It always amazes me how small the house is, yet how thoroughly entrapping. Go out, go forth only a short distance from it, only three or four stone’s-throws and you will find yourself free; yet stay inside, and in most parts, it is a struggle to keep from becoming scattered.
An open meadow is a fine place to sit, a fine place to rest. The sky is there, Father Sky and Mother Earth too. A fine place to sit, a fine place to rest. Out here, the world is wide open, empty of what is dross and vulgar—constantly dissolved into the blacknesses—and full of fullness, spacious, entirely alive. You can walk for hours, nay, days out there, from this holy mountain to that holy mountain. You can sit down in a field and meñamel while the vastness of living lives, the vastness of Heaven and Earth brightly le. Here is the place where living lives, the place where the light dwells and even the darkness in a covered cooking-pot becomes full of light. Here is the bottom, here the endless expanse. And here we are. And there is nothing except this. The multitudes imprisoned between four walls—how could they, in tiny cramped houses, tiny cramped mansions, ever escape Mother and Father, hide in plain sight at their feet? These days when someone wants to disconnect, they bury their face in a smartphone.
And that is how the multitudes escape their mother and father, one of the ways: through toothy-snatching pleasures, pleasures that catch, that snatch and snag, pleasures that sing like a siren’s song, that spin like a spider’s cocoon; and pain, pain and crampedness and unnaturalness and complication that spur one, frantic, to scurry, to do things; and indeed there are things to do, things to accomplish, means and methodologies numerous as the morning jewels on a spider’s web. Between four walls, in any here-and-there house whose windows are large or small, there are pleasures and comforts, tortures and torments alike. There is a pantry full of dross and vanity; televisions, computers and smartphones full of stale air; an oil heater that releases bad smells and dry sultry winds; a cook-stove with burnt and caked-on dreams and anguish; a dishwasher full of not-yet-broken glass and shattered pottery and bent silverware; a desk or countertop piled high with white fear etched all over with black blood; never is there nothing to be done and no business to do. There is dirt, there are mice, there are dirt and dust and mice scurrying about in the head and heart of the one who stays too long here.
With too much dirt and mice scurrying in the head, people become irritable and deluded, lashing out at one another hopelessly, internally agitated, grinding, worrying, dizzy-headed, sickly, sad. Heaven and Earth are forgotten; you are falling deeply into an inward-going hole, crowded and pressing, spiralling down to the hard merciless floor in a confused heap, energy congealing like a blood clot, acute soul failure imminent; or haemorrhaging like a dying star.
And the road. It is nothing more than a portable house, an easy-snatching-toothy pleasure, whether you walk or bike or sit in the car, the latter of which is a house within a house, both luxurious and insidious. It is said, “A road becomes a road by people travelling on it.” Where you step, does the ground turn to ashes? Better to walk slowly, to be calm and concentrated in body and mind, to calmly place one’s foot, walking in a mountain stream, in an old deer-path, a field’s edge.
I’m sorry to be so grim to you. There are good things about a house, too. You can keep jars and pots and baskets full of dried apple slices and acorns and wild grapes and garden corn. You can keep potatoes and parsnips too, and cook them in a clay pot. And when it’s too cold to be outside, you have a place where death is not imminent; when rain comes, you needn’t rot with the wild raspberries. There are good things that come with the bad. Even from in amongst the slime and raw faeces of the internet, a few good seeds, excellent seeds in fact, can be snatched, can be rinsed off. Sometimes the only way to get a good seed is to stick one’s fingers in the sludge, the cow-pie, this fresh fuming dung. And, to the one in need, a truly good seed, is worth it all.
Now, I tell you, the people have forgotten what it means to meñamel, to shaqumeñamel, and to le. They have forgotten the pleasure of emptiness and nothingness, the pleasure of infinity in the meadow, out in the qulumailaa. They have forgotten the pleasure without teeth that snatch, that pleasure of nothing and no pleasure. Verily, the one who delights in wisdom, delights in this pleasure. The wise shun agitation and seek calm, for it is in calm that the truth is seen, in calm that virtue is attained, in calm that the heart is pleased. And Mother and Father have gone nowhere at all; clean out the mind, throw off the roof, smash the walls, pull up and scatter the foundation, and you will see the endless heavens, the wind-bright space; see the vast expanse, the holy steadfast mountains, the qume shen and the ilileshya. Like the little snake on the warm rock, like the well-placed stone in the mountains, a well-sprouted seed, a well-grown cornstalk in the blackness, melxemi.
