Awakening - Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

May 7 - The Ordinary Art

~Before fixing what you're looking at, check what you're looking through.~

It was a beautiful sun-filled day. I had driven 300 miles to see her. She was ninety-four and had been in one room for close to eight months. I was her first-born grandson and she was so happy to see me. But after catching up, we sat in silence on the edge of her bed, and finally, she complained how gray a day it was.

I realized then that her one window hadn't been cleaned in almost a year. When I said this, she chuckled, as only someone ninety-four can, and uttered with her Russian accent, "Got a dirty eye, see a dirty world."

It is the same with our minds and hearts. For our very self is the one window we have into this life. And so often, we suffer the mood of a dirty window, believing the brilliant world gray.

Perhaps the purpose of authentic relationship is to help each other keep our minds and hearts clear. Perhaps inner work is the ordinary art of window washing, so that the day is fully the day.

 

May 8 - The Issue of Fairness

~As long as we see what has come to pass as being unfair, we'll be a prisoner of what might have been.~

This is a very painful issue to discuss for most of us, because so much of how we see the world hinges on a sense of fairness and justice, those truly noble human concepts that govern how we treat each other.

But the laws of experience in the natural world, in which we have no choice but to live, do not work this way. Rather, the larger Universe, of which humankind is a small part, is a world of endless possibility and endless cycle, a world in which life forms come and go, a world itself that has erupted and reformed countless times.

This is why the Hindu tradition has a deity known as Vishnu, who both destroys and bestows life, often in that which we as human creatures try to live with one another, the storm and the germ, the termites eating the foundation of your home, the errant stone breaking your swindshield, the wave swamping your little boat - these molecules of experience do not understand what is fair. They just bombard us in the endless cosmic dance of life that just keeps happening.

When I was struggling with cancer, I was asked repeatedly to release my anger at the injustice of having cancer. Quite honestly, I felt a great many things - fear, pain, anxiety, frustration, uncertainty, exhaustion - but I did not feel that having cancer was unjust. When was I or anyone promised perfect health? An ant can struggle for yards with food in its mouth only to have a dead limb tired of hanging on crush it. What makes human beings presume to be exempt from such thing?

I know now that, over the years, my own cries that life is unfair have come from the inescapable pain of living, and these cries, while understandable, have always diverted me from feeling my way through the pain of my breakage into the re-formation of my life. Somehow, crying "Unfair" has always kept me stuck in what hurts.

I offer what has surprised me in my pain: that life is not fair, but unending in its capacity to change us; that compassion is fair and feeling is just; and that we are not responsible for all that befalls us, only for how we receive it and for how we hold each other up along the way.

 

This is a really good one on fairness.

 

May 9 - The Fear of What Is Different

~ To direct the mind towards the basic unity of all things and to divert it from the seizing of differences - therein lies bliss.~ Tejo-Bindu Upanishad

The eye can see what we have in common or focus on what keeps us apart. And the heart can feel what joins us with everything or replay its many cuts. And the tongue can praise the wind or warn against the storm, can praise the sea or dread the flood.

It's not that there are no differences - the world is made of infinite variety - rather it is the seizing of differences, the fearing of differences, that keeps us from feeling grace.

Paradoxically, everything in life touches the same center through its uniqueness, the way no two souls are the same, though every soul breathes the same air.

When we fall into the illusion that one creation is better than another, we remove ourselves from the miracle of being and enter what the sixth-century sage Seng-Ts'an called the mind's worst disease: the endless deciding between want and don't want, the endless war between for and against.

 

I agree with this one wholeheartedly.

 

May 10 - The Edge of Center

~All tempest has,
like a navel,
a hole in its middle,
through which
a gull can fly,
in silence.~ - Fourteenth-Century Japanese, anonymous

From across the centuries, this nameless voice tells us that at the heart of all struggle there is a peaceful enduring center, if we can only reach it. All the wisdom traditions affirm this.

Still, a deeper paradox of life is carried here. For the gull flies through the peaceful center; it does not live there. The work, it seems, for us is to draw sustenance from that central, eternal space without denying the experience of the storm.

Repeatedly, we are thrown into the storm and into the center. When in the storm, we are exacerbated by our humanness. When in the center, we are relieved by our spiritual place in the Oneness of things. So to find the center and spread our battered wings is to feel the God within.

Our constant struggle is in living both sides of this paradox. For we cannot get to the center without going through the storm that surrounds it. Yet the storm of human experience can only be endured by knowing what the gull knows. The storm can only be survived from the center. In how we pass each other from storm to center and back - there you'll find the trials and gifts of love.

 

I am sure it is true but it is not a simle thing to do when we are afraid or confused.

 

I ditto June on that one.

 

May 11 - To Speak and Embrace

~The dream is awakened when thinking I love you, and life begins when saying I love you, and joy moves like blood when embracing someone with love.~

Though life sometimes begins in the head, the full body of joy cannot be known there. We all have experienced this difference. Simply recall the first time in adolescence that some other stirred you, the first time the presence of another moved you from being the center of the Universe. Recall the strange but moving sense swimming in your head, leaving you unable to extinguish his or her face from your mind. Like a flicker given air, recall how the real and troubled life of flame began as soon as a word was spoken.

It is the same with how we dream of love ourselves or struggle with our belief in God. Kept swimming in the head, life flickers, never setting us aflame. It has taken a lifetime to learn this. As the fire of music awakens the soul of a composer, love sounds within us where no one else can hear. And just as composers must wrestle out the language by which their songs can be played, we must struggle to pronounce our love. All to have our arms rise like flames off the page.

It is a difficult challenge: to speak and embrace in a world that so thoroughly trains the mind. Yet trouble intensifies if not given air. As we live out our days, the imperceptible breath between thinking and saying, and saying and embracing, can often seem like a canyon, impossible to cross. This is why we have invoked the myth of Cupid for centuries, to remind us of that fluttering presence that somehow pierces our confinement of thinking, forcing us to speak and embrace.

We each carry the bow within us, and while the arrow hurts, our casing of thought is broken, forcing us to tremble. Yes, it is true. I confess: I have thought great thoughts and sung great songs - all of it rehearsal for the majesty of being held.

 

Stories of love are always bitter sweet to me. I am not sure what the author is saying here.

 

I too need a little more time with this one.

 

May 12 - Being Direct

~Everyone's bald underneath their hair.~ - Susan McHenry

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are, when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed, and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of pretection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances for joy.

It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. In this way, our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world, but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold, and the car handle feels wet, and the kiss good-bye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.

 

This one I get and I like it.

 

I like this one.

 

May 13 - Feeling Our Way Through

~Underneath, there is only one emotion.~

I used to struggle, fighting off sadness or trying not to be anxious, but as most of us learn, once that drop of melancholy or unrest beads on the heart, trying to feel anything else is denial. Once the mind like a long guitar string is somehow plucked with the slightest agitation, there is nothing to do but let it ring itself out.

We all know of the tears that turn to laughter. Or the laughing that breaks open to a cry. Or the anger that crumbles into a tender loneliness. Or the cool face of indifference that cracks, eventually showing its adhesive of fear. Amazingly, as the infinite forms of flowers all rise from the same earth, the earthly garden of emotions - in all their delicate shapes and colors - all rise from the same earth of heart.

What this opens for us is the often hard-to-accept fact that underneath there is only one unnamable emotion, which all feelings know as home. Despite our efforts to be happy and not sad, to be calm and not anxious, to be clear and not confused, to be understanding and not angry; despite all the ways we carve up our reactions to living and then run from one to the other; despite our fear of certain feelings, it is feeling each of them all the way through that lands us in the vibrant ache that underrides our being alive. To reach this vibrant place is often healing.

It is a hard thing, though, to lean into a sadness we don't want, to let the tremor of anxiety work its way through. For myself, my resistance to unpleasant feelings has been my fear that if I give over to the sadness or anxiety or confusion or pain that is upon me, I will drown in it. I fear it will take over my life. I will become nothing but sadness or anxiety or confusion.

But what I discover, again and again, is that feeling any one feeling deeply enough - that is, thoroughly and completely - somehow opens me to the common source of all feeling. And at the source, no one feeling can last by itself. So, through our feelings, not around them, we come upon the unnamable source of all feeling that can heal us of the pain of any one mood.

 

That one bears rereading. I think there is a lot to it.

 

May 14 - A Game of See-Saw

~The greatest defense is being who you are.~

How often we are drawn into opposition with one another. Certainly, there are times that conflict is inevitable. There is only one parking space. There is only one donut left. There is only one job in view.

But most of the time, on the inner plane, there is plenty to go around, and it is more a game of see-saw: to keep myself up, or to keep my sense of how I see myself up, I somehow feel the need to put you down.

This only diverts me from my path and sucks all my energy into a battle that often doesn't matter. In truth, no amount of rearranging the world will make us feel worthy. The only response to adversity or misunderstanding is to be more completely who we are - to share ourselves more. Otherwise, we are always reacting and countering and never being.

Just look to the flowers and trees. They do not suppress each other. Even when crowded, they show themselves and grow in all directions and so make it to the light.

 

May 15 - The Risk to Bloom

~And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom.~ - Anais Nin

We all face this turning point repeatedly: when resisting the flow of inner events suddenly feels more hurtful than leaping toward the unknown. Yet no one can tell us when to leap. There is no authority to bless our need to enter life but the God within.

How often we thwart ourselves by holding tenaciously to what is familiar. It is instructive, if chilling, that in floral shops the roses that won't open are called bullets. They are discarded because they will never bloom. They have turned in on themselves so tightly that they can never release their fragrance.

Yet as spirits in bodily form, we have the chance to tighten and bloom more than once. But even spirits, if turned in on themselves enough, may grow accustomed to being closed. Unlike roses, however, the human chamber can be shut down for years, and still, it takes but one breath from the true center and we will flower.

It has always amazed and humbled me how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed.

I have a friend in recovery, and when asked what made him stop drinking, he says, "The pain of drinking became greater than the pain of not drinking." The same can be said for us all. We can flower in an instant, as soon as the pain of not flowering and not loving become greater than our fear.

 

Good thoughts.

 

May 16 - Not Needing Approval

~There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.~ - Rumi

I have a young friend who speaks of the time when he reads stories with his daughter as a time that needs no confirmation. There is wisdom in his phrase: a time that needs no confirmation. We all need to touch down with the source of life, again and again, in order to brighten enough to continue. Whether we make our way in by playing or listening to music, by meditating, by painting, or loving, or reading stories to our children, or to our friends' children, or to ourselves - when we close our minds like tired eyes and surrender our hearts like mouths thirsted open, we come upon a common source where nothing need be approved or accepted, where no rejection or criticism need be overcome. The experience itself is all the authority we need.

Interestingly, these renewing moments open precisely when we forget about ourselves. Like horses with blinders we can't quite shake, we sniff out our way until we come upon these deep pools to drink from. And for the moment, we are saved.

In truth, we drink from this great paradox daily: though everyone alive shares this moment we are living right now, no one experiences this moment more directly than you. No one can say what it feels like for you to be alive but you. No one needs permission to be alive, to stay alive, to know the joy of touching your unrepeatable hand to the earth.