Alex Noble, “Lessons In Water, In Rock”

“Lessons In Water, In Rock”
by Alex Noble

“The light focuses, a pattern emerges. You can be sure that most of your questions will resolve themselves eventually. Nothing is harder than this:  those quicksilver changes of mood and meaning that contain your past and your future. It has all been a prelude, each moment urging you on to this inevitable encounter. Not the struggle it used to be. No, now the gears mesh easily and you give it no thought at all. Given half a chance, you would take responsibility for it, but no one has asked, and you hesitate to volunteer. Overhead, in the apartment upstairs, strangers argue fine points of global politics that have always eluded you. Except now it is more serious. The balances are more delicate, the stakes higher. You reflect on the precarious state of things.

Much of what we are talking about here has to do with coming home, finding a place inside yourself and then extending that place to the larger world, until finally you move into that utterly still atomic center of things. In the course of your journey that which is not essential tends to fall away, to dissolve even as vapor trails across the sky at sunset dissolve in the fading light.

You have always known it would be like this, although the exact configuration of it eluded you. Now there is time to look back, and see how each step was necessary, how each disaster contained a seed of truth. These seeds, which you planted and cared for, provided the grain that now sustains you. What was it you knew?  Only that which your intelligence yearned toward, however undefined and distant the ideal was then. The ideal, of course, is complete within itself, and carries within whatever is required.

You have a role to play, but that role is never what you first think it to be. At first, you think it has to be this way or that way, and you become busy about many things, trying this, trying that. You plan, outline, connive, speculate, and bend all circumstances to accommodate that which you would have. It is so tedious, this wishful thinking, an exercise in self-will that leaves you exhausted and desolate. Your fatigue is dense, layered with the rock and sediment of unfulfilled dreams. What was it that seemed so urgent? You are left sitting alone in an upstairs room where the furniture casts long shadows across the floor.

How can it be? You followed the directions that came in the package, that brochure written in six languages. You did what was asked of you, or at least what you thought was being asked of you. No matter.  Eventually you realize that you must begin again and you retrace your footsteps back to square one. You do not pass GO, you do not collect the two hundred dollars. Walking on the white shore, at noon, sunlight glancing off of jade green waves (noon of shells, cypress, sand dunes shifting beneath the wind), you begin to recapture fragments of the original grace, the gift you nearly forgot. And yet, it was here all the time. The air around you dances with light. Nothing is easier than this new beginning.

Faced with so many choices, you are at a loss to know which way to move. You can hardly contain yourself. Why not try them all? For a moment, you slide deliriously along a spectrum of colors. Then, you come to your senses and address the business at hand. You have learned that there is not room for everything and everybody. Quantity destroys quality. You know intuitively what is right, and it is this certainty that lifts you beyond the anguish of indecision. Everything you need has been provided. Remember how you used to wonder if you'd make it through another day, watching the clock on the wall with a clear conviction that time had in fact stopped? There was never enough of anything, except time, and time confronted you at every turn of the road with things you wanted and couldn't have. Now, nothing is denied, and the provision  of each moment is ample to meet your needs. You have, in fact, been outfitted, boots, parka, rope, tent, to explore the new continent.

We move into the day, hedges in their neat rows, peacocks parading on the lawn, swans floating through reflections of clouds on a small lake. All our roads converge at a point. It has not always been like this. No dream is big enough any more to accommodate reality. Look how the images are spilling over the dam. Our minds are flooded with spring, and rain. We move into the day wanting to measure that which is immeasurable, willing to define the indefinable if it will only reveal itself to us. While the near view is discontinuous and fragmentary, the view from far away yields up a luminous whole. Each morning we read of bombings, explosions, revolutions; but these are nothing when set along beside fifteen billion years of evolution and progress.

Wouldn't you rather be here, doing this, than anything else? I tell you, it all has to do with ease, the way thistles arrange themselves just so, in a glass jar, the way a book falls open at a particular poem. That is what I mean by "the necessity of things," when tension resolves itself into harmony and meaning. Philosophy is important, but does not occupy the throne of Reason, as it used to do. We are more apt, now, to seek out the places where the edges almost meet, and sound the depths.

You have sought out this place because you felt a need for refuge. This is nothing to feel guilty about, or apologize for. It is perfectly natural. What you are experiencing now is that sea change that comes when a new mode of being gathers itself around you. A gentleness. Does it matter any more where we live? (The thin column of smoke letting up anchor into the sky at dawn, the fishing nets hung out to dry, cobblestones shining with dew.)  It could be anywhere. We are learning to find meaning in the most random, dislocated situations. In so doing, we find the meaning in ourselves.  It has always been like this, but we have been slow to acknowledge it. Each day opens up like an encyclopedia. I turn this way and that, opening first one eye and then the other.

You have been released from all obligations, the parking tickets paid up, the ledger closed. No one is ready, ever, for such freedom, but we find that we grow into it inch by cautious inch. There will always be ambiguities to resolve. It will never be as easy as you would like it to be. There is always the danger of being too careful. On every windowsill, a candle, the whole city huddled in darkness, each window, an eye. I don't want to try and outline how things should be, or not be. The chairs over there by the window, the Persian rug by the fire. So much depends on the way things are arranged. We need to grow beyond even that. Everything is a false start until one makes the fundamental connection. No one told me this, but I am finding it out day by day. No one can interpret these signs for me. To this task, I bring my whole life: as it was, as it is, and as it must be. There is an attempt here to bring into language a timeless sense of the whole, where everything is connected to everything else. For example, before the shipping fleets of the world crowded our oceans with their noise, a whale, singing its song, could be heard by other whales thirteen thousand miles away.

Whole civilizations rise and fall when I stop, mid-sentence.  An ice age comes and goes between one ring of the telephone and the next.  I notice how we have a way of moving through millions of years without even giving it a thought. We were born from the dust of stars, knowing that there is a purpose to be lived out here. The long stone corridors of the monastery, the emerald green of the playing fields. At twilight, the sound of a Gregorian chant coming to us across the apple orchard. We are here, at this moment, hung in a certain balance, suspended on a possibility. The earth tilts on its axis just so, the light of the sun sweeps by faster than anyone can imagine.  What seems solid is not.  Within this dialogue of forces we are impelled to create beauty out of chaos. We are moved by destiny to explore.  We are part of a chain of being, a symphonic linking up that is going on, has gone on, will go on.

Waiting in the bus station, realizing the immensity of the journey, going carefully over a mental list of things done and things yet to do, the volume of Plato lying open, to be read later. You told me three things, which I have now forgotten, but I know they were important, once. The land, rising in waves, always in motion beneath the wind. The grass green or brown, depending. Wild mustard. Queen Anne's Lace. Each retreated into silence for a time. There was no need to explain or apologize. It was as if nothing at all had passed between them. But they both knew better. The seeds they had planted took root and sent tendrils out to explore the air. This happened in an independent way. It was not forced, or even wished for. Each moment of their growth was a prelude to something else. (All the pastel colored rowboats pulled up on the sand, oars carefully laid inside.) They stopped judging, or expecting anything to happen, just as the shadows in a glacier  change from blue to deeper blue. Things were the way they were.

You could not say that the music followed any particular score. Still, there was rhythm and pattern. The plane, high overhead. A bowl of green pears, there in front of the window. What we learned was as important as the events themselves. No one could see the connection, at first, but then it all came tumbling out leaving us breathless. That year, I photographed a wall over and over again, in every kind of light. The wall used to be barn red, but now it is covered with posters advertising this speech, that concert.

There is so much more to tell. You will find that the way to get a sense of the movement is to watch how the light changes. On the beach, for example, the shadow a rock makes on the sand. And the way the sun comes up a little more to the right,and then swings back. I could stay here for a long time listening to the waterfall, as I lie back on the smooth, cold stone. What compulsion, what urgency? There are times when it is good, to just stop everything and consider an alternative approach, to ponder the lessons in water, in rock."

- http://cowbird.com/

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