Old Orchard Beach, Maine
* * *
Ice that sealed the rock gaps
this morning starts to melt—
under the moss
water trickles
seeking its way
*Saigyō. Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude. Trans. Meredith McKinney. p. 3. Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
* * *
Saigyō (Japan, Buddhist monk, 1118-1190 CE) depicts experiencing a softening of hardness, or at least a hope for it. In my religious upbringing, speaking of hardness of heart was common. Such insensitivity calls for a softening, for our natural way is soft: responsive, relational, kind, gentle, compassionate, adaptable, ...
The opposite of the hardened heart is the soft, pliable, even flowing heart. Insensitivity seals us off, providing a sense of safety but cutting us off from natural humanness, including love, which can lead us to feel vulnerable and exposed.
Thus, the hardheartedness leaves one isolated, even surrounded by many. Life easily becomes purely transactional, an object among objects. And these objects are protecting themselves and their illusory territories. This can happen not only with a person but also with a group; it can determine the policy of a whole government, the culture of a religious sect, or the ethos of a family, for example.
Yet, feeling alive and openhearted is a decision made by each of us. We can be alive in the cemetery. We can enjoy life among the walking dead. We can love among the loveless. Like our poet, we can feel the call to choose a different way. We can do this without judgmentalness toward those who choose otherwise. Rather, our hearts are now softened, and we feel compassion to an extent we did not prior.
* * *
Saigyō points to that within us seeking to find its way, not necessarily for our way is the right one, but the right one for us. This way has been hidden and captured for too long by the solidity of resistance and insensitivity. We did not realize our strength was also our weakness, guarding our hearts was shielding it from its longing. We did not realize how strong we were... enough to let go into the yes and deeply feel what we once saw as a threat.
This within us naturally seeks its way, like the water trickling under the moss. And the poet knows this experience; he is not unsympathetic to it. He sees what he knows about himself in nature. Trickling water below the moss and slowly melting ice shows the possibility of another way. How do we see as he saw? How do we feel the way we are being silently led?
Saigyō seemed to have an ideal life. He was working in his early twenties in the imperial court and was of aristocratic lineage, but something was missing. He had been studying Buddhism and began feeling an urge to be ordained and become a Buddhist wanderer. He shocked people when he, after much vacillation, received ordination, walking away from life as had been mapped out for him. No one knew he would become one of Japan's most esteemed poets in its storied history of poets. Even in his lifetime, he was the most beloved of all poets. The Sun of Grace melted the resistance of the young man. His heart could flow freely in its native currents.
* * *
Saigyō voiced the longing for this day in another poem, using the image of sleep and waking up -
At what moment
of life's long sleep
might I wake from this dream
astonished
by the truth?
*Saigyō, p. 4.
Like the poet, we usually sense tension before a spiritual breakthrough long before the yes to it. The conversion does not happen in an instant as much as over a period leading up to the moment. We feel the urge to prepare for the yes before the yes. Like the poet, we vacillate back and forth. This time before is like the ice slowly melting or our being unhurriedly awakened from our dreamy sleep. We discover the yes was prior to any conscious yes; otherwise, the yes would not have arisen.
Still, there is a point of turning on the pivot, like when you finally admit that you love someone, though you had known it and not been ready to admit it or speak it. Or you decided it was time to turn in your resignation from a job, but you had felt that need for months prior. Often the turn happens, finally, after the exhaustion takes over, and we see the futility of resistance to where and what life calls us to, even if we have no clarity on what that to is, and we usually do not - possibly, never.
* * *
The conversion, or transformation, that the poet points to cannot be managed or pushed into reality. It happens like the sun softening the ice. We cannot decide when the truth will astonish us. We can only prepare as best we know how and without getting in the way.
So, a challenge is to let it happen, to let ourselves be turned; still, you know it will not happen unless you do something. But how do you do when knowing all you do is not going to be the cause of anything happening? Spiritual transformation does not fit into the linguistics of time-and-space. One example is that it is not linear; it only appears to be, for the mind makes sense of change as a movement from a point to a point. We can point to a place and time, yet the place and time arose from where the happening arose. So, any such transformation has a quality of timelessness. The usual assignment of causality, which is linear, does not apply in spiritual transformation.
You may or may not feel a sense of loss of your usual sense of time and place. At age nine, this was my experience in my earliest known such turning. I knew I was, but the sense was of being suddenly inside a different, subtle environment, a habitat I had known but did not know I knew. There was no clock on the wall; there was nowhere else in the world. Time and space collapsed into a boundless moment without moments before or after. Everything was happening just now, like all time put into a needle point.
In sharing this, I do not want to mislead. Most turnings are much less eventful. In fact, if we look closely, we might see we are undergoing conversions all the time. We had never looked closely enough. Possibly, we had thought these turnings were only dramatic. Thunder does not have to rumble and the earth shake when one awakes. One might simply awake, quietly and without even being aware of it, at least not until looking back later.
* * *
We may have many spiritual turning points in life, and we might have such turnings without seeing them as religious or spiritual. With these transformations, we learn to relax, cooperate, and trust the mystery of Grace. We do not know what this Grace is, and we may call it something else or by many words. We may use traditional religious language or secular terminology to speak of it. And after a moment of turning, what can we say? - "It happened, but I don't know how."
(C) brian k wilcox, 2025
