“Nothing comes from outside your mind.” Thich Nhat Hahn

I feel a little like Rain Man. “It’s Friday and I have to write. It’s Friday and I have to write.” Honestly, I live with the forever fear that I will just stop, because I don’t trust myself to keep it going. This writing business has been like a dream in many ways, not believing I am really able to do it, just a series of word accidents. 

On the other hand, I think it serves me to feel this way, because it keeps me honest and kind of innocent. I’d be embarrassed for myself if I thought I was writer posturing, just for the sake of effect. As some of you may know, I began this writing business solely for the sake of my grandson, leaving him my life in words, knowing I will be gone long before we can have the conversations I would love to have. 

This legacy idea allowed me to back into the practice of regularly sitting down at the empty screen, filling it with the words du jour. This week, I have been thinking about the ultimate challenge for me, which is writing about the Mind. Zen is filled with endless lectures on the nature of mind, an incredibly illusive concept, if ever there was one. 

The mind is everything, nothing falls outside its purview. On top of that, it is totally different for each of us, which is exactly what makes it so impossible to define. It is like the buffer between each of us and the world we inhabit. It embodies all our secrets, everything we need to know, always one thought ahead of our cognition. 

Absolutely nothing happens that escapes the mind, like a sponge with infinite absorptivity. It permanently retains the residue of all thoughts and feelings, real or imagined, it makes no difference. It is an encyclopedia of our entire life, secretly coded in a text that is sometimes totally accessible and at other times, a muted miasma of mental mayhem. 

The mind is the repository of all our thoughts and feelings. It is our personal library of life, a mausoleum of all our memories, changing each time we call upon them. We are deluded into thinking that mind is a fixed reflection of the unchanged self. The bitch is every single moment that occurs in our lives, no matter how seemingly insignificant, changes us into someone else, a continuous reinvention. Permanence is an illusion, defying the truth of our existence. On top of that, everything that happens and has ever happened, is the air we breath, a stupefying interconnection.

Our experiences, the rings around the tree of our lives, continually reshape us. Age provides each of us with a classroom of learning and we never graduate, we keep learning. Somewhere in my thirties, I ran out of the deceptions that kept me from myself. I had no idea who I was and thought if I looked more closely, I’d find me. I hit a wall and I stopped. I got myself into therapy and started looking inside in ways that felt so new to me, each thought a revelation. Hating my mother felt so liberating, downright intoxicating. The muddle of my mind began to feel incredibly clear, a comfort and an illusion, which took some time to understand.

It took a move to Santa Fe, NM for me to come face to face with my self. I didn’t own my life in NYC, it owned me. I was absent. For the first time in my life, I was completely alone, my adobe home in the middle of nowhere, a coffin for what I had left behind and a garden of possibility. The only exception, my two sons, engendering a sadness I cannot describe and exacting a cost we still pay and I am sorry for that.

I was a Zen accident waiting to happen, once I got to the high desert country. My mind needed a hook to hang its thoughts and I felt a true kinship with the Buddha. He appealed to my intellect, a homeless, wandering IQ. I understood him. He made sense to me, a home for my mind.

All we are is our minds and there are two of them within each of us. The small mind is everything that happens to us everyday of our lives. We bury ourselves in the minutiae of each moment, blind to a world far beyond the traps we trip over with each breath. 

Hiding in plain sight is way of looking at ourselves and the world we inhabit with a borderless perspective. What may have happened minutes before or what we anticipate happening several minutes hence trivializes our lives, the illusion of an enduring self. Our minds are the motherlode of all that is and all that ever was. The mind is everything and incredibly allusive at the same time.

Now, you are reading this and each of your minds is going to do whatever it does. The mind I am talking about is joined to the heart of each of us. 

Thank you for your time. See you next week. See you next week. See you next week.