Empty Bowl: ‘012

The year left behind is like a valley, or a bowl. As I look down on it from this rivertop height, I see that it is still and low, despite another snowfall in the air. A stream flows underneath the valley’s icecap, parallel to the road of human life, the principle of female energy overcoming the rockbound hardness of the male, casting off the months of action and inaction, of information overload, of joys and sadness in the world at large.

Today I’m doing nothing of consequence, nothing at all, really, other than having climbed to the ridgetop for another view of what is here and what has been. No fishing, no hunting, no work, no taking of ease. “Do nothing,” said the ancient Taoists, “and all will be well.” It’s a pleasant thought at year’s end, as I glance back to some moments recollected in photographs or in daydreams, a perfection of the Empty Bowl impossible to achieve.

The climb was difficult without snowshoes. Thoughts went to my poem “Hiker’s Koan” (Songscapes, 1994):

What sound:/ one foot/ following the other/ on a trail to a place/ where mind and/ mountains meet?

Over and over, “one foot following the other,” as I slogged upward through 18 inches of the white.

The winter valley below my vantage point is like the year gone by. Living there, I can see its usefulness, its flowing water that is life, its emptiness a stream of pleasant phantoms. Flowing toward the distant bay, the stream takes its ease and passes humankind, indifferent yet inviting the imagination to surrrender to its flow.

Another year has been emptied of events; the mind would be emptied if it could be, emptied of concerns and hopes and other times, for a moment or two of stillness like the air surrounding the source of a stream.

For a moment or two of stillness on a snowplumed ridge, I glance behind and watch the calendar fade. There’s peace on the heights, despite another snowfall.

A song begins to swirl around in the snow… “Old Songs/ New Songs” by Family (Music in a Doll’s House, 1968)… Beautiful, progressive rock, with a fabulous sax break, too…

“Old songs… New songs… Keep on s-i-n-g-i-n-g!”

There is peace on the hill, a vessel filling slowly with a song in the snow. A new year wish would be to capture that in words, then voice it to everyone beyond.