“Show me your original face, the face you had before your mother and father were born.”
It is a Zen koan.
The circumstances of our lives lead to this and that, and on, and on, in all directions. And when we hear of the direction some people’s lives take, we have to wonder. For example, how could an old man go into a dance hall and kill a bunch of old people, his peers, while they were doing nothing other than just learning to ballroom dance? What brought him to such a state of congealed anger that he could do something so terrible?
When I am looking forward to my children’s future and the lives of their children and then looking back to when they were new babies, and then thinking of all the life that was before, all the family stories, all of that, and trouble and struggle and sorrow well I know anything can happen.
And yet here I am. Here you are.
My house of cards will be swept away. It has been swept away before, more than once. And it will go along with the last breath of air from my lungs, just as it should. Trying to try to carve any history in stone or lock into a belief for the future, horrible or wonderous, these things are all delusions and all evaporate in the brilliance of this moment.
“Original Face” is not your face or my face. It’s not even what we think of as Buddha, or Jesus or God. It is when this house of cards falls away and we wake up as a human being here, before all our thinking about it.
I woke up this morning early, thinking I would try to sleep longer because I have a busy day ahead. I’d not been sleeping and was just mulling over things, lying in bed. In the dim light of my room, through the bedroom door I saw, in the dim light of the living room, the framed photo that hangs on the wall in the dining area.
Suddenly I saw my life, viewed from one room looking at another room and through that room to another, on and on and ending with a photograph hanging on a wall that I couldn’t even see. It might as well have been a portrait of an artist, or a pipe, or temple.
But I understood.
So, I got up and did what needed to be done. And then I wrote this.
Words About 