TINY ZEN

Now that the cooling days are here, the singing insects are in the summer of their contentment. Here on an early breezy evening I can't even count the variety of choruses from earth, grasses, bamboo, trees and sky; impossible to unweave the warp and woof of this surrounding tapestry of song.

Last night a singing insect of a kind I'd never heard before began sounding through one of our front screen doors not a song but a pure call, a special summons, a rhythmic generation that was more sensation than sound; it rattled the skull and defied such mereness as ears.

Meant to stir the entire bodies of kindred insects with the most important message of their lives, its vibrations implied measures far beyond the spectral pinpoint of human hearing, my ears probably catching only the bare peripheries of the full sonic rainbow flowing over me.

On and on it went into the night, the sounding of a single insect that I could not even find to see, expressing the vast magnitude of a minuscule being taking its brief turn at living a share of life and all it means.

Out there in the darkling air was a tiny Zen master, chanting a cosmic koan.

THE SUMMER OF THEIR CONTENTMENT

Now that the cooling days of late August are here, the insects that sing of night are singing of day as well, full in the summer of their contentment… Here in a mountain breezy afternoon I can't begin to count the variety of choruses from earth, underbrush, tree and sky-- it is impossible to distinguish, into their exquisite threads, all the woof and warp of this skywide tapestry of song...

Last night a singing insect of a kind I'd not yet heard (i.e., not paid attention to) began singing through our screen door-- or rather, sounded, for it was not so much a song as an unadulterated call, unrefined for human ears of course, it was a summons to all kindred, with a rhythmic generation more sensation than sound, defying such mereness as ears, meant for entire bodies of the proper size and impulse, a vibration of greater measure than humanity allows... would that I could hear beyond our mundane range to the sonic rainbow this song implied, with its attention-perturbing power.

On and on it went as we do in our own conversations, but this was only one, giving all there was, awaiting a response in its brief turn at life and what it means to say... A little Zen master, unseen, offering nonetheless a cosmic koan. The same heaven was born in us, if we have not been taught - and learned - to forget…

THE CLOUD RESEMBLES A RABBIT

In a previous millennium, not long after I had first come to Japan and seen how different the news was over here from what it had been back home, where Japan was still not quite above suspicion as an ally (and never will be, in some still-living minds), I was experiencing what every traveler senses at every international transit: that borders affect news, and that the "real" news is local. Every seasoned wanderer knows how the truth changes when that juridical interface is passed, how the victims on one side become the perpetrators on the other. But this was all rather subconsciously perceived by me at the time, amid the swarm of new information travel stirs up.

I guess that's why not long after I arrived in Tokyo I had a dream in which as a dream novice monk I asked my dream abbot the koan "What is media?" and he responded: "The cloud resembles a rabbit," which phrase was floating homeless in my newly alien brain as I awoke. I thought it a dubious answer at the time; but then, I was only a novice alien dream monk. Since then I've traveled a lot more, and have seen and heard more news about here and elsewhere - from an increasingly alien perspective - and have observed how difficult it can be for a local to maintain a healthy skepticism while immersed in a sea of information served up by 'trained' and 'qualified' professionals who are 'on the spot.' It seems most people never travel 'far' enough to perceive such a thing and gain such perspective, so never know how profoundly their own borders alter news. General populaces thus tend to believe the reports of their media, that stand between the seeker and the truth.

Once upon a time, when there was nothing between us and reality, when rock or tree or flower or wind or stream was as real as our imagining-- when we were inseparate from the actuality around us-- our hands were easily water, our eyes easily sky, our hearts easily fire. There was nothing in between.

Long before there were media standing dutifully in our light, streaming through the air in disembodied voices or residing on sheets of paper covered with words from other minds, times and places; before we began to accept the addiction of believing even history was true as told to us, of relying on second, third and fourth-hand accounts of events to keep us abreast of things we didn't have a clue about as we bought into the dangerous illusion that bides at the heart of modern society, i. e., that we actually have a handle on what is going on around the world-- as I say, before all these veils came to be (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain), we saw no separation between ourselves and the world around us; we had as yet created no distinction between the world and ourselves: no palisades of faith, no moats of patriotism, no need for better and better weapons and the right to bear them, no seeds of distrust, no doubting the very air.

Environed as we are now by information, with billboards on our eyeballs and tv in our faces, new stars in the sky and radio waves sectoring our very bodies, all we need is the internet. How crucial it has become, then, that we maintain our skepticism, our own intelligence as we carom like corks down the whitewater rapids of data directed by experts. So acquire perspective: look at a tree if you can find one, and remember the roots; or at least look up at a patch of sky and observe what the cloud resembles.