Rain outside, the world a deep gray-green, each color leaning toward the other.
Objects in the world that become other: Breath (inhale and exhale). Light (night travels through twighlight to day and the other way as crepuscularly well. Bodies. Plants. Of course even the stone sloughs off into space with a touch or a million million of them.
Draw closer to your sources, the things that mark you as a participant in creation, made of its constituent parts, the matter of the universe. Draw close to the moments of exchange of physical matter, and also the exchange of spiritual kindness and energy.
Last night I watched a taiko drumming performance. The drummers were so passionate and physically connected to the movements they were making, gesturing and chanting verses as they struck the drums. The drum almost seemed part of the body that was sounding; or a better explanation is that the body of the drummer itself becomes part of the drum.
We think that there is a division between body (physical matter of the self, skin and bones, hair and blood), mind (sense-making organ, the thing you think you mean when you say “I”) and the spirit (the actual third thing, the real internal self, beyond the physical changes of the corporeal body and the fluctuations of the consciousness of the mind).
And if we think there is a division then perhaps we think the body is temporal, that it disappears, cycles back into creation, while the mind or the spirit are the immortal things that transcend.
You think something difference when you are living in a body the fasts, that removes itself from the cycle of matter transferrance (food and water) and instead depends, for a time, on energy transferrance only (breath).
You imagine the equation is different, that the spirit resides in both the mind and the body equally. That both have their version of temporality and immortality. That it takes knowing one to know the other and takes knowing the other to know the third.
That understanding the self is also a cyclical process, the way food energy enters the body, the body itself changes and regenerates, enters and re-enters the matrix of creation.
Water pouring from the air into the ground. We are breathing some of it also. It will fill the plants and trees and the squash in the garden and return to us eventually.
I have a particular love of sudden storms, of racing for the top floors to close all the windows.
Your house is something you have to take care of for the sake of all the people in it.
Your body is like that also.