Whose Dharma Eye?

Zen Lessons 2025 6 18

I breathe watching the heron meditate so pointedly, staring perfectly still into the creek, or feel with my eyes the vultures soaring the thermal columns in mile long upward spirals. I imagine the lone crayfish the heron waits on, or the raptor life the vultures abandoned tens of millions of years before any human species could even die to be scavenged. The mirror of the world answers us in exactly the terms we can receive, which is why being uncertain and strange gives us more than being certain and determined. The entire sky is in a droplet of water, and both sky and droplet are simple: are the dharma eye.

Whose Dharma Eye?

In the back garden
out of sight of the road
that winds into town

out of sight of the deck
overseeing the plantings
is a small pond

where trees
a hundred foot tall
plunge into its depths.
A heron glides between them,
beyond her, vultures soar.

Breezes about the oaks 
shake pollen into the air
onto the silver, folded film of water
where dust settles
and the trees muddle for a moment
into ambiguous scenes.

I lean over, close, to look in
and the world is gone,
only the leaves of past autumns
laying there on the bottom.