Barn Doors
A monk asked his teacher: `Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?’
The teacher observed: `I always remember spring-time. The birds sing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers.’
A Zen Koan
As I write this, it is nearly Autumn and the birds continue to sing among the flowers. To walk among the flowers, to see the butterflies flit from bloom to bloom among the late blooming wildflowers, to watch the bees gather nectar toward the end of the season, to watch the crickets hop among the blades of prairie grasses all touches on the silence that is to come through the symphony of the meadow. Working in harmony, the continuum of the seasons turning, the relationships of plants and animals supporting life, the circle of the infinite repeated year after year appearing the same with variations provides one with a glimpse into the infinite.
When one accepts that life is a finite continuum along a line of lived experience from birth to death, when one accepts the fact that death is but a heartbeat from now, one has no choice but to accept the wonder of the world surrounding the lived experience. One is bookended by two ineffable infinities, ante-birth and post-death. One cannot know those infinities so human beings are content to make up narratives to help explain the unknown. I assume those narratives to be man made and, therefore, without validity; if one has no knowledge then all one can do is speculate. My own speculation places a difficult freedom on me, the freedom to act in an ethical manner toward my fellow human beings.
The ethical imperative for me is, in brief, the requirement that I act in a manner that allows me to be response-able for the other. This imperative places the other before me in the sense that I must act for the other even at the expense of my own safety. Yet I am always free to choose not to act, not to be response-able, to turn away from need. When Levinas names this the Difficult Freedom he points to the nature of free will as the counter balance to the ethical requirement to act for the other. Acting in the moment is the very stuff that brings one closer to the ineffable infinity of the Absolute Other, the unknown before/beyond the lived experience. Acting for the benefit of the other eschews self interest by engaging with the whole thereby improving the self beyond measure.
I am learning to pay attention to the symphony of silence.
The Barn Door by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
