"When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good for ever."
H.L. Mencken
Because yesterday's ice show was so amazing, I thought I would get up early this clear morning and photograph the rime-covered trees with a blue sky backdrop behind them. However, when I arrived on location, there was absolutely NO TRACE left of the ice, not even on the slopes where the sunlight had not yet hit! This discovery connected immediately in my mind to the above quote which I'd read just last night.
The memory of yesterday's magical landscape has become all the more
amazing to me now that no trace of it is left! Similarly, our own lives
become more precious when we realize that they will eventually end.
However, unlike the author of the quote, perhaps, I don't view "nothingness" as mere annihilation. It is more like a potent and fertile "no-thingness," the spaciousness of Divine awareness out of which all of creation continually emerges and to which it endlessly returns during each millisecond of our lives.
In our usual frame of mind, because we identify ourselves so strongly with our own individual lives (which correspond to the ephemeral "ice show"), we fear the eventual and inevitable loss of that life. However, if we identify ourselves instead with the spacious and loving no-thingness out of which that show emerges, we can then sit back and "watch the show," knowing that when it eventually ends, a new show - whose qualities are, at this point, a total mystery to us - will once again pop out of the spaciousness! It is precisely THIS realization that meditation practice gradually works in us!
Photos: A rime-covered landscape, Lory State Park, CO, January 7, 2015
However, unlike the author of the quote, perhaps, I don't view "nothingness" as mere annihilation. It is more like a potent and fertile "no-thingness," the spaciousness of Divine awareness out of which all of creation continually emerges and to which it endlessly returns during each millisecond of our lives.
In our usual frame of mind, because we identify ourselves so strongly with our own individual lives (which correspond to the ephemeral "ice show"), we fear the eventual and inevitable loss of that life. However, if we identify ourselves instead with the spacious and loving no-thingness out of which that show emerges, we can then sit back and "watch the show," knowing that when it eventually ends, a new show - whose qualities are, at this point, a total mystery to us - will once again pop out of the spaciousness! It is precisely THIS realization that meditation practice gradually works in us!
Photos: A rime-covered landscape, Lory State Park, CO, January 7, 2015
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