WORDS LIKE LIGHT

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

ENDLESSNESS

            In the last few years, I’ve started to understand the astonishing truth that endlessness is endless. Nothing ever ends – not ever. If something seems to end, it is simply because my mind has placed the convenient label called ‘the end’ on it. And of course, it is convenient and necessary to use that label in our daily lives. In order to organize my life, I do need to think in terms of activities starting and stopping, and events as beginning and then ending. However, what I’m seeing more clearly now, in my 79th year, is that these are simply helpful labels, and not anywhere near the truth. In reality, nothing ever starts and nothing ever ends. There is only the unceasing and boundless flow of the endless present moment. If I search for the start of the present moment, I can never find it, nor can I find where it stops. The present has always been here, and it will never end. It extends out beyond any boundaries into limitlessness.  And the important things in life – all of them – are also endless. Powers like love and peace and patience know no boundaries. Because they are not made of material stuff, they have no material form that can set limits and be measured. The power of kindness cannot be stopped by some borderline, and the power of acceptance slips past all boundaries into endlessness. And my life itself is not ‘mine’, as though there are specific borders where ‘Hamilton Salsich’ begins and ends. What is called ‘me’ is simply an inseparable, everchanging ripple in the endless ocean called ‘reality’. I am an ever-shifting wave, a current that’s been flowing and wavering and varying forever. Like love and calmness, there’s no end to the life I’m lucky to belong to – and no end anywhere, of anything. 

"WHERE ARE THE WORDS YOU WROTE TODAY?"
- asked by a friend

The wind carried some away. 
The sunlight slipped some 
into its pockets. 
Flowers fastened a few 
in their hearts., 
and others climbed a stairway to the sky.
Some are as silent as mountains, 
some are whispering on distant trails, 
and some are just crossing the street 
toward your house.