I rarely drink coffee. And I never use any sugar. But there was a time, when I was living and farming with my teacher, that I got into the habit of drinking coffee the way he did—nice and strong, with two spoons of sugar. We’re not talking gourmet coffee or high ceremony here. A heaping teaspoon of instant, quickly mixed on the way out to the tractor, coffee cup in hand.
But coffee, of course, connotes awakeness. And sugar is sweet. And my teacher gave me the gift of that awakeness that is sweet.
At the time of this poem, I had been living alone a little while in a cabin in the woods. It was midwinter, and I was still taking my morning coffee the same way. Well, not so much sugar. There was a little clearing around the cabin and then the surrounding woods, and as I arose from my morning sitting the sun was dancing brilliantly off the snow, both on the ground and in the trees, with a blaze of whiteness. I was observing this through the window as I drank my coffee, but I recalled the many occasions I had stood outside in the snow and experienced the full radiance of the winter world.
It is one thing, I thought, to drink at the window; to look out at the world from my little point of view. Or I may have read about the wonders of snow or entertained various ideas about it; and it may seem very inviting. It is another thing to be standing out in the winter world, the immaculate panorama of dancing light, the cold, fresh vitality in the bones and against the skin, the crystal light hanging from every bough like billions of shimmering holograms of the same bright reality.
Just so, it is one thing to have a longing for “spiritual truth,” or the memory of a glimpse of “reality,” or any of our private ideas about it. But it is another thing to step outside all the structures of our thought and, as on a crisp winter morning, stand out in the full radiance of naked awareness, and in the enjoyment of that original light reflecting everywhere.
Here in that awake sweetness there is no containment, nor the conventional distinction of inside and outside. “All the rivers of the world are running within me.” (Well, come to think of it, maybe that line was influenced by the coffee running in my veins.) But underlying that is a radiant emptiness that is one with all manifestation. All the rivers of the world—all the pathways of reality and all unknown ancestral wanderings—are simply at home in my body, which is the very body of the world.
Before the birth of space, before the arising of the first structure of thought, there is already no end to the snow fields of the universe, the timeless radiance. Great space does not contain the moonlight.