You Just Can’t Miss It
Yesterday we held our first-ever Retreat in a Box (led by Jack Kornfield) and I think it was a hit. (Jack’s always a hit.)
So for today I offer this by Alice Walker, which Jack quoted at the retreat:
“One day when I was sitting there like a motherless child which I was, it came to me, that feeling of being a part of everything, and I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed, and I laughed and cried and I ran all around the house. When it happens, you just can’t miss it.”
An Intuitive Sense of What’s Possible
One of the many wonderful (and ordinary) things Mirabai and I talked about while I was staying with her was Sharon Salzberg‘s book, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience. (Sharon was one of the guest teachers at the CDL retreat.) The book had come out a couple of years ago and I thought I’d read it, but during my discussion with Mirabai it became clear that I had not.
So of course, as soon as I got home, I started reading. And I couldn’t stop! It is EXCELLENT. (Despite the title, which I think is the reason I never got around to reading it in the first place. “Faith.” Not my favorite concept — at least not the way it’s usually meant, i.e. a belief you’re supposed to have, no matter how irrational, unlikely, and/or contrary to fact.)
But I love this book! Here’s a sample:
“I stepped onto the spiritual path moved by an inner sense that I might find greatness of heart, that I might find profound belonging, that I might find a hidden source of love and compassion. Like a homing instinct for freedom, my intuitive sense that this was possible was the faint, flickering, yet undeniable expression of faith.
“The breakout moment of faith was my decision to travel to India without knowing where to go once I got there. A few days before my departure, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, was scheduled to speak in Buffalo. I decided to go. Trungpa Rinpoche was the first practicing Buddhist I’d encountered. His background seemed very exotic…
“After his talk, Trungpa Rinpoche asked people to submit written questions. Mine happened to be the first piece of paper he picked out of the huge stack in front of him. He read the question aloud: ‘In a few days I am leaving for India to study Buddhism. Do you have any recommendations as to where I should go?’
“He was silent for a few minutes, then in his precise British accent he replied: ‘In this matter you had perhaps best follow the pretense of accident.’ That was it–no names or addresses, no maps, no directions.
“What could he mean by ‘the pretense of accident?’ This was the first intimation that I might be embarking on a journey unlike anything I could image or predict.”
***
No kidding.
Even if you think you already know everything about Sharon and what it’s like to take a “leap of faith”….check out this book. It’s quite the story. And it just “happens” to be exactly the book I needed to be reading at this moment. What an accident!
What Else Is There To Do?
While I was visiting with Mirabai after the CDL retreat, she told me about an event she organized, in which Jack Kornfield read this letter from his friend, the poet Alison Luterman:
“Don’t tell anyone, but even as a good Jewish girl I love Jesus. I love his dark Semitic eyes and how his friends are all the poor and the prostitutes. He’s just that Buddhist Bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokitesvara, except his name is easier to pronounce. It’s hard to yell for Avalokitesvara when you’re in big trouble, but ‘Oh Jesus!’ comes naturally. I just don’t want to die saying ‘Oh shit.’ I want to die like a lama, lie on my right side, and turn my head in the direction of my next birth. I know I have to meditate a lot to do this and well, let’s face it, I haven’t started early enough in my life to ever get there, I’m afraid, and following Jesus seems so much easier. All you have to do is love everyone.
“Well, ‘seems’ is the critical word here. Sometimes it seems impossible, especially with the particular people around you, but then if you really look, you realize what else is there to do? What else is there to do?”
“Spooky Action at a Distance”
For today, a little poetry-and-quantum-physics entanglement:
Entanglement
by Jane Hirshfield
A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague
sign their moon-faced illicit emails,
“ton entagle’e”.
No one can explain it.
The strange charm between border collie and sheep,
leaf and wind, the two distant electrons.
There is, too, the matter of a horse race.
Each person shouts for his own horse louder,
confident in the rising din
past whip, past mud,
the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear.
Desire is different:
desire is the moment before the race is run.
Has an electron never refused
the invitation to change direction,
sent in no knowable envelope, with no knowable ring?
A story told often: after the lecture, the widow
insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle.
And what, the physicist
asks, does the turtle rest on?
Very clever, young man, she replies, very clever,
but it’s turtles all the way down.
And so a woman in Beijing buys for her love,
who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket
from a night-market street stall.
On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell,
a turtle.
Inside that green-painted shell, still smaller.
This continues for many turtles,
until finally, too small to see
or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head,
a single un-green electron
waits the width of a world for some weightless message
sent into the din of existence for it alone.
Murmur of all that is clasp able, clabberable, clamberable,
against all that is not:
You are there. I am here. I remember.
When You Are Very Busy…
For today:
“Half an hour’s meditation is essential except when you are very busy. Then a full hour is needed.”
— Saint Francis de Sales
Dominate or Subordinate?
One of the workshops that I think I really “got” at the recent CDL (Community Dharma Leader) training retreat was the one led by Ruth King on the Five Characteristics of Dominant/Subordinate Dynamics, specifically as it relates to interactions between racial groups in the US. (Ferguson anyone?)
One of these characteristics is Cultural Conditioning:
* Dominant members live at the individual level. (“I’m not racist. I never owned slaves. I’m a good person.”)
* Subordinate members live a the group level. (“Black men are often perceived as dangerous by white people, so as a black man I have to get used to white people locking their car doors when I walk by.”)
This has so many implications! Frankly, I had no idea. But I’m starting to.
Here’s a way to practice waking up to this dynamic:
* Consider: In this relationship, am I in the dominate or subordinate group? In this instance, am I consciously aware of myself as a part of a group? Or not? How about the other person (people) in this relationship? Do they seem to be talking about themselves as an individual? Or as a member of a group? How do they seem to be relating to me — as an individual or group member? If there is a difference between how we think of ourselves — and each other? Is this getting in the way of our being able to understand each other?
Etc.
How It Feels To Be Free
OK, so now I’m ready to talk about it…and I just want to say that the CDL training retreat was awesome.
To give you a taste, take a minute (actually 6 minutes and 12 seconds) to watch/listen to this You Tube video of Nina Simon singing/playing…teaching the dharma!….live at Montreau in 1976. It’s a video that one of the CDL teachers (Gina Sharp) played for us as part of our training. (And which Gina has played….all by itself, with nothing added — because nothing is needed! — as a dharma talk.)
Check it out! Click here.
What We’re Looking For
For today, another quote from The Sacred: Wisdom from Contemplative Teachers, curated by Mirabai Bush:
“I think people everywhere, young and old and in between, are searching for signs of the sacred in their life, all the time, whether they know it or not. Although there are some tools of practice being used for results simply like stress reduction, I think that’s not ultimately what people are looking for.
“They’re looking for liberation. They’re looking for the sacred. They’re looking to feel that sense of belonging. They want to love and they want to feel unconditional love. And they have wanted that from time immemorial. It is that sacredness that doesn’t need a religious institution. The greatest power of the contemplative arts and meditation is the renewal of the sacred.”
— Steven Smith, founder of Hawai’i Insight Meditation Center
The Temple Within
I’m back from the CDL training retreat and my stay with Mirabai, but I’m not quite ready to post about either of them — perhaps because they were both quite amazing.
So for today, I leave you with this quote from Jon Kabat Zinn (from a sweet little booklet Mirabai curated, The Sacred: Wisdom from Contemplative Teachers).
“Contemplation has the word temple in it. And it really includes the notion that the human being is in touch with being a numinous being, a luminous being, and engaged in something that’s nothing less than sacred — being committed in some way to a sacred calling.”
Something Will Stick in the Mind
As I mentioned yesterday, I leave early Saturday morning for the next Community Dharma Leader (CDL) training retreat in Garrison, NY. Tomorrow will be hectic, so I probably won’t post again until I return. Check back again sometime after September 28.
For today I’m doing all my regular getting-ready-to-go rituals, which in addition to doing laundry and making lists, includes taking a moment to read a bit from my favorite mind-travel guidebook: Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.
Cities & Signs 2
Travelers return from the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
I too am returning from Zirma: my memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level; streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin; underground trains crammed with obese women suffering from the humidity. My traveling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city’s spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on a train’s platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.