flowering acacia, woodsmoke, and baking tortillas from a world of Maya huts.

And the beautiful thing is that to the extent my mind truly embraces the nirvanic insight of unity, I AM the wind bestowing, absorbing, flowing on and on.