-Issa Kobayashi. Issa's Best.
Trans. David G. Lanoue.
Reply: from Latin, "to fold back." Our nature is to fold back and fold back. Receive and give are identical - there is no beginning to it. The tree feeds the soil, and the soil feeds the tree. Any motion, a reaching forth, is reply - it has been going on a long, long time.
Welcoming is a response to that of the other capable of reply and wanting to reply, even if the other has forgotten it. Your acting forth for connection is your faith in that in the other that is in you; you are inviting remembrance. Remembrance touches remembrance. We remember for each other.
Still, demanding a return to your welcome is not in keeping with the Spirit and spirit of welcoming. Spirit does not barge in or lasso and drag out. Nevertheless, yes or no, any reply is a reply - we cannot not reply. We diminish ourselves through the non-reply; we expand ourselves through the reply.
From which comes this reply-with-reply, or welcome-with-welcome? As Ken Wilber, in One Taste, writes of something he calls the "Mystery of the Deep" - "some context beyond the isolated me, that touches each and every one of us, and lifts us from our troubled and mortal selves, this contracted coil, and delivers us into the hands of the timeless and very Divine, and gracefully releases us from ourselves: where openness melts defenses and relationship grounds sanity, where compassion outpaces the hardened heart and care outshines despair, this opening to the Divine ..."
Therefore, what I write of here does not arise from you as a person, a biological organism; yet, the physical, with its mental capacities, is not absent but totally a participant in the giving-and-receiving. When you dip your finger into the river, you dip your finger into the sea; when you dip your finger into the sea, you dip your finger into the river.
Poem:
Reply
a cold winter's night
far away in time and distance from when a small child
surfaced a heartwarming scene long forgotten
standing, my brother and I
beside the highway in front of Grandpa Tommie's farmhouse
two little lads waiting for the sixteen-wheeler
we had heard it coming and sprinted gleefully to await, then
lifting up and down our right-hand thumbs and smiling
the huge truck came within near sight and moving by
the hoped-for sound sounded forth "honk! honk!"
we smiled back, suspended in an air of pure delight;
a brief moment - like life in time - and the truck was past, yet
somehow - and it's more than we think - moments like that,
windows opening to reveal something simple, stubborn,
refusing to surrender up their spirit - childlike moments;
and the cold winter night, many decades since,
I wondered - brother and family all gone - and the truck -
have I been living with thumb uplifted, hopeful, smile on face -
reaching out - has that been my life - is it still -
like the child I was - and maybe am -
giving out words and wordless signs
for the grace of a fleeting, brittle moment of reply
and with it, the love that lifts one off the ground and into the air
quickly passing, but somehow, something remaining
that even death cannot silence or confine in a place or a time
*brian k. wilcox, 12.27-28.2025
* * *
We are one. Yet, we are many. Many, for one seeks connection, and not only with other humans or only with beings of this realm. Union seeks communion. Diversity rests on unity.
Your heart reaches out. What for? Not for all the things you might have been led to think. So many have forgotten - have been led to forget. In forgetfulness, one lives in a quiet desperation, an arid desolation - something knows it is not home, something has not forgotten. One breathes, but is that all it means to be alive?
* * *
Attachment can easily be a refusal to join-with. Boundaries can be walls separating. As an old Zen story shares: The monk approached the Teacher, "I've finally learned detachment. What now?" "Now, it's time you learn attachment." The story points us beyond both, yet it is not a denial of the importance of human closeness, even passionate intimacy - at least, if so, I would totally say "No!"
* * *
Love is a reaching out. Love in its secrecy comes out, and without yielding up its secrecy. The denial of this reaching out is the denial of love, the denial of true nature.
This reaching out does not mean an unscrupulous dive into human society or any relationship, losing yourself in the process. This does not mean you need to befriend everyone or anyone in particular. This, in fact, is beyond acting out of any sense of must or ought. A river flows for it flows, not for it is supposed to. Wind blows for wind is the blowing. Can anyone, really, fake a smile?
True nature does not seek to lose itself in another but to find mutual benefit with the other. We are fingers reaching. The nature of spirit is invitation.
True nature moves in timely-contoured gestures, well-shaped for the occasion, toward the other to see itself in the other, seeing itself. This clarity is alive with the seeing and feeling of a shared tenderness and beauty, shared for it is prior to any reply.
* * *
Could it be our viewpoint is skewed about love by too often seeing love as a thing we have, give, and receive - a noun, a subject, an object ... fitting in a space, waiting for the offering? A reply is a loving, and a reply is in the act of replying, as love is an acting. Is love, then, what we give? Or is love the giving? Today, walking along the highway, I waved at strangers passing by - acting, loving, replying. Each one did the same. Still, seeds birth flowers, and flowers live in seeds.
* * *
We can put - and we humans usually do - this mystery of Depth into frames too small. We can miss the many ways they and we are part of this love-play we can deny, but cannot escape. To say the Sun is not in the sky is only to confess we miss enjoying its Light.
I went into a jail weekly to facilitate a spirituality group. Once, a man, attending for the first time, began raging angrily after I spoke the word "love." The whole group looked on as he persisted in explaining why he no longer believed love is possible. To him, there was no such thing - mere fantasy. Due to his aggression, I decided not to try to reason with him - some doors you do not knock on - even love walks on. Soon, I invited him to leave, if he wished. He got up and called for an officer to come get him.
The inmate could not see his pain arose from a betrayal of his need to love and receive love. His denial of love was an affirmation, a confession. The denial of love arose from his not being well-loved, maybe not loved at all. He could not see my quiet listening, giving space for his hostility, and the invitation for him to leave, if he wished, was itself Love's reply. Somehow, he had lost faith in love and was afraid to love or be loved again. His response to that word "love" was to all there: "I cannot escape." Has anyone among us not raged at love, when our heart offering - the offering of ourself - was denied, betrayed, or ignored?
Some persons may feel the non-reply is the usual reply to their welcomes. Many grieve the love they lost, while many grieve the love they never received. Maybe most of us grieve both. How can we not suffer, reciprocity being the nature of true nature, and the door remains unopened? Do we really want to be so aloof we are immune to feeling such loss? If that is nirvana or heaven, count me out. True nature is not a robot, it can embrace the cry when the heart is broken.
* * *
Are we all like my brother and me, with our thumbs up beside that country highway? Do we adopt gestures from our society and families and create some of our own to reach out for a reply? Do we act for that moment to be lifted up into the air? To feel the natural ecstasy of the heart? To forget ourselves for a moment? Is receiving reply a natural way true nature expresses itself, not only to confirm itself, but to confirm the one who appears as other? Could our struggles in relationships be mainly due to our difficulty finding a way to fit our lives into this dance of reply-and-reply?
* * *
If all this is true, how do you balance your essential aloneness with your essential togetherness? Well, you come to see they are not separate. Some of us lean one way, others the other way. For any one of us, this can shift over time. And, at least for me, honoring time apart enhances my time with others. And, time with others enriches my time alone. I find it fundamental to my inner calling to embody solitude when not in solitude, and embody togetherness when not in togetherness.
See, there is no space between solitude and togetherness. And, with practice, you can learn to be with the world while sitting by yourself in your home - yet, even then, you are far from sitting alone, and you are far from your home.
* * *
(C) brian wilcox, 2025
