but there was nowhere to put my foot. I moved my hand, but it moved through nothing and appeared to remain exactly where it had started. The grass did not part, the one tree did not exchange itself for the other, the ground did not move under me--all was so still that, though I walked and walked, I never went anywhere. As I walked, I heard nothing, saw no new landscapes, felt nothing change under my feet, as though I was deep in a barren dream. As though, were I to walk from here to India, I would’ve ended up exactly where I was, where I had begun.
As I walked nowhere, towards and away from nothing, a temple appeared around me. I must say that I felt like a king or a queen being offered the world’s wares. I did not walk into the temple, rather, its walls rose up around me, its doors behind me, its windows filtering the light of the sun. In the temple, stood my master.
“Welcome!” he said, enthusiastically.
I wanted to walk towards him, sit with him, share some tea, and ask him my questions, for I still had questions.
“No, no don’t disrupt the stillness of your movement,” he said. “I will bring you tea. Rain comes to mountains, not mountains to rain. The teacup will find your hands, if your hands are to hold a teacup. The tea will find your tongue, if your tongue is to taste tea.”
I kept walking then, light and still so that the temple would not be offended. I walked so lightly that the tiles on the floor did not change under my feet. I stayed, forever, in the same square. I drank the tea that flowed from the cup that my hands held still. At the bottom of the cup, the tea leaves danced until they formed the nine stars. Between them, the tails of liquid waved like the ends of wizards’ flying cloaks.
Inside each stillness, a world moves. I know this now. I have made them move by being still. I have created a temple by standing in one spot. In going nowhere, I have heard the flap of wizards’ cloaks as they fly between Vega and the North Star. The whole universe pulses in each of my cells.
They say a lot. They show us a lot. But what they do not say is that when one can find the whole world in one’s self, an indescribably deep loneliness surrounds one as though one is the last star in the sky.
“Master,” I say to the man in myself who has given me tea in the temple to which I have arrived by going no where, “I feel so alone.”
The master laughed again, but even more sweetly than usual. “My child,” he said, “Worlds, universes, exist. The most beautiful ones you have found--as you know, they exist. And you can find them by going out, or going in, but...” he paused here, knowing he was landscaping the last frontier for me. “But in the first case one is separate from the whole, and therefore, afraid. In the second case, one is the whole, and therefore one is alone.” And so comes the answer to the question unspoken by millions of monks:
