Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: poets and poetry

hello darkness my old friend
When I think about the Israel-Hamas war, I struggle for some time, before finally sighing to myself hello darkness my old friend.
The other day I came across a very short poem by the 11th century Japanese woman poet Izumi Shikibu, and it struck a chord:
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
Although The Wind …
the Israel-Hamas war
I knew in my heart there was some meaning to the poem’s effect on me, but I was not sure what it was. I had been scrolling through my news feed and feeling overwhelmed at all the darkness and uncertainty as I read about the Israel-Hamas war, the suffering of tens of thousands, and my own feelings of helplessness.
Our meditation practice teaches us to be purely and simply present, awake and aware, with no agenda at all, to everything, especially this darkness I feel.
the darkness in my heart
I reflect on a poem by Wendell Berry, To Know the Dark:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
To know the dark, Berry says, go dark… and “find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.” We leave our judgements at the door, and surrender to what darkness has to teach us.
When I surrender to this darkness I feel as I think about the Israel-Hamas war, and mindfully contact this fear, the bars in the prison of my own mind bend a little, giving me some breathing room to process it all.
I feel myself melting into feelings of care despite the horrors.
Buddhism is called a “gradual training” because it’s practiced gradually, step by step. We learn from all the little openings and softenings we make every day.
The Dhammapada teaches:
Think not lightly of good, saying, “It will not come to me.” Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise person, gathering it little by little, fills himself with good.
How do we fill ourselves with good, little by little, amid the horror unfolding on our screens?
Little by little, we open our hearts and soften to what is.
In a recent blog post, Nico Hase observes:
Just like a garden grows at midnight, your kindness and compassion can grow when you’re suffering. They can grow when you’re sick, or heartsick. They can grow when everything around you is falling apart.
He adds: “Sometimes, in fact, they grow better when things are worse”.
Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Horse Skull (1931), The Art Institute of Chicago.
And then I saw why Izumi Shikibu’s poem hit me so hard.
It seems she was saying that if you live in a house that’s impermeable to the cold winds and storms and difficulties of this world, you will also wall yourself off from the moonlight.
(Whatever the moonlight may mean for you- safety, warmth, compassion).
I think she is saying for many of us our house needs to be ruined for the moonlight to get in. When the conditions seem the most challenging, they can also be seen as the most ideal, as Nico suggests above.
take refuge in our own vulnerability?
But can we take refuge in this tender, vulnerable place of being open to the way things are, right now?
With a spacious heart, we can remember the bigger picture? We are not the small self our fear preys on. We are life itself regenerating and refreshing itself every moment; we are vulnerable, and we are free.
“Ultimately it is upon your vulnerability that you depend,” the poet Rilke writes.
Listen to Mother Teresa:
If we have no peace, it’s because we’ve forgotten we belong to each other.
When we honor our vulnerability and our dependence on our communities, we open to love in the midst of darkness.
10/14/2023
softly, as in a morning sunrise
Meditation shows me my burdens were mostly imagined. But even imaginary ones can carry real emotional weight.
I remember this cartoon I saw perhaps 20 years ago while waiting at a doctor’s office. A woman and a man are sitting together at a coffee shop in some urban setting. The man looks over and says:
I’m sorry. I was so busy listening to myself talk I forgot what I was saying.
That cartoon has stayed with me all these years because it points to why I continue to meditate every day. Ok, just about every day.
I meditate to take myself less seriously.
Which reminds me of another cartoon that has stayed with me just as long. A Zen monk is walking along a beach carrying an enormous bag over his shoulders that’s so heavy his footsteps are like craters in the sand.
On the bag is written one word – ME.
This is a burden our meditation helps us set aside, the heavy bag called me. Setting the bag down, even for a few minutes when we meditate, lightens our steps and makes us more available to others.
It helps us not take ourselves so seriously we can’t engage in a meaningful conversation without it all being about me.
I first discovered Buddhism in 1979 at the age of 23 and attended my first 10 day vipassana retreat the following year.
And I still take myself way too seriously sometimes.
Some would argue that their burdens are who they are (maybe not exactly phrased this way). They are their struggles. And, if they try hard enough, they are their own victors.
Many of the issues and problems I have faced in my life I was so used to carrying around I didn’t realize they were burdens at all. But when they drop, ah, yes, I feel much lighter now!
Yes- meditation to take oneself less seriously is seriously important.
Meditation has revealed my burdens were mostly imagined. But even imaginary ones can carry real emotional weight.
The more meditation I had under my (imaginary) belt, the easier it was to see we don’t really need all that much to get along happily in this life.
George Carlin once quipped:
That’s all I want, that’s all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know?
And even that might be extra.
I love Emily Dickinson’s short poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” She nails the issue in a few verses and sticks the landing perfectly.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
Often I read a poem I am convinced was written just for me!
There’s that pesky makin’-it-all-about-me again.
The poem sings of the beauty of being a “Nobody” in a boring and crass world of “Somebodies.” And then in lines 3 and 4 the poet realizes the reader is also a “Nobody” but says, shush, don’t tell anyone–they might find out.
Which is how I felt when I first started practicing Buddhism, that I had to keep my nobody-ness a secret because anyone I talked about “dropping the burden of self” looked at me as if I were crazy.
Meditation to take oneself seriously
From one nobody to another, I thank you Emily Dickinson for validating what I knew all along when I started on this path, that it’s such a relief to know how to melt the shell of me, and open to the mystery of this life- softly, as in a morning sunrise.
(thank you Dianne Reeves for that wonderful 1994 performance of this jazz standard.)
05/14/2023
to love the world just as it is
Good poetry can show intricacies of meaning and feeling easily lost. This is why I trust the vision of poets and consider good poetry as mindfulness.
The Zen teacher Sobun Katherine Thanas in a book which was published not long after she passed a few years ago, wrote:
I have come to realize that our work is to love the world just as it is.
Teachings of Katherine Thanas
The work she is talking about is our simple meditation practice.
I took a peek at the world a few minutes through a news app on my phone, and all I saw was racial conflict, seemingly intractable culture wars, to say nothing of the blood and guts war in Europe and ongoing armed conflicts all over this globe.
I can see accepting the world with the aid of mindfulness practice, but even that seems challenging.
The world that Zen teacher Sobun Katherine Thanas asks us to look at is not just the world we encounter in the news, but, as she writes:
the actual life we have—our habits of mind, our desires, our disappointments, our fears, our embarrassments.
If we are quiet and honest, something like humility can arise, allowing us to shed reactive, ego-driven resistance. This is when we catch a glimpse of life as it is, free from our distortions and wishful thinking.
Thich Nhat Hanh often wrote that our ideas of happiness, of how things should be for us to be happy, get in the way of seeing the sources of happiness already here.
Sitting quietly, with mindfulness and humility, reveals this already present contentment.
The Chinese Zen master Wumen (1183-1260) wrote:
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
With gentle mindful awareness of the most ordinary details in our daily routines, we familiarize ourselves with the richness of the present moment.
Oranges et bananes (1913) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
As Thoreu wrote in Walden:
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.
Rather than waste our time on dead moments of the past or on abstract thoughts of the future, let’s attend to the details of the matter at hand: opening the cabinet where the teas are, deciding on green or black, then carefully measuring just the right amount into a favorite mug, and waiting for the water to boil.
Good poetry can show intricacies of meaning and feeling easily lost.
This is why I trust the vision of poets and consider good poetry as mindfulness.
Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order
Take the poem below, the title poem of Ted Kooser’s collection Splitting an Order (2014). It takes place in a diner, with the poet watching an old man cutting a sandwich into two equal parts, one for himself, the other, for his wife.
I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place, and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife, and her fork in their proper places,
then smooths the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.
The poem unfolds as a single graceful sentence. And it reveals a piece of the world with such care and warmth, radiating the message that everything belongs, even the most common moments, as when his wife:
slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon, her knife, and her fork in their proper places.
I’m not sure I can bring myself to loving the world as it is conceptually or abstractly, but I can bring my full attention to this sip of tea and this clicking of the keys as I type this.
This I can do. This small slice of life, yes, this I can love.
I guess this is where we start.
04/18/2023
openness to experience
Meditation turns special moments on their head. It turns out we don’t need special moments to savor the openness of experience.
Are you familiar with the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons? One of my favorites is when Calvin trips and falls down a flight of stairs, landing on his rear and looking confused.
Then he stands up and throws his arms up in the air like a performer taking a bow and says,
Ta da!
I love this cartoon so much because it illustrates one key aspect of mindfulness practice–the space we create around the story we call our “self” allows us to shift our view to a bigger picture.
calamity? what calamity?
A picture in which day to day calamities are not calamities at all. You could call this reframing.
I prefer to call it not being flooded by the inevitable downpours of life.
Or you just savor the openess of experience and not call this anything at all
Here are two takes on this essential mindfulness skill, one from a well-known Buddhist meditation teacher, the other a contemporary poet:
Even if your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, whatever the danger that threatens it, let it concern only the house. If there’s a flood, don’t let it flood your mind. If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart. Let it be merely the house, that which is external to you that is flooded and burned.
Ajahn Chah
Here are few words from the contemporary poet and essayist Mark Nepo:
Ever since the lock on
my door broke, I have
more visitors.
Now the road I always
take is detoured, which
I curse until I see the
heron glide across the
small pond I didn’t
know was there.
Meditation shows us where we are caught, where we are hung up, and shows us we can always let go. And when we let go we open into a kind of space that allows everything, where everything belongs; a radical openness to experience.
Meditation is an invitation to relish the taste of this space that is always here regardless of circumstance.
Here is another take, this one by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), considered one of the foremost literary figures of the nineteenth century. This is from part IV of his poem “Vacillation” from The Winding Stair and Other Poems, (1933):
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.
from Vacillation, W.B. Yeats
The poet is sitting in a crowded London shop, much, I would imagine, like sitting in a coffee shop in our day. We bring a book to read while we sip our latte. We just turned fifty, and we think of the inexorable passage of time. Perhaps lost in melancholic reverie, we put the book down on the marble table-top.
Then his body suddenly blazed. His mind is no longer wandering, no longer melancholic. And his happiness in that moment was so great that religious tones appear-he felt he was blessed and could bless.
Twenty minutes more or less sounds a bit playful.
Perhaps for twenty minutes or so he took a seat in eternity.
We could read into this all sorts of things. What matters for me is the evocative quality. Of feeling our aliveness break through the slumber of our humdrum days. We sense this in our so-called special moments, of noticing a child’s first tooth, or a sunset, a birth or a death.
But meditation turns special moments on their head.
It turns out we don’t need special moments to savor the openness to experience. All moments are special, even sitting at a crowded coffee shop ruminating on one’s life.
Let’s not underestimate the power of our mindfulness practice. We sit, we become aware of sounds, and then we settle the mind into the sensuous, lush undulations of body sensations.
We shift from being a witness to our life to living our life within the fold of our life, within the beating, rising and falling heart of experience itself.
For twenty minute more or less we morph into reality itself, bare, boundary less, and beautiful beyond description.
We allow our body to live its life. And it responds by suddenly blazing into life. The gateway to the blaze is simply the willingness to feel. To feel the body just as it is, moment by moment. The willingness to feel our openness to experience.
Openness is not a goal; rather it’s a relationship to what is happening as it’s happening. And since what is happening is already happening, there isn’t much room here for accomplishments, effort or special feats.
Just to open like a sunflower opens to sunlight; in our case, the sunlight of awareness.
07/04/2022
a moment of well-being
Despite all that is wrong, I can still take delight in a moment of well-being.
News stories are not the conversation starters they used to be. In the day, I could fill an awkward gap by saying “Guess what I heard on NPR this morning?”
I don’t use that line anymore.
These are intense times. We need to find our footing in an information age that may be getting the best of us. We need to find some balance here.
Sometimes a poem jumps off the page and invites you to see the world with new eyes, if only for a moment.
a poem can change everything in a moment
I was looking at the world through those Anxiety Eyes before I read this poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon, who left this earth just a couple of months ago.
Tonight is the final presidential debate in what many are calling the “election of a lifetime” (which is how I felt about Bush-Gore). No sense here going through the litany of everything which is wrong with the world.
Then I read his poem: Everything Is Going to Be All Right
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Everything is Going to be All Right, Derek Mahon
“There will by dying”, he acknowledges, “but there is no need to go into that.”
Yes! That line averted my Anxiety Eyes, telling them, it’s OK, contemplate impermanence, but don’t hold on to it, you can let go.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
I feel Derek letting me inside his heart as it relaxes, taking a little sip of joy as the lines flow from his pen, from his “watchful heart.”
And in spite of everything–the election of a lifetime in less than 12 days, continuing racial injustice, the economic and environmental pillaging– the sun rises, and the beauty of the “far cities” will be there for us when we can travel again.
delight is all around, help yourself
Yes, this can sound trite, but it doesn’t to me.
For me it means that despite all that is wrong, I can still take delight in a moment of well-being.
Like the anonymous person in this well-known Zen story from the classic 1957 collection published by Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge.
The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine.
The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
Tigers and a Strawberry
Yes, there are tigers everywhere we look.
But there are also moments so sweet they stop the mind from whining. And they are everywhere, if you just relax those Anxiety Eyes, as Derek shows us, letting us into a most intimate moment of the morning, in bed, lying
in a riot of sunlight.
… watching the day break and the clouds flying.
How sweet those moments of well-being are!
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10/20/2020
I wish I could have given him the moon
Good poems, for me, are often potent teachings on how to live this precious life we are given. Over the years I have been moved to tears reading poems.
There is one poet in particular I keep coming back to, the Japanese poet Ryōkan Taigu, who lived from 1758–1831.
Ryokan, as a Google search tells me, was a quiet and eccentric Sōtō Zen Buddhist monk who lived much of his life as a hermit. He is remembered for his poetry and calligraphy, which present the essence of Zen life.
Here is Ryokan musing about the premise of true poetry:
Who says my poems are poems? My poems are not poems. When you know that my poems are not poems, Then we can speak of poetry!
Perhaps the most famous story about this eccentric and beloved Zen Master is recounted in the book Great Fool: Zen Master Ryōkan: Poems, Letters, and Other Writings.
One night a thief entered into Ryokan’s small hut. Ryokan had only one blanket which he used day and night to cover his body. That was his only possession. He felt great compassion for the thief because he knew there was nothing in the house.
If the poor fellow had informed me before, I could have begged something from the neighbors and kept it here for him to steal. But now what can I do? Seeing that there was nothing, that he had entered into a monk’s hut, the thief went out.
Ryokan could not resist. He gave his blanket to the thief. When the thief left, he wrote the famous haiku in his diary:
The thief left it behind — The moon at the window.
To which is often added the final line from another diary entry, a line which haunts me to this day:
Poor fellow, I wish I could have given him the moon!
Whew! I would be hard-pressed to find a single line, in all of Buddhist literature or in the many commentarial traditions, that more succinctly describes the path of the bodhissatva than this one!
The implications of this line boggle the rational mind, which, perhaps, is Ryokan’s intention–to shake us up, to wake us up to the only reality there is, the here and now. And to act in the interest of “mother sentient beings.”
To borrow an observation by the English Romantic era poet John Keats, who died at the age of 25, leaving us fifty-four poems to savor; writing in a letter to Fanny Braun, Keats wrote:
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.
This is really what our simple and profound mindfulness practice is all about. Rather than trying to understand, interpret or otherwise wrangle with our present moment’s experience, if we allow ourselves to luxuriate in it and accept its mysteries, we are taken straight to the mystery of our own existence here on this fragile planet.
This is after all, what our practice is all about.
Please luxuriate!
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11/29/2019
letting go of wanting happiness
Folks who meditate in order to feel better often find the opposite. Eventfully they see that it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it!
I can begin to answer by sharing a haiku I recently found:
Since my house burned down
I now have a better view
of the rising moon.
This moving haiku was written by Mizuta Masahide, a 17^th century poet and samurai. It has spoken to me deeply many times.
I am often asked why I meditate.
Depending on who asks, I answer something like – To clearly see why I suffer, and with that understanding to cultivate peace of mind and a kind heart.
I have personally found mindfulness practice does just that.
After his own spiritual awakening, the Buddha distilled his understanding of our human situation into three insights, traditionally known, in an awkward sounding translation, as the three marks of existence.
The three facts of life
Let’s just call them the three facts of life:
1. Everything is temporary;
2. We habitually react to our world with resistance, felt as tension and suffering; and
3. Nothing solidly happens by itself, everything is contingent on causes and conditions.
There is a cool feeling of relief when I acknowledge these facts for myself. They help me appreciate what’s truly important in this fleeting world.
They wake me up as I move through my life in a kind of daze, checking email on my phone, going from one task and one distraction to another.
Because everything is changing, a flower has poignancy. When I realize this, I pause.
And because everything is evanescent, everything is precious. Our obligation is to spend this moment well, with wisdom and compassion
Because I suffer at times, “the sure heart’s release” is more appealing.
And because everything is contingent on something else, I appreciate my interconnection and responsibility to everyone and everything.
The Korean monk Haemin Sunim, in his lovely book The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, expresses the third fact in this way:
The whole universe is contained in an apple wedge in a lunch box. Apple tree, sunlight, cloud, rain, earth, air, farmer’s sweat are all in it. Delivery truck, gas, market, money, cashier’s smile are all in it. Refrigerator, knife, cutting board, mother’s love are all in it.
Everything in the whole universe depends on one another.
The Buddha taught that deeply experiencing these three facts with mindfulness in our daily life brings about wisdom and compassion, and greatly eases our distress and anxiety. I love Sylvia Boorstein’s line:
Life is like a continuous quiz show where the only question ever asked is:
“How are you going to manage whatever is happening now without confusing yourself and creating suffering?“
And daily life is the best place to practice releasing needless suffering and growing in love and compassion. Our everyday lives serve up unending opportunities that catch us, triggering our habitual reactions of “liking and disliking.”
Mindfulness allows us to catch ourselves before life does.
The issue is we find ourselves wanting to have a different experience in other than the one we are having.
For example, folks are often drawn to meditation out of a desire to feel better in some way. But if we meditate with this desire to feel good, we selectively internalize that meditation is all about feeling good, calm, and peaceful.
And when we don’t feel calm or peaceful, we can get frustrated, even agitated.
Despite repeated encouragement to relax and let go of our ideas about meditation, and our fantasies of how we should feel when it works, it can take a while for this to really sink in.
it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it.
letting go of the notion of self-improvement
Crucial to the practice is learning to be radically OK with ourselves just as we are in the present moment. In doing so, we also let go of the notion of self-improvement.
Mindfulness meditation often starts out by working with an uncooperative and rebellious mind. You know this mind-it’s the one that spaces out, goes into la-la land, feels anxious, and wants out.
It’s the mind that opens its eyes during group meditation, looks at the clock, and says “Ugh, ten more minutes!”
Mindfulness takes us right up to the boundaries of our physical and emotional discomfort. But it allows us to be OK there, to settle down, and lose the fear.
Folks who meditate in order to feel better often find the opposite. Eventfully they see that it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it!
Sayadaw U Tejaniya of Burma writes:
Don’t practice with a mind that wants something or wants something to happen. The result will only be that you tire yourself out.
In time you will delight in ordinary mental presence, and you forget about extraordinary anything. Extraordinary experiences are not the goal of meditation. They do come and go, as side –effects of your practice.
This is a huge turning point in your practice – the more you let go, the happier you are. You clearly see that ultimate liberation is the ultimate letting go of everything.
I will leave you this week with the words of the Thai forest teacher Ajahn Chah.
Do everything with a mind that lets go. Don’t accept praise or gain or anything else. If you let go a little you a will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.
Hey, is that a moon I see up there?
10/19/2018
non-contention
We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. It’s the birthplace of the renewable energy sources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.
Despite all that’s wrong in the world, at times I surrender and trust that I can be of some benefit by staying awake for it all, but non entangled, yet connected by a caring heart.
The line from a poem by Neruda comes to mind:
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.
What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance
You can’t keep spring from coming
Neruda was probably addressing the humanitarian and political crisis of his native Chile when he wrote that line, reminding us that at times of oppression, dehumanization cannot last.
But I think that line also describes the fruit of our mindfulness practice. With a calm mind, we live in a bigger, fresher space that accommodates everything with ease. As Jack Kornfield reminds us:
What would it feel like to love the whole kit and caboodle—to make our love bigger than our sorrows?
When I read the Japanese poet Issa’s haiku below, I see cherry blossoms blooming in the dead of winter (despite it’s unlikeliness), and I feel the acute poignancy of life, with all its joys and sorrows:
What a strange thing!
To be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
the power of non-contention
Mindfulness softens the contracted heart many of us experience these days, and hastens the coming of the Spring Neruda mentions.
Diana Winston calls this special power of our mindfulness practice non-contention. “You release the need to struggle and oppose the present moment,” she explains.
Diana elaborates:
If I don’t practice non-contention, I suffer, fret, struggle, complain, and basically ruin my day. If I do do it, I grieve briefly but my mind is at peace. I let go of what are merely ideas about the way things should be and open to the truth of things as they are.
But let’s not miss one key point. This non-contention Diana talks about is not giving in to oppressive conditions nor to escaping them in distraction.
ending the war in our heads
This inner work is suble and layered. First we end the war we carry on in ours minds as we constantly react to this and that, e.g., the news.
But then there is the work of healing, integration and nurting our communuties. Let’s let Cesar Chavez describe this part of our path:
Non-violence is not inaction. It is not discussion. It is not for the timid or weak. It is hard work. It is the willingness to sacrifice. It is the patience to win.
In fact, opposition to injustice will be much more effective by the training in non-violence baked into our basic mindfulness practice.
Before and Afer, by Consuelo Mancheta of Valencia, Spain
whatever blocks your heart is unreal
Jack Kornfield observes that whatever blocks your love is, in the end, unreal. The twelfth-century Sufi philosopher El-Ghazali observed:
If you can lose it in a shipwreck, it isn’t yours.
I don’t think we can easily lose this love in a shipwreck.
We just rest for a moment, being purely and simply present, awake and aware, with no agenda at all, we radically step out of our habitual comfort zones of control, manipulation, and could have-would have-should have.
this takes courage
Living with mindfulness and meeting each moment as it is takes practice, and a kind of courage. I’ve been told this courage is depicted symbolically as those fierce figures in Vajrayana Buddhist iconography.
In times of stress and uncertainty, we may cling to a protected place. This is a small space, where we aren’t fully ourselves, and want to control life. We like to think in this space that we aren’t vulnerable, but that’s not so.
Mindfulness mirrors our humanity. It’s just plain vulnerable to be human, to be in a body, and be intimate with others in this way.
tenderness
To meet that vulnerability fully, not half-assed, that’s tenderness. We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability. It’s the birthplace of the renewable energy sources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.
And the good news is that they are already here for us, at the center of our being, just waiting for us to put down our burdens.
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12/21/2017