Conscious of the Little Things

Consciousness is huge in its implications. One might even say "Cosmic" in that it is undiscoverable in its fact, and infinite in its implications.

Human motives are quite small. There is no behavior without motive, be it smoking a cigarette or zazen. Motives are small; tiny, all but infinitesimal cues that animals get from environment. These little cues are writ large in the stuff of life and death. Motives are the result of consciousness growing into animal form over hundreds of millions of turns 'round the sun. You don't think your self up. Your self happens to you because of the myriad tiny things that humanity makes conscious in a Darwinian social-circumstance sort of way.

There is, of course, growing to the light.

Selflessness is not without self.

The Soul of Things

as if upon one knee in prayer

the rust-roofed barn sinks through the years

back to the dust from which it sprang

where cats once stalked mice that stole the draft horse grain

owls now freely wait for rats that secret acorns

beneath a steel wheeled tractor's rust pitted cowl

as dust will in a vortex all things coalesce

and then like dust by wind they are dispersed

effaced

to leave no trace

for no mark made upon the earth

will survive the earths evaporation

not in matter

but in mystery

lies the soul of things