Being

In your moment of burned-out passion, facing the cold ash alone in the ruins

Scripture

The wild flame has gone out; the oil of light is drying.

Hot tears turn to sleet; gray snow is spreading.

Touch it and it scatters; cold-scorching enters the skin.

Being is in embers, is in purity; being is in the mirror, is in solitude.

Reflecting through the great void; being is at the origin, at the beginning.

Wenzi · On Being

The fire has gone out. Not slowly shrinking—that wildly blazing flame (the wild flame), at some instant, was, without the slightest warning, thoroughly “extinguished.” The light and oil that fed the burning (the oil of light) have run dry (is drying). The tears that were once searing have frozen, in the air, into cold sleet (hot tears turn to sleet). The gray-white embers, like a silent snow, have spread over the whole hearth of the heart (gray snow is spreading). When you reach out to touch them, they scatter (touch it and it scatters), yet a strange “cold-scorching” creeps along your fingertips into the depths of the skin (cold-scorching enters the skin).

“Being is in embers, is in purity; being is in the mirror, is in solitude.” You are in the midst of “embers” and “purity,” “mirror” and “solitude” (being is in embers, is in purity; being is in the mirror, is in solitude). After the burning, all things have turned to ash—yet an unprecedented spaciousness and clarity have also been swept out. This spaciousness is like a mirror; this clarity is accompanied by a vast loneliness.

Do not try to rekindle.

Ash is the final form of burning-out—a sacred completion.

Now, please sit down, in the center of this ash.

Not to mourn—to abide.

Let your breath synchronize with the stillness of this ash; let the weight of your body sink beneath this even covering.

Feel the contrast between that absolute “cold” and the “scorching” in the memory within. This contrast itself is a vivid proof of existence. “Reflecting through the great void; being is at the origin, at the beginning.” When you wholly abide in this ash, a great reversal happens: this mirror of ash born of burning (in the mirror), in its clarity and emptiness, is enough to “reflect through” the whole great void (reflecting through the great void). And at the end of that reflection, what you see is not the future, but the “original, beginning” state of the myriad things before they ever burned (being is at the origin, at the beginning). Ash has become the mirror leading back to the source.

The wind rises; the ash lifts faintly, like mist, like gauze. The hearth is cold, but you know something more enduring than flame has been born. It is a thorough “knowing”—an understanding of existence itself, after burning and extinction. You are not a sad keeper of cold ash—you are that bright mirror, condensed from the ash, reflecting the great void and the origin. Being-Embers: you are not the burned-out one—you are that lucid knowing, at last crystallized from a violent burning.