delighting in the senses
I walk down Hanover Avenue in unprompted ecstasy. I delight at nothing, at the blue African lilies leaping onto the sidewalks, at small clouds spotting the sky. A cyclist bombs down the street and the yellow polyester of his jersey flutters behind him. The sight sends waves of joy up my neck. Delight at nothing is also delight at everything.
These moments of delighting in the senses are all I know of happiness. For what is it, life, except a continual set of sensations, a series of things coming into the senses?
I once read somewhere that you should enjoy the simple pleasures in life, because those are the only kind there ever really are. This line because it moved me and I try to follow its advice. I try also to enjoy what is directly in front of me, arriving through the senses, because that is all that there ever really is.
A heavy-legged wasp floats among the leaves of an orange tree on Hanover Avenue. For a moment, my vision softens and narrow around the creature, and then everything else softens too. My world enlarges enough to contain a single wasp.
We meet at the doors of perception. Here it becomes clear that my sense of the wasp is neither fully and purely the wasp, nor is it fully and purely my own sensations and perceptions. It is a third thing, a moment of contact, a sheet of air that hangs in an empty doorframe.
The doorway opens not onto a landing or onto a stairwell. It opens senselessly, onto free and empty air. None of the things that arrive through the senses seem to make much sense at all.
What they do make, occasionally, is waves of recognition and delight. These waves travel up my forearms or alongside the skin on the back of my neck. It is the same electric sensation that accompanies my experiences of beauty, or of love, or of truth. Of the biggest mysteries.
The cyclist turns a corner at the base of the hill. The yellow fabric of his jersey disappears beneath its horizon. The wasp floats on in the same direction, following the wind.
In these moments of presence, there is unity. There is no me and there is no wasp. There is just a unified experience. There is a searing merging with the world or its mystery. There is a universal recognition, a sense that there was only ever one thing to recognize.
I have an impulse to make complete contact with the world, to merge again with it in some elemental way. A part of me longs to return to the pure space from which it came, from which the wasp and the cyclist came, from which all this beauty and all this pain sprang.
Then the street is silent again and I am left holding an inexplicable joy that arose from nothing but yellow fabric flowing in the breeze. I do not know how any of this works.
I stand on the corner. There is relative quiet. The world asks for nothing. The African lilies sway in the air, moved by the wind and other invisible forces.