I chew on ideas, like a dog worrying over the leg bone of a roadkill deer. I like coming across things to think about. Often in books I find ideas that resonate with me, or that I disagree with. Then I sit with, or more commonly, walk with or fish or hunt with these ideas, and think. Sometimes I work on my thoughts in my journal.
Something caught my attention today, from the 19th-century Bengalese spiritual master Ramakrishna:
“One day it was suddenly revealed to me that everything was Pure Spirit. The utensils of worship, the altar, the doorframe – all Pure Spirit. Men, animals and other living beings – all Pure Spirit. Then like a madman I began to shower flowers in all directions. Whatever I saw I worshipped.”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” ‘The Sun Also Rises’ ends.
The rains finally came last week. And they came.
Sheets and towels hanging heavy on the clothesline strung between sugar maples never did come in dry.
The winds and downpours bent the wild plum saplings to the ground.
The roof leaked in the places where the ice-dams developed over the past couple winters.
The wet dirt and soil got into the cabin and were splashed up onto everything in the yard: chairs, wood, lumber, bones, dog bowls.
The humidity soaked into the maple firewood.
And the low sky kept the odor of the outhouse nearby.
The hole of an outhouse is not Pure Spirit. In spiritual terms, it is Pure Nothingness; the void or abyss; Hell. In real terms it is something unnatural.
A mouse with bulging eyes and a snapped neck in a Victor mousetrap is not Pure Spirit. Nor is the smell of dead mice and mouse urine in the walls.
The woods in the gloaming after a downpour may be Spirit, but not Pure, not something to shower with flowers. The woods are dark and blurred and cold and wet.
In the gloaming after the hard rain I walk down to the shore of Trout Lake in the wet dirt and on slick rocks. Then I walk the hollow to the silted spring back in the sugar bush. Then to the outhouse. Finally I sit in a wet plastic chair at the smoking fireside, wet, without the chance to dry.
I turn to Ramakrishna and his world of Pure Spirit.
And I’m reminded of something I’ve lived by instead, from the 20th-century American spiritual master, Bill Murray, who said in the film The Razor’s Edge (1983):
“It is easy to be a holy man on the top of a mountain.”
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