Rising in the Mist

Spring snowmelt and rain are conspiring to make the Deschutes run wild. I am hiking in the Riley Ranch Preserve and wander off the main path down the riparian access trail to the river bank. I usually need to hop across several basalt boulders to get to the river’s edge, but today the high water is lapping up near the base of the hill. It makes a mud slurry I have to slog through, so I discover another way to locate a dry spot upon which I can sit and contemplate the rapids unfolding before me. 

I eventually circle around an uphill rock outcrop and come upon a smooth boulder just above the water line. It is butt perfect and I settle in to breathe the fresh air pushed by the flow of white water cascading through the canyon. The rapids create thunder in the atmosphere above and vibration in the earth beneath me. All my senses feel engaged in this spring ritual of transition, carried away with the current flowing in my awareness. Deep refreshment.

When nature sweeps through the canyons of my mind, she calls me to attention like no other way. I allow her to caress my senses in effortless pulsations; dakinis of earth and water invite me to dance in space. Thoughts have no chance here. They mingle in the mist and rise into clouds where they rain upon the earth in a never ending cycle of arising and dissolving. In the dzogchen teachings this is described as noticing movement within quiescence and quiescence within movement—like observing life in the the space between heartbeats. 

Meditation is not the absence of thoughts but abiding in the misty spaces between them. This is the way we naturally experience awareness; noticing arising and dissipating like mist into the air. Thoughts do not disappear so much as they move like waves on the the ocean, a liturgy of rising and falling. The rhythms of natural cycles are mirrored in the way our natural mind moves. Our practice is to dissolve into those rhythms and arise as compassion—then dissolve again as rain on water.