It's a dead duck that brings me here. Two ducks. Sunday, that once-ago day of rest found me butchering two young male ducks, muscovies, good carnivore that I am.
I did so....repectfully. Offered the corn meal, expressed gratitude, bismillah, scalpel to the jugular.
Firewood/ashes...firewood/ashes. Pondered the koan with blood on my overalls, blood on my hands.
Killing is a spiritual moment. It must be so. As a keeper of animals, it inevitably comes to this, and I admit my carnivorous desires. But that spark that passes, living a moment ago, now this moment flesh and bone, that's the holy algebra.
X-?=Y, so ?=Y-X, is that how it works?
As we ponder our firewood/ashes koan, I am reminded of the mystery religions I feel a part of, how they turn on the reversal of this notion that death is not life, life not death. Suddenly, miraculously, life becomes ducks becomes death by my hand.
Didn't I learn in sunday school: Christ rolls the stone away, death is overcome?
Meanwhile, on a windy day in New Mexico, those ducks' eyes don't close. Have they solved the great Genjo-koan with the help of this bloody blade?
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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