Skip to main content
Okay, why have I posted a picture of myself studying in my meditation corner?  I recently read a quote from the Buddha, "The moment you see how important it is to love yourself, you will stop making others suffer."  It has been like a koan, stripping away my terra firma and leaving me uncertain.  In our humanness we determine what is good and just and right within us and we lean toward it, grasping, hoping to convey our worthiness in some measure to the world.  All the while we kick, bind, hush and hide the qualities deemed unworthy, leaning as far from them as we can.  When someone mentions them in conversation, we bristle and rail, "Who are you calling controling?".  Our emotional reaction loudly proclaims our resistence.  Are we the grasping or resisting?  Is there a vantage point devoid of charge?  Does it matter if we are patient or impatient? good or bad? neither or both?  What does it mean to love ourselves.  I have often bent toward my "spiritual" self, my generosity, my open heart, my sensitivity, my intelligence and creativity.  I have wanted to sculpt my projected image to best ensure a positive reception and a judgement of "Ah yes, you ARE worthy, capable and deserving".  It is a subtle violence toward self and other.  What if instead I told you that I can be controlling, material, manipulative, unkind and ungenerous?  Would that be more true.  Hardly.  That would exchange violence for violence.  Perhaps we love ourselves best when the weight falls squarely in the middle, when we hold the pendulum in midswing as it is right now, not tomorrow or next week or when we become holier than holy.  Perhaps the life arising and expressing now IS enough.  Regardless, I have a sneaking suspicion that it is all there is.
Perhaps.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I just want to say Hi to Everyone!
January 10, 2011 at 6:21 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

the way of the sunflower

A few weeks ago, I sat holding a sunflower seed in my hand, just prior to the mouth popping, mastication phase, when it's perfect elegance floored me.  I stared in awe at the tiny seed nestled in my palm and saw it, in all of it's possibility, for the first time.  A flower, a million seeds, a million flowers.  Each unique, each the same.  And suddenly I was dumbfounded by the arrogance of human. A small seed, with no big beefy brain to catalogue, categorize, prioritize, conceptualize, quantify, qualify, justify and deify, had within it the flower it could become.  Dissect the seed and there's no  flower, nor any glimmer of the life that will unfold when the seed surrenders to soil, light, water. I wondered. What arrogant assuming is it, to think, with our over indulged brains and narcissistic lens of "self", that we need "do", "think", "struggle", "fight", "hustle", "cajole" and otherwise dance our way...
1 comment
Read more