a sunday short: tossing coins
it’s all the same, this human incarnation
toss the coin heads or tails? tails and heads. it’s the same coin after all. life or death? death and life. same thing. truly. whether you flip it or toss it it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter at all whether it comes up heads or tails. whether it comes up life or death. it doesn’t matter. it is the same coin. and the ending is always the same. flip the coin to land on heads and tails is always right underneath. every time. born onto this world as life and death forever looms at some unknown future. right underneath, every time. it is the same coin. trying to have one over the other, you try to split the coin in half to have only one half. you’ll want heads, you want life. but it’s impossible. you can’t have only the heads, you don’t get only the life. tails tail along and death always accompanies life (but you know that). it is the same coin. you do have options, choices. there is light; what matters is what you are in full control of, whether that be coin tossing or life living. although the coin holds both and solidly, what matters is how high you toss it. toss yours high now and be proud of its flight. just don’t catch it.
~ k
🙏🏼
Love the duality/non duality them of this poem. Just what I needed today. And Trungpa, as in Rinpoche? -- very serendipitous. I'm a Naropa graduate from waaaaaaay back.
Love it!
Something about the way you framed the “two sides of the same coin” idiom brought interesting novelty to it that got me to actually appreciate what the expression means. I think George Orwell wrote about that in “Politics and the English Language”—sometimes a phrase gets used so much that it points directly to its meaning instead of to its imagery.
Also. The last couple lines remind me of this quote:
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.”
-Chögyam Trungpa