The flower sermon

The Buddha saw a lotus blooming in the muddy water. Reaching down he pulled out the flower, stem and root and held it up high for his students to see. For a long time he stood there, saying nothing, just holding up the lotus and looking into the blank faces of his audience.

I reached my hand down between the rafters in my attic. Days before I had placed a trap among telltale dropping and the floorboards. The trap had snapped only the animal had fallen and I did not realize right way that the prey had been snared. Later, as the pungent odor began to waft down thought the cracks, I begin to understand the truth.

My hand was covered in a thick rubber glove surrounded by a trash bag. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it quick. I could feel the weight of it shift in my fingers. I snapped the bag shut around the maggoty corpse and hurried it, unceremoniously, to the trash bin outside.

Lying on the couch later I realized that I had fallen asleep. My eyes would flicker open periodically and catch the snippets of reality that flowed over me. In one moment I was lost in a fragment of dialogue from the television, in another I could hear my wife telling me she was putting the baby to bed, the children would come and go, sometimes poking me, other times trying to crawl in beside me. Finally, like Lazarus, I opened my eyes and stared into the slow circling blades of the ceiling fan, my hair damp with sweat.

Whenever I try to think about what to write next I can hear a faint tune. It comes from the back of my mind, playing as if through a broken speaker. Like the Velvet Underground song “heroin” played on a hurdy-gurdy, the tune is at once both familiar and foreign, comforting and disquieting. It is the music of the stars, an omnibus of sounds: music, prose and poetry. Moments of everyday life: seasons, moods, aspirations, dreams and stages of life.

The Buddha looks into the eyes of his followers. Meeting the gaze of his disciple Mahakasyapa, the disciple looked back and began to laugh. The Buddha handed the lotus to Mahakasyapa and said “What can be said I have said to you, and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.”