Beside the Stream

The monk sat alone beside the stream.

Morning had not yet decided what kind of day it would become.

Mist rested among the trees, drifting slowly between the trunks like something that had forgotten where it was going. The stream moved quietly over stones, carrying pieces of the forest with it—fallen leaves, pine needles, tiny fragments of bark.

The monk watched the water.

He had been sitting there for some time, though he no longer knew how long.

Beside him lay a small stone.

He picked it up.

It was ordinary.

There was nothing remarkable about it. It was smooth from years of water passing over it, brown and gray, with a single line running through its center.

He turned it over in his hand.

And for some reason, he thought of the mountains.

The stone had once been part of them.

Before it became this stone, it had been something else. Before that, something else again. It had been shaped by rain and ice, by heat and pressure, by the slow movement of the earth.

The monk looked toward the mountains rising beyond the mist.

Then he looked back at the stone.

He suddenly wondered where the mountain ended and the stone began.

Was the mountain only the great thing in the distance?

Or was the mountain also here, resting quietly in his palm?

He closed his fingers around it.

For a moment, he imagined the immense history contained within that little piece of earth.

Ancient seas.

Volcanic fire.

Rain falling before any human being had ever looked toward the sky.

Forests that had risen and disappeared.

Creatures that had lived and vanished without leaving a name.

The slow turning of continents.

The patient work of wind and water.

All of it had somehow arrived here.

In this.

In his hand.

The monk opened his fingers.

The stone remained exactly as it had been.

But he was no longer looking at it in quite the same way.

A breeze moved through the trees.

Something bright caught his eye.

A wild flower had opened beside the stream.

It was very small.

Its petals were pale and delicate, almost lost among the grasses.

The monk leaned toward it.

There was no reason for the flower to be there.

No one had planted it.

No one had asked it to bloom.

It simply had.

He watched a bee settle upon its petals.

The flower bent beneath the tiny weight.

The monk smiled.

The bee moved on.

The flower slowly lifted itself again.

And suddenly he felt something open inside himself.

The flower did not need to become anything.

It did not need to understand the universe.

It did not need to know where it had come from or where it was going.

It simply participated in what was happening.

Sunlight.

Rain.

Soil.

Wind.

Insects.

Water.

Earth.

Sky.

The flower was not separate from any of these things.

It was the meeting of them.

A little expression of the whole.

The monk sat back.

He looked at the stream.

He looked at the flower.

He looked at the stone in his hand.

And the words came to him:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

He had heard the words many times.

But perhaps he had misunderstood them.

Perhaps they were not asking him to imagine infinity.

Perhaps they were asking him to stop overlooking it.

He looked at the grain of sand caught between his fingers.

It was almost nothing.

Yet where had it come from?

What mountains had broken apart to create it?

What seas had carried it?

What storms had moved it?

How many centuries had passed before it came to rest here?

He watched the tiny grain slip from his hand and fall onto the earth.

It disappeared among thousands of others.

The monk laughed softly.

The whole universe seemed to be hiding in plain sight.

Not concealed.

Only overlooked.

He remained beside the stream.

An hour passed.

The sun climbed higher.

The mist began to disappear.

Birds moved through the branches.

The water continued its journey.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

And yet the monk felt that something immeasurable had happened.

He had not entered another world.

He had simply stopped rushing through this one.

He watched a single leaf turn slowly in the current.

He watched sunlight tremble upon the water.

He watched the flower move in the breeze.

And he realized that eternity might not be an endless amount of time.

Perhaps eternity was what remained when there was no need to divide time into past and future.

There was only this moment.

Not a moment surrounded by eternity.

But eternity itself.

The monk breathed in.

He breathed out.

The stream flowed.

The flower opened.

The mountain stood beneath the sky.

And for one brief, immeasurable hour, the monk no longer felt like someone standing apart from the world and looking into it.

He was part of the seeing.

Part of the water.

Part of the stone.

Part of the flower.

Part of the mountain.

Part of the silence.

He looked once more at the small stone resting in his palm.

It seemed impossibly small.

And impossibly vast.

The monk closed his hand around it.

Then opened it again.

Nothing had changed.

And everything had.