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

May 17 - Chasing the Butterfly

~In release, we begin.~

Once when I was six, I chased a butterfly halfway through the reservoir before cupping it in my boyish hands. I had the beautiful thing, but couldn't see it. To see it, I had to let it go. I kept my hands cupped as long as I could, past nose itch and leg jiggle, and then the dark flitting against my palms made me open and magnificent plates of color lifted against my will.

It was too delicate a story to tell over dinner, and soon there were books and assignments and model cars to glue and arguments and anger, and I forgot there ever was a butterfly. It's only now, some forty years later, that it awakens in me like a revelation placed in the hands of a pilgrim long before he knew enough to believe. Now chasing the butterfly seems a way of life: afraid to lose or be left out, we chase and cling, and clinging, we are lost. It seems so obvious once living it.

Now I can see that during my illness, this was the difference between fear and faith, between terror and the presence of God. Landing in a hospital bed, I chased the beat of everything I faced into my heart and tried to cup it in my boyish hands, burying my head. Of course, I had the beautiful thing beating like that butterfly, now trapped inside me. As long as I kept all of that beauty and power of raw life cupped - in my chest, in my face, in my hands - I couldn't see it. To see it, I had to let it go.

Just as when a boy, I held it as long as I could, until the pounding made me open and this magnificent sense of life lifted out of me against my will. I now know that what I held so tightly within was the presence of God, which held in felt like pain and fear and terror.

Over forty years to learn this vital lesson: that the deeper things beat within, made dark and fearful by our holding, only uplifting the instant we let go.

 

Oh I love this one so much. I remember chasing butterflies. What beauty when we let it go free again. The whole article is so true.

 

May 18 - Friendship

~Nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God than friendship.~ - Simone Weil

I have been blessed to have deep friends in my time on Earth. They have been an oasis when my life has turned a desert. They have been a cool river to plunge in when my heart has been on fire. When I was ill, one toweled my head when I couldn't stand without bleeding. Another bowed at my door saying, "I will be whatever you need as long as you need it."

Still others have ensured my freedom, and they missed me while I searched for bits of truth that only led me back to them. I have slept in the high lonely wind waiting for God's word. And while it's true - no one can live for you - singing from the peak isn't quite the same as whispering in the center of a circle that has carried you ashore.

Honest friends are doorways to our souls, and loving friends are the grasses that soften the world. It is no mistake that the German root of the word friendship means "place of high safety." This safety opens us to God. As Cicero said, "A friend is a second self." And as Sant Martin said, "My friends are the being through whom God loves me."

There can be no greater or simpler ambition than to be a friend.

 

May 19 - The Bee Comes

~The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.~

At times in my life, I have wanted love so badly that I have reimagined myself, reinvented who I am, in an attempt to be more desirable or more deserving, only to discover, again and again, that it is the tending of my own soul that invites the natural process of love to begin.

I remember my very first tumble into love. I found such comfort there that, like Narcissus, I became lost in how everything other than my pain was reflected in her beauty. All the while, I was abdicating my own worth, empowering her as the key to my sense of joy.

If I have learned anything through the years, it is that, though we discover and experience joy with others, our capacity for joy is carried like a pod of nectar in our very own breast. I now believe that our deepest vocation is to root ourselves enough in this life that we can open our hearts to the light of experience, and so, bloom. For in blooming, we attract others; in being so thoroughly who we are, an inner fragrance is released that calls others to eat of our nectar. And we are loved, by friends and partners alike.

It seems the very job of being is to ready us for such love. By attending our own inner growth, we uncannily become exactly who we are, and like the tulip whose blossomed petal is the exact shape of the bee, our self-actualization attracts a host of loving others more real than all our fantasies. In this way, the universe continues through the unexpected coming together of blossomed souls.

So, if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more often than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply loving yourself.

 

May 20 - Breaking Patterns

~If I contradict myself, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes.~ - Walt Whitman

We create patterns that others depend on, and then the last thing we ever imagined happens: we grow and change, and then to stay vital we must break the patterns we created.

There is no blame or fault in this. It is commonplace in nature. Watch the ocean and shore do their dance of buildup and crumble and you'll see this happen daily.

We know we are close to this threshold when we hear someone say, "You're not yourself," or "That was out of charecter for you." What is difficult at this juncture is to resist either complying with how others see us or withholding who we really are.

The challenge, which I don't do well but stay committed to, is to say to those we love, "I am more than I have shown you and more than you are willing to see. Let's work our love and know each other more fully."

 

These are all so beautiful. I love the May 18 Friendship piece so very much. It is so true.

 

May 21 - When Cut in Two

~The cut worm forgives the plow.~

The worm is one of the only creatures that grows from being cut. Mysteriously, if you cut a worm in two, each cut half become whole, and you have two worms.

What is it in how the worm lives that allows it to grow from its pain, and how might we translate that to being human? Well, without looking too far, the worm is completely in touch with the earth. In fact, it eats earth. It lives in humus - soil - inside and out.

Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live with our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch - both inside and out - with that which is larger than we are.

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new.

 

May 22 - Feeling Beyond the Hurt

~Withstanding the tension between opposites until we know it is "enough" releases us from the swing between one extreme and the other.~ - Helen Luke

Sometimes, when I think of my parents, who have hurt me, I am lulled by a wintering sky to feel for them, to try on their view, but in my empathy an old pattern kicks in and I start to lose the truth of my hurt, as if there's only room for one set of feelings - theirs.

The struggle is a common one. So often we feel for others and lose ourselves, or cut others off to preserve ourselves. Like a radio that can only tune to one station at a time, it seems like only one side of things can be received, though all sides are broadcast.

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are aked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.

This does not remove the emotional facts of our lives, nor does it ask us to remain in a hurtful situation. Rather, compassion asks that we open like mountains to the sky, like mountains that can withstand every kind of weather.

 

May 23 - To Be Awake

~There is always purpose in being, but not always being in purpose.~

How easily we get caught up in defining who we are in relation to those around us. I remember walking home from school in fourth grade, when I noticed Roy, a classmate I didn't really like, walking at the same pace as me on the other side of the street. Until I noticed Roy, I was lost in the joy of walking home, free of school, not yet enmeshed in the anger that waited inside my house. but once seeing Roy, I began, without a word, to walk faster, to try to outwalk him. He, of course, sensed this immediately and picked up his gait. As he strode ahead of me, I felt lacking and so stepped up my gait. Before I knew it, we were both racing to the corner, and I felt that if I didn't get there first, I would be a terrible failure.

I have lived enough in the world to know by now that this is how our ambitions often evolve. We first find ourselves alone in the joy of what we're doing. But somehow, there are suddenly others along the way, and we lapse into the breathless race of comparison, and then we are hopelessly running to avoid being termed a failure.

From here, we often latch onto the nearest goal as a purpose; if we can't find one nearby, we are thought to be adrift. But our lasting sense of purpose is in our breathing, in our being. As the humanitarian Carol Hegedus remind us, "Our purpose is that which we most passionately are when we pay attention to our deepest selves."

So underneath all our worries about careers and jobs and retirements, our purpose really comes down to living fully, to being alight with who we are beneath all the names and titles we are given or aspire to.

Imagine Buddha in his moment of enlightenment, of being lighted from within. I doubt if he knew he was aglow. In fact, when Buddha rose from under the Bodhi tree, it is said a monk approached him in utter amazement at his luminosity and asked, "O Holy One, what are you? You must be a God."

Buddha, not thinking of himself as anything but present, answered, "No...not a God," and kept walking.

But the dazzled monk persited, "Then you must be a Deva," and Buddha stopped and said, "No... not a Deva," and kept walking.

Still, the monk pursued him, "Then you must be a Brahma himself?"

At this, Buddha simply uttered, "No."

The monk, confused, implored, "Then what are you - Tell me, please - What are you?!"

Buddha could no repress his joy and replied, "I am awake."

Can it be that our purpose, no matter whom we run into, no matter what we are told, is simply to be awake?

 

May 24 - Blood Reasons

~If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home, we may miss our star. ~ - William Stafford

Like that old saying, "Water fills a hole," the ways of others will fill the space we live in if we don't fill that space with our own authentic presence. For a long time, I thought that keepin who I am to myslef was the same thing as being myself quietly. I discovered it is not.

Not that we have to verbalize or shout everything, but we do need to be fully here the way a cliff accepts a wave, the way a stem of clover grows into the one patch of light left in the forest, the way corn sweats its sweet moisture when no one is looking.

In truth, there are always two blood resons to be who we are. It is how we find love, and it is how we keep the ways of others from sweeping us away.

 

May 25 - Through the Wall of Flame

~As a frightened man in a burning boat has only one way to the rest of his life, we must move with courage through the wall of flame into the greater sea.~

Living long enough, we each find ourselves surrounded by an old way of being, thinking, or loving that is going up in flames. In that unexpected moment, we usually find outselves full of fear, feeling trapped by an old way of life coming in on us. But this is the passage of rebirth that we must move through if our lives are to unfold. It is the momentary and painful crossing from what is old into what is new.

It is understandable to stall at the wall of flame, not wanting to face all that is burning around us. Yet old ways can burn forever, and waiting for the flames to go out seldom works. We can waste years in the waiting.

Like the frightened man in the burning boat, we must trust that the greater sea we are jumping into will douse whatever catches fire as we move through. This is what faith is all about.

Without trying to be brave and with great fear, I have stumbled and jumped through many walls of flame The first time, I think, was in leaving home - needing to go, burning at the edge, afraid I wouldn't survive beyond the flame of anger in which I was raised. Not much later, I had to move through the flames of first-love rejection. Here the broken part of me was almost willing to be burned alive. I felt certain there was nowhere to go and nothing that could soothe me. I more fell through this wall than jumped and, of course, once in the sea of life beyond myself, the world continued and I healed.

Perhaps the greatest wall of flame I had to jump through was the pain of cancer and the prospect of dying. It seemed the entire sea was on fire. Even once overboard, drifting farther and farther from the flames, I thought I might drown. How could I know that greater sea was the womb of a deeper life? I'm sure this is the same for anyone struggling to break out of any form of addiction, illness, or abusive relationship.

But the subtlest ring of fire, it seems, is that self-centered way of thinking that starts to suffocate us with its smoke. For we carry the smoldering of being self-centered everywhere we go. It lives off us and eats up who we are. So, how to jump from the burning boat that is us? Well, it somehow requires jumping from the boat of the ego into the sea of our spirit. This somehow involves the courage to surrender our stubbornness and reams of control. It means letting the ribs of the ego burn. And jumping through. We will more than survive - we will be carried to an unimagined shore.

 

Sorry about the delay in the posts... time to catch up.

 

May 26 - Being Sad

~The best thing for being sad, replied Merlin, is to learn something.~ - T.H. White

The idea here is not to divert the sadness, but to give it a context from life other than what is making you sad. Just as ginger can lose its bitterness when baked in bread, sadness can be leavened by other life.

When feeling the sharpness of being sad or hurt, it helps to take new things in. This pours the water of life on the fire of the heart.

So when exhausted from expressing all that hurt, listen to music you've never heard of, or ask someone to tell you an old story from before your birth, or take a drive down a road near a ridge you've always meant to look out from.

Look with your sad eyes on things new to you that will give you something to do with your sadness. Your sadness is the paint. You must find a canvas.

 

May 27 - Off the Merry-Go-Round

~No amount of thinking can stop thinking~

Overthinking is an annoying reflex of being human. Often in overanalyzing a problem or replaying what to say or what to do, I feel like a cow shooing a fly that will never go away.

We all do this. No one is exempt. Feeling insecure, I can endlessly repeat the things that should make me feel solid about myself, and all the while my esteem keeps unraveling.

What is there to do? I'm reminded of Einstein's insight that the manner of thinking that creates a problem cannot be the means by which to solve it. In simple terms, when spinning out, the only thing to do, hard as it seems, is to get off the mental merry-go-round.

This is truly the terrain of faith, jumping into the risk to stop in midthought, believing that some deeper knowing will wash over us. In truth, no amount of thinking about yourself will give you confidence, just as no amount of thinking about the sun will warm you, just as no amount of thinking about love will hold you. Confidence and love and the light of the world wait below all the labors of our mind.

 

May 28 - The Risk of Attention

~For the raindrop, joy is entering the river.~ - The Sufi Prophet Ghalib

It is amazing to consider how as infants we are one with everything. In time, of course, we learn how to distinguish between ourselves and others, between the world we carry inside and the world we move through. But ironically, the sages of all paths are those who, after lifetimes of experience, try to return to this primary state of Oneness.

When I think of the moments I have felt most alive, they all have this quality of joining all-of-what-I-keep-inside with everything-outside-me in a way that makes me forget myself. They all feel timeless and open-ended. Tenderly, the deepest moments of making love allow us to join in that Oneness beyond ourselves, as do certain moments of being immersed in great music or great open spaces. I have also felt this after long periods of swimming or running, or after long periods of being healthfully alone. I feel it when discovering what it is I need to write. Joy, it seems, is the feeling of that Oneness.

Not surprisingly, it is the risk to love - the risk to give our full attention - that lets what-is-eternal-within merge with what-is-eternal-without. In those moments on Oneness, we, as drops of spirit, join the larger river of spirit.

And so, it is the risk to be fully present that opens us to the Oneness that flows through all things, the way a spring brook flows from your acre through my fence, through my land, and on through my neighbor's fence and land. Just as that rush of water ignores all we have built in between, so the wholeness of life moves through us all, undermining all the walls we maintain.

It seems we always have the choice: to remain a builder of fences or to enter the stream that ignores all fences.

 

May 29 - Giving Up What No Longer Works

~Burning your way to center is the loneliest fire of all. You'll know you have arrived when nothing else will burn.~

At first this sounds rather somber, but from Moses to Buddha to Jesus, the deepest among us have all shown that living is a process of constantly paring down until we carry only what is essential.

It is the same in the human journey as in the natural world. As the center grows stronger, what once was protective turns into a covering, like tree bark or snake skin, that is now in the way, and, sooner or later, we as spirits growing in bodies are faced with burning old skins, like rags on sticks, to light our way as we move deeper and deeper into the inner world, where the forces of God make us one.

When faced with the need to keep going inward, we are confronted with a very difficult kind of life choice: like carving up your grandmother's table for firewood to keep your loved ones warm, or leaving a job that has been safe and fulfilling in order to feel vital again, or burning an old familiar sense of self because it's gotten so thick you can't feel the rain.

In truth, always needing to stay immediate by removing what is no longer real is the working inner definition of sacrifice - giving up with reverence and compassion what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred.

 

May 30 - A String of Todays

~If not now, when?~

Since surviving cancer, there is a burning bit of truth I live with every day. Sometimes it doesn't let me sleep, but most of the time, it brings me great joy. No one uttered this to me, and I didn't arrive at it or work at it. It just revealed itself, the way a broken bone makes us re-feel the immense pressure of air. And this bit of truth is, If not now, when?

It keeps coming down to this: There is no tomorrow, only a string of todays. Still, like most of us, I was somehow taught to dream forward, to fill the future with everything that matters: Someday I will be happy. When I am rich, I will be free. When I find the right person, then I will know love. I will be loving and happy and truthful and genuine then.

But almost dying seared the sense of future from me, and though I expect to live a very long time, though I make plans and look forward to the many things I plan, I have no choice but to dream now.

I start out, as I always have, pouring the best of me into an imagined time yet to be, but then I hear, If not now, when? and the best of me floods back to the only place it truly knows - Now.

This all helps me understand a story about Jesus very differently. I'm thinking of the young, rich merchant who approaches Jesus after his Sermon on the Mount. He admires Jesus so, is truly touched, and wants to join him. So he asks with great sincerity what he needs to do, what arrangements need to be made.

Jesus opens his arms and says, "Come with me now. Drop everything and come."

The young merchant stumbles and cites his many "yes, buts": He can't leave his business so suddenly. He has to leave word. He'll need to gather fresh clothes. How much money should be bring?

With open arms, Jesus simply says one more time, "come with me now."

How often do we all rehearse this moment, putting off love, truth, joy, and even God, citing our many "Yes, buts" to ourselves, when all we have to do - hard and simple as it is - is to drop everything and Come Now.

 

May 31 - Seeing through Another's Eyes

~Now, I have no choice but to see with your eyes, So I am not alone, so you are not alone.~ - Yannis Ritsos

There is a story of Gandhi that reveals how profound and daring his sense of compassion was. It occurred during one of his famous hunger strikes. A man whose daughter was killed came in anguish, saying to Gandhi that he would stop fighting if the great soul would eat. But Gandhi knew the healing was deeper than just stopping the violence, and so he told the man he would eat only when the tormented father embraced the man who killed his daughter.

It is said that the man collapsed in tears, but did as Gandhi asked, and the larger conflict ended. This is an enormous thing to ask of someone in grief, of someone who has been violated. But beyond the vast courage needed to incorporate this kind of love into our daily lives, Gandhi's request reveals the irrefutable wisdom that only when the broken are healed, no matter what they have done, will we as a people heal.

It is hard to comprehend how this works, yet the mystery of true forgiveness waits in letting go of our ledgers of injustice and retribution in order to regain the feeling in our heart. And so, I am forced to look into my own small life, into my own small and all-consuming pains, and ask, Who am I? Why can't I forgive the wrongs done me? Why can't I, more than forgive, begin to trust again?

 

June 1 - Walking North

~Walk long enough and we all trade places.~

We are always surrounded and carried by the Whole, while we take turns holding and being held, falling and getting up, listening and trying to say what matters. This reminds me of Nur. She too had cancer and was a model of strength, a feisty blessing. I remember when she died. I was so sad. Yet the light was merciless in its beauty that day, forcing me to begin to heal. It made me realize, in those painfully bright hours, that no matter how I turn away, the magnificent light follows, background to my sadness.

It works the other way, too. I have known such moments of complete simplicity that all my problems and limitations seemed, for the moment, to vanish, but they were there, growing like mold in the dark. So I learned that no matter how I lift my heart, my shadow creeps in wait behind, background to my joy.

And when I tried to outrun the fact that I had cancer, it became quite clear that no matter how fast I run, a stillness without thought is where I end. Even when repairing in the quiet of a February afternoon - alone, my ribs all taped - I had to accept that no matter how long I sit, there is a river of motion I must rejoin.

It seems the way of our many lives: wherever we are led, the opposite waits. When I am down, you are up; when you are weak, I am strong. How else to explain that when I can't hold my head up, it always falls in the lap of one who has just opened. How else to understand that when I finally free myself of burden, there is always someone's heavy head landing in my arms.

It's how we grow and heal, again and again, by holding and being held. In my own life, I have been held and dropped, have hurt and soothed others, enough to accept, at last, that the reasons of the heart are leaves in wind. Stand up tall and everything will nest in you.

Yet this is not a complaint. It is as it should be, must be, the way everything natural extends and grows. We all lose and we all gain. Dark crowds the light. Light fills the pain. Living is a conversation with no end, a dance with no steps, a song with no words, a reason too big for any mind.

No matter how we turn or are turned, the magnificence follows....

 

June 2 - Tragedy and Peace

~Too many prints in the same place, because the heart's a narrow path and our arms its only gate.~

At times, so many memories trample my heart that it becomes impossible to know just what I'm feeling and why: my first love laughing in a park whose name I can never recall, my grandmother dying near her dirty bricks in Brooklyn, the dizziness of the Rockies telling me to go back among the living, my ex-wife's shoulders slouching tired in the rain, the old dog I used to live with chasing her tail... and a thousand more....

That all the ways we've been touched merge in the ground of who we are is a blessing, a gift of being human. It is what the sages of all traditions have called peace - the elusive moment that all things become one. That we can't sort our feelings and memories once the soil of our experience is tilled is the nature of staying alive. That we insist on keeping old wounds alive is our curse.

Yet, as Thich Nhat Hanh remind us, "Our mind of love may be buried deep under many layers of forgetfulness and suffering." The difference, I'm learning, is in what we focus on. When I focus on the rake of experience and how its fingers dug into me and the many feet that have walked over me, there is no end to the life of my pain. But when I focus on the soil of heart and how it has been turned over, there is no end to the mix of feelings that defy my want to name them.

Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the result.