I’m going through my journals from my trip to Nepal.
As we were preparing to leave the Everest area, and fly out on a plane from Lukla, Celeste shared with me this quote on Emerson’s definition of success. Certainly she lives it, and I consider it too, this day, a weekend sacred and celebrated with gathering, connection, and a pause to reflect.
Ralph WaldoEmerson’s definition of Success:
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Each season brings its own meaning and teaching. This weekend we celebrate in different ways, each of us with our own beliefs.
I love how the word spring, springs. This morning it brings me to honor the sacrum, the bone at the base of the spine that hosts the four dignities: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. The word sacrum means “sacred” in Latin. The Romans called this bone “os sacrum” which means “holy bone”. The Greeks called it “hieron osteon” which also means “holy bone”.
I sit here now, my holy bone moving back and forth, side to side, floating waves and springing joy in the nature that is my life. Tissues wake.
I’m with these words of Eckhart Tolle from Stillness Speaks.
Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep knowing that is wisdom arises
through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention.
Attention is primordial intelligence, consciousness itself. It dissolves the
barriers created by conceptual thought, and with this comes the recognition
that nothing exists in and by itself. It joins the perceiver and the perceived in a
unifying field of awareness. It is the healer of separation.
Life is both fragile and strong allowing us to balance, ground, rise, and connect, trusting the spring to life.
It rained all day yesterday, and the creek in Mill Valley went from dry to rushing and gushing. This morning, sun.
Gollum’s riddle from The Hobbit seems appropriate:
“A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.”
Eggs are a lovely place to focus as April 15th, Tax Day, is on approach though this year we stretch to the 18th. April is poetry month and this weekend brings Passover and Easter.
These spring days we’re challenged and invited to expand our beliefs. Like an egg dropped into boiling water, we immerse to cohere so when the shell is cracked, we’re still in one piece.
As D.H. Lawrence wrote: You can do whatever you want with a belief. But an experience does something with you.
A turkey on our roof expanding the boundaries of what’s possible at breeding time.
Yesterday I savored a video of my two-year old grandson coloring eggs, bright blue, red, yellow, orange, green. His fingers were colored like tiny rainbows, blended,blurred.
Yesterday I saw a rainbow, not really a bow, more a prismed blend, which perhaps reflects all that’s happening these days. There’s no clear arch.
Where does one come to rest?
I rest my sit bones on the chair, move back and forth, side to side, feel my jaw respond, my eyes.
I wiggle my nose like a bunny and nibble a carrot. It’s Spring and eggs and color are everywhere.
Even among the tragedies unfolding on the earth, may we pause for a moment, and sit in colored curves.
Today I have a dermatologist appointment, which I’m already nervous about, as I’ll have freezings on my face, which I anticipate to be painful as it has been in the past, and yet, what if I could be with these words of Sharon Salzberg:
Beginning again and again is the actual practice, not a problem to be overcome so that one day we can come to the “real” meditation.
At this moment, I’m in a warm house and it’s raining outside. My tummy is full and a new cup of coffee is here with me. This moment – enough.
I was in a discussion today that focused on “Conversing and Interrupting”. How do we enter an ongoing conversation, discussion, or interactive group? How do we find our part, claim our space, or do we sit back in childhood programming of being seen, not heard, and told not to interrupt?And in that, are we actually seen? Are we seeing ourselves?
Instead of the word “interrupting”, I wrap in the words converging and engaging. These words give me a gentle entry, a cushion for reflection on the subject of conversation with others and with myself.
How do I bring myself into a group, or into the diverse voices I am? How do these inner voices converge, engage, and interact? Do they shout or whisper, speak with invitation or confrontation, flow or contract?
As His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is kindness.”
How am I kind to myself, and in that, others?
In the conversation today, we, who were of the age of wisdom, agreed that aging is humbling. Where we once felt formidable, strong, and able to do anything and everything, now there is vulnerability. We have to ask for help.
On Wednesday, I was at the beach with a friend. We brought food and settled ourselves on the sand to watch the sun set. She went to open her water bottle. It wouldn’t budge. I tried. Nothing! And then a lovely young couple walked by, and my friend said to him, “You look strong. Do you think you could open this for me?” And he did, and he opened it so easily, the four of us laughed. It was so funny, and perhaps, as I type this a little sad, but isn’t that where we find humor, in the truth of what it is to be alive, and in the connectivity that vulnerability brings?
I’m with these words from The Power of an Open Question by Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel.
The way we know things depends upon the mind, nothing more. Most of us have moments of deep contentment when we don’t feel a need to alter, express, run from, or invest some special meaning in our experience in any way. Deep contentment shows us that, at least momentarily, our habit of cherishing and protecting ourselves from what we call “other” has subsided. In moments like these, we have stopped objectifying things. We can let things be. And when the mind rests at ease in this way, it accommodates everything, like space.
There is freedom in letting go, in surrender to the moments as they unfold, knowing and trusting there is a timetable beyond what we may understand.
This morning I felt the truth of tears as liquid love, the fullness, as though moisture was dew within me, drops of rain, flowing me to fluidity, a river to the sea. When we feel the light within, prisms form, rainbows we cross along the way.
I was reminded of Stanley Kunitz’s wonderful poem, “The Snakes of September”. He’s writing about summer and how he hears snakes in the shrubbery, sees shadows in the thickets. In September, he thinks they may be gone but then –
Today I spoke with a friend whose husband learned on Monday that his cancer has metastasized. He’s gone through 15 months of torture to combat the cancer. Despite that, it has spread and treatment has ended. They have weeks, possibly months to do what calls them now. Horrific as this is, and I can’t stop shaking, I think of how we all know in our hearts this is how we could live each moment, with this vital, living awareness of what is happening now, and now, and now.
We spoke of how we motivate ourselves to rise each morning. He has been driven by what he wants to do, and she has been more motivated or driven by a sense of duty, and now, there is freedom. What calls them now? He’s always wanted a Panama hat so he just bought one, and when they closed his safety deposit box, the money that would have been spent there paid for the hat. Life is like that. Even when it seems unbalanced, which this does, there is some sort of accounting beyond what we know or see.
All of this circles me back to quotes I love.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
There is nothing so wise as a circle.
John Squadra:
When you love, you complete a circle. When you die, the circle remains.
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