My chair by the window, upstairs, is my teacher. It is my pondering place... my coffee place... my early morning tea place. All I have to do is arrive, and choose to sit and watch. And from my teacher, I have learned about clouds.
Siddhārtha Gautama chose a common tree and had no use for altars, meditation cushions or temples. He never learned to meditate and had never been on a meditation retreat. He certainly never joined an online global meditation group.
He did not own a statue of the Buddha. He simply sat under his favourite cool, shady tree, and just watched. Detached. Allowed. Often.
The clouds come and go. They release sometimes light healing rain, and sometimes destructive deluges which wash away my seeds.
Sometimes they give me delight in their shade from blistering heat, and sometimes my washing molds on the line as I wait for them to pass.
But they always pass.
Meditation does not require closed eyes or breath technique. It asks only the willingness to do 3 things: to arrive, to wait and to watch. Whatever comes. Inside and out.
I am earth and mountain and cloud.
Cloud is rain is cloud.
Cycles within cycles, cycles creating cycles.
My thoughts are clouds.
My body is a cloud.
Events are clouds.
People are clouds.
My feelings are clouds.
Real, but not real. Eternal and fleeting.
To witness the outer clouds, and my inner clouds, is easy. It requires no teacher. Only the desire to do those 3 things: to arrive, to wait and to watch.
The longer I watch clouds, the more I am the mountain, soaked by rain, gratefully yielding the damp steam from my own soggy and tangled undergrowth, and creating more clouds.
The longer I watch clouds, the more I understand that I create the clouds.
It becomes more difficult to say which are good clouds and bad clouds, and it no longer matters. They are all enriching, transient and eternally changing. The good pretty cloud just after dawn can be an ominous threatening deluge by 4pm. All that changed was her intensity, not her nature. So is she good, or bad? In April after the dry season, the deluge is very good. In September, as the rivers threaten to flood and kill with their destruction, they are very bad. Yet the nature of the clouds has not changed. We have.
I am earth and mountain and cloud.
Cloud is rain is cloud.
Cycles within cycles, cycles creating cycles.
Today I am grateful for clouds, and my teacher. My faithful teacher - the teak chair. Who was once a magnificent Teak tree, and now, like a cloud, has changed from being one kind of teacher to another. A different form, but still essentially a tree spirit guru. The teacher in my teak chair and the teacher in the clouds are one.
One day when my teak tree teacher chair is reduced to ash, she will begin again to become the mountain, which creates the very clouds which nourish her enough to support the growth of a new young teak tree.
And so the cycles and seasons turn. Like clouds. Ever changing. Like me.
One Love.
The view from my upstairs living room window from our Thai home in Baan Rim Tai, Mae Rim, Chiang Mai. The Thai mountain I watch each day is Thailand's "holy, mystic mountain", Doi Suthep.
All images used in my posts are created and owned by myself, unless specifically sourced. If you wish to use my images or my content, please contact me.
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