What’s In a View?

I’m sitting as the sun rises over the horizon. There liquid the sea between Canada and America. Further the rocky Olympic Mountain range in Washington State. High up on the top floor of a Victorian house in Victoria (Vancouver Island) I can see for miles and miles. Expansive, and inspiring in a particular kind of way.

I’ve been thinking of life and death. Viewing death, a newly dead body, there seems to be life. Was that a ripple of a breath? Did the eyes flicker, a little. (The sea glass-still is alive.) And the liveliness radiates; a joyful illumination. People notice that about dead bodies. There is joy present.

Rev. Master Meiten, recenty passed here in Victoria, I was at her Cremation on Tuesday. Though gone days before from her shell there was a certain ‘life’ or light. A kind of vibration perhaps, was present in the stillness. Best I can say.

What’s in a view? What is it that comes through our eyes and registers in our brains? Mountains and water? A seeming dead person. Completely solid only? Liquid light, vibrational only? I’m contemplating lines from the Heart Sutra – ‘form is only pure (empty), pure is all form’….’for what is form is pure and what is pure is form’.

What’s in a view, any view, close or distant? Could it be that we are looking into a mirror reflecting back to each of us our liquid light, taken form. Here and gone, being and non being. Simultaneously!

Just sitting we ‘know’, we ARE this!. And just sometimes that truth comes in a flash atop a mountain, or looking through a microscope. Expansive and inspiring in a certain kind of way. That Truth though is ever entering each of us. It just seems we have to stop and view. A wall is as good a view as any.

This post is for Rev. Master Meiten and the Sangha she served here in Victoria and around the world through her writings.

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2 thoughts on “What’s In a View?”

  1. I remember Rev. Master Meiten very fondly from her time at Shasta.
    Rest in Peace Rev. Master Meiten.
    Safe Journey, Rev. Master Mugo.

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