FilmOnDeepWater

Patience

7 February 2006
Napa, CA

On Friday last week my friend, Roger, and I went up to Occidental, a small town in Northern California, to sit with a group from the Pacific Zen Institute.  This was their last full day of a seven or eight day retreat.  The retreat was in a lovely area in a dense stand of redwoods.  The air was cool and quiet; the soil moist and musky.  All in all a perfect place to sit in meditation for few hours, and then hear a talk about meditating.

The sitting part was fine for me.  There was a sort of break every twenty-five minutes or so.  Someone rang a bell, and whoever wanted to would then join the group in a walking meditation for a little while.  Or, if you wanted to, it was fine to just stay put and sit with whatever was occurring in that moment.  Very zenny. 

Time, for me anyway, moved as it often does when I am sitting like that.  I notice that sometimes the moments fly by, and I find myself quite still and at home with myself.  Then moments emerge that seem to drag on forever, and I feel like a great ship dragging her anchor across the seafloor.  I can almost hear the chains moaning under the strain.  And I feel myself wanting to break the chains freeing myself from that anchor and allowing myself to drift off into unconsciousness – the way I can when I daydream.

And the time moved along in those ways that time moved until it was dinnertime.

Right from the moment of our arrival that afternoon we were welcomed.  Michelle, who I guess became the unofficial greeter, made sure that we were comfortable.  No doubt she would have invited us to join them for dinner.  As it happened, Roger had brought along a fabulous chicken salad for the ride up, so we weren’t hungry.  We decided to take a walk while the group went on to dinner.  We arrived back at the main building in time to sit for a half hour or so before the talk and before my excruciating tussle with patience would begin.

The talk (I guess because it was the finale for the week) turned out to be a two-fer.  John, the meditation teacher I wrote about before, was joined by his colleague, David.  They had decided to do a talk in which each one would add some comments to the other’s.  Perhaps there was a coin toss in the foyer, I don't know.  Anyway David went first, and he began to speak about patience…

Early on in his talk David introduced a story as an analogy to the meditative process.  It was a story about patience, and waiting, and it was meant (I think) to highlight a kind of posture of waiting needed for meditation. 

It was a really stupid story about a dog left behind by a Japanese guy at a big train station in Tokyo and the guy died at work and because he happened to be dead at the time he didn't come back to the station that night and the dog ended up waiting every day at the station looking expectantly at each passenger for about ten years until he died too and the Japanese people erected a statue of the dog commemorating such loyalty and devotion and patience.

Did I mention how stupid I thought the story was? 

Oh, and did I mention how impatient I was becoming as I listened to this stupid story? 

Christ, I thought, why didn't someone take the poor dog home?  Maybe he could have found some kids to play with, or some cats to chase?  And the statue, what’s up with that?  It seems that people in Japan really like suffering and the idea of this longing.  As I said to Roger later, the Japanese seemed to have put the “d” into delayed gratification…

Once I was able to let go of this one trait shared by many people in Japan that I find rather unappealing, the rest of the talk was OK.  I got used to being irritated with David’s story, and even took home another koan from John that seemed useful.  At one point he introduced a koan that says something like this: The coin lost in the river is found in the river.  That got my attention as I began to think about how often I have lost a coin in the river and then went off to look for it under the broccoli dish, or (in my less irrational and more concrete moments) under the cushions in the couch.  And I thought about how impatient I was becoming, and how much I was irritated thinking about all the coins, all the important facets in my life, that I have lost in the river, that do not ever show up under the broccoli dish or behind the couch cushions. 

But mostly I was irritated by that stupid Japanese shaggy dog story.

And then somehow Friday became Saturday, and finally I became curious about why I had such a reaction to that story, why I carried it with me all the way back to Berkeley, and slept with it that night, and woke with it, and then carried it all through the day until I found myself sitting with it in a coffee place in Berkeley waiting for my Verger* friend, Rachel, to come and meet me for a quick dinner before she went off for the evening.

And gradually, the story became less stupid.

As it happens from time to time in the Bay Area on a Saturday evening, traffic sucked.  Actually, as it happens every Saturday in the Bay Area, traffic sucks.  This particular Saturday evening it just sucked more than usual.  Since I wasn’t coming down from Napa like Rachel was, I could take surface streets and merely become impatient with the stupid traffic barriers that the proletariat in Berkeley had their commissars in the city council erect in order to make it impossible to get from Point A to Pont B in Berkeley without having to touch base with at least six other points in a zigzag pattern that is almost as irritating as that story.  Even with all those impediments, though, I was able to get to the coffee place before the time we had set to meet.  Rachel on the other hand, was on I80 somewhere north of Berkley.  She did not share my good fortune.

And so there I was sitting in strategic spot at a busy intersection in Berkeley watching all the hustle and bustle of a Saturday evening, and I began to think about that little dog. 

What must it have been like for him?  I could almost see him with his tongue hanging out, and his tail wagging, straining to see each passenger.  The eager look when he would see someone who resembled his master, who wore a similar coat, who had similar hair.  And then that moment of disappointment, when he realized that this man in the coat was not the one he was waiting for.  And then that awful moment when there were no more passengers that day, when the crowd had thinned.  Did he go home, or did he find a place to sleep near the station? 

Certainly, I have had such experiences in my life – literally.  There is a time I will never forget waiting in old Terminal 1 (that pier is closed now) at the San Francisco Airport, waiting for the woman I loved to come up the jetway at Gate 14 in those days when you could wait at the gate for arriving passengers.  How I scanned everyone looking for her, and how after some number of passengers had deplaned, I worried that maybe she missed the flight, and how then I saw her, and all the waiting – patiently and impatiently - and all the longing for her arrival just evaporated like the tule fog when the sun comes up.

Those kinds of waiting are full of expectancy.  Always there waiting with me at the edges of my awareness - in those kinds of waiting times - is the possibility of disappointment.  Somehow, though, in this particular waiting time, sitting at this particular table outside this coffee place, watching people all around me come and go in the early evening, I noticed that I was neither patient nor impatient.  I noticed the couple at the next table pouring over a newspapaer looking up the time of the movie they wanted to see.  Her hand resting on his knee.  His arm across her shoulder.  This affection for each other was so clear that it was almost transparent, almost invisible.  Then I noticed the old man walking so carefully so as not to spill his coffee that he had filled too close to the brim.  And then two girls came walking by arm in arm smiling and talking at the same time.  Everything was just as it was.

Then I thought about Rachel, and how she must be a bit frantic by now and worried about keeping me waiting.  And since I was not frantic, and not disappointed, and not expectant, and neither patient nor impatient, I was able to get in touch with the compassion I had for her in that moment.  I was also aware that I was powerless to change anything.  If I called her to tell her not to be frantic, she might only become more impatient and stressed.  So I just waited.  I was looking forward to seeing her without being concerned with how much time we would have together.  Fifteen minutes.  An hour.  It was all the same.

What became clear to me then was how different this kind of waiting is.  How little this kind of waiting has to do with patience.  When I am able to sit without expectation, without the fear of disappointment, without all the usual chatter in my head, then I am able to experience a compassionate mind – at least for a moment or two.   

So what of this word patience that you have been waiting patiently to know about?  As it happens, it has an origin that is quite telling.   Patience comes from the Middle English pacient, from Middle French, from Latin patient-, patiens, from present participle of pati "to suffer"; perhaps akin to Greek pEma suffering.

It is a good thing not to suffer once in a while.

* Verger refers to On the Verge, a group of emerging young leaders in the Bay Area working in non-profit organizations.

Hope

15 January 2006
Berkeley, CA

More and more I realize how often I confuse hope with expectation.  Hope, as we have come to know the word, has changed very little.  In Old English it was hopian, and was related to the Old German hoffen, to hope.  Not much new there, except to notice how these simple, powerful words in our lives seem to change so little over time.   But the real learning occurred for me when I looked at a second definition for hope, and archaic one – trust.

This old, dusty use of the word opens new possibilities.  Such a way of thinking about, or holding, hope brings it very much into the present moment.  And it makes it much less some expectation in and for the future. 

What if I were to substitute the word trust for hope whenever I encounter it?

I trust that I will sustain joy in my life.
I trust that all is unfolding now in ways that it needs to.
I trust that my heart will remain open to all that is possible.

And then, from this perch hopelessness becomes the same as trustlessness.  “The situation is trustless”, seems to be a more honest sentence than: “The situation is hopeless.”

Grounding hope in the bedrock of trust forces me to take responsibility for the posture I am holding.  If I am feeling hopeless, no when I am feeling hopeless, what would happen if were to instead sit with my trustlessness?  It is then that I would see the deeper connection that hope has to fear.  If, and when, I am without hope, and so without trust, it is then when I am acting or not acting because of fear and isolation.  I cannot then hold on to the illusion that the “situation is hopeless”.   The only thing a situation can be is situated.  The honest statement here would be, “I am hopeless.”  And again looking deeper at this, I would have to say, “I am trustless.”

So now, what of this word “trust”?  It is as old and as unchanged as hope.  Trust is a variation of true, especially in the sense of being reliable and dependable.  Thinking about it more, the word “trustworthy” came to mind.  That word has such a wonderful quality of dependablity as well.

The root of this word, dependable, is pendere, which means “to hang”, like a pendant.  In a way being trustworthy has much the same attribute as a pendant hanging around someone’s neck.  It is like a plumb line, steady and true, always pointing in the same direction.

If I say, “I am hopeless”, then I am also saying, "I am trustless”.  To be without truth is to lose one's way. 

Hope is a posture in the present.  If I say, “I am hopeful”, then obviously I am also holding in that moment the possibility that I am trustful as well.  And here to be truthful means to be as trustworthy as that pendant, as reliable as a compass needle.

Hope also then becomes an investment in others.  A way of putting myself in trust with and for others.  There can be no hope in isolation, just as there can be no truth.  In this way hope is always in a relationship with truth.      

Not Knowing

12 January 2006
Berkeley, CA

This morning I sat with an idea presented by John Tarrant, the meditation teacher up in Santa Rosa.  During his talk, he said, “Not knowing is a wonderful place to rest.” After sitting with this thought for a while I found myself settling into not knowing in ways that I had not before.  I don't know how to describe the feeling here – another experience of not knowing!

Not knowing is about mystery and surprise.  In these moments sitting with not knowing, I had a similar experience as I did when I was contemplating the word station a while back.  How station has such a restful quality to it.  Maybe one of the way stations in my life should be called “Uncertainty”.  What might some of the other stations be called?  Where are some other places to rest?

Odd how from this perspective certainty, knowing, has a draining quality to it.  Or at least some sense of depletion.  When I know, I am not at rest.  I am in motion, in the doing.  A good thing – no less so than resting.  It is just that in this moment I am aware of the heaviness, aware of how burdensome, knowing can be. 

Sometimes I try so hard to know – holding on to the possibility that knowing will somehow be relieving, be soothing.  Yet, how often is this the case?  What if, for instance, I really “knew” someone, even myself, with a sense of certainty?  What might follow from that?  The feeling I have in this moment is that I would then experience that person as a kind of dead weight.  They would feel heavy to me, and probably not much more than that.  I know the small, ornamental anvil on the living room floor.  I know it to be dense and heavy.  There is literally not much more to it.  All that is left are some inconsequential questions about how dense and how heavy.   That’s about it.

If I really knew another person, how would that be any different from my knowing the anvil?  That person would be reduced to some attributes – the way any object is reduced.  This is heavy.  That thing is light.  The one over there is pretty.  The other thing is broken.  Objectifying is a product of this reduction process.  If I can reduce whomever or whatever sufficiently, I can know that object.  But I can only know it as static, as inanimate, and in a way as dead.

Striving for certainty has a quality of trying to rest with that anvil around my neck.  Not an easy thing to do.  The antidote to this striving seems to be a posture of openness to all possibilities.  Resting in uncertainty this way really does allow for the emergence of all possibilities, including the possibility of knowing.

Accepting “that which is” encompasses a kind of knowing that comes without the suffering attached to reducing and objectifying.  If and when I can sit with what is – what is me, what is another, without trying to know, without judging and assessing, without thoughts of a make-over (a bit more of this, a little less of that… all the what-ifs and if-onlys), then I could settle into the kind of knowing that is also loving.

Love in this sense becomes a mysterious kind of resting in certainty.  A certainty that comes with accepting another and a knowing the other (and myself) because I am attending to all that is showing up.  Nothing more and nothing less.  Loving in this way is sitting with the possibility that whatever is showing up is enough.  What could be more restful than that?

Expectation

12 December 2005
Berkeley, CA

What are expectations? Ex-pectere means “to look forward”.  In addition to the current meanings to the word, there is also an archaic one.  Expect also means “to wait” or “to stay”.  From this meaning there is a quality of standing still while looking forward.  With this in mind, how do I hold the distinction between expectation and anticipation?

Anticipate comes from ante-capere, and capere means “to take”.  Anticipation, then, is a kind of taking before there is an offering. In my imagination I create something I want to have, or to occur in my life.  My anticipation is expressed in the images I create that make it as if this thing, or this occurrence, has already come into being.  Anticipation is a taking, maybe even a stealing, from the future.

Just how different is expectation form this?  Isn’t it another way of stealing from the future?  As I was looking into these words, another emerged that is related in some ways to capere.  That word is heave, as in “to heave a heavy rock”.  In Middle English it is heven, and in Old English it is hebbe, which means “to lift”.

Maybe anticipate is on a different axis than expect.  Rather than looking forward, anticipate has a quality of lifting up, or at least looking up.  Some quality of raising up.  Whereas expectation has a more expansive feel to it – of looking out and forward to the horizon line both in terms of space and time.  And there can be a somewhat neutral sense to the word.  If I am standing still while looking forward, and not anticipating a good thing or a bad thing, a happy event or a sad one, just looking, then there is a quality of waiting for whatever is “out there” to be offered to me, instead of me grabbing it from the future.  Taking from the future what does not belong to me yet, blinds me in the present to what does belong to me now.

Worry

9 January 2006
Berkeley, CA

The other day I found myself worrying about something.  Doesn't matter what, really.  Maybe it was global warming, or my son’s future, or my future.  Whatever.  I was worried.  And I became aware of how familiar the feeling was.  Familiar and uncomfortable at the same time.

So what of this word worry?  Where does it come from and what are its deeper meanings?  Turns out that worry has a short, but ancient lineage.  In Middle English it was worrien, form the Old English wyngan.  In that form it is related to the Old German word wungen.  And here is where it gets interesting – wungen means, “to strangle, or constrict”.

When I am worrying, what am I strangling?  What am I constricting?  Immediately what came to mind was that I am strangling the possibility for change, for the situation to be any different than it is in that moment.

Until now I never thought of how limiting worry is.  This primal focus on one outcome, one unfortunate, unpleasant, or even tragic, outcome.

Worrying, when I look at to through this lens of language, is like having a death grip on the throat of the future.  The flow of possibility becomes so constricted that the only droplets that can get past that grip are precisely the ones that I so want to prevent from emerging into the world.

Holding on - even with a light touch - to this notion of worry as a form of strangulation, I can feel myself letting go of some of that worry that I was focused on a minutes ago when I began this entry.  I find that I have given myself some breathing room to allow for other possibilities to emerge.

Like most things of this nature, it seems that the antidote for worry is breathing.  And there may be something important here.  In a way the origins of this word inform me that worry is somehow lodged in the throat, and in the neck.  If I open my throat I can also let go of grief, and loss.  Opening the throat also allows me to connect more deeply to my heart.

The Medusa story also comes to mind here.  It is revealing to hold the image of Medusa’s hair that was transformed into snakes as a manifestation of strangled thoughts with a writhing and worrying nature to them.  When Perseus cut off her head, out of that wellspring came the blood that spilled into the ground.  From that pool emerged Pegasus, the winged horse, and the patron of creativity, especially poets and writers.

Worry becomes a slayer of the future.  It becomes another way for me to lapse into unconsciousness, another way for me to lose my way.  And as I open myself up to other ways of being in this moment besides worrying, I find that I become flooded with feelings of compassion and care.

As I let go of worry, I feel a sense of openness to change, an openness to the inherent truth that everything is right here waiting for me.  And what is this everything waiting for?  Maybe it is waiting for me to release the dammed up possibilities that I have strangled and constricted with so much worrying.

Belonging

3 January 2006
Napa, CA

Somehow I managed to do it again!  I was late again getting to the meditation session in Santa Rosa last night. This time it was due to the road closed across the mountain from Saint Helena.  That – the closed road and all the recent flooding - is one explanation.  The other, more valuable, explanation is that I am learning about belonging, and it is a long and difficult lesson.

What is most important for me to capture here, though, is the process I am watching unfold.  Almost magically, I arrived at the meditation last night at the exact same time as the week before – fifteen minutes late.  Only this time, rather than walking around the neighborhood for a bit less than a half hour waiting for the meditation to end, I sat and meditated on a bench near the back door.  I sat with the feeling of being an outsider.  I also sat with the koan that John, the Zen teacher, gave me last week – The whole world is medicine.  My mind turned on the word “medicine” – its healing quality.  Healing led me to health, and health brought me to home, and home brought me to belonging – right where I started from.

I began to feel a sense of home as a field that neither moves nor stays still.  I also began to experience belonging as a kind of granting permission.  Not just granting myself permission, but also receiving permission from others who are in this field.  I was not at all aware of the what in all this – the granting permission to do? To just be? To belong?  Not at all sure.  And then I realized that as long as I am open to accepting that permission, it is always open to me.  It may be just as true that belonging is a gift I give to others as much as a gift I receive from others.

“Belong” comes from the Middle English word belongen.  And longen means “to be suitable”.   In ancient days suitable meant something different than it does today.  Then suitable meant “similar, matching”.  Its last vestige, I guess, is the four suits in a deck of cards.  There still was the sense of “fit”, but maybe back then fit was a bit tighter than now.

There is some important learning for me here.  Just as I am never “exactly the size I am” (as an old companion of mine would say), the fit may not be exact either.  When I pay attention to my breathing, I am aware of how my body is constantly changing shape, how it expands and contracts with each breath.  I – this material self – is no less ephemeral than my constantly shifting emotional self, or emotional body, or my spiritual self for all that.

And just as I am never exactly the size I am, my clothes – this “suit” I wear, is never exactly the size it is either.   The next time I look at a label with a garment’s size, I hope I stay aware that this is their size only when the garments are not breathing.

Just as a good suit is forgiving as my body changes size and shape in every moment, so it is with a community of belonging.  Maybe belonging is a kind of conspiracy where everyone who belongs is breathing together, where everyone gives permission to all the many selves who show up in the constant expansion and contraction to just show up, and expect no more than that.

So, there I was sitting on the bench next to the back door sitting with belonging.  There came a moment when I chose to break another of my well-worn patterns.  As quietly as I could, I entered the house through the back door and went into the kitchen.  I sat in a chair next to the kitchen table.  The kitchen was perfect in its ordinariness as a kitchen – comfortable in its familiarity.  And then in that moment I found some peace.  I found in that moment that I was exactly where I belonged – right on the edge, right at the boundary of belonging.

Had I chosen to stay out there on the little patio, I would have ploughed another well-tilled field.  And I somehow knew that going into the living room with the others would have been a tight fit in that moment, and so would not have been suitable.

It was then that I realized that only in that moment did I belong on the periphery, in the vestibule of my own house.  In that moment I also remembered the vestibule in my grandmother’s house.  It was a place of transition – a place to take off my jacket and boots on a winter afternoon, a place for me to become comfortable with belonging.

A bench is medicine.  So is a kitchen chair.  And a vestibule.  The whole world is medicine.

Wishes and Choices

Wishes and Choices
Berkeley, CA                                                            
11 October 2002

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.  I think that is how my grandmother said it.  But the truth of it is that wishes are horses, unbridled ones, unsaddled ones at that.  Once I mount one of these horses, I relinquish control – over my choices, my destiny.  Over time and over memory.  It is just off toward whatever destination these horses – my wishes – take me.

What is a wish anyway?  It is an old word. Old English, Germanic and Icelandic word.  Funny how the words from the frigid north change so little.  It is as if they hold their forms the way glaciers do.  Slowly releasing a letter here and there over the ages.  The way glaciers recede by shedding icebergs over time.

The word “wish” was wichen before medieval times, and it meant “to desire”.  Wish still does mean that.  But here seems to be some subtle difference now from then.  I make a wish.  But do I make a desire?  I suppose not.  Instead, I suspect, that I experience one.  Desire, de + sidere, literally means “from the stars”.  A star seems to be a burgeoning thread here.  When a child wishes upon a star, what is she doing?  When I wish upon a star, what am I doing?  Maybe I am grounding my wishes in the distant cradle of my origins, the essential stuff of my being.  It is as if I am anchoring my wish and somehow giving it direction.  Or maybe it is that I am taking some kind of direction from the stars the way sailors chart their way home with them.

Wishing upon a star has the quality of desiring to go home – home in the deepest sense of the word.  Home as harbor, as the sure shelter that calms the waves and buffers the winds.  Maybe wishes aren’t horses after all.  Maybe they are compass points for the heart. Precious love notes from the soul. 

                                                                                                            11 November 2002

Choices in my life emerge from an awareness of possibility.  They emerge from the very core of myself.  For what am I, what are we at our essence, if not possibility? I am all the choices I make.  I am possibility made actual at this moment in time.  And what of the next moment?  Nothing more or less than a whole new galaxy of possibilities made actual.  I make my choices, while at the same time my choices make me.  Is it simply a matter of being present to what is?  To what I have chosen?  Is that enough, or is there more?  Embedded in the question, I suppose, is perhaps not an answer, but at least a position.  No, awareness is not enough.  Being present is the context for meaningful action.  It is not an action in and of itself.

So what now of this word choice?  Well, like “wish” it has changed little over the centuries.  In Middle English it was choise, and meant then what it means today – to freely select one thing over another.  As a verb, it holds a distant kinship to the Sanskrit word, jusate, meaning “he enjoys, tastes, or loves”.  In my wanderings looking into the origins of choice I came upon the curious adjective - choice as in “the best”.  The choicest cut of meat.  Choice seats at the theatre, and so forth.  This act of choosing, this creating actuals out of possibles, and then distilling them down to the “choicest” bits – what if this were how I lived my life?  What if I were to live my life as a choice life?  As the choicest life possible?  How would that look different from the life I am living now?  Would it taste different?  Would I love differently?

I am choosing to type these particular words across this particular screen.  And by doing this I am letting go of all the other possibilities available to me.  As I attend to this simple act, I see it in its unfathomable depth.  Choice is not the same as freedom.  Once I choose, and I am awake to my choosing, I see that I am bound by that choice.  I am bound to complete that act, or choose to let it be incomplete, and then accept the consequences for either choice.

Making choices may not be a liberating act in itself, but making conscious choices is a way, maybe the way, toward liberating myself, toward getting off that unbridled horse.  Becoming free is completely dependent on my awareness of the binding nature of choice.

Happiness and Joy

Happiness and Joy
Philadelphia, PA                                                                           
28 August 2005
                                                                                                 

This morning, while cleaning up the kitchen and making some coffee, I found myself wondering about the difference, or the distinctions, between happiness and joy.  Actually, it didn’t start there.  It began, this thread began while thinking about a conversation yesterday with Mother and Dad.

They are both the most systematically, and relentlessly pessimistic people I know.   Mother has been predicting another ‘Great Depression” for decades.  She has been probably right all along about that, but just not in the realm of macroeconomics!  And Dad is such a worrier.  He twists and turns most experiences and events in his world until he has figured out every unfortunate outcome.  Then he seems to fixate on the most unfortunate of all the possible misfortunes that might befall him, and waits for that to occur.

Last night, I mentioned to him only half-jokingly that pessimists generally live longer than optimists.  At least this is what I recall from a brief conversation I had with Marty Seligman from Penn a while back.   Since both Mother and Dad are pushing on ninety, there may well be something to this.  If it is true about pessimists living longer, though, I do wonder why.

At first blush I would think that the opposite would be true since optimism is a philosophical doctrine that asserts that this world, this “actual world”, is the best of all possible worlds, I would think that optimists would like to live in this “best of all possible worlds” a bit longer.  That seems not to be the case.  Maybe, because they are so often pleasantly surprised that things did not turn out so badly, or as badly as they predicted, pessimists are by and large happier. And maybe it is that optimists are so often disappointed.

That is how I got to thinking about this distinction between happiness and joy.

When I looked up this word “happy”, I was immediately struck by how obvious the root word is, and how odd that it never occurred to me.  “Happy” was first used in the fourteenth century and meant “fortune or lucky”.  Its root is “hap”, meaning chance.   Hap, as in happen, or happenstance, or haphazard.

Two things come to mind about this root, hap.  One is how neutral it is.  Hap happens.  There are fortunate haps and unfortunate haps.  Happy seems to be a hap on the fortunate side of the ledger.  The other realization that came my way here is how random, how haphazard, happiness actually is.  It is almost to say that happiness is a random occurrence, a sort of negative train wreck.  Happiness, then, is something I might pursue, but, if I am rigorously honest in this pursuit, I must also acknowledge that I cannot attain this happiness unless it somehow comes to me.

This new understanding of this word, happy, can possibly shift my whole view – the difference between “the pursuit of happiness” and an expectation that I “will be happy” just got bigger.

Joy in its origins was less surprising, but no less revealing.  It comes from joie, meaning “gladness, delight, joy”.  Coming from the Latin, gaudia, by way of the French, it means “to rejoice”.  Joy has a “state of being” quality to it that “happy” lacks. Joy is not a hap.  Joy just is.

How often am I reminded of Chime Rinpoche’s* admonition: When he spoke to his students about responsibility, and said, “It is your responsibility to sustain joy in your life.”  How powerful that was for me to hear at the time.  Grafting joy and responsibility with the expertise of a tree surgeon was a stunning moment.

On a deeper level I now see that it is only by letting go of the expectation of happiness that I can sustain joy in my life.  It is not that the two cannot coexist.  More so it is that joy is a response.  It doesn't just “happen”.  Joy is a response to the hap.  Maybe joy is in knowing that “this too shall pass”, regardless the “this too”.  Engaging fully in the world - with the deep awareness of its impermanence - may well be the way to write joy into my life in a sustained way.

And maybe then I can let happy just hap now and again.

* Chime Rinpoche is one of the several Tibetan lamas who were charged by his order to go into the west to establish Tibetan monasteries throughout Europe, the United States and Australia.  I believe that, even though he is a "stateless person" whose home was taken over by the Chinese, he is also one of the most joyful individuals I have ever encountered.

Regard

Regard
Oakland, CA                                                                                        
19 July 2000
                                                                                                            

Somehow I lost sight of the future.  I had it, I had the capacity, and then I lost it.  So far it has not returned.  And that is troublesome.  Living in the moment does not mean disregarding the future.  Living in the moment also means living with regard.  With regard for myself, with regard for others, with regard to the past, as well as to the future.

There is a lovely definition at the bottom of the list of definitions for regard.  It says, “Obsolete: To take care of”.  It seems sad to me that this definition fell out of fashion.  I wonder when that was.  It may serve me well to bring it back into use.

Living in the moment means to live with regard; it means taking care of myself and others, taking care of the past, as well as the future.  How do I “regard” the past and the future?  Maybe I do it by holding as honest a picture of the past as I can.  Neither with too much recrimination, self-recrimination that is, and not too much self-deception either.  Taking care of the future means to be more planful, more aware of the possibilities that may, or may not, emerge based on the picture I create of the future and my actions in this moment that take care of that picture.

Regard is a wonderful word.  I may use it more in my letters and notes in the ether world.  So often I read (or write myself) at the end of a note “Take care”, when “Regards” or “Warmest Regards” has a much richer history. 

Regard also means “to observe closely”.   So, it also has the quality of attentiveness to it.  This particular meaning well serves the sense of living in the moment posture as well.   To live with regard requires me to pay attention and to hold someone, or something, with a sense of respect and esteem.  There are times when I have been living for the moment, rather than in the moment.  In those times I have been living regardless – literally living without regard to the four pillars of the present: self and others, past and future.  Living for the moment has a quality of self-absorption and mindless subjectivity to it.   When I am living for the moment, I am a consumer having no appreciation, no regard, for all the time, effort and attention that went into whatever it was that I just consumed.  Everything I encounter has the quality of cotton candy, when I am living for the moment, when I am living without regard.

And having said all that, it does little good to focus too much on the times when I have lived merely for the moment.  I can even honor that past by being present, and by acknowledging, to myself anyway, that many such moments have comprised the fabric of my life. 

As I sit with this now, the now that emerges and recedes with each word I place on this page, I am only beginning to get a sense of how powerful it might be to live with regard, and how simple it might be actually. 

What does all this mean in practical, everyday terms?  It means to regard time and money as both distinct and important.  It means to regard myself with the same esteem I afford others.  It means being aware of how my past informs the present.  And it means paying more attention to what is possible in the future, and to honor it by moving into action to create that future.

Today, now, this now, the only now I have, is a good time to begin again.  I need/want to create the future in the present, to see greater possibilities embedded in the very kernel of the present.  Today is the day to begin again to live my life full of regard.

Safe

Safe
9 February 2002
Berkeley, CA

What does it mean to feel safe?  It is a feeling, or a situation?  Or is it a place?  What is it anyway, this notion of safe?  Are your valuables safe?  Are they in a safe?  Is the safe safe?  How safe can we expect to be?  What does it cost?  What am I willing to pay for it?  How safe is the homeland?  Can a homeland be safe? 

And now for some really bizarre questions.  Am I safer now than I was in the past?  If I were, why don’t I feel that way?  What is safe’s relationship to power?  Am I safer if I have more power?  Am I less safe the more powerful I become?  Strange questions for strange times.

This word safe is a curious one.  I use it all the time, yet I never looked into where it came from and how the roots of this word can inform me about how I am thinking and feeling these days.  As it turns out, in the English language anyway, safe has its roots in religion and theology.  In the thirteenth century or so the word sauf entered into the public discourse.  It meant “not damned”, or “redeemed”.  And perhaps there is a deep longing in my psyche to know that ultimately I am not damned, or that I am somehow redeemed, whatever those two phrases might mean.

Redemption is about “buying back”.  For me to be safe, for me to be redeemed, who is the buyer?  Who is the seller?  What was/is the price?  Is it worth it?  What am I willing to pay to be safe?  Have I already paid, and just don’t know it?  I remember hearing Pat Rodegast speak once – she channels Emmanuel.  Someone one asked Emmanuel: What is the one thing that you wished that we all knew?
Emmanuel said, What I wish for you to know is this:  You are safe.  You are safe.  You are incredibly safe.

Do the leaders of this country feel safe?  In one sense, one very twisted sense, I suspect they do.  I believe they believe they are already “redeemed”.  Safe and sound.  Cocooned in the unreflected certainty of the rightness and righteousness of their position, and in their own personal redemption.  For them God truly is on their side.

So what happens when those who are safe and sound suddenly find themselves to be as vulnerable as the rest of the hoards of the great unwashed, of what they believe to be the as yet still unredeemed – you know, us?  What they do, I imagine, is bulk up.  They lift weights.  They buy lots of armor plating.

My money’s on Emmanuel.

Whim

Whim
21 August 2005
Berkeley, CA                                                                              

The other day this word whim entered into a dialogue I was engaged in.  This word has been reverberating inside my head ever since.  I guess I had better find out what it wants to teach me.  I am not sure why the word seems to hold so much power.  It has a stark honesty about it, maybe that’s it.

In what ways are the facets of my life affected by the whims of others?  In what ways are others affected by my whims?  Are whims a source of power, or a way of covering for my powerlessness?   How do whims serve me?  How do they wound me?

Whim came from the expression “whim-wham”.  This is lost now, but there was a time when a whim-wham was a trifle or a trinket – “a whimsical object especially of ornament or dress”.  It also held one of its current definitions even back then – “fancy”, as in liking something or someone because of caprice, rather than reason.

A whim has the quality of spontaneity to it.  A bit out of the blue.  I guess most important relationships begin this way.  I recall hearing Kim and Zoë in England talking about how they “fancied” this boy or that one. So, a whim is a capricious, spontaneous notion.  It is outside of reason, but not necessarily unreasonable.  All still a bit confusing to me.

Acting on a whim I get.  God knows I have done it enough.  But what would it be like, no what is it like, to “be at the whim”, or to “serve at the whim”, or to “work at the whim” of another?  Now it is beginning to get more serious, and maybe more dangerous.  A whim has a regal, “off with his head” quality to it.  A “because I said so, that’s why”.  There is more here that just dependency.  Many times, even now, I am dependent on others, but at the same time I feel safe in that relationship.  I feel safe because I know (or at least I believe) the next encounter I have with them will be pretty much the same as the last one.  I hope this is true for those who depend on me from time to time.

But what about when it isn’t true?  What about the times when I act on a whim and it is hurtful – what is that all about?  I am not sure, but in this moment I have the sense that, when I do act that way, when I do act capriciously, it is out of fear.  Fear of what?  That I will lose my independence?  Or fear that I will have to acknowledge my dependence?  I am not sure.  Maybe each is so at different times in my life.

So caprice is at the root of these whims.  I don’t recall ever looking into the origins of this teacher before…  Glad I did.  It has much to teach.  Caprice comes to English by way of the French, from the Italian.  (I love how well traveled this teacher is already!)  The Italian capriccio means “caprice” and “shiver”.  The word comes from capo – head and riccio – hedgehog.  Essentially, then, capriccio means “a head with hair standing on end”, and in a way it means “having the shivers”, or being frightened.

The quality of fear was embedded there all along.  Maybe if we are really awake, when that moment occurs when we see someone we really “fancy”, we should pay more attention to the hairs standing on end in the backs of our heads!  Exciting possibilities are exciting also because they are dangerous.

But the fear of working, or being involved in something important, at the whim of another is deeper and maybe even more dangerous.  Just before I closed up the dictionary I came upon another meaning for whim.  A whim is also a kind of drum that was used in the old mining days.  They would attach a horse or ox to this whim, and the animal would walk endlessly around and around pulling up ore, or pumping out water.  Maybe that is what it is like to work, or to live, at the whim of another – yoked with blinders on, head down, always knowing it is there, but never seeing the drum, never confronting the whim.

Whims can be exciting, but they are also dangerous, and maybe even a bit deadly.   

Accomplishment

Accomplishment
19 June 2005
Philadelphia, PA                                                                                    

This morning I woke up with the word “accomplishment”.  Well, maybe I didn’t wake up with the word.  While still half asleep, I was listening to the radio and a woman was being interviewed about her new book.  The writer, Julie Mars, (funny how I remember her name) wrote a book called A Month of Sundays about how she came to terms with her sister’s death.  She went to thirty-one different churches and synagogues and other faith settings and rituals to try to figure out why her sister had to suffer so much.

I have no idea why I just added so much detail.  I guess it has to do with creating some markers, so that when and if I reread this I will remember something of it.  Just like how right now I need to mention the sound of the birds chirping and how that is the only sound I hear right now except for the scratchy sounds of my pen and the occasional distant sound of a passing car.

So, I must have heard the word “accomplish” while listening to the radio.  Anyway, it came into the realm of forethought.  I guess that must mean something.

My books tell me that “accomplish” came into use around 1380.  It seems a lot of these words came in around this time.  Must have something to do with the French/Norman influences in England around then.  Does a change in language always come with bloodshed?  I think not always, but so often it has.

Accomplish started out as accomplisshen.  The French stem accomplishir means to fulfill.  The Latin root comes from complere, meaning "to fill up".  An accomplishment, then, it is a kind of full bag, or a full something, anyway.  And maybe that was the context in which I first heard the word this morning.  The author was talking about how, when her sister was dying, her sense of time shifted, as well as concerns about all she had done in her life – all of her accomplishments.

Again, I come to the same teaching from the words.  It is always the same; it is always a cycle.  It is always about paying attention and being present to that cycle, to the wheel.  The only way off the wheel is to become present to it.

Each breath I/we take is an accomplishment.  It is a cycle of emptying out and filling up again.  Sometimes when I am caught up in the doubts and questions and second-guessing about accomplishments and failures – now there’s an interesting polarity! – it is as if I am trying to breathe in and breathe out at the same time.

I just tried to find an antonym for accomplish besides failure, but there doesn't seem to be one.  The closest I came was loss.  At first that seemed insufficient, but as I thought about it more, as I sat with it, the word “loss” felt better as a polar opposite.  But the question remains for me: What is lost when I do not accomplish?  And what is lost when I do accomplish something?  And what is gained?

Maybe the teaching here is about both the necessity and the illusion of gain and loss.  As necessary and illusory as the cycles of my breath.  Each cycle contains the promise of the next breath.  Each one is complete, fulfilled.  With each breath I accomplish.  Yet, the promise is also illusory because one day, one time, one breath, the promise will be broken – just like the writer’s sister’s last breath.

Now it feels right to look at that other polarity to accomplishment - failure.  What does it mean to fail?  Is it just about “not accomplishing” something?  Is it related to my old friend enough?  Again deep in its origins, this word holds many teachings.  It came to us from Middle English (failen), by way of the Old French (failler) and originally from Latin (fallere).  This Latin word holds the nuggets.  Fallere means “to deceive, to disappoint”.

The opposite of an accomplishment, then, is a deception, a self-deception perhaps.  And at the core of a deception there also is a disappointment.  An accomplishment is a kind of honoring an appointment with myself, a kind of showing up.  Not surprisingly, another word for “appointment” is an engagement, and to engage is to honor a pledge.  Accomplishment then is a lovely necklace whose beads comprise elements like: being present, honoring a pledge, acknowledging loss, and risking failure.

As is so often the case, when I get to the end of the last page I am faced with the enormous mystery of the human condition.  At the end, at the very end at least, the accomplishment is to do nothing, and in so doing (or not doing) to be accomplished.

Undertaking

Undertaking
22 March 2004
Philadelphia, PA                                                                                    

What actually is taken under when I begin some endeavor, when I take something on?  And why is overtaking not the opposite of undertaking?  I sense that this notion of taking something on means that I will be pulled down, even weighted down by it – whatever the “it “ is.  Not necessarily a bad thing.  Maybe our undertakings ground us, give us mass and substance, purpose and meaning.

An undertaking is also a bit like a declaration – it stands on its own authority.  It exists, or begins anyway, when I say so freely, or at least act on it freely.  When I undertake something, I literally take it upon myself.  It cannot be imposed because, if it were, it would then be an order, or a directive, or an imposition.  An undertaking is a commitment then.  No wonder, when we are awake, we are apprehensive about the potential weight we are taking on.  Yet weight is not really the apt word here.  An undertaking has no more weight than the sound of a ringing bell.  It is more about the awareness of the irreversibility of it all.  It is about the transformative qualities that come with each undertaking.

And I can’t gloss over the reality that in the past we had undertakers, but today we have "funeral directors".  I guess now even death is so much more about presentation and show than it is about sitting with one of the great undertakings, one the great mysteries of life.  Funerals now are “produced and directed” much the way films are.  In the past there was more honesty about this undertaking business.  And there was the sense that someone had to do it for us.  In a spiritual sense the undertaker in his worn black suit, white shirt, dark tie and scuffed black shoes was there to “takes us under” and then lets us go.

Embedded then in every commitment, every undertaking, is a kind of death. Undertaking a relationship is a death to the solitary life I had before.  Undertaking parenting is a death to that untethered life I had before a child came careening into it.  Taking on a new career means letting go of what had been my path previously.  No matter how much I wish to avoid or deny this at times, it is there all the time nonetheless.  A little death, and sometimes a big death.  I guess in the moment I never really know which is which.

And then looking even deeper embedded in each of these deaths – both big and little – is the possibility for a life full of purpose.  Purpose, as I envision it here, has an abrasive quality to it.  Purpose can scrub away every vestige of inauthenticity I try to smuggle along with me from one life into another, from one undertaking to another, from one death to another.  Each undertaking - when I am fully awake to it – is a kind of cleansing, an opportunity for sacrifice and letting go, a promise of irreversible change, a commitment, and an invitation to love and be loved.

Reveal

Reveal
22 April 1999
Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 

Revealing is about removing a veil.  Literally, from a Latin word revelere meaning “to unveil, to reveal”.  It is not a terribly old word as they go, but it has been around for more than six hundred years.  What happens when we remove a veil?  There is such drama in the moment. What is behind it?  How will we feel after it is removed?  Who will we be with this new information?  How will the impact of this revelation change things?  And who exactly is behind the veil?  Is it another, is it me?  Is it a stranger, or one familiar? When we reveal ourselves to another, when we drop the veil, who is the knower and who is the known?

When the bride lifts her veil, or has it lifted by her new husband, she is seen for the first time.  And yet so is he.  They both are revealed, not just to each other, but to themselves as well.   It is as if in some deeply symbolic way before that moment, before the revealing, they had been not truly visible to each other, and maybe not visible to themselves either.

A revelation is an uncovering, not a discovery.  Discover is a word for another day.  Revelation is a moment of seeing clearly for the first time, seeing what was there the whole time, right before my eyes, yet it was obscured from view.  It is not something outside our awareness.  Its power comes from the very fact that it is mysterious, but is already present in our consciousness.  We see the bride, or an apparition of the bride.  We already know that there is a secret about to be uncovered. A mystery about to be revealed.

The act of revealing is an act of making us known to ourselves.  It is an act of becoming.  It is also an act of letting go.  Letting the veil drop can be an incredibly powerful moment of tolerating being seen, of becoming completely visible and known. 

The moment the veil drops we are not only seen, but perhaps for the first time, we can see clearly.  When we choose to live our lives with the seductive sisters - secrecy and mystery - as close companions, we also give up the possibility of seeing the world as it is.  We can only see the world through the veil of our own distorted sense of safety.  Revealing is choosing to be known, and to know that I can also free myself to see, to know, to accept, and to love.

Provide

Provide
18 March 2005
Philadelphia, PA                                                                                     

Provide is a powerful word.  When I am providing, what am I doing?  The word itself offers me some guidance.  Literally, provide means "to see ahead", or "to look ahead".  Providing means to hold the vision for action, to hold the provisions.  It implies an action in service to others.  It seems almost impossible for me to say the word “provide” without following it with “for”.  A provider, then, is one who holds the foreknowledge, the awareness, of what is over the horizon line.

Until now I don’t think I ever really understood the word “providence”.  I guess before now I thought of it in a vague way as some good things falling down upon us like a gentle, soothing summer rain.  Now I am beginning to see providence as an active engagement, a taking care of, a posture of benevolent vigilance.

When we are truly at our best as providers – as adults, as parents, as friends - we are literally “seeing ahead” for another.  True providing goes well beyond the material; it goes to a capacity to hold the image of a landscape that is beyond the horizon line, beyond what those we are in service to can imagine.  To live with this deep intentionality is to have a visceral awareness that actions in the present, in this moment, ripple across the physical, emotional and spiritual landscapes beyond the limits of what usually can be perceived.  So, in this sense living intentionally means to live providently.  In a way it means taking the risk of perching in the crow’s nest so those below will eventually gain, or regain, their footing on solid land.

Intentional living, provident living, has within it the possibility for growth and deeper insight.  The trick, of course, is to stay in the present on this perch and not become so focused on the future that I lose sight of the now, so focused on the material that I lose sight of the spirit. 

Experiencing providence in my life means at times trusting in the vision of others, just as it means trusting my own vision to serve them as well.

Indulgence

Indulgence
18 September 2000
Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 

What does it mean to "indulge”?  I know it comes from indulgere, meaning “to be complacent, to yield, to concede”.  In our culture most of these words are bitter ones to bite on.  Another artifact from the Puritans?  Could be, but deeper than that, I believe.  In a competitive world, conceding is losing.  We make such poor distinctions between giving in and giving up.  And do the distinctions really matter all that much?  Maybe they do.  Giving up has the quality of defeat, of subordination -- literally ordering myself below.  Giving in has the quality of surrender, but paradoxically not necessarily being defeated.  There is a certain honorableness, an authentic humility, when we give in to a power, to a reality, greater than ourselves. 

Indulge has the connotation of softness, or wimping out.  This is especially true when directed at myself.  I seem to have no problem asking in many subtle ways for other people to indulge me - for being late, for not being organized, for being overextended.  It seems OK to ask it of others, but is it more difficult to grant such indulgences to others?  Often I think it is.  Where does giving in meet giving up?  Am I at my core a self-indulgent person, and I am somehow ashamed of that fact?  In another moment this feeling, this belief, this question, may pass… and that may very well be another well-disguised, self-indulgent moment.

After a rather long search I believe I came across the opposite of indulgence -- rigor.  There is a hardness, and unbending quality to rigor that counterpoints indulgence well.  When I think of rigor I see the rigging for the trapeze in a circus tent.  The tautness that speaks of care, attention to detail, and being unforgiving with anything less than perfection.  There is no forgiveness in such rigor, no indulgences granted.  And the performers seem to mirror this rigor.

Indulgence without rigor leads to a dangerously suffocating softness.  Such an imbalance leads to a kind of unhealthy loss of self, a handing over of the self to the indulgent behavior.  Indulgence without rigor has a drowning quality to it - as if I were drowning in my own permissiveness, in my own inactivity, in my own reluctance to take a stand, my own reluctance to move into action. 

Rigor without indulgence, on the other hand, leads to a severity, a stringency, that is equally dangerous.  Rigor without indulgence becomes an external skeleton that has a shell-like quality to it.  Clams and oysters are images of rigor without indulgence.  They have a hard shell with no internal structure to support the interior life -- all tissue and no bones.  Maybe that's the danger of such relentless rigor.  Camouflaged self-indulgence that appears rigorous to the outside, but that really leads to a sort of oyster-like existence, a life with no backbone. 

There are, however, other definitions, other qualities, associated with this word indulgence -- qualities like tenderness and forbearance and kindness.  Forbearance is particularly important here.  The capacity to show tolerance and restraint, to know deeply the distinction between giving in and giving up in the face of provocation, is the result of a mysterious alchemy that produces the correct mixture of rigor and indulgence.

It is as if our very bones, our struggle to harden ourselves without coarsening our character, is softened and made pliable and more resilient by this quality of indulgence permeating the equally important rigor in our lives. 

Skill

Skill
22 September 2000 - Autumnal Equinox
Portola Valley, CA                                                                         
                                                                                                            

Last day of summer, first day of fall.  Actually, it is an autumn morning, with no trace at all of summer.  No doubt moments, fleeting moments, of summer will come by, but there is also no doubt that summer is over.

This has been a difficult season for me.  No doubt about that.  Most of the time I have been alone, a bit of a hermit, I guess.  Strange how I don't feel isolated like I did before.  I feel more separated instead.  A distinction that I never thought of before.  Me being isolated is more of a state of being.  In a way it feels imposed.  I don’t think I choose isolation.  It chooses me.  Separation is different.  It is more of a clear choice.   It is something I do with more, rather than less, awareness in the moment.

The distinction is not always as clear as I just made it out to be.  I see that now.  In this moment I feel isolated.  It has nothing to do with geography.  It has everything to do with psychology – or psyche, anyway.  Maybe all this is being triggered by the appearance of fall.  I don’t know if I can tolerate an even deeper descent into the psyche.  I feel like I have already descended too far for too long.  Maybe I will move counter to the seasons and move into action when, or while, the garden moves into stillness.

I have idea after idea for the website.  Could be that I have too many ideas.  I still lack some of the skills I need.  I need some time around writers, to be with people who care about and know good writing.

The isolation must be getting to me.  I keep checking my e-mail – as if the in-box is some determinate of my skill? funny word to write.  I hadn’t intended to write “skill”, but I did.  I was going to say “some determinate of my existence”, but I didn’t.

Turns out that skill has an interesting root system.  Comes from skel, which means “to cut”.  It is from an Old Norse word, skil, meaning “reason, discernment, knowledge – as in “incisiveness”.  And then there is incisive, which means “to cut”.

What have I been cutting away, or not cutting away?  What are my skills now?  All skills seem to share this common element of cutting.  Whether it is the skill of the carpenter, or of the surgeon, or of the writer – it’s all the same.  It is essentially about cutting away all that is extraneous, all that is non-essential.  In a way that is the artist’s skill, too.  Wasn’t it Michelangelo who said about David that he cut away all the extraneous marble to liberate the figure encased inside? 

All skill requires cutting. Cutting away and then letting go of what is no longer.

Being incisive also means cutting away, getting to the core.  I heard on the radio this morning the story of the family in London with the conjoint twins.  The parents could not agree to the operation to separate them because one would die.  The judge used his skill to cut to the core of the matter.  Both girls will die if they did nothing.  One will die if separated.  He decided to save one child.  And now the surgeons will use their skills to cut away the child who was never destined to survive.

In a way each of us has a twin, the one of us who is never to be.  The one of us who is sacrificed so that we may live.  It is our twin from the other world, maybe our spiritual twin.  It is as if one, the one I think of as stronger, is really the one not ready to live in this physical world - she is just not of this world.  And the other twin, the survivor, who appears stronger maybe is just not able to survive in that spirit world - she is just not ready. The twin who will survive will have all the scars of that separation to keep him in touch with the loss of that connection.

Separation and isolation are very different.  The scars from cutting apart the twins show that.  My scars show that.  The skill is in the cutting.

Faking Good

Portola Valley, CA                                                                             5 June 2000

Writing now feels like such an awful choice.  What happened?  For so long it was energizing and so crucial to me.  How did I lose my focus?  Maybe it was becoming too difficult, too draining to hold on to the inauthenticity of my life as it is, as it was.  I push others in my work very hard.  Yet, who pushes me?  What would my life be like if I had a me to coach or mentor me when I was younger? 

I can ill afford to go there now.  If I were to write my biography, I think I would call it The Self Authored Life – the Tortuous Journey of Making It Up in the Moment.  That is how I feel at times – like now.  That I am making it up.  That I am relinquishing the hard work of authentic inquiry and building community.  That I am “faking good”.

Maybe that would be an even better title for the biography, Faking Good.  Great title for a novel about a man in his fifties whose life is slowly coming apart.  Too slowly for his friends to see.  Each one sees a different facet of the man.  Seven narrators each describing the man from a different view.  Each one holds a unique piece to the puzzle.  Each one holds some secret information.  Each one is invested in their own delusions about how well he is doing.

How would the novel end?  Not sure.  It begins at his funeral, though.  Well, at his wake really.  They all, all seven of them, find themselves together there.  A strange realization comes over them – that this is the first time they are all together at the same time in the same place.  Who would be there?  His son?  A friend from childhood?  Someone who witnessed his moral cowardice?  Someone who felt saved by his integrity?  A former lover?  A teacher?  Who would be the seventh?

The unfolding of a life lies in the telling.  How would I tell his story?  How would it be both truthful and a lie?  What if at the end of the tale the narrator, mistrustful at first, comes to find that this character wasn’t “faking good” after all?  Maybe in his own time he comes to find that “good” is not the product of some calculation, but the realization of some essential, innate quality.

I began writing this entry with a sense of labor.  As usual, the writing itself freed me up more than I had expected.  It always does that.

Sunflowers

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                  20 September 1999

The sun is beginning to break through the morning mist.  All the sunflower blooms are dead now.  Their main stems have broken under the weight of the dead sunbursts.  Each one the same.  There are so many splendid corpses in the garden this time of year!  Their splendor, not just in memory, but also in a kind of noble adherence to their fundamental natures.  As if they are saying, this decay, this ending, this humbling piece of our existence, this too is as unspeakably beautiful as our first promises in the springtime.

There is so much beauty in the world.  In a sense that’s all there is in the world – beauty.  Ugliness, dreariness – all the unfortunate ways I choose to arrange the world – all this creates a vacuum, an absence of beauty.  When I am most like me, I am more like all the rest of creation than I am different.  Maybe that is why complete self-acceptance is so difficult.  Maybe it is because of the loss attached.  Maybe it is about what the ego has to ultimately give up – its tenacious grip on differentiation without really knowing individuation.

Important distinctions here.  Differentiating myself is a process of defining me in opposition to the world around me.  How am I unique?  In what ways am I distinct and clearly bounded?  Where do “I” end and the rest of the world begin?  All these are about difference, about differing, about opposing.  It’s a crucial developmental phase, but left to its own devices it will continue to run amok.  In some ways it already has for me.  So much of my life has really been about not being like my parents.  Not opposing them, but in living my life in such a way that I could be as unlike them as possible.  An incredibly pathetic and extended adolescence!

I have this sense that becoming an individual is a much more dynamic process than differing from others.  Creating myself as an individual means in some ways to, means to what?  Start over.  Creating my own sense of self means to take into my life what is authentic and what resonates and is somehow true for me.  It is not about being same or different.  Those categories have no content in the self.  They only have meaning to the ego – to the splinter that believes it is the tree.

Creating myself means to be in the beauty of the world, to take in the beauty of this self.  It isn’t the beauty of Narcissus.  This kind of beauty is the splendor that comes from seeing the world, and then seeing myself as complete, as perfect.  Just as there is perfection for the sunflowers outside my window.  They are no less perfect in death than the hummingbirds are in their magnificent display of divine energy.  The beauty – not the devil – is in the details.  In the smallest and most humble facets of the world and in myself.

If all this is true, and I sense that it is, it means that for me to really create myself, I have to own my ego in all its petty puffery.  I have to own the pride I feel in accomplishments that may not have been entirely my own.  I have to own the shame for the things I have done that may not have been all that honorable.  I have to own the incompleteness in my life no less than the perfection.

Completion is perfection.  The self – my self – began complete and always remains complete.  The work is in letting go of the different and embracing what is not.    All the sunflower blooms are dead now.  The main stems have broken under the weight of the dead sunbursts.  Each one the same…

Enough

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                20 September 2001

Dream fragments are all that I have this morning.  Images of running.  Nowhere to go.  Nowhere to hide.  Oddly, though, not trapped.  It was just where I was.  Just there - neither able to run, nor able to hide.  For some reason I feel that the dream was about authenticity.  About my authentic self.  And the dream is about having enough.  (That sentence is a surprise.)

I have enough.  Too much in fact.  The cottage is bursting with stuff.  Somehow I don’t think the dream was about stuff.  What exactly was I running from, then?  I was running from being enough.  Wow, that’s a true sentence!

Enough really is enough.  It is an old word that has changed very little over the eons.  Before 1200 it was inoh.  A bit later it became ynough.  Even in the ancient Frisian enough was enoh.  A good word, a steady one.  Maybe there is something important about that.

How do I know enough?  Why is the actual experience of enough so elusive to me?  Why do I seem to know it only from the other sides – from either excess or scarcity?  Maybe it is because I think of enough as a thing, as a static event, as something that I can count, or measure.  Maybe I see it as some sort of goal to attain.

I don't ask if there is enough water in the ocean, or if there are enough clouds in the sky, or enough rocks on the beach.  There is always a perfect amount of water in the ocean.  There are just enough clouds in the sky.  Never have I thought that there were too many, or too few rocks along the beach.  It is always how it should be.  There is always enough.

So, as I sit with this word, enough, now, for me is about looking at myself just as I would the ocean, the sky, or the beach.  No different.  Whole and complete, right now.  When I look at the excesses in my life then, what are they teaching me?  They are pointing to the moments when I feel a deep sense of scarcity.  When I am attracted to excess, to the wanting more and more, there is a deeper awareness of insufficiency, a powerful urge to protect myself. If I have more of this, or of that, I will be safe, I seem to say to myself. If I just buy one more thing, have a little more and that will be enough...

I need to look directly at these pockets of insufficiency, these messages of “not enough”.  I need to open myself to them, shine some light of awareness on them, and then embrace them as my own.  And in this moment I sense that when I do that, when I really pay attention to those thoughts of scarcity, I will discharge some of their power, and then the urge toward “too much” might also recede for a while, and I can be just enough. 

That would be a good thing.

Disaster

Oakland, CA                                                                                        29 October 1999

Nothing seems right this morning.  All sixes and sevens.  It is only when I am completely out of my routines that I see how deeply embedded they really are.  How much I depend on them.  More than “structure” because structure implies some sort of immovable “thing”.  Some of the patterns – the ones that I am aware of anyway – act more like a coxswain, riding in the boat with me providing rhythm and pace to my day.  The habits and patterns that are outside my awareness are so troublesome to me.  This morning is an opportunity for me to see more and more of them operating, and to pay attention to myself when I am rowing this boat alone, in a shell without a coxswain.

Earlier this morning, while taking a shower (funny expression, I wonder who I take the shower from) I couldn't find anything I needed.   I am at my sister’s house, and I can’t find anything I need.  No shampoo visible.  No soap either.  Rummage through some cabinets and find some shampoo.  It’ll have to be soap as well. Then I hear myself say in my head, You should have brought your own.  You should have been prepared.  You need to be more self-reliant.   Then I realized I left my journal at home.  How could you be so stupid??  You thought you might not go home.  Why didn’t you put it in the bag??  And it goes on and on from there.

How quickly, how effortlessly, I go into self-recrimination mode.  It is the one pattern I carry with me no matter where I am.  If only I could contain self-recrimination inside a bottle of shampoo and then “forget it” from time to time.  How freeing it must be not to carry it around all the time.

What purpose does it serve – all this self-criticism?  Maybe it is some doomed attempt on my part to make me a better person.  Some antidote to the fear that, if it were not for all the tortuous self-talk, I might sometime get to the very bottom of my psyche such as it is, and I won’t find anything there.  I suspect that might be a universal fear.  Certainly it is for me at times.  What if, at the end of all this inquiry, and struggle, and delving, I get to the very core of me, my essential New Age Self, and find nothing there?  My deepest suspicion is that this would be wonderfully liberating.  My ego, though, my conscious self here and now, believes it would be a disaster.

Disaster comes from the Italian word disastro (dis- away, without + astro star).  For the ancients disasters occurred because of an unfavorable alignment of the planets and the stars.  I guess it was literally acting without the stars, sort of flying blind.  Disasters, then, are not events, but outcomes.  Disasters don’t strike; they emerge when something is not in alignment in the Universe.  When I am not in alignment with the Universe.  That means disasters are occurring all the time, I just don't see them.  I get distracted by the thought that magnitude matters – as if the size of any disaster I could imagine matters at all in comparison to the infinite size of the Universe.

Disasters may be opportunities of us, for me, to pay closer attention to alignment.  Maybe that’s why there is so much kindness and generosity displayed during a disaster.  For a moment, just a moment, we get a glimmer of what it is like to be truly alone – to be without the stars, and we get a chance to put the Universe back right again.  All the little things become crucial.  Where one stray lamb makes all the difference to the survival of the flock, and where one grain of sand moved into the right spot saves the whole beach.  For a moment there we are all alone, the gods have abandoned us, we only have each other.

And then the disaster receded, and we all go back to sleep.

So here I am sitting in a coffee house on Grand Avenue, “The Oldest Coffee House in Oakland”, recovering from the disaster of dislocating myself for a night and not having my own shampoo.  No small thing, if I stay present to the deeper bits.

Forcing myself out of a pattern I was in, out of a routine where I thought I was in control, has created an opening for me – an opening to see how fragile it all is. How life, how this life I have composed, is comprised of a web of countless golden threads of divine love.  The threads themselves radiate with energy as they transform themselves into all the colors imaginable. 

Disasters pull against those fragile threads, and at times these threads stretch and adapt and, as their resonance changes, alter their color.  They may be cut with the quickness and sureness of the executioner’s axe – swoosh from gold to black - or, left to their own rhythms, they may slowly shift from gold through yellow, red and blue, then to purple, and finally to black.  When that occurs, I suspect, there is a sense of completion and perfection, and the threads, bathed in infinite light and love return to white – the harmonic color of our source.

Then, of course, disaster strikes again, and we find ourselves shifting from white to gold, and on to yellow… the eternal dance, where we are our own light show, continues.

Station

Station
Portola Valley, CA                                                                               
26 April 2001

In some ways it feels as if I have already left here.  The cottage is no longer home.  So much of the interior space has now been dismantled that this house, this interior space, feels more like a way station.  A brief stop on a long journey.  In a way the two and a half years here have been something of a station for me.  A place to rest, to find some stillness.

In this moment I am thinking of some of the stations I have been in before.  How many train stations have I found myself in?  How many times did I squander opportunities to sit for a minute or an hour and pay attention to the stillness?  I am calling to mind some of the amazing railroad stations in the east – great granite temples dedicated to waiting.

Yes, there is a quality of stillness to this word, station.  Standing still.  A bit vigilant at times – a sentry station.  And a resting place, a way station – a place to be still along the way to going somewhere.  The word itself comes from an old lost Latin noun, statis, which comes from stare, meaning “to stand”.

Also, I think of the Stations of the Cross in the Catholic Church.  I remember how worshippers would stop at each station and recall the event pictured in the engraving on the church wall.  Each station a resting place along a circuit.  Always back to the beginning, but with resting points along the way.

There are, and have been stations to my life as well.  Not necessarily resting places, but times of relative stillness, times with little change.  A kind of flat spot on the side of the road.  The notion that there is a “station of life” is a delusion.  There is no one station in a person’s life.  Rather, there are many stations along the way, and I suspect it takes great wisdom to notice them hidden as they so often are by the distractions of everyday living.

These stations can be anywhere.  A moment to catch my breath and recall what is really important, what is essential in the moment.  Waiting for the light to change at an intersection is a station.  Standing in a checkout line can also be one, if I pay attention and stay aware of what is being offered.   Such stations can be calls to stillness, and invitations to settle in and settle down for a moment.  They are not calls to stop, or calls to go to sleep.  The opposite is true.  These stations can be times and places where I can put down some of the baggage I carry with me – literally the impediments – that keep me from seeing deeply the course and purpose of my life.

When I am able to put those bags down for a moment and take a breath, thoughts about identity, meaning and purpose are no longer vague philosophical categories.  Rather, they become gauges, or signposts – not unlike those carvings on the church walls.  At these stations I am able to see who is am now, why I am now, and what I stand for now.  This is a good thing.

Just as I finished writing that sentence the sun burst through the clouds shining trapezoids of light across the desk and this page.  It is as if I am writing from the shadows and into the light, and then back into the shadows, as the windowpanes break the sunlight into these patterns. 

This moment is a small station as well – inviting me to reflect on the need for both sunlight and shadows in my life.  A reminder that my life is a constant swirl between the two.  At times the shadows become the resting area, a place to recover.  Like standing in the cool embrace of an old tree’s shady base.  I forget sometimes that shade is in essence a shadow. 

Usually, I think of Shadow as a dark place, maybe even a dangerous place – and at times it can be.  But I hold the idea of shade differently.   It is lovingly protective and nurturing.  It’s that wonderful feeling of standing near someone and creating some shade for them.  For that moment I am sharing a purpose with something as still as a tree. In that moment I become a station.  How cool is that.

Curiosity

Oakland, CA                                                                                            29 September 2001

The last entry for this journal.  I feel a subtle pressure to make this one exceptional.  It is an urge I must resist.  This is my next entry, or more accurately, my current entry.  I have written before about “becoming current with myself”.  It feels that I am there now.  I have a clear sense of who I am, as well as what I want in my life, and how I want this life to unfold.  No small accomplishment.

The terrible ache from missing A is gone now, or at least gone for now.  I am keenly aware of this wavelike quality to grief, and, no doubt, that ache will return now and again.  In its place now is a deep curiosity.  A wonder about how it will all turn out.  A wonder about why this is all so difficult for her.  This is a surprising word – curious.  I wouldn’t have expected this word to emerge from the ache of missing her.  Curiosus means “full of care”.  It comes from cura, which itself means “care”.  This is the same root word for cure.

If I have looked at this word curiosity before I have forgotten it, but it is precisely the right word for how I am feeling now.  I am full to overflowing with care for her.  As I am full of care for myself in this moment.  To be truly curious is to plumb the depths with great care, with the full awareness that tremendous harm can be done because of inattention or carelessness.  To be deeply curious also means that I hold the intention to be a healing force in all this.  This kind of curiosity is not about a goal, or arriving at some desired destination.  It is about sitting with the feeling of caring and holding a question without trying to answer it. 

Now for the first time I am beginning to see the power, or the creative tension, that is embedded in some of my questions – What do you want?  What would happen if you were to get what you want?  To be deeply curious about these questions means to be open to all possibilities.  Otherwise they become either subtle, or not so subtle, manipulations. 

I also believe now that this practice of curiosity that I embarked on with these Morning Pages has had a curative effect on me as well.  And I notice that I am not second-guessing myself either.  In this one area of my life, in the practice of self-inquiry, I have felt over time a deep caring and a kind of self-curing, a self-healing.  This has allowed me, maybe for the first time in my life, to know what is true for me and know that, no matter how deeply I plumb, that same truth remains.  It is as if there is an unbreakable thread anchored by my heart that remains fixed and centered regardless how events on the surface clang about, regardless how the storms on the surface may buffet me to and fro.  On the deeper level of caring there also emerges that deeper kind of knowing.  It is a knowing that can only emerge from deep, abiding, unshakeable love. 

Deep, profound and authentic curiosity is the path to a loving relationship.  I guess in a way I have always known this, but now for the first time I am able to articulate it in a way that allows me to drop my shoulders and sink into my breathing.  I can now begin to notice how much there is to be curious about within me and around me.  Not how will this, or anything else, “turn out”.  Not how will I, or anyone else, “turn out”.  Rather it is this, right now, what is true right now?  This is real care; this is real curiosity.

Faults

Oakland, CA                                                                                            3 October 2001

Things are shifting here.  I am moving in bit by bit.  Soon I may actually feel at home here in Oakland again.  I would not have predicted this some months ago.  I would have said that such an idea was crazy.  Then again a few months ago Nick was alive, I was living in Portola Valley, I did not know A, and my sister had a great job with a bright future.

I need to be mindful of this, of how surprising it is to see possibilities unfold in my life.  And not expectations or extrapolations from the current state.  Most of what is possible is unimaginable.  The choice points are like synapses with very little discernable pattern.  Like the choices water makes seeking its own level.

A little while ago I was out at the car looking for my pen.  As I was walking back to the house, I felt this wave of sadness and loss and missing what is no longer in my life.  I felt it also earlier this morning.  My first thought about it was that it was a sign of weakness and vulnerability.  Then I thought better of that.  There is a quality of craving to the missing.  A selfish part.  A needing or wanting to scratch an itch part.  But there is also a deeper part, a part that reveals itself when I don’t act to relieve the… what?  not pain really, it is more like an ache.  When I let the ache settle into me, it has a transformative effect, and it is transformed in return. 

As I sit with this ache – with no intention of acting on it in the moment - I have the clear sense that I can endure this. Not acting to discharge this feeling is the right thing to do in this moment.  Those are actions that serve to pull me to the surface.  There is a time for such buoyancy, but this is not one of those times.  I need to stay on the heartline, on the plumbline.

As I wrote the word “plumbline” I was thinking “faultline”.  This may also be a time to “find fault”, but not I the usual sense of ascribing blame.  Maybe if I were to look at what has happened over the past two weeks from a very rigorous posture of finding fault, important learnings would emerge.

A fault is a weakness.  It is not a failure.  It is not frail in the usual sense of that word.  A fault has an odd strength to it, an enduring quality.  My weaknesses, my faults, seem to withstand enormous pressures for them to somehow disappear.  These weaknesses have an admirable (grudgingly so) tenacity to them.  At the same time these faults, these weaknesses, are the only way I have to get into the deeper fissures of my life.  And they are the only way for me to get into the deeper fissures in other’s lives that I care for and love so deeply.

Maybe it is from living here so long - living on or near faults - that I feel so differently about the word than someone else might.  The faultlines here are actually beautiful.  I remember driving on Interstate 280 with A in the spring and I showed her the beautiful reservoir at Crystal Springs and the watershed next to it.  I could see in her eyes how beautiful she found it.  And then I told her that it was the San Andrea Fault and I could see the mild surprise on her face.

I/ we are not accustomed to seeing faults as beautiful.  I, when I am not paying attention that is, see them as embarrassing and shameful.  It is only when I can trust that someone would still see the beauty in them that I can reveal them to another.  And it is only when someone else can trust that I will see their embedded beauty that they will reveal theirs to me.   

And the trust goes deeper, just as faultlines go deeper.  I need to trust that my acknowledgement of their faults is not going to be seen as a judgement.  Faults relieve pressure.  They expose the hidden truth to our lives, the truth often buried beneath the crust from the stories that we tell ourselves, stories about who we are and who we are not. 

Caregiving and Caretaking

 

This word “care’ is old – older than the records can reveal.  Two millennia ago caru originally meant “sorrow” and “grief”.  Strange how it has morphed into its opposite, but that seems to be the way of it.  One of the many wonderful mysteries of a living language.  But what of “caregiving? When I speak of giving care, what is being given?  Fundamentally, what does it mean to say that I care?  To care for?  To care about?  To take care of?  And when this care is being taken, does it mean that it is being taken to, or taken away? 

It is important somehow that this word care does have its roots in sorrow and pain.  Caring is a kind of connecting – a connecting to my own deepest self, the self that is always connected to the deepest, most profound suffering of the world.  Care then seems to be a gift; at least that is what the word seems to be saying to me.  On a deeper level it may be that the words are saying that it is not so much that sorrow is a gift, but that my awareness of this deep sorrow that lies near the center of my soul is the door, the portal, that invites me to participate in the even deeper joyful noise of the world.  “Giving care” then is a way of dipping into the deep well of my own sorrow and moving outward in the action of caring for another. This action of giving care is what transforms my sorrow and grief into connection and joy. 

On the other hand, “taking care of” has a transactional quality to it.  Expressions like “taking care of business” or “taking care of a pet” speak of being responsible for maintaining, rather than creating. “Caretaking” also seems to have a kind of temporary sense to it. Caretakers, paid for their labors, are somehow itinerant in nature, like the caretaker on an estate who lives at the edge of the property and can move on with the usual thirty day notice. 

Someone, even with great skill, who is hired to take care of a garden, will maintain it at least adequately, and perhaps even well. But a gardener, who lovingly “gives care” to her garden, can do nothing less than cause the garden to flourish.  It could be no other way because the well-tended garden then becomes an expression, a manifestation, of this deeper relationship between the caregiver and the cared for.  With every turn of the spade the boundary between the two is increasingly blurred until there is a time when the gardener can no longer tell who is really being cared for in any given moment.

Opportunities to give care are both ubiquitous and fleeting. Ubiquitous because there are always opportunities for me to give care to someone, even if that someone is myself.  These opportunities, squandered as they are more than I would care to know, are still ever present, are presents, gift wrapped lying at my feet.  But these opportunities are fleeting at the same time in the way that the doors of sorrow that serve the vestibule of my soul open and close in a rhythm and pace known only to itself.  I feel, though, that when I am giving care to myself, rather than just “taking care of myself” I am more aware of those open doors in others.  That may well be because in such moments, the doors to my own soul, the doors to my own sorrow, are wide open offering me an invitation to be real.

So the question for me gets distilled down to how do I care for, rather than what do I care about. How I care for myself and my world and all who are between and within determines what I really care about.  And that may well be very different from what I say I care about.  It is not possible for me to care for myself and at the same time fail to take care of myself.  It is truly an act of selfishness on my part when I don’t take care of myself.  Just as selfish as those times when I refuse to allow another to take care of me, when such care is warranted.

It’s remarkable to me now how often I move into questions of how, rather than why.  The how of things is so central to me now.  The how for me right now is writing.  The how is finding my voice and trusting that, in caring for myself in this way, I will hold the tension between generosity and stinginess.  The generosity will show up in my willingness to share my truth of the world, while avoiding the stinginess of withholding that truth from my world and myself.

Crisis

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 24 April 2001

The first sunlight of the morning is dusting the taller trees in the garden.  The big bay trees catch the first light.  They are the gentle, watchful giants that see over the horizon line.  Maybe their deep wisdom comes from their height.  They draw in light from all directions – is that not a kind of seeing, not a source of wisdom?  The last ones to feel the soft rays of sunset; the first ones to feel the welcomed dawn.  I so love the golden light of this time of day in this time of the year.

I feel like I am sitting on a fragile perch right now.  Yet, I trust something will emerge from all the spadework I am doing with this writing.  I am thinking now about all the crises I have written about in past entries.  I barely remember most of them now, but then they seemed, they were, very real.  But the moment passed.  Whatever they were, for all their importance at the time, they have gradually receded into the vague memories, catalogued under “Trying Times”.

There is an important learning for me here.  The learning is to not take things lightly.  In fact the opposite is the case.  It is to pay attention to these critical moments, but to pay attention to them in motion.  In a way these critical moments themselves are in motion – constantly changing and shifting this way and that.  By realizing that “this too shall pass” lets me really see the opportunities embedded in these crises.  If I wait – immobile – the moment will pass, and I will then have missed a chance to go deeper, a chance to dip into that diamond water that carries so much wisdom.

Crisis is a word that I have often used without much thought.  Its roots are important.  The word itself comes from the Greek word krísis, which means “a separating, discrimination or decision”.  And that Greek word comes from krínein, which means “to separate or decide”.

What I take from this root meaning is that a crisis is not really an event at all.  Rather, it is a way of thinking, and a way of acting as well.  Critical thinking is a kind of “crisis creating”.  It is my interpretation of separating that probably creates the usual sense of “crisis” for me.  But what if I were to comprehend that separating is an act of thinking, of discerning much more than some external event imposed on me?  What if I were to see the crises in my life as bell weather bits created by my soul to get my attention, to get me to move to the deeper levels – the levels of awareness where there is no separation, where individuation and immersion co-exist in a mysterious dance?  What if I were to see these crises in my life as signposts telling me that whatever is truly part of my life, part of who I am, can never be lost, never be separated?  What if I were to see that separating is a choice, just as much as joining is?

If I were to accomplish these things, get to that level of awareness, then I would be able to hold the notion that “this too shall pass” in a whole new light.  I would then discern places where separating, cutting away, is what is best right now.  I would know that grief is not an experience of the soul because for the soul nothing can be lost or cut away.  It can only be given away freely.  For the soul there are no crises, only choices to know separation and loneliness, or the deep connection of belonging.

Certainty

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 18 April 2001   

It is a bit later in the morning for me to be writing.  The garden is buzzing with activity this time of day.  I don’t know why it seems so important to capture all the comings and goings of the insects and the birds in the garden, but it does.  I guess it is a sort of good-bye – my way of letting go.  One way to let go is to take in.  I am reminded of Thich Nhat Hahn’s talk in Berkeley about “interbeing”, about the interrelatedness of all that is made manifest in the physical world.  Such a simple notion.  I wonder at the difficulty of holding on to this during the day.  In this moment, there is no garden without me, and there is no me without this garden.  This interdependence is what is so disturbing to the identity I hold as “myself”, as distinct, as somehow non-contextual.

My sense is that, for whatever karmic reason, I/we hold fast to the illusion of separateness and distinction.  A kind of cycle, I suspect.  We all begin as an undifferentiated self, as an infant – how I so marvel at those tiny Buddhas that capture me in their tractor beam stares.  And then the fierce journey toward individuation – the boy picking up a feather, or the girl who pricks her finger on a thorn.  Finally, the urge toward reintegration, toward a new kind of immersion.  It is an immersion that sees life, all life, as relationship.  And these most profound ones – the binding ones – are the path onto this new level of immersion.  Or is it emersion?

Loving someone deeply is an act of self-annihilation.  This “I”, this distinctiveness that I have carved out for myself, is rooted in a wonderful garden of loving energy.  It is as if this “I” is a stalk rising out of the garden’s soil.  To the birds the stalk is all there is.  It is the sum total of their experience of “me”.  But to the burrowing insects below the soil, the stringy roots - the bits that intertwine with other roots - is all there is of this “me” as well.

Loving someone deeply honors these distinctions as loving illusions, as necessary distractions.  It also means coming to realize that this inter-connectedness, this mutual sustenance, means giving up the illusion of separateness in the face of a more profound truth.  Not an easy thing to do.

In this moment I have a glimmering understanding of those remarkable Buddhist monks who immolated themselves during the war in Vietnam.  They so loved the world, the whole world, that they had the capacity to see the entire garden, the complete root system that makes up the entire web of life.  The web that goes beyond the distinction between the seen and the unseen, between the known and the unknown.  They were immersed in the necessity that they make this interbeing visible, so that we might see that what we were doing to the children we were doing to ourselves.  And that must have been what Christ was all about - a kind of loving self-sacrifice, and an offering up of the illusion of distinction, to let us/me see behind the veil of my own creation.

But what does all this mean in the everyday world?  What are the implications of this for how I should live my everyday life?  My inner voice is telling me to continue digging.  Spend more time with the birds and the burrowing bugs.

Now I know where my place is.  Or at least I know where my place is now.  Important difference.  I know this in a way I have never known knowing before.  Not a certainty in a factual sort of way.  More the way a plant takes root and comes to know its place, and knows where it belongs even after being uprooted and replanted.  It is a knowing, a certainty, that comes with settling in deeper soil, rather than just settling for a place to stay for a time.  A settling in making it possible to be more comfortable in the darkness of the rich earth.

Certainty is about knowing about.  Certain comes from the root kra, which means “to sieve, to discriminate, to distinguish”.  Certainty thrives in the harsh light of distinctions.  No, not always harsh, but unusually bright anyway.  Knowing about is only one kind of knowing; it is sequential, patterned, and full of valuable nuggets.

Knowing “my place” is not so certain, not so well lighted.  It occurs to me now in this moment how I still hold to the thought of darkness as somehow sinister.  The roots of my being are bathed in darkness just as much as those plant roots in the garden.  This darkness is full of wonder and mystery.  And, I suspect, full of safety.  Safe only so long as I speak my truth with the certainty that comes not only from standing rooted in the dark soil, but also from facing humbly into the light.

Holding My Own

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 13 May 1999

Usually I “hold my own” against something, against an adversary.  Someone can ask me how I am doing, and I’ll sometimes say, “Oh, I’m holding my own, I guess.”  Very often this is accompanied by a well-rehearsed sigh.  The meaning here is obvious.  I’m treading water.  I’m not losing ground, but I’m not gaining any either… cum see cum sah (or however the hell you spell it).  Those dark forces out there, whatever they may be, have not defeated me yet.  Although there is usually an implicit sense that they eventually will win out.  It is only a matter of time.

What if I were to hold this phrase just by itself, not in opposition to anything or anyone?  What does it mean to “hold my own”?  What exactly is “my own”?  How do I “hold” it?  What shifts in my perception of myself would occur if I were to remove this imagined adversary, as I sit with the phrase and all its embedded implications without filtering it through the sieve of distorted interpretations.

Holding my own in this context begins to mean embracing what is truly mine, what is essential to who I am as a person.  Rather than standing my own ground, it really is a matter of standing in my own ground.  Of taking a position, not in opposition, but literally planting my feet in the ground and saying, This is where I belong.  This is where my soul, my spirit, my whatever, is in touch with the material world.  This is me as a concrete being, not as some abstract idea, or some ephemeral spirit being floating a few feet above the earth, fearing to touch down less it become somehow contaminated by the dirt and shit and mess and chaos that is the essential nature of matter.

“Holding” conjures up images of an embrace.  I hold a child in my arms.  I hold a lover as a sacred trust.  I can’t grip them tight-fistedly and still call it holding.  I may grip a child’s hand as we cross the street, but that is a matter of protecting the weak from the powerful onslaught of traffic.  And I have gripped a lover’s hand, but that was usually just before she left, or just before I left, as a last desperate attempt to deny what was happening in the moment.  As if by gripping tighter it would make it harder for one of us to release the grip.  Of course, the opposite is true.  A tight grip is the surest way to lose touch.  No, holding has the quality of an embrace, a looseness of the reins, an allowance for movement and change, not unbridled, but not ratcheted down either.

Holding my own means embracing myself and all that I am with the same care and concern and urgent attention that I give to those I love.  It is a way of really taking responsibility for my life.  It means paying attention to the realities of the material world.  It means letting go of the denial that I am not in this world, and of this world.  That is not a choice, it is what is.  The choice is how I will take action, how I will allow the passions that I hold to fuel the actions in my life.  It means acknowledging that I care deeply about things.  This kind of holding also means that I am willing to really accept gain in my life as readily as I am willing to accept loss. 

This is yet another way to accept responsibility for sustaining joy in my life.  I can choose to hold joy just as much as I do sorrow, abundance just as much as scarcity, possibility just as much as limitation, strength just as much as weakness, courage just as much as fear, resilience just as much as vulnerability, and fulfillment just as much as emptiness.

Holding my own is not some abstraction.  It is an essential quality of a flourishing life, of a life taken seriously. 

Handles

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 9 May 1999
               

The way we grasp something is how we integrate it into ourselves.  It is how we make something real.  And how we grasp something, or even how we fail to do so, is to a large extent a result of the handles we use for the task.  When we hold onto a thought, a feeling, or even a mental image, there is some piece that we hold onto that allows us to take it in somehow.  Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher in ancient Rome, said, “Everything has two handles: one by which it may be carried, the other by which it can’t.” That piece of startling wisdom is about two thousand years old.  So much for New Age thinking.

If in fact everything does have two handles, it is important to be clear about which one I am trying to grasp.  Thinking deeper on this two-handle notion I began to focus on the word handle.  We say things like “I’ll handle it.”  Or just as likely “I can’t handle it.”  It isn’t just carrying something.  It is more like having a particular kind of purchase on it, such that it won’t get away from us, even if we only have just a few fingers in the handle.  It’s about grasping and holding on, rather than “standing under” and knowing with some sort of completion or totality.  Sometimes perhaps losing our grip, but at least having a grip to lose. 

There is, however, another, meaning to this word handle – one that can add significant light to this kind of knowing.  Handle, in our culture is also a slang term that means a name.  It is what someone is called by.  So, naming becomes a central issue to handling.  If we do not properly name situations, or feelings or thoughts that are occurring, we miss enormously important opportunities to handle them, to really grasp them and integrate them into our lives.

This same Stoic philosopher had something to say about this as well.  He wrote about the importance of calling things by their right names.  He wrote, “When we name things correctly, we comprehend them correctly, without adding information or judgments that aren’t there… Do not risk being beguiled by appearances and constructing theories and interpretations based on distortions through misnaming.  Give your assent to only what is actually true.”

The word beguiled strikes me as right on the mark.  There is a deceptive quality to interpreting what is going on even before taking the time to name it, sit with it, and allow whatever the “it” is to name itself.  There is also an arrogant quality to that process.  It is as if I am in control, that my interpretations -- no matter how premature  -- will in the long run win out.  They never do.  Eventually the deception is revealed.  It always is. 

In time we come to the realization that we are trying to carry something with the handle by which it can’t be carried.  It is then in the moment when we put it down, in the moment that feels so much like a humiliating defeat, in the moment when we say, “I can’t handle it”, it is only then that its true name is revealed.  Then we can begin to carry it and take whatever it was that was so overwhelming and make it a part of ourselves.

The more I pay attention to handles of all kinds in my life, the more I see where my authentic power is.  It isn’t in handling everything, but it is in allowing all that comes into my life to have its proper name.  Handles are what we use to open doors, to cross thresholds.  They are also what we use to create leverage, to move something that is otherwise beyond our capacities.  Grasping events and circumstances in our lives as they really are allows us to develop a relationship with ourselves that is free from denial and self-deception.  This frees us to see choices that seemed non-existent so long as we were intent on interpreting, rather than committed to knowing things by their true names -- by what is, and not by what isn’t.

Handles are wonderful allies; powerful reminders that calling things by their right names has a magical quality to it.  Perhaps that is what is behind the old stories about wizards and witches whose special words could open doors and reveal hidden passageways.  Maybe they are really stories about opening ourselves to the possibility that one day we could call ourselves by our true names, open doors unavailable to us, and know another level of intimacy in which we can first name ourselves correctly and then reveal that name to those we love.   

Canyons

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                    29 April 1999

Canyons, even the Grand Canyon, are nothing more or less than an expression of the repetitive patterns of rivers and streams over time.  Given enough time, water always endures.  Rock eventually gives way.  What do these deep chasms have to teach us about ourselves?  What do they have to teach me about myself?

As I thought deeply on it, what occurred for me was that canyons, at least the ones in my mind, become present to teach me the distinction between denial and avoidance.  Denial is a complete obliviousness to what is.  Avoidance on the other hand is an awareness of what is, but an awareness from a distance.

I am holding an image of myself walking on a path.  I can see a huge canyon ahead.  I know it is there.  I also know there is no way around it.  Yet, I turn south, or maybe north.  It doesn’t matter.  I create a new path parallel to the canyon.  This is a path that I know isn’t going anywhere.  Except I do know that it isn’t going toward that canyon.  It is the path of avoidance.  And the canyon looms deeper and darker than I have ever imagined.  As long as I stay on that parallel path the edge looks like it leads down into a bottomless abyss. 

For some reason I find myself moving toward the canyon’s edge.  Why now?  It doesn’t matter.  It just is.  As I move closer to the lip I am surprised to find that the drop isn’t as sheer as I had expected.  In fact there’s a trail, a path leading downward.  Who knows? I think, there may be a guide or two that I’ll meet along the way. I also notice that it really isn’t so dark after all.  The distortion came from maintaining my distance from the edge.  Avoidance darkens the terrain. 

Silence is part of the canyon.  So is the aloneness.  There are rocks and boulders strewn along the path.  I know I’ll have to remove them, leverage them aside maybe, but there is no going around them.  These rocks and boulders are everything that I have been avoiding in my life.  Here they are right in my path now.  Only now the canyon is working with me.  I am on the down slope.  I can leverage them out of the way.  They needn’t be barriers any longer.  That is my choice in the moment.  Confront these fears, move deeper into the canyon, or lose my footing, slip and slide a bit and scurry back up to the old well-worn path on the side to the canyon.  The choice is now unavoidable.

The other difference is that now I can see to the bottom.  There’s a river at the bottom.  A nourishing, clear flowing river.  It’s as if the water is made up of countless sparkling diamonds cascading through the gorge.  Now I notice that barriers are not everywhere along this path.  There are level places along the way.  Moments to take a breath, places to sit and to rest.  There are also switchbacks along the trail.  At times it seems like I’m backtracking, but I’m not.  I realize that it is just too dangerous to go down too quickly.  Pay attention to the pace, I say to myself.  Just keep going down.  You’ll be fine once you reach the river with the diamond water. 

A canyon is a stream that followed a path over and over.  It became a river that developed its own course, its own pattern. It channeled deeper and deeper into the rocks until they gave way and open themselves up to reveal what was buried for all the ages.

This canyon image is a guide.  It is saying that it is me – in all my lifetimes – that has created this beautiful and terrifying chasm.  It is showing itself now, telling me that this is the time for me to go into these deep, deep patterns to learn from them.  The canyon is inviting me to go to their source, and drink from the water of the first stream, the diamond water that cuts to the truth, that nourishes my soul, my true self, the water that connects me to all that is.

To get to that water I must face down the demons that protect the river.  They are of my own making.  They are me.  I can’t fight them, but I can engage and acknowledge them, even thank them for their vigilance.  I can tell them that they now can rest.  Their work is done. 

I wonder what awaits me at the river, I wonder what the diamond water tastes like, and I wonder what waits for me on the other side.

Breaking Silence

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                    26 April 1999

Silence is an unuttered promise. It is filled to overflowing with unspoken possibility.  What will occur to break the silence?  Asking even this question limits the possibilities embedded in the silence – as if it were some fragile, expensive vase teetering on the edge of the table about to smash into a thousand pieces.  As if silence, once broken, can never be reclaimed.  In fact there is nothing in our lives quite as resilient as silence.  Nothing so inviting, and at times, nothing as precious.

Silence is the space inside the vase and the space outside the vase.  It is all that the vase is not.  Silence sacrifices itself as it shapes us and allows us to create all that we are to become.  It accommodates us like an attentive innkeeper, ever alert to our pauses, always offering us some breathing room.  It is within the space of silence that lovers come to know each other.  It is in these silent breaths they take that their conspiracy is hatched, as they conspire to become intimate with each other, allowing the silence to unfold, letting the seeds of themselves germinate within each other. 

Why is it then that we are so often disquieted by silence?  Why is it that we so often go out of our way to disinvite it from our lives?  Why do we work so hard to fill those silent spaces?  Why does it feel so awkward at times to allow silence to sit with us?  What are we so afraid of, I wonder?  Could it be that we are not so much afraid of the silence as we are of the deeper conversations that might emerge if a generous enough space were granted?  What if the silence were not relegated to the delicate vase on the table, but rather allowed to fill our internal landscape like an exquisitely simple, yet beautiful, giant clay pot we come upon in a European garden?  What if we were to acknowledge a silence that is greater than us?  A silence so deep and so profound that we would risk everything we know about who and what we are if we were to enter into it.

That may be the silence that is so disquieting. 

Once as a young man, just beginning college, I was invited by some new found friends to go camping in Western Maryland.  We trekked deep into the woods and finally came upon a clearing where the more experienced campers in the group decided we would bed down for the night.  As the fire slowly faded to barely a flicker, I remember lying on the ground, cocooned in a light sleeping bag, and looking up at the canopy of stars.  At first I was stunned by the sheer number of stars above me.  I had spent my whole life in and near cities.  I had never in my young life ever encountered the night sky before.  As the shock of seeing such a spectacular sight slowly receded, I became agitated.  All my preconceptions about what the night is were exploding, as I lay still with a fixed gaze trying not to take too much of it in all at once.

And then I heard what sounded like a deep hum -- deeper than any voice I had ever heard before.  The sound itself was not frightening, but the strangeness of it was.  It seemed alien to me.  The hum gradually grew louder as I attended to it more consciously.  Finally, I couldn’t tolerate it any more, and asked one of my companions what that “noise” was.  He said he couldn’t hear anything.  I asked again – about the hum that seemed all around me.  Finally he got it.  He then said, “Oh, that hum! That’s the sound of the earth… now go to sleep.” 

It was then that it occurred to me that I was the alien.  That the silence, so disturbing, was really my birthright.  It is the soothing sound of a mother humming her child to sleep.  It is the whisper that comes out of the silence.  The whisper that emerges from the silence that lives deep in the ground, the whisper that tells us how incredibly safe we are when we are in touch with the deepest parts of ourselves. 

Now as I think back on that time I know that the stars as we see them are long gone.  The light we see is really nothing more than fingerprints left long ago on that great canopy.  They are there to remind us of our place in the Universe.  No matter how small we are, we still have a place.  And the ever-present whisper from the silence of the Earth is as reassuring as an embrace.  It reminds us that we are always home, that our true home is in the silent embrace of love.

Bursting Bubbles

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                    18 April 1999

Bursting bubbles is serious business.  That may well be why we take such delight in doing it as children.  Maybe deep in the psyche we are aware of how serious this will be later in our lives.  It is wonderful to watch children scurry about chasing down bubbles and poking them before they have a chance to touch the ground.  The squeal of laughter and the look of utter surprise at how rapidly the bubble disappears.  It’s as if they are learning all about the illusion of substance and the impermanence of stuff.  Little buddhas chasing bubbles.  As adults we instinctively know that they need to practice this skill to use later when the stakes may be higher than they could ever imagine.

Bubbles burst.  It is in their nature.  So the most important element here is who does the bursting, and how the bursting happens.  Does the bubble fall to the ground, crashing and burning, leaving no survivors?  Or do we consciously burst the bubble?  Do we confront the illusions that we have carried for so long, that we have protected so assiduously?  Protected from predators of our own making.  Fierce predators determined to know what is, to know who I am essentially, to know just what the stakes are in living an authentic life.

Bubble bursting is serious business.  It is about being in touch with the film that envelops the illusions that float inside the psyche.  This film of language and images is protective, keeping the illusions from taking over our lives.  They are contained in some way.  In a sense we know in a deep kind of knowing that these illusions about our world and ourselves are just that – illusions.  This enveloping film may also serve to protect us from experiences that are too powerful to handle in the moment - truths about ourselves that may overwhelm us without the mitigation that words and images can provide.

Bubble bursting is irreversible.  There is a Zen saying, “You can’t unring a bell”.  Just so, you can’t unburst a bubble.  The experience we have as children in the face of bursting bubbles may be about the shock we encounter in the face of the irreversibility of it all.  I can’t take my finger back.  I can’t unpoke the bubble.  I can’t reconstitute the illusion that just named itself as it ceased to be.

Bursting bubbles is an act of courage.  It takes enormous courage to unleash the fierce angels of our nature to seek out our hidden pockets of falseness, those places in our lives that we have secreted all sorts of misinformation, half-truths, neurotic fears, the way families used to secret their deformed children, letting them out only in the nighttime, hiding their shame.  There is tremendous courage embedded in the act of removing the covering and allowing whatever has been lurking in the background to come into the light of awareness.

Bubble bursting is an act of lovingkindness, but only an act of kindness toward ourselves.  We are so often eager to burst other’s bubbles.  We will often go out of our way to be of service to them.  We do it for their own good, of course.  We do it for altruistic reasons.  Yet there is a part of us that knows that this is nothing more than the film of our own bubbles, of our own illusions.  We know deeply that every time we burst another’s bubble, we are secretly protecting our own.

That is also the game we learn as children, isn’t it?  One child blows bubbles; the other chases them down relentlessly.  The true act of lovingkindness is to chase down our own bubbles, our own illusions.   In so doing we release tremendous amounts of loving energy that was previously unavailable.  This energy then becomes available to those we love.  Love released from illusion can transform itself into courage.  This newfound courage can allow those we love to burst their bubbles, thereby becoming more available to us.  This unfolding of our true selves deepens the relationship because more of each of us has shown up without all the wrapping, without all the attractive sugar coating.  We have fashioned this true self by loving what is so about ourselves and those we love… and what isn’t so.  We have become real.

Bubble bursting is an act of letting go.  It is about letting go of fears and well-entrenched patterns.  It is about letting go of the illusory selves, the false selves to which we have grown so accustomed, for whom we may even have affection – an old friend, a houseguest, that we now tolerate because we cannot imagine living in the house alone.  It is an act of letting go of the fear that, once the bubble is burst, there will be nothing to hold onto, no protective blanket, nowhere to hide.

Bursting bubbles is serious business.  Perhaps this is why children do it so well. 

Loss

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                 11 April 1999

How do I deal with this notion of loss?  What does it mean to lose something or someone?  I remember that poem that David Whyte wrote about – the Native American one about being lost in the forest and how impossible that it.  We cannot be “lost” because we are always somewhere.  It – whatever that “it” is – cannot be lost because it also is somewhere.  Loss is a point of view; it is a position or posture I take in the world.   An inescapable point of view in the moment.  It grabs me.  Holds me.  Creates a powerful reality.  In the moment it is as if there is no other point of view, no other perspective.  There is an illusion to it that says that this is so.  There is no other way for this to be.  It is happening to me.  I have no choice here.

    How could this happen to me? 
    How can I go on without…? 
    Who am I now without…? 
    How do I make sense of what just occurred?
    What will I do now?

When I lose something or someone, who or what is lost?  Am I the one lost?  Is that why it is so effortless for me to focus on what I have lost, rather than the feeling of being lost?  What would happen if I were to move into the feeling of being lost, to hold onto that feeling, to move deeper into it?  Not in some self-pitying way, but as a way of informing me about who I am now that I have just discarded a peripheral self, like a snake shedding its skin.  Another self, more vulnerable, more in touch with my own center, might begin to emerge.

Loss is what happens to me every time I go through a doorway, across a threshold.  It happens every time I answer the telephone.  There is that moment, so fleeting at times that I rarely catch it, that moment like Coleridge’s “who’s that knocking at my door” moment, when there is the awesome possibility that my life will never be the same again.  That I will receive news, information -- that I will be formed inwardly in some radically unalterable and irreversible way.  When that occurs I will experience loss of my sense of self in that moment without feeling any simultaneous experience of gaining a self in all its newness and freshness -- the way one does when falling in love for instance.

Loss and gain are like two planets orbiting around a fixed sun of constant change.  What a powerful paradox that is.  The illusion is in our experience of loss and gain, of up and down, of in an out, of losing and winning, of rising and falling.  The deeper reality is that these are merely manifestations of my view of the world.  I conjure them up.  These are interpretations that I make in order to make sense of my world.  These interpretations are the source of my pain in the face of loss, and my pleasure in the face of gain.

What if I were to interchange the experiences?  What if I were to feel terrible loss every time I gained something, found something, met someone?  What would it be like to say How terrible, I just met the one person who will make my life complete… How could this happen to me?  If only I hadn’t walked into that room, picked up that phone.  What am I going to do now…?  Just putting those words on the page seems absurd.  But the loss that is encapsulated in gain is no less real for me, no matter how much I minimize it in such situations. 

This time it is different, I say.  This time it will be wonderful, perfect.  Like winning the lottery.  Wouldn’t that be great?  All gain no pain.  But must there be loss just as proportional to the gain?  Must there always be an evening, a kind of karmic balancing act? 

Maybe not.  Maybe it is all just a matter of change – that loss begets gain, and gain begets loss.  And whatever it is that I am experiencing in this moment is all there is, that loss is a door opening and gain is one closing.  This is the catastrophe – the constant overturning of joy and sorrow, of one turning into the other – of the human condition, of being alive.

Discouragement

Portola Valley, CA                                                                                    6 April 1999

Just at pre-dawn.  A quiet, almost eerie time of day for me.  It is the time of promise and the time of confusion.  Is it day or night?  Neither…both…it doesn’t matter…it is just now…this now…the one you are holding on to…the one that becomes then if you don’t let it go and allow yourself to be… just be…

The most daunting task before me is to face the possibility of discouragement and failure.  They are related, but they are not the same.  I really do believe that failure is nothing more or less than bits of information about what has already transpired.  It is impossible to fail in the moment because the moment always holds the tension between the actual and the potential – between what was and what is possible.  Failure is merely information about what was.

Discouragement is in the present.  It is about losing my heart.  It is about heartbreak.  I usually think of broken hearts only in the romantic sense.  But I think hearts are broken all the time.  If I let it, my heart gets broken in my work fairly often.  I sometimes break my own heart when I choose not to face my fears and let them run my life.  I break my heart when I see patterns in my life that are harmful, but I fail to muster up the courage -- the heart -- to face them and alter their course a bit.  And I break my heart when I disengage from the people I love.

It’s revealing to me that one of the definitions for encourage is "to hearten". What in my life heartens me, gives me more heart?  What comes to mind, oddly enough, is… words.  Encouraging words.  And actions.  Actions that lead me toward hopefulness and greater possibility.

For me encouragement means having more heart, moving into a greater sense of self. I recall reading about aboriginal people who would (still do?) eat the heart of the wild animal they killed.  The animal demonstrated great courage and, once vanquished, became an offering to the hunter for him to literally take in that courage by eating the heart.  The hunter was then encouraged, filled with more courage, and thereby able to continue on.  It is as if the hunter knew (maybe he did) that the task was too great for him to do alone.  So he relied on the relationship he had with his prey to nourish his soul as well as his body.

Encouragement for me comes from words these days.  It comes from the nourishing conversations I have with people close to me, people who know and love me.  The words may not always be pleasant, often they are not, but they are heartening.  The remarkable thing for me to realize right now is how much I need those words of encouragement, more so than even when I was younger.  I don’t need those words as often, but they now go deeper into me.  I eat them.  They become part of me in a way that they didn’t in the past. 

All this living, and loving and succeeding and failing and hoping -- the whole catastrophe of living the life of a seeker – is also a task too great to do alone.  By taking an arrogant stance of going it alone, it is too easy to lose heart, to become discouraged, to give into fear.  It is only by the action of opening my heart that I can become even more resilient, more tempered, more able to face into those fears, and continue to face into the biting headwinds of resistance and fear. 

I know right now that, for me, my path is into the wind, for a time at least.  The wind will not be at my back, as the Irish wish, not for a while.  Each step I take, each action no matter how small, is itself encouraging.  Each simple action leads to another that begins to create a heartening pattern.

And what is stronger or more beautiful, or more encouraging than a pattern of interlocking hearts?