Melting

Sometimes, when I have leftover oatmeal, I slice it up the next day and fry it up for breakfast. This morning, I opened the storage container with the thickened oats and divided the contents in two. I prepared the cast iron frying pan by dropping in a modest pat of butter. It landed on the warming surface and began to melt, sending interesting ripples in all directions. I imagined I was a bird flying high in the sky, looking down over a new landform being created by flowing magma. The ripples flowing from the melting butter reminded me of pahoehoe lava flows near Bend.

As I reflected on the melting butter, I felt something move in my mind; an awareness of molten thoughts forming an idea about natural phenomena. It seems all things share a common way of creating the appearance of solidity from fluidity, and the other way around. Melting earth, melting butter…what is the real difference? In the grand scheme of universal creation, there is no difference. Everything is everything else. It is only the mind that makes distinctions.

I imagine some of you reading this post are wondering what was in that oatmeal I ate this morning. Was I frying up some hallucinogenic mushrooms? Not that I am aware of, unless Tarn slipped something into the skillet when I wasn’t watching. This is just the way my mind has always functioned, but I did not always feel free to share those ideas with the world. I was conditioned like everyone else to see things as actual; to see form and forget the formless.

Perhaps it is a matter of aging out of that habit, but as I march closer to my inevitable end as a life form, the formless seems to entice me even more. I am compelled to engage in my momentary apparitional life with less fear and more fluidity. Having experienced a moment of death during a surgery a number of years ago, I seem to have a foot in both worlds anyway; form and formless co-arise, often without any reifying thoughts. 

We all have a foot in both worlds whether we know it or not. Our bodies will eventually decay into the elements; we will dissolve into earth, water, fire, wind, and dissipate into the space surrounding. We will melt—and create interesting ripples in the universe.