Samadhi in Mariposa

Night Sky


Warm
---------mid-summer night
clear air
------------sounds radiate unhindered
no moon
-------------darkness rules the ground
sky above
---------------ten thousand dancing candles
consciousness
-------------------once confined to the shell of my body
expands
-------------absorbing the vastness.




I had an experience in Mariposa when I was young. I must have been about 6 years old. I might have been alone but most likely there were others there star-gazing with me on a mid summer night, standing in our front yard, absorbing the beauty offered to us. The Milky Way was so pronounced, I have never seen it so vibrantly since, and I actually began to see its depth. My equilibrium for a moment and I had the sensation that I was on the verge of falling away into the sky. I knew what the Milky Way was, I knew that stars were exponentially larger than the earth, the distances between them even more vast. How could a force so immense as the Milky Way be overcome by a little thing like the gravity of the Earth. I was seeing this all at once in my mind, it was my first and most pronounced instance of samadhi.