My backyard has a Buddha pond, and three original koi are still there, now over a foot long. I am waiting to see if they will outgrow their ocean and die or will their enclosure naturally check their expansion. Koi are carp and they can get quite big. Many of us outgrow our pond and have to leave. But many of us stay.

Anyway, I digress. Last week I noticed that the pump had stopped and the flow between the two ponds, an upper and a lower, had stopped. When the water stops flowing it loses its oxygen and the fish will die. The pump is the heart of the ponds. A small stream flows down from the upper to the lower, which is bigger and holds the larger koi. A lily, my faux lotus, grows in a pot in the upper pond where the fish are smaller. The lower pond is a hungry ponds and the koi there are like pigs and they root up the lily.

I cleaned the mud out of the pump’s nozzle, but it still didn’t work, I cleaned out the filter container, which was full of mud, and still the pump didn’t work. Ok, I have to have a pump, so I ordered on for $90 on my credit card that was already stuffed like a Thanksgiving belly. I installed it, and, Oh, No, the water didn’t flow. Yet, unattached to the hose connecting the lower to the. Upper, the pump worked. For a moment I was caught in the ambiguity of my dilemma: The pump worked but the water didn’t flow. A single Idea popped into my head: clear the hose that runs from the pump to the upper pond, so I got a clothes line wire and reamed out the line like a surgeon removing clots to the heart. The hose burped and coughed up great blobs of mud. Then, just out of curiosity, I plugged the old pump in and it worked. Well, now I have a backup pump for the future.

The pond came back to life; the water cleared, and the fish started swimming vigorously again, even thought they slow down if not stop completely in the cold winter water.

A pump is the heart of a Buddha Pond, and if the flow stops, the fish die. We are all pumps in our pond, which is our world. Blackstone is a metaphor for my small world. It was all too small for me when I first arrived in. 1980, but, unable to leave even though I tried several time, I snapped back here like a yoyo. I don’t know why until now.

For a fish, your are the pond and the pond is you. For those who swim in Blackstone; you are Blackstone and Blackstone is you. (Remember, I speaking with metaphors here). For those who are unhappy here, the pond feels too small or the pump isn’t working and the water has no oxygen. We dream of a bigger better pond.

Then there are those who stay—like I did even though I felt I was suffocating from the lack of oxygen— and and swim listlessly through the day, dreaming of a bigger pond but unable to leave because, well, it is the only pond you know.

And there are those that live here who swim vigorously, happy as if there were no boundaries, no edge to the pond beyond with they cannot go. They always fit in the pond because they are the pond and the pond is them.

When you and the pond are One, then Blackstone (your world) is the whole world and there is no better world in someone else’s yard. There are the fish, there is the pond and there is the Pump that gives it life. This is the Trinity that makes life work. You are the fish, you are the pond, but most of all, you are the pump.

When the water of the pond (Blackstone) flow through your heart, you give the pond and yourself life. (Remember, you and the pond are One.) But it is the heart that gives you and the pond life. And what is that pump but service, but love. The pump just pumps because it loves to pump, to beat. You, however, must clear the clots. If you feel like your pond is running out of oxygen and you are suffocating, don’t change your pump. Don’t look on the internet for another pond. Look to see if some mud in not clogging your arteries.

See the picture of the Buddha and frog. This is a real Buddha frog. The first year the pond was flowing a large bull frog appeared and he would sit in the cup of the Buddha and I could walk right up to him and take his picture. Reminds of of the Haiku:

The old pond,

A frog jumps in:.

Plop! 

But this frog didn’t jump in.

The map for. your inner journey is read in the external world as metaphor. When I discovered that the pond hose was plugged, and that the heart was OK, I just removed the clog. When your pump is working, even though partially, you can’t tell. You only know your full potential when you discover that the clog is in your own pipes, not in the world.

I have two ponds, an upper where the lily blooms and the lower where the big koi roam. One pond; two ponds. Which is it? Two ponds, one water, one pump. The water flows equally through both, yet the water takes a different shape in each pond. (sticking to the metaphor) the Lower Pond is the perceived pond of the external world where the koi (and your racoons) eat everything in sight. The upper pond, however, is where a few gold fish nibble at the base of the lily, unable to disturb the flower’s bright light. Each pond reflects the same trees and clouds above. Both ponds are One in the greater space that holds them. Higher and lower, both ponds reflect the same moon.

Well, you have to listen to the talk for the answer. When is a knot a measurement of a boat’s speed or a tangle in a rope? What does MU! mean? What do you call the chapter’s in your Book of Life. Do you have as book? Do you know you are writing your story, chapter by chapter; have you named come up with metaphorical titles for each stage of your life? 

I speak from the advantage of having lived long enough to have many chapters. But even if you are half way through, that doesn’t mean that can’t get a sense that the whole book is in every chapter, every page, and even sentence for that matter. 

What is the driving question of your life, your book? Mine was “How can I be or service? I asked God. I asked people. I asked two yogi Guru’s. I asked bosses, employers, my children and my wife….and all I got was MU! (metaphor warning) 

No one can tell you how you can be of service, of use, having purpose and meaning. No one. You have to live on a houseboat that is not a boat or a house. The houseboat is a metaphor. You have to live as a metaphor. 

How can you live as a metaphor? A metaphor points to the facts of you book, the l literal historical facts with one finger, and it point to your greater story, the untold (but told), the incomplete (but complete) story of your Soul’s journey. This journey when told in facts, in history has no meaning. It’s a sad tale told by idiots, signifying nothing…but the Story of your Soul is the romantic journey of a hero/heroine, that of a god and goddess. The greatest story every told. 

But you have to live on a houseboat that is neither a house or a boat.

Unless we can understand ambiguity we cannot understand life, and if we cannot understand life we cannot understand ourselves. And if I can’t understand myself, I am the walking blind. But even if I understand myself, I don’t understand myself. I am ambiguous. So how can I cope? How can you cope? Nothing is what we think it is, and yet it is. I fall back on my default gestalt image to get me out of a semantic fix. Is the image a houseboat or a boat? A Hag or a Princess. What is the One that both images are? There must be One, you know. Reality is not two, unless you are Schizophrenic. Reality is not a split screen like on CNN. Which is it, Hag or Princess. You must choose.

Can you feel the pressure…you have to choose but you can’t. You either burn up the picture, throw it on the ground and stomp on it or step of the Pirates Plank and discover a new but whole you that is not ambiguous, yet not unambiguous. Where is that Still Point, that Silent Night, where there is no ambiguity? That point is what we yearn for, long for, search for…but you can’t find it. You must fall into it as if by accident. But only after you struggle for it with all your heart and mind.

We have chapters in our life where we have turning points, just a sudden change when you ask your heart what you really want to do. When we look back over the chapters of our life, there is an ambiguity: did I make that decision or is there an author of me that I don’t know. Am I writing me or am I being written?

I was tuned on Xmas Eve. A piano tuner came to tune my uncle’s Yamaha Player Piano. This created by Christmas Metaphor. How to you tune your heart when your mind is tuned to the sub-cultures of society? Society is like Russian Nesting Dolls, tuning forks within tuning forks, and we are often if not in conflict with the different forks in our own mind. 

We tune to our religion, but religion is out of tune with the greater society; we tune to our political party, but the party is out of tune with the greater society. Anything we tune our mind to is going to be out of tune with other sub-cultures. Each one has its own note; that is what makes it different. So society, if not the world, is like a piano each with its own note, and the whole piano is out of tune when each note tunes to a different cord. 

I watched the Piano Tuner work. He tuned each note, tapping each key to his inner ear. What was that? What was that tuned to. I couldn’t hear it. 

Carry out the metaphor here. Your Heart is tuned to the Absolute Cord, a metaphorical OM, if you will, or God’s silent Word. But the mind listens to the tuning fork of something in the world that it identifies with. The mind is then out of tune with the Heart. 

Ah, here is the cause of our suffering. We know we are out of tune, but we blame not the sub-cultures we are tuned with—we believe we are in tune or righteous—but other pianos. 

You see the trap here? What is it that our heart tunes with that the mind cannot hear? You may say Love or God, but these are just the words our particular piano plays (the piano of our own mind). 

Everything must be tested against the tuning fork of the Heart. Is this true? What is the Truth here? I don’t know; my mind doesn’t know because it’s tuned to the world that is fragmented.

When you are in tune with life, the difference between and the world disappears. It is only when you are out of tune that you feel the rub. And, naturally, you want to get rid of the painful grating to the ear by getting the other in tune, as you believe it is the Other who is out of tune. When I believe I’m out of tune, we fall into self-loathing, blaming ourselves for the rub, cutting ourselves, crucifying ourselves instead of some other poor bloke. 

In our out-of-tune society, we blame everything for the rub, and we blame ourselves. Someone has to be the blame for the pain of being out of tune. We are born with the promise, with the actual experience of being in tune with the world as the Mother. When are identity is transferred from our biological Mother to the Culture as Mother, it is then that we begin to feel the rub.

The birthday of the Fish has layers of meaning. The first one is that it is my birthday and I use my Holy Grail Fish martini glass for birthdays and special occasions. My Martini Priest Uncle who collected 500 martini glasses and left them to me, paid. $350 for this fish. The fish is a mythological symbol of Christ because the fish dies and comes back, so it’s a sign of death and rebirth, which is what Christ is a metaphor for, our death and resurrection on our Birthday. 

When you blow out the candles, you are blowing out your life, all the years you have lived. And then you get to eat the cake! This is a death of the old and a birth of the new, the Fish. You are renewed at your birthday. 

Cakes are always a symbol for the world. The wedding cake is our greatest symbol: the bride and groom cut the world and share it with each other. The birthday cake is your whole life, all the years, and you blow them out to make way for a new year, a new birth. 

Unfortunately, we don’t actually use these rituals to make the. uncconscious conscious. We just blindly do them without deeper understanding. So the next time you blow out the candles, reflect on what you are doing. Make the ritual conscious. Have the intention to blow out the previous years, and to make space of a clean birth of the innocent and non-comparing mind, the mind of a child, for it is only when you are like an innocent child can you enter the Kingdom of God on earth right now as your are.