I’ve just had a bit of fresh air, and it’s fascinating to me to notice a proximity to a sense of shame at a threshold held just at bay by the practiced work of heart opening in the face of fear.
The fear expresses as a sense of threatened failure for not having a clear path forward through a system that still trends heavily in the direction of imagined freedom from dependence and the practical, but polar rule of “self-sufficiency.”
While at peace in the work of the open-heart, my psyche is also often (not entirely paradoxically) restless as the habitual and pragmatic mind peers forward, insisting on the, now all-too-familiar, question of “how shall these efforts be sustained…?”
Yet this is a question I am not just now clear on which agency to apply to its addressing. From many a meaningful perspective, the time to do so appears short. (Today I have only been a few weeks of finances on account, with no clear next deposits in order.) Which agency… That of surrender? The agency of faith? All hands on deck, sounding the alarms of desperation? A patient but persistent brainstorm of creative potent?
I do not want this piece to become mired in that exploration, and perhaps I will return to those questions before the page comes to a close, but for now…
The fear of failure, a psyche’s desperate longing for some certainty in an otherwise mysterious, full, and majestic cosmos erupting each moment a new in dazzling detail and intricacy. An open heart that embraces this chaotic perfection, blissfully discovering fascinating pattern and in the same instant, letting them go in ecstatic liberation.
Today I passed nearly 5 hours away from my “station of productivity,” the office from which I might leverage some spontaneous creative act of inspired creativity to call forth a reciprocity of sustenance in our collective endeavor. Though I could account on my to do list, inbox, and calendar as being “behind schedule,” I opted instead today to turn my flesh out to the sun and the air and the world that I might be nourished in other ways.
Though it has been literally six months, the death of my father, two extended hospitalizations, and weeks more in bed since I traveled more than a few minutes by foot from my home, nonetheless a trip up the coast today to the meditation gardens of the Self-Realization Center in Encinitas and a little lunch with coffee down the block from there still felt like hints of getting away with something not quite mine to possess.
I knew in the freshness of the morning, the clear blue sky and the return of a warm day, that adopting such an errand was likely to surface these feelings of insecurity threatened inadequacy to our nonetheless struggling human collective. Nonetheless, I offered that Western work ethic up as a sacrificial offering to the spirit of cosmic relationship as the true source of wellness and well-being.
I’m glad I did. I have love to give, and the hermitage of this little room, sufficient as it may be, can be helped by the openness of the bluff, the wide open skies above, and the wide open sea below, in their combined capacity open those gifts to the world. I know that love is real, I think also though that it may be wise at times to test my faith. Many know I certainly have no shortage of help in that department.
So yes, my dear friend Charles, the only travel I’ve had my motorcar in six months is a handful of ambulance rides. Merging onto the freeway, though familiar today, felt also a bit voyeuristic as though returning to some distant and therefore dreamlike memory. “Traffic,” I said aloud to my generous companion, “I haven’t seen this for a while…”
Home now. It is early evening. A walk in the gardens, a sit for something of meditation on the bluff, a local café for toast and eggs and coffee, and a 30 minute drive home itself with the afternoon sunshine bearing in through the passenger window, and it was a high time for a nap before returning any efforts to that insistent call for “getting things done.”
And so here it is, early evening and I am writing this note to publish. While I sit each day in some time of practiced quiet, those efforts do not yet reveal themselves to me as an overwhelming act of service, though certainly they may be. Meanwhile, writing this, attaching a few photos and clicking send allows me to coddle my ego some, reassuringly insisting that I have done at least one thing of worth to the world that I might earn my bread for the day.
There is so much of each of us, so much beautiful kindness and care that goes unseen in the world. It seems to me not right to call attention to those things in oneself, but rather to be instead vigilant for the places where it might falter. At the same time, in our culture of hyper individualism and demands of endless growth, we are called upon each day to stand up and declare ourselves loudly and proudly, or at the very least with some insistence, to others that we are of value and must be compensated for our collaboration in these mad systems of ours.
I’m thinking about a quote I have long admired:
"When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'"
Often attributed to Lao Tzu (though I know not the authenticity of such attribution), I have often considered this condition and aspirational state for true service and strive to practice something of this in my life.
Even now… I cross a threshold even to raise such a matter with myself as object to pair with such a statement. This, I think, is one of the true values earned by those Masters who can sit quietly in a cave, a park, at the market, or on the exercise bike and beam rays of loving empowerment across the room, the world, the cosmos. Those Masters who, realizing their own nature as ripples in the divine ocean of love, find themselves sustained through simple efforts of care, chopping wood, carrying water, tending fire, like deer in the forest – collecting herbs and needing little of the world to flourish and do their work.
So yes, in the end it seems, this piece is truly about those close paths of fear and faith in a profoundly self realized generosity of care.
The month of October is nearly up. The full moon’s eclipse still rippling its effects into the field of our world, and I have practical horizons to which I much attend in some sense of agency. I have good, and I hope generous, work to do and kind souls with whom to relate. I have a home, a to do list, a window to the street, and bed on which to rest myself at the end of each day.
I have a precious, rare, and sacred connection to teachings and skilled practitioners who practice their generosity in guiding myself and others into those views where we might find a humble and diligent path of wise love and compassion and skillful means in service to others, and perhaps may I hope, to life itself.
As I bring this page to a close, I notice with some gentleness, how many loving friends and family, strangers even and acquaintances, that I could thank, and should, and do in the little ways that I find that I can. I do not exist outside and apart, I do not forage in some other of a world, seeking to extract of it my own desperate survival. I am 51 years of age in this go around, and have been nourished every step of the way by the love and compassion and kindness of others who make up the mirror to the majesty of self that is the fullness of this implicate order and wellness of being in the mystery of the timeless and boundless gesture of the great perfection that is here now.
Thank you
.
I hear you and see you, my friend. I especially love the paradoxical juxtaposition of independence / self-sufficiency with the collective realization that “we did it ourselves.” The ego may be a personal, practical way to keep the will to live and survive alive, but knowing we are all one and connected in the process of the divine getting to know itself sure seems like a cruel cosmic joke we either get or we don’t, at our own peril. Thank you for sharing your graceful wisdom on the struggle of being an individual soul becoming one with the mysterious spirit of the universe!
Shalom rav al Yisrael am'cha tasim l'olam. Ki atah hu Melech Adon l'chol ha-shalom. V'tov b'einecha l'vareich et am'cha Yisrael b'chol et uv'chol sha'ah bish-lomecha.
שָׁלוֹם רָב עַל יִשְׂרָאֵל עַמְּךָ תָּשִׂים לְעוֹלָם
Your outing seemed to do a world of good. Hope it can happen again before too much time passes.