Everything comes clear in Presence. Yet Presence can’t be described or forced, proven or produced on demand. Everything you can say about the Tao, which isn’t much, can be said about Presence. (Holy Spirit, we can only make little songs about you, skipping-rope songs.) We hear the melody. We see it on the faces in all the different ways. Transparent Presence makes everything visible.

The ancestors wait in Presence. The pain of the long past is there as is the joy, as is a fountain of words and colors moving out into the world. Presence is pleasure’s simple joy.

Presence arrives like sleep. Effort doesn’t help. Nothing helps. Nothing hinders either. Presence is waiting for you. The impossible koan of your own partial perspective relaxes in Presence. You’ll always be only you, always be only Presence. You’re like a shrub growing in a forest of Presence. You’re helplessly part of the vastness, the pain, the comedy, the working itself out, the privilege, the mystery. You’re stuck with it, given it, blessed with it.

Present to it. You’re a part in a play of Presence.

It’s a feeling. The feeling of feeling Presence is like touching. Presence knows us and Presence is being known, the actor in the costume. Any fool can feel Presence and that’s good to know.

Presence must be bigger than death since death rests in it. Pain is the part of the drama before resolution.

Everyone comes to Presence their own way. Everyone comes to Presence the same way.

Illusion gives way. It gives itself up. In bereftness the strong arms of Presence hold us and we wonder whose arms it could be. Illusion can linger a long while and Presence is perfectly uninsulted. It doesn’t change at all.

No one could presence all of Presence. Yet even a little taste is the whole thing. When you’re screwed up, it’s Presence that screwed you up, knowing it’s all alright and because it loves you and your birthing helps the world so much.