Thomas, I appreciate your honesty, and it reminded me of a poem by Rick Cain

“The ancient of Man ponders his curiosity. Questions arise as he wonders of his own significance… How time moves as sands of an hour glass, not to be grasped, but reckoned with by the moment. The focus of a single crystal houses Hope, Love and the rainbow multitude of Life’s involvement. We see these things as in passing… we feel them as now. The Master of these sands is he who loves each crystal.”

I’ve never been great at zazen myself. I used to approach the silence as if I were building a fortress, trying to keep the “world” out so I could finally be “spiritual.” I had to let that go. Part of the letting go was changing my relationship to the word “spiritual” to a experience of “Harmony”.

So when you say a pop song breaks in, wonder if that song isn’t a wall but a Gate?

When you sit in the silence and a song arises, it feels like encountering that “rainbow multitude of Life’s involvement.” That lyric in your head a crystal of sand, a opportunity to “reckon with the moment,” where the silence turns out to be big enough to carry the song.

Your instinct to writing those lyrics out feels like an act of loving the crystal. Acknowledging that right now, the universe is singing a popular tune through you. I don’t think the SandMaster would tell you to be quiet; he’d probably just start humming along.

Thanks Thomas. you remind me that the ‘original key’ is always here, just waiting for us to tune the instrument.

I think my own path is a bit of a trinity of Prayer, Meditation, and Contemplation.

Meditation’ is often defined as quieting the mind until thoughts stop, however, I’ve come to see it more as a flow. A act of ‘pondering and treasuring’ that notices how they pass and holding them lightly.

In this flow, Prayer is the opening of the heart; Meditation is the movement; and Contemplation is the silence… I try not to get too wrapped up in those specific labels, though. I don’t want the words to define the experience, only to act as a shorthand for the way the heart opens.

Less Zen, I guess and perhaps more Hermetic – AI describes as:
— Prayer (Opening): Not a petition for “things,” but a turning of the will. It is the Mary-like “Yes” that makes the heart receptive.
— Meditation (Pondering): This is where you “hold words lightly.” It is a rhythmic, imaginative thinking that doesn’t try to “solve” the world, but simply “treasures” the images until they begin to speak.
— Contemplation (Silence): This is the “Virgin Birth” of meaning. The words fall away, the “shore” of language vanishes, and you are left in the Splendor of Silence. It is no longer “about” God; it is the presence of G_d. It is here I wonder that ‘new consciousness’ arises?

I’ll be sure to check out that Seals and Crofts song, it’s a beautiful reminder that we are all just passing through together.

Thanks Alessa

Hi Thomas, thank you for that. I agree language is a profound gift and one I think is intimately tied to the gift of consciousness itself. It is indeed the bridge that keeps us from being truly alone.

What I love about poems, and yours was beautiful) and Zen stories is how they invite us to hold that gifts lightly, so the words are less likely to become cages. In my own meditation, I’ve noticed a strange paradox: the very words I use to make my experience conscious can sometimes create a wall against that experience. There have been moments where I wasn’t sure when I was using the words, or when the words were using me.

For example, my relationship with the word Forgiveness, and it is a relationship, actually kept me from the act itself for a long time. The word arrived like a commandment, already shaped by other hands. I found myself bowing to it, forgetting it was mine to rename. I’ve learned that when a word tightens around the heart, no doorway opens.

I once thought I had to heal the past. But I’ve come to see that the past was never the wound, only the mirror. It was the lens I carried that needed tending, a lens made of words that had become too heavy for the truth. When we hold them lightly, the silence beneath them finally begins to breathe.

Prison House of Language

The walls are built of vowels and iron nouns,
A mortar mixed from should and must and when.
I pace the cell while all the world renowns
Arrive as echoes scratching from my pen.

I feel a grief without a face
A tidal ache that never finds
Yet lonely is the closest word,
A hollow key that fits no door.

I hunger for a truth too soft for speech,
A pulse beneath the grammar of the mind;
But since my youth, I’ve bartered what I reach
For definitions where the lies are signed.

The “I” I speak is not the “I” I know,
Just syntax haunting bones it cannot feel;
And what we call a “wound” can never show
The raw, unworded space that waits to heal.

We cease to think the moment we agree
To walk the narrow halls the lexicons command.
To stay within the lines is to be “free”
Yet here I am, exiled in my native land.

So let the “hurt,” and “forgive” fall past;
Let the unfinished sentence hang in open air.
For only when the final word has breathed its last
Will I be found in the silence waiting there.

On the Word That Would Not Open
There is a room in me where language never learned to walk. I used to think the door was locked, but now I see it was only held shut by the weight of words I carried, all the forgive me’s and I should haves pressed together like stones in a satchel.

I believed each word was a key. But every time I reached for one, it turned to dust in my hand. So I sat in the doorway of my own silence, too weary to speak, too afraid not to.

One day, while tracing the grooves of an old wound, I whispered the word “forgiveness” the way you whisper the name of someone who left years ago. The word echoed back to me, thin, obedient, harmless. Nothing in it moved.

It was then I understood: The word had become a wall. And I had been kneeling before it, thinking it was a gate. I felt a loneliness then, not the ache of being unseen, but the ache of seeing at last that I had mistaken the symbol for the thing itself.

So I placed the word on the ground, gently, like setting down a cup I no longer needed. It did not break. It simply stopped trying to hold what it could not hold. The silence that followed was not empty. It was spacious, like a lung discovering its first breath. In that space, something shifted, a soft loosening in the center of my being. As if the truth, long patient, had been waiting for me to stop talking.

I realized then that forgiveness is not a word you say, but a room you return to. A room where nothing must be named, and nothing is held against you. Not even the years you spent trying to open a door that was never meant to be opened with language.
I stepped inside. And the moment I did, the loneliness slipped from my shoulders like a garment I no longer needed to wear. In the quiet, I finally felt found.