Our lives are as precarious as a lamp flame in a strong breeze.
—NĀGĀRJUNA
I’M SITTING IN a winter cabin that I’ve returned to year after year, sitting before the same window, waiting for the same trees to sway when no one’s looking. As if this year I might listen better and hear more. It’s in this familiar silence that I realize that the only thing we truly have control over in this life is our presence and our absence. We can show up or hide. We can reach out or turn away. We can lean in or back off. We can live with the house of all we know open so the breeze of life can refresh us, or we can hide and dwindle behind a barricade of opinions. And while we have to calculate danger and guard what we love, the only true way to protect ourselves is to be so present that our elemental being comes forth to meet the world. This is how the elements heal the world. Light incubates. Water irrigates. Wind lifts. The ground sprouts. And presence enjoins whatever it touches. This is why I return to this cabin, to be lifted by that presence one more time.
While walking in the snow, I look back at the cabin and realize that when hurt, I withdraw my presence. Yet all too often, in withdrawing, I vanish when hurt rather than relocate myself. When mistreated, I don’t need to hide or muffle who I am. I just need to limit my exposure to those who would hurt me.
The snow is lightly covering my face, and I can see that no matter what we face, our real challenge is not to vanish but to keep the house we call being, open. For it’s only when open and present that we can be filled with the holiness that informs everything. For presence meets presence, the way water will rush to join other water.
The sun is going down. I return to the cabin and make a fire and listen to it for hours. In the absence of the noise of my life, I can see that something in us wants to make a pilgrimage of everything. As if there’s always more over there. Always some truth just out of reach because of our limitations. Always the need for more air because we can’t hold our breath any longer. Always more darkness to move through because we can’t stay awake any longer. Always more fire to endure because we can hold our heart like a hand over the open flame of life only so long.
But here, in the stillness, it all seems much simpler. And that ever-present simplicity calls us to return to it. It doesn’t matter where we return to, because we can find it anywhere. In the climb to the top of a small mountain. In a patch of heather bending to a yellow wind. Or in the shimmering sea along a coast I’ve always known.
The fire needs another stick, so I stoke another log and watch it flare. In the absence of all the traffic, the presence at the heart of things has risen in me again. I feel myself filling myself. It makes me see that just as we lift weights at the edge of what we can bear in order to strengthen our muscles, we need to heart-lift at the edge of what we can bear in order to strengthen our heart. As I fall asleep, the fire turns to embers.
In the morning, the sun is climbing over the tired shoulders of night, making silk of the treetops. It hasn’t reached my neighbor’s cabin, not yet. He’s still sleeping, as I was forty minutes ago. He still thinks it’s night. As did I. This is the rhythm of presence: the fullness of being alive always climbing on the shoulders of our darkness without our knowing. This is what keeps us going: the acceptance that there’s light beyond our darkness, stillness beyond our pain, and a river of dream rushing toward us.
I get in my car and rejoin the tribe I’m a part of. I stop once back in the city, park, and wander a few blocks. I enter a street I’ve known for years and sit on a bench and meet whatever life comes my way with no attempt to name it, to judge it, to rescue it, or to push it away. I let the homeless person I see remind me of my own vulnerability. I let the bird looking for food touch the part of me that’s hungry. I let the cloud about to rain touch the part of me that’s cloudy. I watch the blind woman tap the sidewalk ahead of her and feel the part of me that refuses to see. I let the light on the iron bench warm the part of me so in need of light. I rise from the bench and go down another street. I’m beginning to touch the world again. Feeling present, I’m able to give warmth to those in need of warmth.
It’s only when open and present that we can be filled with the holiness that informs everything.