The Celebration of Everyday Dreaming

My partner and I had a restaurant for ten years. Each menu had a theme that celebrated some person, event or feature of the local landscape. This meant that our dishes had some very peculiar names, but people (said they) loved the prose poems on the back of the menu that reflected on the theme. This is one of them.

The Celebration of Everyday Dreaming
Smiley found himself in a most unexpected situation: waiting in a line of neophytes for an audience with the Zen Master. He alone of the two dozen or so hopefuls had not attended the Sesshin, yet he was about to be tested for enlightenment. All before him were asked the same question: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Each in turn, seated in the lotus position, leaned forward and whispered an answer, and each was ordered by the poker faced Roshi to proceed to the Great Hall where the next phase of their initiation into the art of cosmic consciousness would begin.

Smiley stole a sideways glance at his immediate senior and saw to his surprise that it was Jason, a former Australian surf circuiteer whom he’d met some time ago in Kathmandu. With a sly grin Jason asked out of the side of his mouth: “Want a clue?”
“Strewth yes,” begged Smiley.
“What’s the length of a piece of string?”
Smiley baulked. He’d used a lot of string in his life, but he’d never bothered to measure any. “It could be anything,” he hissed, annoyed at what seemed like a bit of a leg pull.
“There you go,” replied the surfie.
Smiley drooped momentarily, regretting his suspicion of what turned out to be an astute mediation. He regained his posture when he felt a whack across his back. “Could it be that easy?” he wondered. “The sound of one hand clapping could be anything?”

His whole attention focused upon those words, and as he repeated them to himself they began to resonate with a variety of meanings for which he had no other words, but which allowed him a glimpse of a single field of meaning in which words and the things they represent merge and emerge as epiphanies of the whole.

In no time he was seated before the Zen Master whose question took him by surprise. “What is the difference between a duck?” Smiley’s eyes widened. His face burst with laughter and he felt as though he was swimming in the surf. He knew he had to catch the next wave, but he’d never surfed in his life. He yelled to the other surfers, “What do I do?” it was Jason who turned to him and said, “Wait till you’re about half way up, then kick like hell!”

The water lifted him, and, at just the right moment, Smiley thrashed out and instantly became one with The Wave. He travelled for light years exploring the universe, and broke back into space-time in a curve of foam breaking on a sand bar. He ran through the undertow to the beach, and when he sat down to catch his breath, the Zen Master came back into focus. “One of its legs is both the same,” said Smiley.

It was now the Zen Master who laughed. The power and rhythm of their mutual delight triggered the genesis of a new galaxy, and Smiley woke from the dream that changed his life. Smiley didn’t know anyone called Jason. He’d never been to Kathmandu. And because of a stainless steel pin in his ankle – a legacy of the Asian War (Yes, he did come home, by the way) he couldn’t sit in the lotus position. But Smiley became a poet that day when he woke to his everyday dreaming as an epiphany of The Dreaming Cosmos.