Maybe I should have meditated first. Or at least clipped my nails. But I am here.

My feet aren’t in the water this time. I’m just looking out onto it, wistfully. I’m trying to reach for gratitude at being able to visit this place. It has the solitude and the beauty I crave. For the first time, I see huts. I can’t tell if they’re on my side of the bank or on the opposite side. The water won’t stay in focus any time I see the straw roofs.

I am here, I say. 

I don’t know who might hear me. 

I would like to talk to whomever is out there. 

I notice someone kneeling on the ground, planting reeds. I didn’t think the land needed planting, especially not reeds that seem to grow wherever there’s space by the water.

Then again, she’s planting these reeds on land, not in the marshy shallows. Maybe it is wheat or another grain I don’t recognize.

I watch her, as Patience watched me yesterday, quietly and from a distance I maintain. I don’t know if she knows she’s not alone. I hope she doesn’t. I want to watch her as she is, un-self-conscious.

Then again, it seems that everyone I’ve met here so far is purely themselves, whether they are observed or not.

She softly rubs the dirt, smooths it out using a stem from one of the reeds she hasn’t planted yet. I notice that she doesn’t have …. what doesn’t she have?

As soon as I begin to question her practice, new items appear. A trowel. Gloves, soil, more reeds. I wonder where she harvested them from.

I want to bring to her the issue I’m having in the other world. Expectations from someone whose presence in my life brings me great sadness. And yet I feel obligated to them. Harmed by their denial and unwillingness to see solutions and run with them.

But this world doesn’t need more of my world — I need more of this one. 

The woman planting, is she the same woman who told me, “I DO NOT QUESTION”? I finally recognize her. Yes, it is she. 

So I watch. And wait for her to speak. 

YOU ARE SAD.

Yes. I have a lot of heaviness.

She doesn’t turn around. I imagine her asking me if I remember what she told me last time. I feel the twinge of not being a good enough student. I breathe in and try to summon the relief I felt in her words then: I do not question.

There it is. The heaviness dissipates. I want to cry with the relief of it.

You helped me last time. You’re helping me today.

I don’t want to ask this next thing, but I can’t refrain.

Do you have any other sage words for me?

She keeps planting, continuing to focus on the ground and dirt and dry thin stalks at her feet.

I breathe. I breathe and repeat in my head, I do not question. 

The woman stays on task. She is unburdened by my emotions or the open-ended questions I carry inside my chest. She sticks to what is hers, and leaves the rest behind.

You can focus amidst the noise?

WHAT NOISE?

I am so sure there is noise. There always is, where I’m from. But here, there’s just the breeze and the steady rippling of the river. If I clanged a cymbal in her ear, I’m pretty sure she still wouldn’t turn around.

You don’t carry what isn’t yours.

She … well, she doesn’t do anything. I want her to nod, though. I only receive her non-contradiction.

I do not question, I think. I do not question. The desperate mantra of one who needs to self-soothe.

 A different tack, then.

How do you know when you’re done?

I ask, because she doesn’t appear to be making much progress. 

I think she wants to say 

I AM NEVER DONE. THERE IS ONLY DOING AND NOT DOING. 

but I fear mistaking my voice for hers.

She doesn’t turn around. She stands up, dusts off her gloves. She angles her head slightly in such a way that I see her small smile of satisfaction.

I want to give her a hug. I don’t know if that’s allowed.

She continues to look at her work. I realize, I don’t know if she thinks of it as work or not.

How does it feel to be not doing?

And somewhere between typing 

FINE 

and 

I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE QUESTION

I lose her.