The following entry in my sporadic spiritual journal was made twelve days after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, with which I’d been failing to make even the most ragged peace. The slightly bastardized IkkyÅ« versions are based on Stephen Berg’s Crow with No Mouth (Copper Canyon).
I’m not complaining. In fact I want to praise You. But here’s the trick about You, me, and praise: every time I vanish into the Moment and feel how You took 10 million years to prepare a place for me, I’m flooded, as You come again, by a gratitude that drowns me. This same blissful drowning then causes a consciousness free-of-me to fly infinitely out, embracing everything, including things and events for which, once the drowning is over and a workaday me returns, I have no capacity to feel grateful at all. Which leads me to believe that I have never once really praised You. All of “my” praise, in my experience, was really You praising You via an abated or vanished me. Take the Moment just now, for instance:
