River De Chute, NE Maine
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It was as if time slowed so that Mabel could no longer breathe or feel her own pulse. What she was seeing could not be, and yet it did not waver. There in the child’s hand. A single snowflake, luminous and translucent. A sharp-edged miracle.
*Eowyn Ivey. The Snow Child: A Novel.
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On a month-long silence over a decade ago, I kept recalling something that happened years prior at a bar in Gainesville, Florida. On returning home, I wrote the following -
This man, dancing, I saw, again, his body moving to a band playing and singing "The Thrill is Gone." That return, here, was to Gainesville, FL, early first decade 2000s.
A couple of my congregants - I was a clergyperson then - invited me to a bar to eat and enjoy fellowship. I went, a good way to act out a goodbye to my more conservative, restrictive previous life.
We ate and afterward focused on enjoying the band. I saw there was a birthday party for the soon-to-be dancing man. He, later, got on the floor and began moving about in the glow of the moment. He seemed oblivious to anyone else being present, totally with the moving movement, the music, all of it, like a Dakini Dance.
Beautiful sight, I admired. I admired him doing what I would not do, and not what I necessarily would ever need to do. We are different, like every snowflake, yet each a snowflake, an amazing, never-before-been miracle.
For anyone to say another should be something he or she is not, well, that is a negation of this mysterious, playful play of duality. And duality is simply the flow, the dance, the moving movement of life.
In the spaciousness we are all one, in time we are each unique. Would you say to a snowflake, "Be like that snowflake over there?" No. Admire the array of snowflakes, how each is one in the one beauty of life.
How Wonderful! One man, just enjoying the dance, the music, moving - maybe better being moved -, feeling the energy of life, to sway, to play, to be. I could see he was in the moment, not a moment among other moments, the one moment, only moment, moving at the intersection of space and time, a vibrant, breathing particularity of the one Playwright of it all.
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Recollection of the dancing man, well, that reminded me how we are each different. Life bubbles up into duality - the life dance - with a specificity no other being has manifested before or will again. No one had ever been that dancing man. That was the first and last dance of the dance.
Everything keeps moving, yet there is something of you that does not move. It makes the dancing man and the dance possible. "The Thrill is Gone" arises into time and space from this something. We all arise and leave together.
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I lived beside the River De Chute, in Aroostook County, Maine, recently and several years prior. Both times I lived there, the River De Chute was the River De Chute, yet I saw the river only once. Something never changes, yet one never sees it twice. So, you, too... everyone, everything.
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An aged Zen teacher met a monk deep in meditation. "What are you doing?" asked the teacher. "I'm trying to become a buddha," the monk responded. "Ah, I understand," said the teacher.
Later, the monk saw the teacher sitting on the ground rubbing a stone across a brick. "What are you doing?" asked the monk. "I'm trying to make a mirror out of this brick," said the teacher.
"You can't make a mirror out of a brick by rubbing it, no matter how hard or how long you rub," said the monk. "Ah," said the teacher, "and neither can you make yourself a buddha, no matter how long or hard you sit in meditation."
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You cannot make yourself a buddha, a christ, a saint, a holy man or holy woman, an anyone or anything. You cannot make you you or another you. So...
Who are you - really? Or what? What is your dance, the dance belonging only to you? How can you be in constant change, part of the life-flow, yet you are the same you from moment to moment, birth to death? What do these questions have to do with the dancing man? And the snowflake, "a sharp-edged miracle," in a child's hand? Why even ask such questions as these? Who cares? Do you?
Enjoy your precious life, you amazing lotus blossoms!
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(C) brian k wilcox, 2025
