Cycles Within Cycles

The dark is firmly established here in the Temple garden just a month before the autumnal equinox. Nights are cool and lengthening. I wake in full darkness and am re-learning to reach for the light. This is the new normal and will be for the next six months—a lifetime. Each season playing its role in the cycles of the year. And through these cycles, life and death play out in multiple wave lengths.

Dogen said that life itself is flashing on and off 27,000 times a second. He anticipated, through his own careful observation, the theories of some modern physicists who speak of a vibratory universe created of strings of possibility. Substance and continuity are an illusion of consciousness superimposed on the dynamic soup of stuff. Real life cycles itself into existence and then tracelessly disappears at unknown speed.

Slowing down slightly, we can notice is moment after moment. Though we string moments of experience into compelling narratives of who we were, who we are and who we will be, each present moment is its own complete universe. I can’t vouch for Dogen’s 27,000 times per second, but I can vouch for some wholeness that appears in the moment of our conscious awareness. This wholeness includes, but is not limited by, the infinite stories we are telling ourselves and others. In each moment, the fullness of each life is the fullness of all life. Past and future are merely stories that we tell and are both fully included in the infinite time of here.

Then there is the story of the cycle of day after day. The darkness of night giving way to the full light of daily activity. We rouse ourselves early or late, move into our day reluctantly or excitedly, then fall back when the darkness comes again—lying ourselves down restfully or fitfully into the obscurity of night. Again and again we travel through these diurnal cycles of light and dark. The imprint of this earthly revolving rhythm is imprinted in every cell of our body. (Though sometimes needing to be assisted by our morning alarm.)

The daily cycle then appears in abstract circles of weeks and months—a purely human invention that appears to have no connection to the natural world. Why seven days? Why twelve months and not nine? Does February have to be shorter than July? Social custom and convention rule our experience till Friday really feels different from Sunday—just because we’ve decided to divide our lives for the convenience of commerce.

But the seasons—different in every part of the world—come to us viscerally in the varying length of light and dark, the temperature and weather patterns. And all the flora and fauna of each particular place live in and through these subtle patterns. The trees in the Temple garden express and embody the seasons of New England. Hot in the summer with sometimes drought but often rain. Cool in the fall and spring. Then the cold and dark of winter. The coming and going of sap up and down the trunk and the emergence of leaves and the falling of leaves. Continual motion. Continual expression of the annual cycles of season. Look closely at a tree and you’ll know the season.

Then the cycles of the lives of all the beings themselves. The mayflies that live for a day, the wine red hibiscus flowers that open for a few days, the zinnia plants for a season. Then us humans that live for some unspecified length of days, months, years and decades. All our lives with a beginning, middle, then some unspecified but definite end date. We can’t know exactly which part of the cycle we’re in, but those of us of a certain age do certainly know we’re not at the beginning or even the middle anymore.

No time this morning for the centennial oak trees or the forests that live and change for centuries. Then the ponds and streams and mountains and valleys, even planets and stars and galaxies – all appearing and disappearing in their own time.

Morning twilight has come in the time it took to write all this. The nasturtium flowers that last for three or four days and are delicious and lovely to eat in salads are doing their early morning wiggle dance in the soft breezes that float by. The mug that holds my now cold tea was made from mud and water but will be around, broken or whole, for centuries—available to archeologists long after all I see vanishes.

Cycles within cycles. Stories within stories. All resting easily in this moment as the day begins.