The Gift of Momentary Seeing

In the last few days, there have been moments when I am seeing things differently.  I looked across the street, and the arms of the evergreens were crisscrossing and swaying to the rhythm of the song I was listening to, Chambermaid Swing.  Not just uniformly swaying in the wind, but actually dancing to the rhythm.

This morning the leaves on the trees outside the zendo were vibrating with white lights.   Near the zendo door, on the tallest stalk, was one pink rock rose facing the sun.  It was a ray of enthusiastic light leaping out to me.  It was saying, “Good morning!  Here I am!” 

This kind of seeing is almost hallucinatory.   These lights and visions are like a flash and then gone.  I don’t know why this is happening – maybe an unknown side effect of Methotrexate.  But whatever the cause, it really is grace.  It is the grace of a moment of beauty that pierces through the truly gloomy and dark experiences of being sick with active rheumatoid.

I think that these flashes of dancing in the trees, the brief piercing beauty of the rock rose, are possibly glimpses of things as they actually are – of thusness.  For me they feel as a gift, somehow, given hand-in – hand with the suffering.