October Snowstorm

Awakening / Awareness / Climate Change / Extreme Weather / Global Warming / Grace / Happiness / October Snowstorm / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing / Tracy Cochran / Waking Up — 8 Comments
14
Nov 11

A Life With Heart

What does it mean to live fully?  To live a life with heart? The lesson from the power outage is still with me.  Even as I go about living my ordinary, electrically illuminated, computer active life, I find myself remembering there can be a deeper quality to life.  In the darkness and stillness, my sleep had a different quality, and so did my dreams.  As I mentioned in this space before, I have embarked on a book project I am tentatively calling “How Jane Eyre Can Change Your Life,” so I read Jane Eyre by firelight and candlelight, noting with a new awareness the role that fires and candlelight played in this masterpiece.   I went to sleep at night full of the insight that much of human life was—and still is, in much of the world—a struggle to survive in the most elemental sense —to build fires and have fresh, clean water and good food.   And this elemental  physical quest to get all the right elements in the right relation resonates with our quest for inner harmony—for expression, love, and connection in this world.

One night, buried under nine blankets and still cold, I dreamed I was wandering through a dark, northern place searching for shelter and food.  This is possibly the influence of Jane Eyre, although it had a very ancient, Nordic feel about it—I was marching through snow afraid of a wolf-like creature that dragged off children, a creature which could change shape and become a raven or even a black insect that devoured from within (Creepy!).  I woke up realizing that our bodies and minds carry the memory of being tiny, vulnerable things surrounded by unknown forces.   And the unknown had teeth.  A Christian missionary once asked some Viking thanes how they saw life.  They told him (I paraphrase) that we are like birds that fly out of the darkness into the light and warmth of the meade hall.  After a brief time we fly out into the unknown again.   If we really knew that life is brief and our future uncertain, dependent on mysterious forces, how would we live?

I came out of my brief time in the dark and the cold realizing (along with so many others) that we really do need to shift to a different kind of economy, a sustainable economy.   And this includes our inner economy.   We need to learn to use all we are given—even the seemingly painful stuff.  From my time reading by firelight, I began to appreciate that Jane Eyre can be read as quest to love and find love and more: she had to use her own light.  As Jane is about to be shipped off to boarding school, her nurse Bessie calls her “a little roving, solitary thing” ….and tells her, “You should be bolder.”

“I don’t think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you; and I shall soon have another set of people to dread.”

“If you dread, they’ll dislike you.”

In the course of this story Jane Eyre learns to go beyond bursts to rebellion and vengeance—to claim her own inner fire and use it meet the unknown (and not to give it away, but it is full of scary things).   Before Rochester professes love for her, she expresses love—and not just for Rochester but for her own life, for what she is in essence.

“ Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?  You think wrong! –I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!  And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.  I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!”

I wish to remember what I learned during the power outage about what it means to live a different, sustainable life, a life with heart.

Awakening / Awareness / Extreme Weather / Grace / Happiness / October Snowstorm / Presence / Radical Acceptance / Seeing — 2 Comments
06
Nov 11

What Would Thoreau Do When the Power Goes Out?

“I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.  Nay, I often did more than this.  There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.  I love a broad margin to my life,” writes Thoreau, as quoted in beautiful “Many Paths One Truth” issue of Parabola.

Thoreau describes finding his own way to the luminous awakened mind, first bathing in Walden Pond in the morning, then sitting his sunny doorway, “rapt in a revery, admidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, undisturbed solitude and stillness….” Thoreau discovered that when he was still and observant, when he refrained from all striving seeking anything outside himself, those moments were bountiful in a way that our conventional busy life is not: “They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.”

Day by day, finding his own way of meditating and being with his experience, Thoreau discovered that life unfolds naturally without any input from us.  He describes a luminous awakened mind state of mind that innately knows how to meet and mirror what is arising:  In this deeper, receptive state of mind, everything about the housework and chores that were part of his simple rustic life became interesting and fun: “It was a drama of many scenes and without end.  If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.”

I happened to think of this as I poked the fire in the woodstove, cold and miserable, desperately wishing the power would come back on so I could get on with my “real” life.  I suddenly wondered what Thoreau would have made of the experience, and that changed everything.  Especially during the days when trees and wires were down everywhere and we were advised not to drive, I realized that I could actually try not fighting the experience, letting go of fretting about what I was missing and following “the last and best mode” of mindful observation (the last resort for many of us).  It’s amazing how an attitude of attentive interest, a wish to investigate and learn, can allow experience to unfold.

I actually jotted down a list of things I wished to remember, and these are a few:  I noticed how darkness and stillness aids concentration—and that I didn’t feel cut off from life but closer, part of it; I noticed the power of illumination—even a small candle brings warmth as well as light; and as I wrote last time acts of kindness and cooperation also bring warmth.  I learned that the effort I most need to make is not grasping but letting go, being with life as it unfolds, receiving what is being offered instead of huddling there shivering and waiting for the lights to come back on.

I tried to get into the chores that faced me the way I thought Thoreau wood, and I did enjoy the drama of it all, and I found it absorbing, well, until the morning of the fifth day when I spent hours trying to get a fire started with damp wood.  But I realized that this is the way it goes.  As I walked around the yard, foraging for fallen limbs, I realized that this was a very different way to reflect on impermanence.   Somewhere along the way I heard or read that impermanence is most often allied with deterioration. Trees fall down in a storm, all conditioned things—including loved ones and ourselves—change and pass away. And we, living in the forest of desires, are entirely composed of the impermanent.  Last week (at least at my better moments) I saw how my  desire for things to be different blinded me to this deeper truth.  And when it occurred to me to stop fighting the experience—and let’s face it I couldn’t turn on the computer or the TV or be busy in the usual way, I had to live so deliberately!—I saw that my own mind and body states were continually changing, shifting from pleasant to unpleasant to neutral, continually arising and passing away.

Like Thoreau, I began to realize that the truth of life—and its real unfolding drama–is not to be found in a book—out and away somewhere.  It is right here and right now, wherever we are.  And when we give up doing and striving for a time to watch, we may find a field of brightness inside, a kind of natural solar powered attention, that can meet any condition that arises, illuminating from within.

 

Awakening / Awareness / Christmas / Happiness / October Snowstorm / Scrooge / Waking Up — 7 Comments
04
Nov 11

Christmas in October

As I write this, I am struggling to get a good fire going in the woodstove.  We are in the middle of a freak October snow storm—the third freak storm since August—and we have no lights, no heat, and no running water since we depend on a well. A few months ago, during Hurricane Irene, I wrote about tending the stove and feeling a connection to my ancestors.  In the midst of this particular massive and record-breaking storm (there are getting to be so many we have to distinguish), I am feeling a particular connection to my ancestors who lived in very cold climates (I’m washing dishes in snow!)  How hearty they had to be.  It takes an enormous act of will to get up in a cold, dark house and light a fire.  Yet, as I kneel here shivering , I am also thinking of those who are younger than I am.  I am wondering if they will wonder why in the name of all that is good the deeper cause of this wild weather didn’t quite sink in last time.   I’m talking about what the Buddhists call the “three poisons” of greed, hatred, and delusion.

By firelight and flashlight, or in my bedroom under about nine blankets, I am reading and reflecting on a teaching of the Buddha called the “Fire Sermon,” translated from Pali, the earliest Buddhist language,  by the Buddhist scholar monk Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi.   For a future issue of Parabola  called “Burning World,” he adds a brilliant commentary.  In plain language, the Buddha talks about the way life goes—that everything  human is burning or impermanent, all our impressions and feelings and our life itself, all fleeting.   Yet, as Ven. Bodhi points out, on top of this natural burning, there is the “parasitic”  burning of greed or grasping, hatred or aversion to people and things we don’t like, and delusion or the denial of what is really happening.  These are natural tendencies in all of us, and most of us do our best to overcome them through meditation, prayer, or sheer live-and-learn common sense.   Yet, we now live in an age where we aren’t just impacted by greed, hatred, and delusion on a personal or local level.  There are vast systems fueled by greed, hatred, and delusion—and those systems effect all us, in the economy, in climate change.

Huddling by the woodstove, I suddenly realize that as much as I may want to I really can’t separate myself from the global situation.   But I bring good news.   Having the power cut off has a way of drawing out the power of kindness and generosity.    In the midst of dramatic news reporters talking about what was happening being beyond anything in recorded history and the millions without power in our region, individuals and groups quietly set about helping their neighbor.  The Salvation Army set up a warming station in the local Middle School.  My neighbor came over and told us about it and over we went to charge phones and laptop.  It was incredibly warming illuminating, watching the look on peoples’ faces as they entered and saw tables set out with food and big vats of coffee.  I live in a middle class pocket of a generally very affluent area, and it was especially touching to see people coming in who looked just astonished to see smiling Salvation Army and other volunteers there offering not just basic necessities like food and army cots and blankets but smiles.   For a time, the gym looked like an old time town square, kids watching movies on lap tops, groups of old people talking.  It made me realize how wonderful it would be, to have more community life, not just Manhattan and rushing home to your own house.

But the real food for thought came with simple individual acts of generosity.  My neighbor Keith, who was getting up at 4:30 to start a fire for his family before heading for his job in the city, came over after dark to see if we needed water.  He was headed to the fire station where there was a hose for everybody’s use.  I remembered what our ancestors knew, that survival depends on cooperation.  And not just practical cooperation—but offering a smile and a laugh, fellowship.  Love your neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you–or don’t do what you would you would not have done—however you frame it, I learned that this is a very profound and spiritually developed way to live.

In his commentary on the Fire Sermon, Ven. Bodhi  offers that our culture has to shift our notion of success, away from the achievement of more and more wealth, power, and domination, to the actualization of truth, goodness, and beauty.   When the lights and heat went off, I realized that this shift really is possible in the moment—and there is a great deal of good will and generosity out there that just seems to flower when it is needed. I had five long cold, dark days to reflect on what is really essential to a good life, and what is not.  I feel a little bit like Scrooge on Christmas morning, resolved to live by different lights (not that I ever did amass wealth or fame.   I realized that I the direction I want to move in is out of separation into no separation.  Now how do I remember this when the lights and the heat come back on.