The Buddha walked the earth some 2,500 years ago. The seeds he planted during his nearly fifty year long ministry, the seeds he had hoped would awaken the world and transform it—while still alive in parts of the world today—have for the most part since been unearthed by wind and drought, and by finding little sustenance in shallow, greedy, and unfertile minds, now bent mainly on possessing more and more and more.
He decides to return to earth. As a girl named Ruth.
This is book two of a three-book tale.
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::1:: (Pasadena)
Imagine this: An ocean in a small flask. A vast day encased unable to unfold. A universe with cheekbones.
An impatient genie.
Yet, I have learned patience. As Bruno awaiting sentence for nearly a decade in that cold, infested cell, watching each day claw its way across the sometimes slippery, sometimes frosty floor and back into darkness.
As Natha in the Tusita Heaven, returned from Earth, willing my just planted seeds to grow, hoping they would spread, reseed, grow, spread, reseed, grow, to eventually cover the Earth, knowing they had to do this on their own, by the impetus of my teaching, for I cannot guide each and every spirit individually. Far, far too many. I have not hands enough, nor fingers enough to point.
And here and now, learning patience all over, now as Ruth, the little flask for me the ocean. It never gets easier.
Learning, too, how to maneuver this flask. On wobbly legs at first, too feeble to support much of anything, then growing less so, then growing stable, then working balance from joke to fact, into the first step, and then the second, and so walking soon, muscles agreeing now and all pulling in the same direction.
Finding voice and shaping it into words sung out across air, mainly to Melissa and Ananda. But sometimes to others. To Doctor Fairfield, my pediatrician, amazed, she says each time we meet, how well I have developed, how so very healthy I am—for it is true, this bottle does not get sick. Amazed, she says each time we meet, how quickly I am learning how to talk, how precisely (is the word she uses, each time) I pronounce each word, and so clearly. She said once it was as if I had been born in Inverness, Scotland, where, so she said—and she had been there to hear it for herself, she informed us, each time—they speak the clearest English in the world. Well, I don’t know about that, but I know that I enjoy a clear voice, clear enunciation, the unambiguous, the translucent, the distinct, the fine. Nectar for the tongue and palate. Luminous song. Amazing, says my pediatrician, again, and wonders if we’ve ever been to Inverness.
Ears to hear words slung back across air from other lungs, other tongues. Language. This jumble of many strains that calls itself English.
To be honest, I prefer Pali, where by long and deep agreement words rise out of and mean things more essential to life. A language where nuances were spiritual and aesthetic rather than material and economic.
Still, English is a bountiful garden, replete, wild and untamed, and often profound enough to serve quite well. And if individual words do not burrow as deeply as those of Pali, they easily and nimbly, and willingly—I have come to discover—combine to metaphor to take you deeper, as deep even as Pali, and sometimes even deeper still, as the target image forms just beyond their borders.