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

July 9 - The Surface and the Deep

~When under, remember the surface. When on the surface, remember the deep.~

When our days are turbulent and troubled, our challenge is to remember that the wave is not the sea. Though it pounds us, the pounding will pass. Though it tosses us about, the tossing will pass, if we don't fight it.

Often our fear misleads us to stay in close to shore, when the safest place is in the deep, if we can get there. Any swimmer knows: Stay too close to shore and you will be battered by the surf and undertow. We must swim out past the breakers if we are to know the hammock of the deep.

Stay on land or make it to the deep. It is the in-between that kills.

 

July 10 - The Ring of Safety

~Who sees all beings in his own Self and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.~ The Isa Upanishad

I was sitting on a bench in the sun, waiting for Robert, when a yellow jacket landed about four feet to my left. I watched its striped anterior pulse and protract, the sun making its black rings blacker and its yellow rings almost orange.

It made me think of my mother and how if that yellow jacket were within yards of her, she would have rolled up the nearest magazine and with trepidation tried until she swat it. Her fear of being stung made her kill many a small thing. She couldn't tolerate the uncertainty that something living might hurt her, and in her deep fear of being hurt, she walled herself in, swatting everything away.

Almost forty years later, I realize that we all suffer the uncertainty of being hurt by the life that surrounds us, and we all have a changing ring of safety beyond which we are likely to hurt other living things in the guise of self-defense.

I sat on the bench and the yellow jacket flitted closer. But having almost died from cancer, feeling blessed to be here at all, I let the little insect come much closer than I used to. With a softer, more truthful eye, I could see it had little interest in me, and I am ashamed to admit just how many times I have harmed others because, like my mother, I couldn't tolerate the unpredictable nature of their advance.

How often we imagine things are dangerous when they are only doing what comes naturally. The yellow jacket came closer still; when it was almost on my arm, there was time enough to gently shoo it on its way. If flirted with me for quite some time, coming close till I would shoo it on, buzzing at a distance, then coming close again.

This is so much like the dance we do with strangers and loved ones alike. How often we murder parts of ourselves by not letting things advance or come close. How often we let fear and the swat rule our emothional lives. How often we kill or chase away everything that moves.

I think of Francis of Assisi, who held so still the birds landed on his branchlike arms, and we wonder why we are so lonely when we won't let anything full of life come near. If we could only see the bee, or the bird, or our enemy as a brief living center like ourselves, we could let them go on their way withour pulling us into opposition.

 

July 11 - The Moon and the Dewdrop

~Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass. The moon does not get wet, nor is the drop of water broken....And the whole moon and entire sky are reflected in even one drop of water.~ - Dogen

The mystery - in love, in work, in any moment of oneness - is that, like the dewdrop and the moon, we are briefly ourselves and everything at once. Our essential nature is not changed, only enhanced.

The lovers and friends that have helped me stay alive and be more fully alive have come into my life like Dogen's moon - all of their love, as big as the sky, fills my heart and yet I do not become them, but only more myself.

Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.

In truth, the smallest stem of a damaged heart, like a single blade of grass, holds the essence of everything alive. Enlightenment is the kiss of anything - moon, storm, or kindness - that opens us to that essence.

 

Caroline,
I relate to this one..thanks for your time and energy in posting these! :-*

 

July 12 - Making Waves

~I would do anything for you. Would you be yourself?~

In the Hans Christian Anderson classic, The Little Mermaid, Ariel gives up her beautiful voice in exchange for legs. This is a seemingly innocent fable that captures our deal with the modern devil. For aren't we taught that mobility is freedom, whether it be moving from atate to state, or from marriage to marriage, or from adventure to adventure? Aren't we convinced that upward mobility, moving from job to job, is the definition of success?

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with change or variety or newness or with improving our condition. The catch is when we are asked to give up our voice in order to move freely, when we are asked to silence what makes us uique in order to be successful. When not making waves means giving up our chance to dive into the deep, then we are bartering our access to God for a better driveway.

As a story about relationship, the lesson of Ariel is crucial. On the surface, her desire for legs seems touching and sweetly motivated by love and the want to belong. Yet here too is another false bargain that plagues everyone who ever tries it. For no matter how badly we want to love or be loved, we cannot alter our basic nature and survive inside, where it counts.

 

July 13 - Now You See It, Now You Don't

~God leads me to still waters that restore my spirit.~ - Psalm 23

It doesn't take very long for each of us to accumulate an emotional history. A child burns her hand on a stove and a fear of fire begins; in a tender moment, a hand is slapped and a fear of love begins. Our emotional associations and reflexes run deep. Often, the heart breathes beneath all our associations like a soft, sandy bottom waiting underwater.

Thus, to see ourselves clearly, we must try to still our associations till we are as transparent as a calm lake. When still enough and clear enough, others can also see through to our bottom. It makes love possible again. But paradoxically, when someone is moved to reach for us, their fingers stir things up, sending ripples everywhere, and we and they can often lose sight of what matters.

All this affirms the need to stay with our feelings long enough for the emotional associations - the ripples - to settle. No one can escape this. No matter how young or old you may be, no matter how innocent or experienced you are, if you've been awake and alive and in any kind of relationship that has in any way been real, your waters will stir, your emotions will ripple. It seems the only way we can truly know our own depth is to wait for our associations and reflexes to subside, till we are clear as a lake again. Only when what gets stirred up settles can we see ourselves and each other clearly.

 

July 14 - To Know Someone Deeply

~To know someone deeply is like hearing the moon through the ocean or having a hawk lay bright leaves at your feet. It seems impossible, even while it happens.~

Discovering who we are is like breaking a trail up the side of a mountain. Yet the deepest friendships begin when we look into the eye of another and discover that they have been there too. It is always astonishing to me to find out that someone else sees what I have seen, and always humbling to learn that what I thought was my path and my mountain is everyone's.

We carry whole worlds within us as we brush by each other in the supermarket to read mayonnaise jars. The entire drama of life churns in our blood as we rush underground to catch a train. We are always both so known and so unknown.

This is why knowing someone deeply is such a treasure. It opens the sky of all time. It lets the song come out of the sea. It lets the heart like a photograph be developed for being touched by another.

And though we may find someone along the way who's been where we are going or going where we have been, we must never stop breaking our own trail up the mountain. For only by daring to be ourselves can we deeply know others.

 

So true!

 

Agreed... ;D

 

To Know Someone Deeply Is To Know Someone Softly!


Very nice C!

 

Very nice. It reveals part of the beauty of a long marriage.

 

Exactly, June..I was thinking no matter the bumps of a long marriage..this is what it's about..he knows my soul, inside out and loves me anyway, as I do him..so we work through the bumps..

 

July 15 - The Risk to Be Touched

~Touch bleeds the heart of its pressure.~

There are many reasons why we want to be touched. The simplest and most profound is that touch heals us. The way a drop of water spreads when touched, the pains of living that we carry spread when we are held and comforted. The buildup of bearing things alone is released for being touched with sincerity and love.

Beneath all language, touch is the common gesture, the energy that connects all that lives inside us with all that lives outside us. We can disagree - be Catholic or Muslim or Jewish, be conservative or liberal, corporate or rural - and all the stern walls created by what we think will crumble for the gentle reach of a compassionate hand.

Often, we are frightened to let others in, afraid of being hurt, and sometimes, once knowing the salve of being touched, we seek that comfort for pains we can only heal ourselves. I, repeatedly, have found myself doing both. But these are problems of when and how to open ourselves to touch. The need to be touched is never really in question, anymore than we question the need to breathe.

When my grandmother was dying at ninety-four, I felt crippled at heart because she had reverted to speaking the Russian of her childhood, and I feared we wouldn't be able to understand each other. But an old friend took me aside and said, "You both can understand touch." With this, I stroked her face and arms in silence and she rubbed my wrists, and, even when she couldn't open her eyes or speak any longer, we had a language of comfort that carried us to the moment of her passing.

Sometimes we would do better to admit the heart works best in mime. For beneath the worries and fears of being hurt or rejected or taken advantage of, beneath the avalanche of excuses and explanations, there waits a deep and simple pulse that we need from each other in order to be whole.

 

July 16 - The Magic of Peace

~As the lungs remember to breathe, even when we sleep, the spirit keeps us alive through the dream of our will.~

It is said that Merlin, when training young Arthur in the woods of Camelot, told him that the only difference between magicians and the rest of us is that magicians accept that our will is but a dream. Certainly, we decide what clothes to buy and what car to drive and even how to spend our days. But these are like the stones a hungry fish mouths along the bottom as the river sweeps its small life along.

Still, we devote ourselves to these small things, for that is what we do, and it is true, God is inside every particular. Yet often, we survive, and even thrive, not because of our endless schemes but in spite of them.

But what I need to tell you is that I met Merlin in a dream, and I sked him about being alive. He wanted to know if I knew Arthur and, after a time, he whispered, "Go beneath the many languages of desire... for our peace depends on whether we fight or ride the stream."

 

July 17 - The Impulse to Love

~If somebody were to cut me into a thousand pieces, every piece of me would say that it loves....~ - Chris Lubbe

The man who said this is a deeply spiritual person who is a native of South Africa. He like many others grew up under apartheid. He told me that he was taught by his ancestors not to stay bitter or vengeful, for hate eats up the heart, and with a damaged heart, life is not possible.

In a way, we are each confronted with the same dilemma that Chris faces: how to feel the pain of living without denying it and without letting that pain define us. Ultimately, no matter the burden we are given - apartheid, cancer, abuse, depression, addiction - once whittled to the bone we are faced with a never-ending choice: to become the wound or to heal.

Terrible things are hard enough to experience the first time. Beyond their second and third and fourth experience as trauma, their impact can easily make us become terrible if we do not keep our want to love alive. Perhaps the most difficult challenge of being wounded is not turning our deepest loving nature over to the life and way of the wound.

This touching statement by this South African man affirms that the nature of the human spirit is irrepressible. Just as a vine or shrub - not matter how often it is cut back - will keep growing to the light, the human heart - no matter how often it is cut - can reassert its impulse to love.

 

Many of us are lucky enough - that whatever injustices we face day to day - there is one such person in our lives who was full of love. That makes all the difference.

 

July 18 - A Firefly of Love

~Who knows that in the depth of the ravine of the mountain of my hidden heart a firefly of my love is aflame.~ - Abutsu-Ni

This quiet Japanese woman's confession to herself almost a thousand years ago tells us that the most important things begin so far inside we can hardly hear them ourselves at first. Or that we keep the most important things so tucked away that they barely have a chance to grow. Probably her sigh of heart bears witness to both. Please. Read her lines again. Now.

These are not just words, but the heartcloud of a living being, catching herself alive in a moment that has repeated itself in everyone who has ever known or wanted to know love. And, though I'm not sure how, we can, in the snap of a guarded moment, in the wince of an unexpected hurt, be a mountain away from what we feel. but if we own the separation, we then begin the arduous pilgrimage back to Oneness.

Somewhere along the way and often with good reason, we learn to fear putting our feelings out in the open, out in the weather of ordinary air, as if our small piece of love will die for exposure to the elements, as if our true feelings will not survive the gaze of others. Yet we all know so very well that without air nothing can grow. So what are we to do with our tiny little firefly?

It is a beautiful irony that in confessing her hiddenness, Abutsu-Ni has given us a way. For isn't it her firefly that has fluttered all the way up from the ravine, up from the mountain of her hidden heart, flitting to moisten her eye and wag her reluctant tongue? Isn't it her little firefly of love that has kept its tail lit for more than nine hundred years?

It doesn't have to be pretty or smart, just honest and true. For many a dance starts with a trip, and many a song finds its opening through a cough.

 

July 19 - The Wisdom in Blinking

~Asleep too long, we need to wake. Awake too long, we need to sleep.~

We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can't escape this opening and closing. It's a reflex we can't control. Even as you read this, your eyes, along with your heart and mind, are blinking - opening and closing repeatedly, no matter what you do. It is part of being human.

Yet so much depends on which you see as home - being open or closed. Do you see life as one stream of light interspersed with nights of dark, or as one stream of darkness interspersed with days of light? Though there will never be an answer, what we believe about the nature of life matters. It lifts or burdens our days. So ask yourself, more than once, Is life one long miracle of feeling interspersed with moments of breaking?: Do we repeatedly fall in our humanness from a never-ending light? Or is life one long painful breaking interspersed with moments of wonder? Do we struggle up from the unending dark briefly into glimpses of light?

Obviously, there are times we feel one way and time we are certain it is the other. There are even times we know it is both. But how we allow for both -how much we make the light our home and how much we settle into the dark - determines the personal alchemy of our hope and despair, our optimism and pessimism, our belief and doubt.

My journey has been mixed. Entering surgery, I was certain life was dark and I couldn't keep my eyes open. But waking from surgery, I was certain that all that had changed while I was under. Now everything was buoyant and I could barely close my eyes to rest. The same thing has happened when losing love. I felt closed and dark and unable to open. Yet falling in love has always made life one singing interval of light during which I can barely sleep.

Perhaps the wisdom in blinking is that it keeps us in the middle, keeps us from drowning in the dark and from burning up in the light. Perhaps this is the reflex that lets us make sense of being human.

 

July 20 - Learning How to Float

~When we stop struggling, we float.~

When first learning how to swim, I didn't trust the deep. No matter how many assuring voices I heard from shore, I strained and flapped to keep my chin above the surface. It exhausted me, and only when exhausted did I relax enough to immerse myself to the point that I could feel the cradle of the deep keep me afloat.

I've come to understand that this is the struggle we all play between doubt and faith. When thrust into any situation over our head, our reflex is to fight with all our might the terrible feeling that we are sinking. Yet the more we resist, the moe we feel our own weight and wear ourselves out.

At times like this, I remember learning to float. Mysteriously, it required letting almost all of me rest below the surface before the deep would hold me up. It seems to me, almost forty years later, that the practice of finding our faith is very much like that - we need to rest enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves upheld.

This is very hard to do. But the essence of trust is believing you will be held up if you let go. And though we can practice relaxing our fear and meeting the deep, there is no real way to prepare for letting go other than to just let go.

Once immersed, once below the surface, it is not by chance that things slow down, go clear, feel weightless. Perhaps faith is nothing more than taking the risk to rest below the surface.

That we can't stay there only affirms that we must choose the deep again and again in order to live fully. That we must move through the sense of sinking before being upheld is what trusting the Universe is all about.