Moment in a Face Towel II

In an earlier post, I described in conventional language an experience I had while drying my face one morning. I don’t have these experiences all the time; this is that same experience. However, I just came across something I wrote shortly after it happened. I think its style and structure better convey the experience, so I offer it here.

I want to describe something that happened to me today, but I don’t know how to. It was a completely un-worded and un-wordable experience. The language fails me immediately. I have to say “I” had the experience. But I wasn’t quite there. The experience sounds, as we commonly relate our experiences, as if it began outside me, with a towel on my face. But the towel and I were there together at once, no separation.  There was no distinction between outside—the towel, my face—and inside my mind. Just as the teachers always speak of non-duality. I can’t even say “there it was.” There was no there, it, or was. I suddenly try to describe things that were not things, and a space that was not the space you will think of.

What happened could perhaps be said this way, though even with that, I am setting a boundary around it when it was more like encountering (notice the spatial dimension—and the sense of “I”) something already in progress. Becoming aware of what I was? Well, no. Of just now. But of what now? How to tell you? So here is how it comes out:

Towel. Face against the towel.

Turn one quarter of an inch.

The world focuses.

No boundaries.

Face, towel, air, sink, floor, door—all one whole,

not shimmering, not still.

Olding, womaning, toweling, skying, flooring, thinking…

All at once. Turning, shining into it.  

Nothing there but infinite light in a whole:

me, towel, old, floor forming and reforming,

like a movie playing endlessly.

This is the screenshot. Nothing to be seen on it.

Rats. I see why the old masters wrote Haiku. Too many words yet.

It’s why they say, “just sit.”

Sitting flooring womaning sunrising suffering happy lost. No boundaries.