Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 9)

"Be astonished,"
she says. "Or at least
mildly curious."
But I say
that's wrong
for me here
because there's a point
with all these things--
sadness, joy, thisness--
where they all
go beyond you.
The sadness of a
miniature waterlogged scene
opens up, and as it opens
it replenishes
in gorgeous repose.
Because everything happens by itself.
That's what astonishes me.
And it's just
one thing after another,
and a point
from time to time
when it hits:
couldn't have been otherwise.
And another point:
there's nothing more here.
And another:
there's no here here.

I have a lingering image from a dream
in which I woke up, and meditated.
I fixated on green, green ivy
on a brown-grey brick wall.
And a light suffused all of it
and I woke up,
thought I learned something
about the nature of mind:
its hollowness,
the brittleness of its sense-making.
The whole dream of ivy on bricks
and no self but the watcher,
no desire but the ivy in itself.
"There's a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in."
Cohen.

Consider: "There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in."