Today's Considerations
27. Yesterday's post ended with this:
It was in the presence of that speck of unblocked consciousness that the first taste of the cycles and the first taste of the nectar of "Floyd's Original Nature" came. That will be described tomorrow and will include certain understandings she shared from the indigenous people and will also include certain excerpts from another essay entitled "The Summer of 1955 (Recollections of an Eight-Year-Old from Visits with His Tsa-la-gi Grandmother)." Here are those excerpts:
With Grandmother, witnessing happened more than anything else. With her, it was as Maharaj said: "Mine is a silent language. Learn to listen and understand."
During walks in the woods, deer and owls and hawks and rabbits and foxes and eagles and snakes and the fish in the nearby stream and scores of species of birds would be witnessed. Once, while gathering herbs with her in an area which was farther away from the cabin than usual, I asked, “Can we get into trouble for trespassing if the owner catches us?” She said something that, at the time, made no sense at all: “Do not be concerned. No one owns the land.”
I thought but did not say, "Grandmother, all land is owned by somebody." (Most statements that come from the Realized will seem to be ignorant or even insane to non-Realized listeners.)
Each morning, Grandmother would go into the woods alone after sending me to the garden where I picked the vegetables that we would prepare for lunch and dinner and would place them in a bushel basket: Let's see . . . for lunch we'll have okra and tomatoes, corn, and cream peas with cornbread, and tonight we'll eat black-eyed peas, potatoes, and the chunks of smoked ham that the woman gave Grandmother in gratitude for curing her migraines.
Many times at night, while sitting with her in the home-made rocking chairs on the front porch, the plaintive cry of a bobcat could be heard in the distance as fireflies passed before our eyes. Grandmother could lift an upturned hand and the fireflies would land on her palm and walk about.
On the few occasions when I could be still, they would do the same with me. (It seemed that I could not unwind during the first days of my visits with her, but the longer I was there, the more slowly I began to move . . . the less I spoke . . . the more comfortable the silence became.)
The rustle of insects’ wings could be heard. Chirping crickets provided a musical background for a small child sitting next to his Ah-ni-yv-wi-ya Grandmother. But a happening one evening provided a taste of My Original Nature. (Those early tastes would eventually drive me throughout a multi-decade-long quest as an adult to try to recapture the calm and soothing sense of "atonement" - that is, "at-one-ment" - that came to a child "on retreat" in those early Original Nature moments.)
It was late one evening when Grandmother and I were using paring knives to strip away willow bark in preparation for making a healing potion. Another woman would be visiting early the next morning, also in order to receive treatment for her migraine headaches from that Cherokee Medicine Woman called "Grandmother."
After the bark was taken into the kitchen and put to soak with other herbs before being boiled into an herbal tea, we returned to the front porch and sat down once more in the rocking chairs. I was unaware of how vigorously my chair was moving on the dark porch, nor how still Grandmother’s chair was in contrast.
Unconsciously, when my rapid rocking walked the chair to the edge of the porch, I stood, moved it back, and began the process all over again. Later, the full moon would clear the tops of some of the trees in the piney woods in front of the house, and a gap between the limbs of the taller trees allowed moonbeams to strike Grandmother.
I glanced to my right to see that she was looking straight ahead toward the trees and the moon. She was enlightened by the moonbeams that bathed her in a bluish luminosity that was still bright enough to reveal the brown spots that covered the top of her hands, hands which looked to be more bone than skin. I looked at my smooth right hand, then at the rough skin on her left hand, and then at the lines that crossed her face.
I foresaw my own body's rough and wrinkled and browned "future." With Grandmother, Nature would not allow those lines to be ironed out into a smooth texture ever again. As I looked at her, an obscure awareness of something about "patterns" or "cycles" or "phases" tried to surface from the brain-stem, but I had no tools to use to clear the way for one of her many native pointers to come into consciousness: even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.
So there sat a child that had not yet cycled one decade with a grandmother that had cycled many. There was smooth skin and rough, there was a day that had cycled into night, there was a moon cycling across the sky, and that full moon would soon complete another cycle as well.
There was something there to be understood, but it was beyond my grasp, so the nervous rocking began again. And again the rocker walked to the edge of the porch. And again, a chair was pushed back beside Grandmother’s. I looked to the right and saw Grandmother’s expressionless face looking forward into the bluish moonlight, then my rocking began again as I looked at her hand, at mine, and at the moon that had moved diagonally into a higher position in the sky.
With my chair moving front-to-back, front-to-back, front-to-back, I looked again at Grandmother, beautiful now in the subtle color that was fading into a darker shade of blue. Something wanted to be realized, yet I was decades from that happening. Then suddenly, my rocking stopped . . . and did not start up again. And when it was obvious that something had stilled the chair and would keep it still for the rest of the night, I looked at Grandmother, still looking straight ahead, but I saw a smile form on her lips. "Remember the peace that may be found in silence" came into consciousness without her having said a word. "How could she be so totally aware without even looking?" I wondered.
Then, I began to feel a calmness. Next, I felt her left hand move from the arm of her rocker and rest itself atop my right. In the stillness, I had finally become . . . available. The moon had moved so high into the sky that the roof of the porch was beginning to cast us into shadow. I looked down at those two hands and, for some reason, they did not look so different anymore when viewed in the fading light. I looked at her and she looked at me, and she smiled and I smiled, and then we both looked back toward the piney trees and the sky above.
Suddenly, I felt a swelling within, a swelling which seemed to be trying to spread even beyond the boundaries of my body. It grew so much that I felt for a moment as if I might burst. Then I came to understand, by way of what seemed to be nothing more than the gentle touch of a hand, exactly what it was like to love unconditionally and to be loved unconditionally.
In the city, I would feel the force of a hand striking me regularly as conditionals and expectations were never consistently met by "that rebellious damn boy floyd." In the forest, by contrast, I felt the gentle touch of a hand and was shown how to Truly Love.
That night in 1955 on the porch of a wooden cabin sitting in the middle of a remote forest, I felt in harmony with all things, but that feeling would only last briefly; after reaching the "adult years," it would take decades for it to manifest again. That sense of harmony would not become a permanently-fixed condition until Full Realization in 1989. Now, this pointer is understood: "Being Indian" is an attitude . . . a way of being in harmony with all things and all beings. It is allowing the heart to be the distributor of energy on this planet.
Yet for a few moments that night, I sat back, in something approaching "Nirvana," experiencing a taste of The Original State that was indefinable to a small child, without a clue . . . but also without a single fear or a single desire. I felt, but did not say out loud, “I feel whole; I feel complete; I feel safe; I feel happy; I feel like all is well; OK, Grandmother, I have learned another lesson and I am not concerned, and you did not have to utter so much as a single audible word to convey the lesson.”
When I sneaked another glance at her, it seemed that Grandmother was even closer than by my side. I could not understand, but that did not interrupt the peace. The first peace, which is the most important, comes from within when people realize their Oneness with the universe. I would barely remember being gently shaken some time later, coaxed to my feet from the rocker, guided from my rocking chair to a bed with her arm wrapped around my back and side as she half-carried, half-walked me out of the shadows and through the night and into the comfort of very, very deep sleep.
How about you? Have you had a taste of Your Original Nature that you might be recalling once again? Was the taste sweet enough to trigger a search to find it and keep it? If not, is the bitterness of not having that sweet taste enough to inspire you to begin to follow "the path" that will lead you there? Are you ready to walk out of the shadows and through the night and into the comfort of Realization? If so, then you might consider heeding these words:
Maharaj: "Stay beyond all thoughts, in silent Being-Awareness. It is not 'progress', for what you come to is already there in You, waiting for you."
Again: I felt a swelling within, a swelling which seemed to be trying to spread even beyond the boundaries of my body. Nowadays, that feeling still happens. It was that same feeling which ultimately inspired Maharaj to tell seekers the truth which they often did not want to hear initially. It is that same feeling which inspires telling the seekers that come here the truth which they often do not want to hear initially.
May you also feel that feeling of "Fullness" (which can manifest only after having been "emptied" of everything), for it signals the presence of Unconditional Love; then, Unconditional Love can be followed by a sense of Unconditional Happiness.
Yet that does not generate a sense of freedom and peace. Freedom and peace must always precede Unconditional Love and Unconditional Happiness. They are the prerequisites for Unconditional Love and Unconditional Happiness.
May you abide as Your Original Nature and as a No-Knowing Child in order that you may find freedom and peace and Unconditional Love and Unconditional Happiness now.
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
