For you, everything has its own unique beauty
yet you grasp at none of it, calmly watching
as it passes before you, like a grandmother
sitting out on her porch, smiling wistfully
as children tussle briefly and just as soon
make up, running laughing down the street.
It wasn’t always like that. There was a time
you couldn’t resist reaching for it, wanting
to touch, to taste it, to flood your senses
with every molecule of it, and as much
as you could, you did, over and over,
but any satisfaction was fleeting.
Gradually, you noticed that the anxious craving
to possess diminished the objects of desire,
rendering their pursuit and acquisition
increasingly futile and unfulfilling,
until you began to lose interest
in the whole weary endeavor.
At last, every molecule of your being
rebelled at the prospect of further effort
in search of empty gratification, the motive
to attain ground down, and you entered into
a dark limbo in which the impulse to exploit
the various possibilities of experience had
evaporated, with nothing to fill the void.
How long you lingered in that intermediate
zone, bereft of any natural vitality or redemptive
vision, doesn’t matter. What mattered was every
molecule of grace that had always been yours,
but which you had ignored or overlooked
in your desperate quest to manipulate
and accumulate sensation.
Now that you had finally become available,
it was that very grace which stepped forth
to serve you, revealing to you the innate
art and liberating path of the truly wise —
the rare intelligence of nondwelling,
the perfection of simply letting go.
Writing On Water 