[Verse 1] I'm losing my connection I'm tired of the rules and your corrections I want to live my life, be all of its pages And underline that I am not an angel
[Pre-Chorus] 'Cause if I'm not pure, I guess that I'm too much I never know how to keep in, keep in touch
[Chorus] If I'll be somebody, I'll never let my skin decide it for me I never had the world, so why change for it? I never had the world, so why change for it?
[Post-Chorus] Giving in to the love Giving in to the love Giving in to the love, the love, the love, the love
[Verse 2] Someone out there is trying To find somebody whole, who is not dying But everybody cries and nobody comforts The television lies and now my mind hurts
[Pre-Chorus] And if I'm not loved, I guess that I am cursed I gotta know how to beat it, beat it first
[Chorus] If I'll be somebody, I'll never let my skin decide it for me I never had the world, so why change for it? I never had the world, so why change for it?
[Post-Chorus] Giving in to the love Giving in to the love Giving in to the love, the love, the love, the love, the love Giving in to the love Giving in to the love Giving in to the love, the love, the love, the love
Treading the mountain path, The violets fill my heart With indefinable gracefulness.
* * *
Basho (b. 1644) and violets walk the path together. The intimacy is deep meeting. We could call this the appearing of the third presence, while the third presence encompasses both Basho and violets. Still, the third presence is not separate from Basho and violets.
Presences is plural; presence is singular. We experience presences; in doing so, we experience presence as their ground. A face has potential faces. A face remains, not so frowns, scowls, or smiles.
This is a meeting deep for more subtle than Basho the Japanese man, poet, and Zen Buddhist and violets the flowers. Who we are and what violets are are more than appearances or how society has agreed to identify us. We agree on words but cannot know the more through them. In intimacy, violets are more than violets, and your friend or lover is more than a friend or lover. Othering begins to lose its power, as the intimacy manifests.
* * *
Violets are being violets, and Basho is being Basho. Violets are not trying to be violets; Basho is not trying to be Basho. No aggressive trying is present.
Violets are not asking for attention or seeking recognition - likewise with Basho. They are being themselves, so this walking together happens.
This withness is unlike Basho using an iPhone and taking pictures of the violets. This intimacy he cannot capture. Basho points to intimacy through poetry, but he is not like one trying to capture the moment for others to admire violets like objects: "Here, see the violets I saw today along the path. Aren't they lovely?" The "they" are not violets or the meeting with them. Violets remain in their natural habitat, and so does Basho. Intimacy arises in that uncaptured freedom.
This intimacy is intimacy-in-action. Basho is treading a path. Violets are filling the heart. Intimacy is verbal, not substantive. This intimacy is so intimate, Basho says the violets fill his heart.
* * *
We may begin a spiritual path by trying to experience the more. We get frustrated. Later, the more naturally, spontaneously arises, for we have become the space where it can. As this intimacy expands, we can be frustrated for the intimacy outflows beyond our capacity to conceptualize it and relate to it emotionally. This experience, then, is beyond a sentimental feeling common to persons who identify as nature lovers. The loss of the sentimentality can create confusion, and we try to pull the mutuality back into some grounding in our previous habit of captivating to have a sense of knowledge of and control over. A sense of uneasiness or even threat can arise when we lose the capacity to find refuge in the conceptualization or emotion of experience. We are confused by the experience of the nonexperience. The mind-and-body, based on memory and sensation, cannot hold the directness and purity of the unfolding and meeting.
* * *
With violets and Basho, the outside has entered, speaking locally, yet the intimacy is nonlocal. Even to say entered is misleading, as is inside or outside. This deep meeting is possible because the intimacy was only awaiting realization - it was already present... always is. Unless intimacy is present, intimacy does not happen. Intimacy is an aspect of our natural, basic nature. Violets and Basho brought intimacy to each other; otherwise, no intimacy would have appeared.
If Basho had not experienced the intimacy, he could not have blamed the violets. He would not have been able logically to conclude, "I'm so lonely! No one loves me," and walked on down the road. The feeling of not being loved arises not from a lack of love but from the lack of the arising of love into embodied realization. Love is present, or love cannot become.
Yet, a feeling of aloneness can arise with this kind of meeting, or third presence, becoming more your habitat. When life becomes more the meeting, the contrast with superficiality becomes more and more clear. One learns to relate with a subtle experience - or love - with life. One does not need to seek refuge from the aloneness; rather, one befriends and recognizes it is a sign of the deeper meeting, the arising of the intimacy into the body. So, here we can see the subtle truth of a Jesus saying, "You are not of the world...". You are fully here, but you do not have a conventional relationship with the world. You are relating progressively more in a less personal, more transpersonal, so intimate, way. You have welcomed a more profound relationship with the world. You are truly in love with the world, a being of nonsentimental, nonemotional compassion and insight. You have not fallen in love with the world, you have grown in love with the world. The world is no longer an object you relate to, the world is a subject you share with intimately.
* * *
Zen Buddhist Dainin Katagiri, in You Have to Say Something, asks regarding the liveliness of the flower -
But where does this life force come from? Is it something flowers just have? If so, then where is it? Is it inside them, or outside them? We look, but we can't find it anywhere. Yet the flower blooms.
* * *
Still, this intimacy might not have happened on the day Basho walked the path. A likeness within violets and Basho, each a receptive, welcoming presence was present to allow this closeness. Other non-Bashos may have walked the same path that day and missed this sacred intercourse.
What is the nature of this meeting-with? Basho points to it with "indefinable gracefulness." Yet, while giving words, he says "indefinable." Something here is unspeakable yet real. And one cannot package it to give to someone else.
The form of violets and Basho provide a means for manifestation. Still, for this to occur, violets are violets, and Basho is Basho. The relative dimension is the impermanent form for the unspeakable grace to manifest - the ultimate dimension. And the relative takes on a sense of new life thereby.
* * *
How much intimacy do we enjoy? It depends on how prepared we are to be the place where this indefinable gracefulness can show itself. Certainly, we can only begin at one place. With what is already present, the beginning point is ourselves and where we are. Then, the world becomes a place filled with diverse forms having potential to be sacramental, expressing something mystifying and fulfilling, yet communicated with us through the ordinary of everyday.
Yet, this is unlike what churches teach. Most Christians are taught about sacraments. So, there are so many sacraments, which are ceremonial means for grace-manifestation, but you are not a sacrament. For example, one is taught baptism is a sacrament, but the one being baptized is not. Here, today, we speak of a shared sacramentality, an inter-are between one form and another. In fact, we cannot escape this sacramentality, only be asleep to its presence.
Violets and Basho are a single sacramentality. Basho is not a mere recipient of something given from outside and certainly not involved in a ritualistic act mediated by a religious institution. There is not even a Zen way of this meeting. Basho does not think about a god or a buddha and ignore violets as being instrumental in this holy communication.
There is no theology for this, no ideology to explain it. Awe and love appear before someone can give thanks to his or her god, or a Buddhist can think about Dharmakaya, Suchness, or Interbeing. Before the thought, something happens free of it. Later, we attribute a source to it. We word it. But how can you put the sunshine in a shoe box? Or the ocean inside a thumbnail? We learn to relax in the feltness of the intimacy, and silently.
Life - not merely what we call my life and your life - dance free of explanation. Yes, you might experience this in a church or zendo or another place of religious or spiritual practice, and you might walk a path in the morning or early evening, all alone, and realize the flowers are filling your heart.
This meeting can happen when you are prepared for it to happen. And we cannot predict the moment it will happen. When it happens, we receive it, yet we need to know it is arising with us, not something merely outside and to and for us. Spirituality or religiousness is a meeting, a shared mutuality deeper than appearance, an intimacy with the ultimate through the commonplace, including the form we call our body. And we grow to realize this arising is happening all the time, just that at times it manifests into awareness - regardless, our life is being shaped by an awareness that includes it always. The Sun shines as much on overcast days as other days.
