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….
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 reminds 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.
The buffalo fed on the buffalo grass that was fertilized by their own droppings. This grass had deep roots bound to the earth and was resistant to drought.
—DAVID PEAT
Try as we will, we cannot escape the making of mistakes. But fortunately, the everhumbling cycle of growing strong roots comes from eating what grows from our own shit, from digesting and processing our own humanity. Like the buffalo, we are nourished by what sprouts from our own broken trail. What we trample and leave behind fertilizes what will feed us. No one is exempt.
A pipe falls on a dancer's leg and the dancer must reinvent herself, while the worker who dropped it is driven to volunteer with crippled veterans. A dear friend discovers small bulbous tumors and his tulips begin to speak, and when he dies, his nurse begins a garden. Things come apart and join sometimes faster than we can cope. But we evolve in spite of our limitations, and though we break and make mistakes, we are always mysteriously more than what is broken. Indeed, we somehow grow from the soil of our mistakes. And often in the process, the things we refuse to let go of are somehow forced from our grip.
I have been broken and have failed so many times that my sense of identity has sprouted and peeled like an onion. But because of this, I have lived more than my share of lives and feel both young and old at once, with a sudden heart that cries just to meet the air. Now, on the other side of all I've suffered so far, everything, from the quick song of birds to the peace trapped inside a fresh brook's gurgle, is rare and uncertain. Now I want to stand naked before every wind; and though I'm still frightened I will break, I somehow know it's all a part—even the fright—of the rhythm of being alive.
You see, no one ever told me that as snakes shed skin, as trees snap bark, the human heart peels, crying when forced open, singing when loved open. Now I understand that whatever keeps us from burning truth as food, whatever tricks the heart into thinking we can hide in the open, whatever makes us look everywhere but in the core, this is the smoke that drives us from what is living. And whatever keeps us coming back, coming up, whatever makes us build a home out of straw, out of heartache, out of nothing, whatever ignites us to see again for the very first time, this is the bluish flame that keeps the Earth grinding to the sun.
Throughout all the ten regions of the Universe there is no place where the Source is not.
—HAKUIN
There's an old story about a young man who's freezing on the side of the road in Alaska. He's hitching a ride to Miami. He's so cold he can barely hold up his hand-made sign. After a long wait, a friendly trucker stops and says, “I'm not going to Miami, but I'm going as far as Fort Lauderdale.”
Dejectedly, the young man says, “Oh,” and turns the ride down.
This is a folk myth of our modern culture that warns us against our want for perfection. How often do we refuse our fate under the guise of holding out for the right thing? How often do we turn down the path presented like a gift because it's not exactly what we're dreaming of? How often do we hold out for the perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect house? How often do we martyr ourselves to some imagined ideal?
How often do we lose sight of what we're really after, insisting on all or nothing, when there is so much abundance wherever we are and so many opportunities that can help us on our way?
There's no need to seek the truth—just put a stop to your opinions!
—SENG-TS'AN
Just as life is made up of day and night, and song is made up of music and silence, friendships, because they are of this world, are also made up of times of being in touch and spaces in-between. Being human, we sometimes fill these spaces with worry, or we imagine the silence is some form of punishment, or we internalize the time we are not in touch with a loved one as some unexpressed change of heart.
Our minds work very hard to make something out of nothing. We can perceive silence as rejection in an instant, and then build a cold castle on that tiny imagined brick.
The only release from the tensions we weave around nothing is to remain a creature of the heart. By giving voice to the river of feelings as they flow through and through, we can stay clear and open.
In daily terms, we call this checking in with each other, though most of us reduce this to a grocery list: How are you today? Do you need any milk? Eggs? Juice? Toilet paper? Though we can help each other survive with such outer kindnesses, we help each other thrive when the checking in with each other comes from a list of inner kindnesses: How are you today? Do you need any affirmation? Clarity? Support? Understanding?
When we ask these deeper questions directly, we wipe the mind clean of its misperceptions. Just as we must dust our belongings from time to time, we must wipe away what covers us when we are apart.
Tenderness does not choose its own uses. It goes out to everything equally.
—JANE HIRSHFIELD
We wandered into a corner of the Central Park Zoo, and there, despite the dozens of tourists pointing and tapping the glass, two monkeys were squatting on a perch of stone. To our surprise, they were both in deep sleep, their dark heads bowed to each other, their small frames limp.
What was amazing was that their small delicate hands were touching, their monkey fingers leaning into each other. It was clear that it was this small sustained touch that allowed them to sleep. As long as they were touching, they could let go.
I envied their trust and simplicity. There was none of the human pretense at independence. They clearly needed each other to experience peace. One stirred but didn't wake, and the other, in sleep, kept their fingers touching. How deeply rewarding the life of touch. Each was drifting inwardly, dreaming whatever monkeys dream.
They looked like ancient travelers praying inside a place of rest made possible because they dared to stay connected. It was one of the most tender and humbling moments I have ever seen. Two aging monkeys weaving fingertips, as if their touch alone kept them from oblivion.
I pray for the courage to be as simple in asking for what I need to be.
Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes.
—THE HINDU SAGE RAMANA MAHARSHI
Everyone personalizes and projects. Personalizing is mistaking what happens in the world as always having to do with you. An extreme example would be when a child doesn't do her homework and learns the next day that a plane went down in Dallas; she somehow believes that she was responsible. A more common adult version of this, and less extreme, is when your partner comes home sullen and moody, and you immediately believe it is your fault.
Projecting is the reverse. It occurs when we place the things that happen in us onto the world around us. Often unknowingly, we attribute our fears and frustrations to others. Rather than accept my own anger, I see you as angry. A generational example would be that if I am afraid of dogs, I protect my children from dogs and, without asking how they feel, keep them away from dogs too. A subtler example of this is when someone is crying, and we say there is no need to be upset, because we are uncomfortable with all the emotion. Or when we keep asking the other person if they are okay, when it is we who are not.
The truth is that no one can avoid personalizing or projecting. There are only those of us who are aware of it, and those of us who are not; only those of us who own it when it happens, and those of us who don't. But this difference is crucial. Not owning these things can end relationships. Owning them can deepen relationships.
Humans have spilled soup for eternity, and generations have made excuses, saying, “It was the Earth. The Earth shifted,” and generations have secretly thought, “He meant to do it.”
If you want to save the world, then when you spill the soup, simply say, “I'm sorry I spilled the soup.”
Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a great tree in the midst of them all.
—BUDDHA'S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK
It helps to remember this. Of course, it's hard to remember this when feeling blame, loss, or sorrow. But that's when we need this wisdom the most.
Like everyone, I'd rather not experience the undercurrents of life, but the challenge is not to shun them, but to accept that over a lifetime we will have our share of them.
Avoiding the difficult aspects of living only stunts our fullness. When we do this, we are like a tree that never fully opens to the sky. And dwelling on our difficulties only prevents them from going on their way. When we do this, we are like a great tree that nets the storm in its leaves.
The storm by its nature wants to move on, and the tree's grace is that it has no hands. Our blessing and curse is to learn and relearn when to reach and hold, and when to put our hands in our pockets.
Pain is often a sign that something has to change.
Our hearts and bodies often give us messages we fail to pay attention to. Ironically, we are all so aware of pain, can hardly ignore it, but we rarely hear what it has to say. It is true that we may need to withstand great pain, great heartache, great disappointment and loss in order to unfold into the rest of our lives. But our pain may also be showing us exactly where we need to change.
If we view our bodies as bridges that carry us from our inner life to the outer world, then pain often gives us insight as to where the bridge is experiencing the most stress. Pain lets us know where we might crack, where our lives need to be reinforced and rested, in order for us to keep bringing our inner and outer lives together.
During my struggle with cancer, I experienced a variety of deep and acute pains. I learned how to hold on and let go, learned how to endure—that is, let the pain go through without denying its hurt. But the most crucial thing I learned was to listen to the pain.
I was being worn down by my chemo treatments, which were very aggressive. I was trying the best I knew how to live through as many treatments as I could manage. Everyone was coaching me to stick it out. “Certainly,” I was told by those more afraid than I, “you want to swallow as much poison as you can tolerate, so the cancer will be stricken from your body completely.” I remained committed to this approach.
But after four months, I lost feeling in my fingers and toes. The chemo was causing nerve damage, and I had lost my reflexes. I struggled, unsure whether to continue or not. I felt that the cancer was gone, but the chemo was insurance. Endure more, if you can. Hold on.
Within twenty-four hours, I was up in the night with the worst stomach attack I have ever experienced. There I was, pacing the living room floor at three in the morning, trying to endure the pain, asking God for a sign. The chemo had now ulcerated my esophagus. Another attack gripped me. I doubled over: God, give me a sign. What should I do? I want to live.
Another attack. This happened three more times, when I suddenly realized—the pain was the sign. And its message was to stop. It was over. There I stood, hunched over with my windpipe bleeding and numbness in my hands and feet, and God was saying, “These are the signs. Do you want more? I can give you more.”
The next day I told my sweet doctor that I would not take that needle to my arm again. And it was over.
I have no power of miracle other than the attainment of quiet happiness, I have no tact except the exercise of gentleness.
—ORACLE OF SUMIYOSHI
This Shinto sage from the hills of Japan affirms what we all know in our hearts but seldom honor. I have worked hard to give up attaining a place ordained by others in the world, for this always leads me into noise, confusion, and gruffness. Often it is some grief or pain that halts me, jars me into remembering the exercise of gentleness that opens the quiet world.
The truth is that, more than forgetting this, some unloved part of me whispers insistently that I can have both. Foolishly, I tend to listen, out of pity or pride, only to find out painfully, again and again, that it just doesn't work.
In beautiful mystery, the extraordinary edge to everything is covered over with a current of speed and noise, the way beautiful stones are not quite seeable under the rush of the river's face. Only when we can still the river of the world and the river in our face do things become extraordinary and clear.
Those who drink from the one water gaze at the same stars.
The climb was long. The day was hot. Tom had thought ahead and had frozen his water bottle, so his water would stay cold. But once he drank what had melted, he was left with a small chunk of ice rattling in a plastic bottle. That was when Bill, another climber, who hadn't thought ahead, asked Tom to share his ice. Bill had plenty of water, but it was hot from their climb in the sun.
Tom was glad to share his ice, and tried to break the chunk up so he could pass ice chips into Bill's bottle. After a long frustration, it occurred to Tom to let Bill pour his hot water over the ice and to then let Bill drink from his bottle.
This small moment changed Tom's life. He suddenly realized that if he let things in, he could share more easily than if he kept breaking things down in order to get them out.
As he came back down into the world, he understood the three mysteries of sharing: First, if there's time, let the cold things thaw. But if there is no time, let the warm things in, and only when necessary, break the hard things remaining and pray like hell you can pass them.
We need to count by touching, not by adding and subtracting.
When we count with our eyes, we stall the heart. For the eyes can see clearly what is broken without ever feeling the break, and the mind can calculate the loss without ever sewing up the wound. Without touching the life coming apart before us, we can race to rebuild before the wrecked dream ever hits the ground. While this makes us resilient and efficient as ants, it also keeps us from ever living in what we build.
Alas, what makes us precise and efficient can also begin a life of neurosis: not touching what we see, not feeling what we know. This is how the mind skips the heart's step. How we forget that blood on the news is real, that the cry from the street is attached to something living.
I remember waking after rib surgery to find a dear friend at the foot of my bed. I was elated to have arrived on the other side and called to her, but she was staring off. I knew in that instant she was already mourning me, and so she missed me coming alive. She was already preparing for life without me, and so, the deeper closeness awaiting us was never felt or worn. We think we protect ourselves by taking inventory and moving on, but we only spin our web tighter.
Recently, another friend had a dream in which we were building a home with sturdy shelves for the things we loved. She tried to count the shelves, but couldn't keep the numbers in her head. She had to go over and count the shelves by touching each one. Mysteriously, as she did this, the shelves kept multiplying. Her touch made more shelves possible.
Such a profound and simple lesson: to count with our hands brings us deeper than all counting. Then numbers give way to notes, and sums give way to song.
As an inlet cannot close itself to the sea that shapes it, the heart can only wear itself open.
One of the hardest blessings to accept about the heart is that in the image of life itself, it will not stop emerging through experience. No matter how we try to preserve or relive what has already happened, the heart will not stop being shaped.
This is a magnificent key to health: that, despite our resistance to accept that what we've lost is behind us, despite our need at times to stitch our wounds closed by reliving them, and despite our heroic efforts to preserve whatever is precious, despite all our attempts to stop the flow of life, the heart knows better. It knows that the only way to truly remember or stay whole is to take the best and worst into its tissue.
Despite all our intentions not to be hurt again, the heart keeps us going by moving us ever forward into health. Though we walk around thinking we can direct it, our heart is endlessly shaped like the land, often against our will.
I lose sight of us at times; the way that fish can't see the ocean; the price of lovers swimming in their love.
When we first fall in love, the powerful force of possibility grips us and pulls us along deeper and deeper into the days. When first shaping the bonds of love, we look at each other with incredible freshness and appreciate who is before us. We stare into our new lover's eyes the way we might an overwhelming painting in which we imagine the secrets of life have been stroked thickly.
Inevitably, though, as we grow intimate, we begin to lose sight of each other, and there comes a day when we no longer see our loved one as others do. Now we see the inside of their face, up close. Now we swim in each other like a mysterious river in which we sometimes see ourselves, and sometimes soothe ourselves, and sometimes drink of each other.
Eventually, we climb into the painting we once stared at with our pounding heart, and from inside the painting, we can forget there ever was such a painting. This is how we can take each other for granted. This is how we can imagine that the magic is gone.
But, as the reward for being drawn to the sea is to swim with the waves, the reward for being drawn into the depth of another is to feel each other rather than to see each other. This is the paradox of intimacy. On the way, we see what we dream of feeling, but once there, we feel from the inside what we can no longer readily see.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
Iam jogging in the city on a hot summer day, and my legs are in a rhythm, carrying me without much guidance through small crowds, past roses and bus stops.
I begin to think about my struggle not to give myself away. When growing up, I had to check myself at the door like a coat in order to relate to others. Often, I had to pretend to be less than I was in order to be loved.
For years, I would shelve my light to take care of others. Like a fireman, I'd drop whatever I was doing to rush to the rescue. For so long, the choice seemed only to stay open and lose myself or to close up and cut others off. But today, while running freely through the streets, close to others but not entangled, I realize I am learning after many attempts that I can stay close and porous, caring and present, without holding everyone's anxiety and without going underground. At least I can try.
I am dripping and breathing like a small horse. It is clouding over. It begins to rain slightly. I move through the beautiful people and ask for a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut. As I chew this simple food, rain from the sky meets rain from my body, and in the rain, sweating, the tang of sauerkraut on my lip, I feel joy. Others shuffle by. Today, there is no room for worthlessness.
We wander and think no one will ever find us. And lifing our sorry head, we are next to each other.
—MARK NEPO
We imagine that so many conditions are prerequisite to finding love, when all that is required is that, like a man stepping from a boat to a dock, we step over the small gap that exists between us. Often there is nothing to prepare for, nothing to set up in advance—just to step over what separates us and to land in what is before us.
But, giving in to our fears, we widen the gap by creating conditions that must be filled before stepping toward another. This is how we invest in the building of credentials and lifestyles and bank accounts that are often distractions from the simple and essential need to be held. In this way, we move up and down and around, but seldom straight into what will give us love.
To know love we must do more than understand, we must land and enter. Before we step, the gap to others seems like a canyon. But stepping anyway, the separations we move through look so much smaller once crossed. Often the thing feared, once crossed, turns out to be an unexpected bridge from which we can see who we were and who we are becoming.
Even the clearest water seems opaque at great depth.
—JOEL AGEE
Each of us is like a great, untamed sea, obedient to deeper currents that are seldom visible. Knowing this gives us three insights worth keeping in our awareness. First, we must consider that the deepest patch of ocean is as clear as its surface wave, though it remains unseeable to the human eye that bobs above it. Second, how far we can see into the deep depends on the calmness or turbulence of the surface. And third, just as the depth and surface of the sea are inseparable, so too are the spirit and psychology of each human being.
It is our deep-sounding, untamed currents that cause us to rise and swell, dip and crash. Yet that base of spirit remains unaffected by the storms that churn up the surface. It obeys a deeper order. Still, we as beings living in the world are always subject to both: the depth and the surface, our spirit and our psychology. Though we can never see all the way to bottom, on clear days—when our psychology is calm—we can know the depth that carries us. When free of turbulence and anxiety, we can know the ocean of God that swells within.
So, in love, in relationship, in the brief clarity that living gives rise to, I see all the way through you, as far as my sight can go, and am forever changed. Then the winds come from the east, and suddenly you're all churned up, your depth seems blocked, and I wonder who you are. This happens in the course of knowing one's self as well. It is unavoidable. Watch any patch of sea. It is never completely still. Even when calm, it reflects everything as it spreads and never vanishes. So, too, our feelings, which keep changing in the light.
The degree to which we are clear and seeable depends on how calm we are and how calm the day. But we are never cut off from our spirit, any more than the surface wave is cut off from the ocean floor. Fear of living often comes when we place all our energy into the moment of the wave, into the turbulent moment of our psychology.
If revelation is the brief experience of seeing through the surface, into ourselves or others, then wisdom is the recall of that seeing when the waters are murky.
This night will pass… Then we have work to do… Everything has to do with loving and not loving….
—RUMI
Very often, when hurt or depressed or anxious, we encounter powerful feelings like ghosts without a body, trying to pour themselves into us, trying to dominate our lives. They seem to gather in the cave of our pain, stoking our wounds like stones in a fire that keeps them warm.
After years of struggling to let my painful feelings out, I'm learning that the other side of this, which is just as essential to my well-being, is not to let the hurt or depression or anxiety set up camp inside me.
I must confess it has taken me all this way to fully understand that the purpose of surfacing these powerful feelings is to continually empty my heart and mind of its sediment, so that new life can make its way into me.
There are dangers to not letting such feelings out. But once felt, there are dangers as well to not letting such feelings move on through. For just as our lungs must stay clear for the next mouthful of air, our heart must stay unobstructed for the next feeling we encounter.
There is no freedom until we dance the ghosts from the chambers of our wounds, until we pile our wounds like stones at the mouth of our own quarries.
The eyes experience less stress when they can look upon a wider horizon.
—R. D. CHIN
Whether it be physics or architecture or Eastern forms of meditation or Western forms of prayer, every field of inquiry affirms the fact that the wider our view, the less isolated we are. The more connected we stay to everything larger than us, the less turbulent our time on Earth.
This is why it helps to share our journey with others, because in so doing we become a chorus of voices, and the stress of going solo lessens once we discover that we are not alone.
As light when confined turns to heat, the stuff of our lives when confined ignites brush fires out of our isolation. I felt the difference dramatically when joining a wellness group during my cancer experience. Alone, I was feeling the heat of dying. But once voicing my pain in a circle of others on the same path, my heart relaxed back into the light of living.
So when you see someone stumbling forward with a stone in their heart, simply go near them and listen. When the pains of living feel sharp, open up your attention and give it freely, and the connections will even out the sharpness. When things feel heavy, reach out to whomever is near and distribute the weight.
Live for the air after pain and there will be no reason to run.
Hippocrates said that pleasure is the absence of pain. Anyone who has ever suffered knows this is a deep truth. When I fell into the gauntlet of tests that awaited after the pronouncement that I had cancer, I was terrified of being in pain. I introduced myself to every physician and nurse as Mark-put me out-Nepo. But with every procedure, there was some medical reason why I had to be awake. I came to realize that there was nowhere to run.
Once I accepted this, which took some time, I understood that what was most terrifying about my pain was the prospect that it would never end, that life would somehow freeze in whatever moment of discomfort I came upon. The terror gained its power from not being able to imagine life beyond the pain.
The breakthrough moment for me came the day I had to have yet another bone marrow sampling. For some reason, these were the worst for me. But with the appearance that day of some deeper grace, I suddenly saw it differently. I recognized that this very uncomfortable procedure lasted at most forty to fifty seconds and I was arranging my entire life and being in anticipation and avoidance of those fifty seconds.
For the first time I realized I had a choice. The pain of those seconds would be the same, but I could ground myself, including my fear, in the very real fact that my life would resume after those fifty seconds. There would be light in the air, once again, after the pain. For the first time, I felt in my soul that I was larger than my pain. This empowered me.
So many times, in our despair, we see our pain as something that will never end. In fact, this often defines our moments of despair: when we believe that our pain contains the rest of us. In contrast, there is this sense of peace to work toward: the belief that our life contains our pain.
I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
Consider how the sun continually lights our daily world, yet we cannot see light except in what it touches. Though the sun burns constantly and holds everything living within its pull, though it sends its power across millions of miles, it is unseen for all that way, until it hits a simple blade of grass or makes the web of a spider a golden patch of lace.
In the same way, the presence of God powerfully moves between us unseen, only visible in the brief moments we are lighted, in those enlivened moments we know as love.
For just as we can look at that spider web and never see its beauty until it reveals itself in sudden light, we can look upon the nearest face, again and again, never seeing the beauty in each other, until one or both of us is suddenly revealed. Spirits show themselves in just this way, or rather, our gentleness of heart allows us to see and be seen.
It makes our search for love a humble one. For what is there to do but grow in the open and wait.
Honesty is the net by which we fish the deep.
Though we are taught to make plans and keep to them, and though we work our way through predesigned courses of study to receive credentials and degrees, our attempts at real living don't happen this way.
For me, finding where I fit in the world feels a lot like spiritual fishing. The vast, mysterious ocean of experience keeps calling, and whether it is by buckets of question or nets of honesty, I keep hauling up food from the days. I keep hauling in shells and pearls and seaweed from a common depth that no one can see, and then I spend time cleaning what I've found and hearing what it has to say.
In this way, everyone alive must fish, and this requires stillness and patience and a willingness to drift. For we never know where deep things live. Even our effort to know ourselves resembles this process, for much of who we are lives cleanly below the surface, and we each must be nourished from what lives below, if we are to survive.
Paradoxically, our essential feelings and personal truths live below like fish, not wanting to be caught. But spiritual fishing yields spiritual food, and the secret nourishment of eating what lives within us is that to eat what lives in our shell we must open that shell, and eating what swims below our surface lets us see with the perspective of the deep.
In truth, every person I have ever loved and every path I have been called to has shown itself to me after fishing in the waters of my spirit, which, entered deep enough, is the ocean of all spirit. I believe we are all connected there, and only by this communion—of bringing up and taking in what lives within us—can we hope to uncover our common purpose of being. In committing to this honest practice, wisdom becomes that very good net of mindful heart, through which we rinse and claim the smallest of shells, those hidden casings that hold both food and pearls.
Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace, than the going beast, marking the earth.
—FERNANDO PESSOA
Much of our anxiety and inner turmoil comes from living in a global culture whose values drive us from the essence of what matters. At the heart of this is the conflict between the outer definition of success and the inner value of peace.
Unfortunately, we are encouraged, even trained, to get attention when the renewing secret of life is to give attention. From performing well on tests to positioning ourselves for promotions, we are schooled to believe that to succeed we must get attention and be recognized as special, when the threshold to all that is extraordinary in life opens only when we devote ourselves to giving attention, not getting it. Things come alive for us only when we dare to see and recognize everything as special.
The longer we try to get attention instead of giving it, the deeper our unhappiness. It leads us to move through the world dreaming of greatness, needing to be verified at every turn, when feelings of oneness grace us only when we verify the life around us. It makes us desperate to be loved, when we sorely need the medicine of being loving.
One reason so many of us are lonely in our dream of success is that instead of looking for what is clear and true, we learn to covet what is great and powerful. One reason we live so far from peace is that instead of loving our way into the nameless joy of spirit, we think fame will soothe us. And while we are busy dreaming of being a celebrity, we stifle our need to see and give and love, all of which opens us to the true health of celebration.
It leaves us with these choices: fame or peace, be a celebrity or celebrate being, work all our days to be seen or devote ourselves to seeing, build our identity on the attention we can get or find our place in the beauty of things by the attention we can give.
When was the last time you danced?
—QUESTION PUT TO THE SICK BY A NATIVE AMERICAN MEDICINE MAN
The beginning of dance is giving gesture to what we feel. While this is very obvious and basic to most children, it remains very difficult for those of us schooled to live in our heads.
The ongoing effort to dance, to give gesture to what we feel and experience, is ultimately healing because, as riverbeds are continually shaped by the water that moves through them, living beings are continually shaped by the feelings and experiences that move through them. If there is no water moving through, the riverbed dries up and crumbles. Likewise, if there is no feeling moving through the body, the being at the center of that body will crumble.
More often, though, there is too much to give gesture to, and we fail to move these feelings through our bodies. In truth, much of our inner sickness comes from the buildup and pressure of all that is kept in. The ongoing act of releasing that inner buildup is what spiritual practices call embodiment.
There are many ancient practices intended to help us live more fully in our bodies, including the Chinese art of meditation movement known as t'ai chi and the Buddhist art of space awareness known as maitri, to name just two. Once unblocked, giving gesture to our inwardness not only frees us from becoming pressurized, but the gestures, once allowed out, teach us how to dance further into our own lives.
Still, most of us learn to feel, trap, and snuff our feelings in our hearts, and if they won't go away, we try to hush them with our minds. If they still persist, we often feel them throb in our temples or burn in our gut.
In contrast to the painful layering of heart, mind, and body, embodiment itself is nothing more or less than feeling the wound or lip you touch in your hand and mind and heart at once. Embodiment is allowing our heart, mind, and body to exist as one miraculous skin.
The Love we show saves the Love we hide, the way a sprig in sun feeds its unseen root.
Even though I believe in living in the open, parts of me hide. I can't help it. But what I can help is which parts of me—the open or the hidden—run my life. What I can rely on is this inexplicable knowing that when I am in the open, life nourishes even those parts so sorely hidden.
Just as green stems in spring stay connected to their darker roots, just as the roots grow when the stems do, my compassion soothes my fear where I can't see. Unknown to me, my love feeds the underside of my confusion. The light I take in keeps the roots of my soul alive.
We become so preoccupied with what we are not able to address, what we are not able to mend, what we are not able to leave behind, that we forget that whatever we are in the light of day is slowly, but surely, healing the rest of us.
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness… And so, it is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
—GANDHI
This great spiritual teacher reminds us that prayer of the deepest kind is more a pledge of gratitude for what has already been received than a request or plea for something not yet experienced. Such an effort refreshes the soul.
Implicit in Gandhi's instruction is the need to surrender to our lives here on Earth. By admitting our weaknesses, we lay down all the masks we show the world and as we do so, what is holy floods in.
I once saw a blind man rocking endlessly in the sun, an unstoppable smile on his face. Not a word was uttered. To me, he was a priest, a shaman, and his whole being was praying and shouting in silence that the day, beyond his blindness, was happily enough.
This is what the heart knows beyond all words, if we can find a way to listen: that beyond our small sense of things a magnificent light surrounds us, more than anyone could ask for. This is what prayer as gratitude can open us to.
It is said a great Zen teacher asked an initiate to sit by a stream until he heard all the water had to teach. After days of bending his mind around the scene, a small monkey happened by, and, in one seeming bound of joy, splashed about in the stream. The initiate wept and returned to his teacher, who scolded him lovingly, “The monkey heard. You just listened.”
With the best of intentions, we often build false careers of studying the river without ever getting wet. In this way, we can ponder great philosophy without ever telling the truth, or analyze our pain without ever feeling it, or study holy places without ever making where we live sacred. In this way, we can build a cathedral on the water's edge, spending all our time keeping it clean. Or we can count our money or say our prayers, without ever spending anything or ever feeling God's presence. In this way, we can play music or make love skillfully without ever feeling the music or our passion.
The apprentice was brought to tears because the monkey, slapping and yapping its way in the river, had landed in a moment of joy, and the apprentice knew that all his reverence and devotion and meditation hadn't brought him the joy of a monkey.
The river, of course, is the ongoing moment of our living. It is the current that calls us to inhabit our lives. And no matter how close we come, no matter how much we get from staying close with a sensitive heart, nothing will open us to joy but entering the stream.
I once was on a screened-in porch on a lake I used to visit every summer for twenty years. My friend and I were watching it rain, as we had done countless times over the years. Suddenly, like that simple and beautiful monkey, my friend bounded up, slapped the screen door open, tracked his clothes, and jumped into the rain-filled lake.
I watched like the apprentice, feeling the pain of always being dry, and then I shed my clothes and jumped in too.
There we were: in the center of the lake, water from above in our mouths, in our eyes, pelting us, water entering water, lives entering their living. Each pelt of rain, on us and in the lake, uttering … joy, joy, joy.
Discernment is a process of letting go of what we are not.
—FATHER THOMAS KEATING
Ican easily over-identify with my emotions and roles, becoming what I feel: I am angry…. I am divorced…. I am depressed…. I am a failure…. I am nothing but my confusion and my sadness….
No matter how we feel in any one moment, we are not just our feelings, our roles, our traumas, our prescription of values, or our obligations or ambitions. It is so easy to define ourselves by the moment of struggle we are wrestling with. It is a very human way, to be consumed by what moves through us.
In contrast, I often think of how Michelangelo sculpted, how he saw the sculpture waiting, already complete, in the uncut stone. He would often say that his job was to carve away the excess, freeing the thing of beauty just waiting to be released.
It helps me to think of spiritual discernment in this way. Facing ourselves, uncovering the meaning in our hard experiences, the entire work of consciousness speaks to a process by which we sculpt away the excess, all that we are not; finding and releasing the gesture of soul that is already waiting, complete, within us. Self-actualization is this process applied to our life on Earth. The many ways we suffer, both inwardly and outwardly, are the chisels of God freeing the thing of beauty that we have carried within since birth.
The instant fish accept that they will never have arms, they grow fins.
Iconfess I was surprised to wake one day with this knowing about fish. It seems a koan or riddle to decipher. After living with it awhile, I've come to feel that it holds another key to faith: that before we can be what we are meant to be, we must accept what we are not. This form of discernment asks us to let go of those grand fantasies that take us out of our nature, that make us work to be famous instead of loving, or perfect instead of compassionate.
Yet the instant we can accept what is not in our nature, rather than being distracted by all we think we could or should be, then all our inner resources are free to transform us into the particular self we are aching to be.
This act of acceptance is a risk that frees us because we can't find the growth that awaits us until we give up what is against our very nature. It is this surrender, without knowing what will happen next, that allows our lives to truly unfold.
In exchange for the promise of security, many people put a barrier between themselves and the adventures in consciousness that could put a whole new light on their personal lives.
—JUNE SINGER
The pull into the truth of things is very strong. Often the only way to resist it is to deny what we are seeing, to pretend our lives do not have to grow or change. Yet when we do this, our spirit, which doesn't know how to pretend, keeps moving. For as the Isa Upanishad says, “The Spirit is swifter than the mind.” We are then, painfully, like a dog at the end of its leash, staked and running at the same time, pretending we don't know any better.
Interestingly, we tend to think of ignorance as an innocent not-knowing, but the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa points out that to ignore someone or something is a willful looking away, a grave act of denying what is already conscious. Trungpa suggests that the willful act of looking away is a crime against the essence of things that costs us dearly.
When we find our spirit on the move when we are pretending otherwise, the tension can be ripping. It leaves us all with the need to learn how to discern between an innocent not-knowing and a willful looking away. This is an inner knowing that can determine whether we will live like a dog at the end of our leash or whether we will run free through the grasses of life.