The ground seems empty but…
We were only planning to have events here in the summer, but the autumn has been stunning so we might have to re-think (also we need help raking leaves!)
When I was a kid, all my pictures had a thick brown line at the bottom, the ground, and a thick blue line at the top, the sky. Everything happened in the space between these two lines.
There are two images for emptiness in Buddhism: one is a ‘clear blue sky’, the other is ‘the ground’. They each carry a different message. The clear blue sky is open. Imagine you are lying on the ground, gazing up into this clear blue sky. You look up and up and up, and neither your gaze nor your mind, meet any obstacle. The sky is limitless. Clouds appear in the sky; they emerge from the sky; they disappear back into the sky. The sky is the space in which everything appears. What is this image telling you?
You are still lying on the ground, but now instead of looking up into the sky, you close your eyes and feel the ground beneath you. What is the ground telling you about emptiness? Everything around you comes from the ground. I’m sitting at my desk; it’s made of wood that grew from the ground. The coffee at my side grew in the ground, and it’s in a cup made of clay, which people dug from the ground. A cow made the milk from the grass she ate from the ground. My computer, which doesn’t look very earthy, uses metal from the ground and plastic made from oil from the ground. Me, my body, made of food and water from the ground.
I still find it incredible that everything comes from the ground. But then, where else would it come from? There is nowhere else other than the sky. The ground is the source of everything; everything comes from the ground, and everything goes back into the ground. The ground beneath us seems empty, but is a dark womb, full of potential.
Now, as I look out my window, I realise there is no space between the ground and the sky. If I look into the distance, there seems to be a horizon, a line; I know it’s an illusion that will change as I move closer. And if I look right here in front of me, I see that the sky is not something that starts somewhere up there, but it reaches right down to the ground around me. There’s no empty space between the sky and the ground. Or, all there is is empty space, in which everything arises.
Different times call for different images. Sometimes we want the luminous clear blue sky, other times the deep dark earth. Remember that both are always holding you.
Related posts:
Practice a radical hospitality
Renunciation for hedonists
