Koan For A Father

My 8-year-old boy quickens his pace to match mine.
That afternoon, in fact, my feet are getting active, urging for a walk.
My mind is not there for the discussions of facts or the agreed-upon, conventional sound fillers.
No. It is asking me for a job. This mind and body want to harness themselves to some mythical promising horse, a muscular Pegasus that will be able to take them beyond the illusory crusts of the mundane.

Adam then asks me:
-What do you want us to talk about?

Absolutely unwilling to give in to childishness, I answer him without filter, without buffer:
-Let’s talk about what is really important to me. No blah blah, ok?
-OK

The essential question that my meditating body-mind ruminates on,
the koan of my time, life that asks to be resolved without succeeding:

On one side, the great silence of Zen, the immanence that shatters the veneers of life and plunges the disciple into an ocean of beauty.

In all this, when I try to bring in the concepts of God, I do not see any compatibility: like a puzzle piece from another box.

On the other side, the magnificent transcendence, the one that I secretly envy when it burns in the eyes of my Christian and Muslim friends.

God, the one who « blows where he wants », the one in whom we abandon ourselves totally, the Permanent.

These are two polarities of my practice and I can not manage to resolve them. However, both are called to be resolved, I remember.

I did not expect an answer from this 8-year-old child. I give him the content of this koan, thinking that he will always be able to keep something from it and will not try to talk to me in return about trivial things in such a context.

I barely have time to finish this display of my inner questioning when he answers me, most spontaneously, and with disarming assurance:

– There is no problem.
There is nothing difficult in that since God and your consciousness are eventually the same.

©FJ August 2024
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