Finding the expansive through the small, singular, and immediate (Hennegen)

This post grew out of what started as a comment on Mr. Allen's post of Plum Blossom photos (the second time I've started a comment on a post of Mr. Allen's that keeps growing until I realize it might need to be its own post!)

The detail of this image... the broad petals of declarative pink. The blossoms look somehow both plump (perhaps because the petals are short and wide, plus the density of many layers of petals) and yet paper-soft and delicate. The dark center is like a navel. A tightly puckered kiss. A warm yellow-brown iris around a pupil. And the spindly-thin, white arms (a feature that I'm sure has an official botanical name) remind me of an insect's cilia. 

I have spent a few summers in Vermont at a Master's program where the 200 or so students live in these modest barns and houses about 20 miles outside Middlebury. The campus is very remote, surrounded by obscenely verdant hills and broad meadows, trickling streams. Skys that turn urgent in an instant, thickening with storm, only to clear twenty minutes later. An expansive sky, the sprinkle of clouds restored. I have spent long afternoons lying in the meadow, arms wide, looking at the fingers of light through clouds. I wouldn't know the names for the species of bugs, but I'd let them traverse me. I would look at these strange insects as though with new eyes, noticing their antennae, their oddly-joined knees, their wings fringed in see-through cilia. And I must have paid attention to bugs before--surely I couldn't have been so oblivious?--but... somehow it felt as though I had never noticed any of these details, the particularity of the different species. 


I appreciate these moments, especially as someone who tends to dwell in expansive thought and abstraction and "all-too-muchness." They were a sort of welcome myopia, focusing on the smallest wonders and finding such curious details, such beauty. Perhaps this is the sort of perspective I need to discover in reading Dogen. I can feel overwhelmed in the face of articulating any confident, conclusive statement about his project, his teaching. Because it is all too sumptuous, various, playful. Who am I to say what he is up to? But then I turn to a single passage or line that seizes me, and my attentiveness to something smaller starts to quell my stress.

“Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses [all things] throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the beginning of practice. 
When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and beyond understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and beyond understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time being is all the time there is. Grass being, form being, are both time.

Each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.”

The first paragraph (from chapter 12 on the Time Being) conveys the expanse--countless, multitudinous, sheer enormity. Yet, the following paragraph situates me in something more proximate. We are not going to endeavor to count what cannot be counted, to know what cannot be known, to understand what is beyond our perception and experience. I am centered in this place. A place with just one grass, just one form. But to encounter this one grass and this one form need not be a limitation. Is it possible that through understanding what is immediate and tangible to me (one grass, one form) my understanding can transcend the singular and immediate? This is what I hear in "there is understanding of grass beyond understanding of grass." Rather than overwhelm myself in the mad thrash of trying to set out to understand all grasses, all forms, all time, the path to greater understanding beyond immediate limitations and confines is precisely by leaning into the limited immediate. Through close study, I might come to discover that which I took to be a limitation turns out to be the exact means of getting beyond the immediate. For the immediate (each moment, each grass, each form) contain so much more than the singular.


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