Zen, Liver, & Spring

Did my first zen meditation this morning, to a book and CD by John Daido Loori. Since then I have been walking around and now sitting with a lot of fractiousness. Was it brought up by the meditation? Are these things I need to address? Now I remember that I had woken up in the night—during the liver hours—with a strange and unsettling feeling of being a bit off the ‘ground’, hovering, and the discomfort was like a small tongue of fear or anxiety, poking tentatively out of its dark, familiarly enclosed space inside clam shells. It isn’t free-floating but fixed, and I couldn’t get a handle on it for as long as I tried to in the night, but now I sense it is a fear of the unknown.

Does the first tiny shoot of spring awake to this fear, after its indeterminably long sleep in the dormant darkness? If it does it is compelled nevertheless to reach for the light above and the water below. Growth and expansion are intrinsic in the cycles of nature, fear or no fear. Because love is what is inherent in creation. It is in our molecules and energy and spirit. It is always there.

I am, in this moment, that tiny shoot and timid tongue, on the brink of an unknowable journey and unimaginable change, and the detachment from the solace of all that I have and all that I’ve known is becoming a bed of nails under my skin.

Nothing to be done about it, though, until the tides of spring come, to push me on and out.