A Buddhist Un-still life... alone

1. Once upon a time, forever now,  there was a short-haired monkey with long braids who lived at the edge of a desert near the flatlands where the big water meets the broad sky amidst the tall trees of the jungle in the highlands of the craggy plateau. Now you might imagine that the certitude of this space was fantastical in its nature, and there, you might be correct in your disbelief of the thought required to accept that which is most certainly ambiguous...

2. That is to say, quite circuitously, nothing is as it seems to be; and all that is, is a function of its proximity to that which isn't—in its being—there...

3. Now "all great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town," but this isn't great literature, nor is it even much of a story, and it isn't even about a man... therefore our primate of discussion will neither travel nor be visited in this moment... for no destination is distant to him (as he is there already), and no stranger will come to visit him (as all who might arrive are not strangers, and as he is already present despite being a stranger to himself)...

4. The monkey is alone and he is afraid. He does not know his fear and so is happily, spastically, hyper-ly reflective in his calm tranquility of speedy unaware introspective being...

5. He runs about his clearing, visiting with all those who are not there and chattering away to each in their own tongue, babbling and cheetering while waving his hands—with elegant opposable thumbs—about the sky as if painting something profoundly mundane in the air with pigments of his own imagination...

6. The monkey is not aware of the fear of being alone that lingers in his hairless core, as his self-awareness is tied to his self-compassion. If he were to place thought to this, he would realize a deep reluctance to being left to himself in that jumbled clearing of mind...

7. It is a noisy life of seclusion in the cluttered no-space where the chorus sings voicelessly to the monkey—who would seek peace if he were only able to grasp the no-monkey nature of his non-monkey mind. "For a solitary life to flourish...aloneness asks us to make friends of silence." And the monkey chatters away waving his hands until he becomes exhausted with the volume of the lack of other-sound...

8. And then, in that tiredness, in an instant of immense improbability the self-condemned monkey stumbles upon the random idea of non-monkey-ness and chooses to swim. He dives deeply into he nearby pool to drown out the cacophony of silence. And there in the pressure of the depths—a clamorously muffled murky green—choosing replaces sentencing and the silence mingles with the chatter. The monkey-fish emerges from the settled sediment-less waters and settles himself upon a nearby white lotus... prepared to sit in the stillness and watch his monkey-mind alone. Ah, the lotus, though! He seems to fit upon it as if it were fashioned to be just so... (and yet we know that too to be just perception, as fit is more in the mind than in reality)...

•. And the monkey sits fitted with the lotus in the silence. And to describe that fit, upon the lake, seated in the afternoon light, in the space between the extremes, while connected to everything and nothing (all at once and in succession) would defy words, save one, right. And the monkey, aware, raises his head, lets loose a quiet squeak of immense contentment and peace, and he lowers his eyes to gaze upon nothing in its perfection...