Paul Fleischman is a psychiatrist and a Teacher of Vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. he is the author, among others, of Cultivating Inner Peace and Karma and Chaos.
Swirling with impersonal ferocity
White flakes like stars in proliferating galaxies
Rotate and eddy into multiplying milky ways.
How did we emerge here
On this one planet among all the pinholes of light
In their infinite expanse and variety?
What brought these three stilled and receptive minds
To stare through eyes with quiet joy
At the gusting veils of brownian celebration
Of manifestation, amplification, and dissolution–
This snowstorm seen from an isolated cabin in the woods?
A sere old pine is all we can see
That’s dark and green, the only other sign
Of life–all else is shades of chalky invisibility.
Sky, air, and earth merge indistinguishably.
Outside we march among the great blankets and eves.
Nothing moves, nothing lives, but wind and flakes.
The tracery of deer trails leading to and from
Old apple trees and streams are smoothed and smothered
Into oblivion, and we move,
Oafish brown and jerking things with poles,
Lone triad of lost giants among
Exquisite and phantasmagoric comforters.
Everything seems simultaneously flailing and at rest.
A heaven of wild and meditating stars billow around us.
We wander through unspeakable beauty within the storm,
A pure new creation uninhabited yet and cold,
The mystery of emergence,
Something present in the emptiness of winter woods and snow.
Hemlock trees form inviting peaked huts
Sealed shut with thickly layered cream of flakes,
Under which snow cannot reach, where our eyes
And necks receive a brief respite
From the freezing wet buffeting.
Curved cones and ghosts appear from detritus of the air.
The blowdowns of old maple and beech lie long
Contorted and asleep,
Like ruins of ancient and arboreal civilizations
In which the plants were once strong, wise and tall,
Before they were battered by storms, broke and fell.
We lurch up hills, crawl under white weighted evergreen limbs
That when we brush them
Scatter icy solar systems down our necks.
We traverse a deep unfolding nativity of secrecy and splendor.
White, white, white, all the world is softly held
In this maternal lining
Of pensive and pregnant endometrial fertility.
We wander through unspeakable beauty within the storm,
A pure new creation uninhabited yet and cold,
The mystery of emergence,
Something present in the emptiness of winter woods and snow.
But we cannot stay outdoors. There is no home
For us within the wind and cold,
So we return through stubborn and circumlocutious
Foot-puffing pathways, to our cabin in the woods.
We pack the wood stove with logs of apple, birch, and ash,
The bones of our solar-sipping ancestry,
Knocked dead from storms of other years,
Who left their skeletal remains among the woods
Where we collected them, without which
The cabin walls would only entomb
The thermometer’s impoverishment.
Only the birth and death of trees consigned to fire
Enable our remote and rapturous reveries.
This is the greatest peace we know:
To sit in warm harmony at one, and yet removed,
From the power and potency of the storm.
We are its witness, its inner eye.
Buried under its accumulating residue
We think its unanswerable questions,
Laugh its casual laughs, relax in the warm
Familiarity that can only be found inside
The cold and killing chaos of the storm.
When the morning comes we are pensioners
On the hillside of wide white resolution.
Meditating the three of us in our hushed cabin
With our eyes closed like buddhas and like elves,
Observing the crystalline cascade of life we call ourselves
Scintillant and descending among the indispensable melange
Of wakefulness and ending that is the destiny of living things.
Now I wonder:
These overarching heavens, these stars above,
These ungraspable expanses of the perpetual snowstorm sky,
Do they harbor within them some cabin in deific woods?
Does the perfection of peace and joy reside
In those who meditate within the storm
That roams some far off cosmogonal center
Of the cosmic whirl?
The best in our life is a transient reflection, a reception,
Of what in fact abides. We ensconce ourselves
In storms, in cabins, in bodies to reconfigure it, although
It does not exist inside of bodies, wind, or snow.
We face the storm to find it.
We cannot name it.
But we know.
