I am reminded, after a visit with my baby granddaughter, of the lively direct universe that we all encounter when we first emerge into human form. We encounter, in the words of e.e.cummings, “everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is ‘yes’”. The up-close naturalness of each tiny experience, all the senses, open and curious. Before the narratives form, before the social story begins to limit perceptions, everything lives. Before language sculpts the open field there is only the immediacy of how each face appears, and expresses. Each morsel tastes. Each sound, a meaning. Each touch, welcome or unwelcome. We can appreciate how conditions formulate, from our very emergence, what it is to be “me”. By the time we have lived years into this incarnation, we take so very much for granted, becoming desensitized by the multitudes, through time. Taking up zazen, we stir again to the minutiae of sense impressions and the meanings that we take from them. We return to primary experience, settling through all the accumulations and fabrications that have coalesced, ossified, hardened into a “me” sensation, and continue to function as barriers to realizing the fresh, simultaneous wholeness of all life.
