As long as we stay in closed rooms

And stiff coats, we were disguised;

But toward the end of winter the carnival

Helps us to play at disguise for a while.

For soon spring will remove all the masks

It wants a clear country, an honest garden;

Already a fully naked air leans on the basin

Where water waits for the shadows of spring.

We'll feel its body, full of sap, stretch,

But have we ever seen its face?

Barely adult, it never takes off

The mask of greenery it completes.

Moment between Masks is from Rainer Maria Rilke's collection of French poems translated by A. Poulin Jr. Rilke used nature to talk about human life. I wear many masks in the course of physical life while probing and experiencing the nature of my existence. I am many different selves, but only focus on one. The others blink in and out of my thoughts as I expand. Without effort I become another me, then another and yet another.

Like the seasons, my cells and molecules go through cycles of change and I am re-born with the dawn of a new day. Each day I use a mask that fits my current beliefs about me and this aspect of my journey. I never see my whole self stripped naked standing in front of a mirror, but I sense its presence. It swirls through me like the air that slaps the river and makes it smile. This innate consciousness is filled with every season, every year and all life. I accept it as a mystery for it is easier to justify my self that way. I feel safe in what I claim to be real. Real is a small room where I stand wearing a stiff coat and a full-length mask. But real is just one room in a house of multidimensional rooms.

The masks and the rooms and the other selves that are a part of my entity are like a garden filled with consciousness and I wander through the garden picking  flowers of thought in order to express my focused self. My garden of masks and mental enzymes of consciousness are my creations and they are choices I experience without judgment, unless I become a judge using beliefs. The garden changes as I change and it grows the flowers I need to see and smell as well as pick, as I continue to expand. The masks eventually reveal themselves like a bud that becomes a rose.

My mask of greenery is filled with color and beauty and is never adult in its bloom. It's completely filled with the sap of my own energy, which projects its magnificence in the vibration of color and becomes another me. I see the face of the garden as I sense the sap in me. The sap of consciousness stretches within me and I expand in awareness. I hear the sounds of my own nature and my shadow moves to another garden. I see the world changing within me as I catch a sunburst butterfly and know its beauty rests in me. No longer disguised, I am real in the mask of my own greenery.

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 D.T.Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism is an interesting look into the how the consciousness of Zen was studied through the centuries. We all have a belief about Zen as well as other schools of Buddhism based on our developed beliefs about religion, truth and other fundamental beliefs that create our experiences. Zen, as I understand it is not a religion or an achievement in terms of acquiring something that I am unaware of or fulfilling certain rules in order, or to attain a specific goal. Zen is an awareness of my inner being or self nature. It is seeing my self without eyes and hearing my self without ears and becoming what I already am. I need not climb up a ladder of perfection or repent openly and judge my so-called wrongdoings to sense my self nature. All I need to do is to allow it to express itself freely. At that moment I become what I have always been and find a group of selves in the same state of knowing. I can call it riding on the wind, which is the lesson of non doing.

Suzuki tells the story of a Lieh-tzu, the fourth century B.C. Chinese philosopher of Taoism. The story explains the stages of awareness in the practice of the Tao. Here is the way Suzuki wrote it in 1927.

The teacher of Lieh-tzu was Lao-shang-shih and his friend Pai-kao-tzu. When Lieh-tzu was well advanced in the teachings of these two philosophers, he came home riding on the wind. Yin- sheng heard of this and came to Lieh-tzu to be instructed. Yin-sheng neglected his own household for several months. He never lost opportunities to ask the master to instruct him in the arts [of riding on the wind; he asked ten times, and was refused each time.

Yin-sheng grew impatient and wanted to depart. Lieh-tzu did not urge him to stay. For several months Yin-sheng kept himself away from the master, but did not feel any easier in his mind. He came over to Lieh-tzu again. Asked the master, "Why this constant coming back and forth?" Yin-sheng replied, "The other day, I, Chang Tai, wished to be instructed by you, but you refused to teach me, which naturally I did not like. I feel, however, no grudge against you now, hence my presence here again."

"I thought the other time," said the master, "you understood it all. But seeing now what a commonplace mortal you are, I will tell you what I have learned under the master. Sit down and listen! It was three years after I went to my master Lao-shang and my friend Pai-kao-tzu that my mind began to cease thinking of right and wrong, and my tongue talking of gain and loss, whereby he favoured me with just a glance. At the end of five years my mind again began to think of right and wrong and my tongue to talk about gain and loss. Then for the first time the master relaxed his expression and gave me a smile.

At the end of seven years I just let my mind think of whatever it pleased, and there was no more question of right and wrong, I just let my tongue talk of whatever it pleased and there was no more question of gain and loss. Then for the first time the master beckoned me to sit beside him. At the end of nine years, just letting my mind think of whatever it pleased and letting my tongue talk of whatever it pleased, I was not conscious whether I or anybody else was in the right or  wrong, whether I or anybody else gained or lost; nor was I aware of the old master's being my teacher or the young Pai-kao's being my friend. Both inwardly and outwardly I was advanced. It was then that the eye was like the ear, and the ear like the nose, and the nose like the mouth; for they were all one and the same. The mind was in rapture, the form dissolved, and the bones and flesh all thawed away; and I did not know how the frame supported itself and what the feet were treading upon. I gave myself away to the wind, eastward or westward, like the leaves of a tree or like a dry chaff. Was the wind riding on me? Or was I riding on the wind? I did not know either way.

Your stay with the master has not covered much space of time, and you are already feeling grudge against him. The air will not hold even a fragment of your body, nor will the earth support one member of yours. How then could you ever think of treading on empty space and riding the wind?"

Seeing into my self nature is like riding on the wind where there is no right or wrong or gain or loss. There is only acceptance, appreciation and abundance.

In your light I learn how to love;

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside of my chest,

Where no one sees you,

But sometimes I do,

And that sight becomes this art.

Rumi, the 13^th century poet, is one of my creative teachers. The art of creating is an innate ability I have, but realizing I create in every moment of my physical life seems strange. I use the word creative to describe a great painter or writer while I define myself as a common self. It's easier to go along with the herd, blend into the scenery and feel a void within me. That's the way of life. Death will recreate me at some point, the afterlife is my creative playground; that's what I'm told to believe and I believe it.

My void is filled with creativity; I can use the void as a key and unlock my creativity. I begin to sense another room in this house of flesh. Searching the void for the key is my purpose and I do it through expansion. By unlocking the void, which is really never locked, I begin to find other aspects of my self. I find a world that has been covered by a blanket of separation. In the blink of an eyelash I sense a bubbling creativity that has been releasing bubbles, but my thoughts trap most of the bubbles under a lid of resistance. Like boiling water with the lid tightly closed, I slowly evaporate using my own energy as a catalyst. My own light is the flame that creates my demise. It is a self-induced process that is rooted in the lack of value fulfillment and fear.

The boiling bubbles of creativity within me find a way to be released. Those bubbles dance within my chest as I hear the music of consciousness playing my song. My song of love comes from the orchestra of selves which is flowing through my bubbling stream. The stream originates from a source which extrudes love, creation and expansion. Each bubble represents a particle of my source. As I become aware of the bubbles and release my resistance, I experience a wave of consciousness that is saturated with that creative mixture from my source. That expression fuels my choices and becomes my daily art. The art of waking, the art of dressing, the art of appreciate and the art of being human are gifts from my bubbling stream of consciousness. When I accept these gifts, I become aware that I am living art in physical form.

My creative bubbles define me and alter my belief structure, so I can consciously accept my diversity and multi-dimensionality and still focus on this reality. That focus is centered in the void within my chest, which is bubbling over with the music from a rhythmic stream, which expands and creates as I become aware of it. In that light I learn how to love. I learn to love and accept my self and use my creative bubbles to express that love through my creativity. My creativity could be as simple as a thought or as expansive as the desire I have to fulfill one dream with the value of bubbles, which I sometimes do and that dream becomes my living art.

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So though the eyes love attains the heart:

For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,

And the eyes go reconnoitering

For what it would please the heart to possess.

And when they are in full accord

And firm, all three, in the one resolve,

At that time, perfect love is born

From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.

Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement

Then by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.

By the grace and by command

Of these three, and from their pleasure,

Love is born, who with fair hope

Goes comforting her friends

For as all true lovers

Know, love is perfect kindness,

Which is born, there is no doubt, from the heart and eyes.

The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:

Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.

Giraut de Bornelh was born in 1138 in Limousin, which is in central France around the area known as Limoges. He was connected with the castle of Viscount of Limoges and his skill as a Troubadour earned him the title, "Master of the Troubadours." About ninety of his poems and four of his melodies have survived through the years. Love, as Giraut mentions, is the fruit of my own seed, which is constantly flowering into magnificent arrangements that manifest when I become aware of them. The eyes and the heart are always searching for what I already possess. My body consciousness wants to unite and feel and sense what my inner senses express unendingly. Expressions of love fueled by mental enzymes act as a catalyst, so I can innately sense other aspects of my entity. Through the mental enzymes of love I live; I fail; I triumph, as well as err and create a physical life in order to experience the expansion of my consciousness. Love in physical form is the expression of my own awareness in the presence of my spirit, as well as other aspects of the self I call human.

James Joyce, the 19^th century Irish writer, novelist and poet explains this inner awakening this way:

At the moment of the wakening to love, an object, apparently without, passes into the soul forever. . . And the soul leaps at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

Physical love returns to the place it has always been, but uses a different form to do it. Manifested physically, the flower of love travels inward to the root of its existence and unites and expands in its own action. As Joyce mentions it takes on the form of life and I create experiences using my beliefs about it. My beliefs continue to expand in this mixture of flower and root as I become aware of the power that rests within me.

Joseph Campbell the 20^th century American Mythologist simply says:

The distance of your love

Is the distance of your life

Love is exactly as strong as life.

Joseph understood that love is the catalyst for life and it re-invents itself in order for me to become aware that love is in every aspect of consciousness. I constantly create my experiences using a portion of it, which I filter through my beliefs. When I finally become aware of that fact my eyes make it blossom, my heart matures it and I sense it in every aspect of consciousness within my focus, as well as other forms of consciousness I choose to ignore.

Love is the fruit of my own seed and when I share it abundantly and with appreciation, the root, as well as my tree of life continues to expand in the likeness of my love-filled creator.

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