Relentless Ants, Drifting Clouds

Hakuin (1685-1768)

This Zen master, I've recently learned, often painted the image of an ant circling a grindstone. Round and round the ant goes. Ants will relentlessly follow an ant track. Repeat, repeat. Relentless repetition: call it obsession; call it despair, call it slavery. Slave masters enforce unrelenting repeated motion. Why when the slave master is dead or no longer in power, do we repeat, repeat, exhausting ourselves? Even a wise person like Hakuin cannot give a pat answer. Instead he exhorts:

An ant goes round and round without rest

Like all beings in the six realms of existence,

Born here and dying there without release,

Now becoming a hungry ghost, then an animal.

If you are searching for freedom from this suffering

You must hear the sound of one hand.

(Not "one hand clapping," the way the line has been translated.)

I wonder whether Hakuin drank tea. I did this morning--some green. Not bad!

Yesterday I shot a picture of an empty decaying house in South Beach. The ants and termites are taking it down. Eating it, undermining it. Are you smiling with me? Are you ant-like today? Are you free? Are you both? I can't do it alone. Ants of the World, Unite. We'll wear away the world together. And unlike ants, watch the clouds drift. They're massing southward, cumulus; low, stratus. Mixed: there's even mackerel-mottled. I grew up, a noodle-eating city girl who seldom looked at the sky. Books and mud-pie pleasures. Years later, the window of my Boston room had a view to the sky. With J. I saw the sky over the Allagash--other skies too. The same sky here in South Beach seems endless--more endless, if there is such a thing--endlessissimo. Venus low and bright at 4: AM. My Crocs squeak on the tile floor. Dust blows in. The little metal table rusts. From the trash shoot on our floor, my lithe neighbor runs barefoot, bare-chested back to his apartment, empty handed.

Wandering Concentration

It's difficult to concentrate. We need the third eye, a candle flame, paying attention to our breaths. This morning as I did my breathing exercise/ mediation, I thought of the snow storm, the ants in the cupboard feeding on the bait I had laid out for them, a passage from Marilynne Robinson's novel, Home. Our minds have peripheral vision, so to speak. (When I framed this second picture through the window screen, in the view finder, the camera picked up a moire pattern, but in the final shot the pattern disappeared. I began to think about that.)

Earlier as I breathed and counted, I thought of the cold snow and the warm life of the ants. They went for the mixture of sugar, butter and boric acid. Should I leave them be, as some believe? I would have if I hadn't found them crawling on me. It's easy to blame odd things on global warming, but I have never seen ants inside in winter.

I concentrate when I'm writing and reading.

Robinson's novel was interminable, yet I kept at it, reading a small chunk before I fell asleep. It was worth it. She gives us a sensitive portrait of a minister's family and of Christian believers. There was far too much dialogue--most of the novel is dialogue--but she lets herself finally go in this description, which was also in my head as I paid attention to my breath, inhalation and exhalation:

And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence.

Now I'm looking out through two panes of glass, through the screen. The snow comes down. Across the street a little boy and his mother play frisbee. The red disk flies; they are covered with snow. Now the father comes out. He is lifting his camera.