True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

–William Penn

Genuine prayer is an event in which man surpasses himself. Man hardly comprehends what is coming to pass. Its beginning lies on this side of the word, but the end lies beyond all words. What is happening is not always brought about by the power of man. At times all we do is to utter a word with all our heart, yet it is as if we lifted up a whole world. It is as if someone unsuspectingly pressed a button and a gigantic wheel-work were stormily and surprisingly set in motion.

–Abraham Joshua Heschel

“When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.”

– Japanese Proverb

Last week we made necklaces for each other, because on Thursday I head to Hazy Moon Zen Center to sit my first sesshin with my teacher, Maezen, and Nyogen Roshi. We used Shrinky Dinks, and I wrote her message to me and one to her (the handwriting is choppy because I wrote backward so it would read properly on the shiny side.) My favorite color is green and hers is yellow (though trending toward pink), so we’ll feel connected while I’m gone. I’m sure we’ll feel connected regardless, but this is a tangible connection for us both, a sort of talisman. It will be a fine time for Claire and her Daddy to go on special outings. I’ll be home Sunday evening from “Buddhist Summer Camp” (as Hub jokingly calls it) — one step (at least) closer to enlightenment.

Next up: thinking of something cool for dinner. It’s been mild this summer, but today it’s 95F! No complaints here. Hakuna Matata!

A small stone for today.

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”

“Gone where?”
Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
“Here she comes!”
And that is dying.

–Henry Van Dyke

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

–Victor Hugo

Updated 7/11 (because comments are closed and I didn’t want to take the time to figure out how that happened): Perhaps the quote makes more sense if it reads, “Life is the toast for which love is the honey.”

Lift your arm. Let it fall onto your leg. Simple?

Is existence simple?

Consider that there are two massive objects: the earth — the whole big round rock of it — and your relaxed arm. The reality of the earth’s gravitational pull can be experienced in the heavy fall of your arm. Drop your arm again, cosmically this time.

OK, here is a less obvious thought: the mass of your arm is attracting the mass of the earth. Earth-arm force is just as reciprocal as earth-moon force, or in twin stars, star-star force. The earth is falling toward your arm as your arm is falling toward the earth. The attraction is mutual. It’s love.

There’s a binding force in nature, and gravity is its large-scale expression. Every time you drop your hand, or take a step, or hoe the garden, it is the experience of eternal love. Our bones and the earth are lovers; they embrace when we sleep, they mate when we die.

–W. A. Mathieu, The Listening Book: Discovering Your Own Music

In the past two weeks — one of them being my PMS hell-week, when I normally feel like my skin is too tight, am bone-tired, and am agitated and simmering with anger — I have felt something different. Calm. Centered. Grounded. Like a mountain. Unshakeable. Patient. Bemused by things that normally piss me off (stupid drivers, for example). Toward Claire, I have felt the wide open space of graciousness and being, just spending time with her. When we’re getting ready to go somewhere, I haven’t been in my usual flurry of cranky nagging, and we still manage to get where we need to go. As I wrote to Maezen, Claire has been responsive to this. The other day she said, “Mommy, I like the way you talk to me. You’re magic. I love you.” She’s been very affectionate — possibly also because my absence refreshed us both!

I feel a change in my interaction with my husband too. Rather than becoming snippy and defensive when I’m tired, or when discussions snag, I’ve remained clear and calm. I like him more. Or perhaps I’m encountering me differently?! I asked him this morning if he’d noticed any changes in me, and he admitted he had not, but that he also hasn’t been paying much attention. His head has been at work most of the time, even when home.

But possibly the most convincing (to me) evidence that meditation has helped is that I skipped yesterday completely, and as a result today I have that vibrating, irritable energy. I hear a stridency in my voice when I talk to Claire that has been otherwise absent. Perhaps the “honeymoon” of my mini-vacation is over, or perhaps it’s because meditation really has that much impact. The only way to tell is to keep sitting.

On Writing Poetry

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say “We loved the earth but could not stay.”

–Ted Kooser

I’m sharing this after reading Maezen’s post of today.

Time is very precious. Do not wait until you are dying to understand your spiritual nature. If you do it now, you will discover resources of kindness and compassion you didn’t know you had. It is from this mind of intrinsic wisdom and compassion that you can truly benefit others….Moment by moment, we should look at life as if it were a dream unfolding….In this relaxed, more open state of being, we have the opportunity to gain the infallible means of dying well, which is recognition of our absolute nature.

–Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

I am thinking… about the health of our cat, Stella. Tomorrow we’ll take her to the vet.

I am thankful for… a good night’s sleep.

From the kitchen… I have fresh homemade bread.

I am wearing… the usual — jeans, turtleneck, knit vest, with a pair of colorful new earrings to add dash.

I am creating… glittery wood ornaments as gifts for friends.

I am going… to wrap gifts this evening.

I am reading… chapters 11, 12, 13, and 14 again in Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life.

I am hoping… we all stay well the next few weeks!

I am hearing… the sounds of leaf-raking, an airplane descending to the airport, and boys skateboarding.

Around the house… lots of wrapping to do, the never-ending sweeping, and preparing to make a gingerbread house with Claire.

One of my favorite things… is getting personal email.

A few plans for the rest of the week: getting on the bike at 7:30 each day, and finding some time to just sit before bed.

Here is picture I am sharing..

Post idea borrowed from Surfside Serenity.

So, we are born and we grow. We encounter “splits” in our being as we develop and the ego grows. Who we are narrows into mostly mind. We focus on developing language, rationality, competency within our world. Language is so powerful, so immersive, that we tend to forget we are in it. We mistake it, and thought, for reality. Our culture, the biosocial band, is a filter of myths, stories, and worldview that we are born into. We have not only a self, but a self-image. The ego is “an identity that conceives of itself as a separate and inner entity, existing inside the body somewhere in the region of the head, and assumes it is commanding the body from on high.” Singh continues:

We all believe and act as if our identity were something with substance, with reality, and with enduring characteristics. In point of fact, however, our identity is nothing more than who we think we are at any moment in time, a compendium of inner desires, aversions, memories, and tightly interwoven beliefs. Identity is something that exists only in being conceived.

We talk to ourselves incessantly to establish a sense of our existence. We narrate our lives, issue judgments, articulate opinions, engage fantasies, and chatter to ourselves constantly in our heads. We believe our identity is our name, occupation, relationships, diplomas, biography, etc. We are capable of introspection and self-reflection.

When the adolescent ego begins to look at itself, it encounters an existential abyss of fundamental dimension. When it begins to look inside, it knows that it is, but hard as it tries, it can never quite grasp what exactly it is. In some vague and slightly nauseating, slightly terrifying way, the mental ego senses its incompleteness, the flimsiness of illusion upon which it is constructed. The abyss is quickly side-stepped.

And where do we go as we dodge away? We embark upon the identity project.

The identity project, which arises at first out of defensiveness against terror, becomes a lifelong endeavor. We choose a persona (or several over time) and focus on becoming that. It might arise from our profession or relationships. For example, I was a a perpetual student and later a therapist. I was a single woman and am now a wife and mother. We work to solidify and secure these concepts of ourselves. And you know what? We achieve great things in this.

The level of ego is an elevated and encompassing level of consciousness — quite an achievement for our evolving and beloved species. Certainly, hosannas can be shouted for what we have achieved in our identity projects wiht the use of our faculties and talents. We have become capable, technological selves, acting upon the world in ways that further our own evolution. We have quintessentially lifted ourselves by our bootstraps.

And yet, we also create our own dramas, our own suffering. We are embroiled in the soap opera, forgetting that we are not the show. We are more than that, but we have forgotten.

Most of us plateau here, until we are informed that we are terminal and have a short time to live. Then we face the fact that we (as defined by our ego) are not in control. Nor are we complete or whole. While this terrifies us, it is actually good news. We’ll get to go home. And for some of us, we find a way to go home before we leave our bodies, through a dedication to meditation over many many years.

This is an extremely simplified synopsis of the journey into ego in Singh’s book. As I read it, I had an understanding that exploded between my eyes (in my third eye?). I get what Jesus meant. He was trying to enlighten people, to help them understand that this is not all that is, but that as long as we cling to our “treasures on earth,” we’ll not see this. His death was a way of showing what the ego must endure — its annihilation — which is required before we can transcend to unity with the Ground of Being. And I knew this, growing up I understood this, but it was laden with fear and ideas of hell and punishment and worthlessness. Later on it was tarnished by the stupidity of the simplistic “born again” prayers/positions espoused by the churches I was in. It was like buying eternal life insurance. Say these words and all is forgiven, but the focus on “being saved” from my sins and from damnation was misleading and eventually rang hollow for me.

The mental ego must die before true life, whole life, heaven, nirvana is found. And everybody will enter whole life, find unity, because every body dies. Buddha said it. Jesus said it. Many prior and subsequent mystics and philosophers have said it. The message is we each will get there, and we don’t have to wait until we are dying to do so (or to try). We can arrive at enlightenment; we can be born again. What does that really mean? What is that really like? What is transpersonal consciousness? What is connection with the Ground of Being/God/Unity? The ego, the identity we cling to, is deeply established. It must actually confront its fear of death (which pretty much qualifies as hell for me) as we travel the path of return. We will only know as we go.

I don’t even know if I should be writing all this here. It’s not polished. I’m tired and have little time for finesse. But that’s what I’ve got, folks.

Radiant One, You shine within us, outside us —
even darkness shines when we remember.

Focus your light within us — make it useful!

Create your reign of unity now!

Create in me a divine cooperation: from
many selves, one voice, one action.

Help us fulfill what lies within the circle
of our lives; each day we ask no more, no less.

Loose the cords of mistakes binding us as we
release the strands we hold of others’ guilt.

Don’t let us enter forgetfulness,
the temptation of false appearances.

Truly — power to these statements —
may they be the ground from which
all my actions grow.

The above is a translation of the Lord’s Prayer from the original Aramaic. I find it liberating, and fascinating to see a greater truth in this version than in the stilted (though much simpler to memorize) version I grew up with. This was synthesized from a book of various interpretations entitled Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus’s Words, by Neil Douglas-Klotz. For a line-by-line comparison, see below.

Radiant One, You shine within us, outside us —
even darkness shines when we remember.
Our Father, Who art in heaven

Focus your light within us — make it useful!
Hallowed by Thy name

Create your reign of unity now!
Thy Kingdom come

Create in me a divine cooperation: from
many selves, one voice, one action.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Help us fulfill what lies within the circle
of our lives; each day we ask no more, no less.
Give us this day our daily bread

Loose the cords of mistakes binding us as we
release the strands we hold of others’ guilt.
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those
who trespass against us

Don’t let us enter forgetfulness,
the temptation of false appearances
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

Truly — power to these statements —
may they be the ground from which
all my actions grow.
For Thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever.