from: The Book of the Dead Man
Live as if you were already dead. -Zen admonition
When the dead man wears his camouflage suit, he hides in plain sight.
The dead man, in plain sight, disrupts the scene but cannot be seen.
His chocolate-chip-cookie shirt mimics the leaves in a breeze.
His frog-skin dress, his bumpy earth nature, leave us lost and alone, his mottled apparel sends us in circles.
His displacements distract and disabuse us, he is a slick beguiler.
Everything the dead man does is a slight disruption of normality.
He is the optical trickster, the optimum space-saver, the one to watch for.
He is of a stripe that flusters convention, he is the one to watch out for.
That we thought him gone only proves his wily knowledge.
The dead man has lain unseen among the relics of embalmed time.
He was always here, always there, right in front of us, timely.
For it was not in the dead man’s future to be preserved.
It was his fate to blend in, to appear in the form of, to become...
Now he lives unseen among the lilies, the pines, the sweet corn.
It was the dead man’s native desire to appear not to be.
-by Marvin Bell; Opening Remarks | The Thinking Eye
Posted by Stubbornson at May 25, 2006 05:30 AM