Bubble

"Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don't try to figure anything out.
Don't try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest."
~Tilopa

I put my lips to the small, pink-red plastic hoop. Against the rigid, raised-barred teeth, I blow. This is my breath filling the transparency. The bubble breaks the surface tension, unattaches. There is a rainbow shimmer. Each color dashes across the film as the boundaries wobble, as the currents take hold. This is the beauty of randomness. This is the formlessness of soapy intent. This is the delicacy of outcome.

It was late September when the car fell from the bridge. It was the most horrific accident I’d ever seen, that upside-down automobile smashed almost flat from the plunge, still on fire along one of the main thoroughfares into the city of Seattle. Traffic was stalled, and black raincoated policemen ran about the scene, not so much trying to help, for there was no help to be given, but trying to cut a huge swatch away from the impact to shield such a thing from view. I was watching, an insect in an Orange Cab driven by another insect, and together from above we were a dark smudge against the vibration of the event.

What I best remember about that moment, nearly two years ago, is not the color of the car, the weather, or the smell of burning gasoline. What I remember are the hours before and the hours after and the sliding point of change.

My driver and I were mutually nondescript. His mind was turning over the night’s receipts, his wife at home, the mounting and unexplained pileup on the highway, the backroad escape route, morning coffee. My mind was chewing a depression that was always sparked from Columbus business trips, feeling low and empty and directionless, turning in small circles. We hadn’t spoken past the convivial greetings, the where tos, and where froms. I still don’t know his name and I’m sure he doesn’t know mine.

But there, staring together at the accident in the chilled, wet night, all windows rolled down, we were silent and united. No horns sounded around us and no radios played. The idle of engines rumbled together in a deep, resounding, warbled moan. I think he said something like “My God” and I nodded softly and wrapped my arms around my chest.

The traffic cleared and we drove on, but the world of us had changed. We talked at great length about his immigration here and my new marriage, swapped stories of growing up and families, of children and grandfathers and chickens and revolutionaries. I’m sure had we not had our own obligations, we would have spent the evening in some restaurant or coffee shoppe. But as it was, we reached my apartment and conducted our business. Money changed hands and luggage was unloaded.

We leaned against the cab as the rain misted down upon us, looked at each other and promised that we’d each be careful, live good lives, and remember to hold the important things important.

I don’t have to explain this or explicate this further, because everyone at some time in their life has had the same sort of story. And that is it’s meaning. When we see the whole picture, we see the whole picture. And the truth of life’s impermanence, the ever changeable, false-foundational nature of passage from cradle to grave, this truth de-evolves role play and dissipates the thought-shields of our self-defenses. Against it, we are only naked apes.

Inhale, inhale like a pirate with no horizon, and exhale through the wheel even as it is turning. This is you and I.

In a shuttle a few days ago I left the airport, inbound from a business trip to Colorado. My mind was chewing up a depression, sparked into life by all these questions, these fears and these long days of seemingly infinite choice and addiction to safety. As we drove, we crossed over a highway bridge at the same time that a van in another lane drew perilously close to us and kept pace, threatening us onto the shoulder. I glanced down to the road far below us, the short guard rail and the rainy night, and I remembered my cab driver’s face and the slight softness of his voice.

I’ve spent a good amount of time over the last year reading books about writing from Buddhist writers who create mainstream fiction. Early in the process of exploring this collection of uniquely dharmic and literary wisdom, I came upon the phrase, “It doesn’t exist until it is on the page.”

The meaning of that teaching suddenly became clear to me as I thought about the burning highway. Like everything else lately, it’s about impermanence. Nothing exists unless it is on the page. The unwritten novel is intangible and all the scenes those characters might have are just possibility. There is no substance to the future, no concretity of plans and schemes and hopes. The only thing that is real is what you are writing at the moment, and some would say that is questionable as well.

What you are about to write simply doesn’t exist at all, no matter how firmly you attach to it and will it to be, not matter how much time has been spent planning for it and attempting to shove the present moment into it’s mold. The thing that you might one day hold in your hand has no form or substance other than intent. And as powerful as intent can be, as transformative as it can become, there is no way you can show it to anyone, hold it yourself, or put it in the bank. To release this structured future, to excel in the moment of creation rather than in the self-supposed goal of creation is a giddy freedom.

I have lived often in the future, planning for conflicts that never came to pass, formulating dreams that I considered built of iron girders and hard oak beams, constructing movement and project lists and outlines and resisting shifts in motion that led away from my hard-eyed destination. And almost to the one, none of these things came into being. Rather, the spirit of them arrived, but the manner of their arrival varied, or the form they inhabited was not one that I would have imagined… or they simply impacted my presence more like a soap bubble rather than a freight train.

And this really is the difference between passion and attachment that I’ve been trying to describe for months now. One is flow and the other is form. And I think, too, at last, that it is the definition of wind walking. Perhaps it is much more important how you go about things than what those things are, the way you think about them as you pass through them, rather than the passage itself. For me, that was the missing key in both creation and life, to take stock, to detail method, to set schedules, and then to throw it all away.

And so I do, throw it all away, all that I have learned in the last year about my creative roadblocks and my process. For it was crucial and meaningless. What I was doing all along was absolutely what I should have been doing. How I was thinking about it as I was doing it was simply wrong.

My burning desire is my breath, but after breathing, it is not mine to determine direction, shape, or resiliency. Though my hopes and dreams are as strong and as real as they ever were, it’s only my job to keep breathing. The wonder of life is what happens next.

Full circle, round back to where it all began.

I inhale and press my lips against the ring. And everything else comes now from that exhalation.