Light On the Panel

The old, analog, panel switches had lights like Cadillac tail lights, so you would know the switch was on.

The light's lens is faceted on the inside. They look like big, bullet-nosed jewels. The panels are anodized black, sans-serif letters and numbers are engraved, filled with white enamel, and the jewels stand in contrast like the polarized paralysis of stoplights at the end of a very long road.

They look like dials on combination locks, because this opera is by Sargent & Greenleaf: secret keys on a tiny piano mounted on a wall, and the curtain rises. Secrecy is the overture to deepest desire. Surveillance is its oracle. Music seems wild when nobody knows the score.

All kinds of meaninglessly urgent noise.

Behind the lights and switches lie complications as numberless as stars. Let the moon shine forever upon the enchanted lakes and rivers; may it give forth endless, flowing moons in every chop of the water brought about for the wind's own reasons. No number of moons will measure those complications.

Those complications are measured in emotions. Though numberless, they are finite. They are without essence. They cannot hurt us in the end.

Once, a long time ago, I watched, mesmerized at a blinking jewel as the panels slid away. Like Icarus did shed his wings, so did those dark panels jettison themselves into space. God damn but it hurts to hit that switch. It hurts in ways you need not bring yourself to fear, because the fear is already deep inside. Better learn to be hopeless. Better jump on death's lap.

Otherwise, why be a soldier? If you are a soldier, you have a soldier's duty to die.

So, wild soldier, jump out by moonlight, from high in sky,  and land alone somewhere you are bound to suffer.

Leave your uniform at home, and go as samsara's own saboteur.

Jump there not as a soldier, but as a spy.

Do it in the face of never, ever being comforted by so much as the silent peace of justice, gone to grave.

There are no monuments to bodhisattvas worth as much as the monument to bodhisattva's activity in which we are immersed every perfect moment of every perfect day.

Look down at everything, then look here. If you are afraid to jump, you come to me, and I will hold your hand in the air. While we fly, we will be laughing in triumph. 

There is no more confusion once we reach the sky.

If I have to let you go before we reach the ground, it is only because I wish to be there waiting for you, when you finally stop flying long enough to collapse the boundary of heaven and earth.

Clear wind in a high sky. What else is left a patient one to see?