In my thinning collection of books that I lug from place to place, I have a small dog-eared paperback which is a collection of words and phrases from other languages that are really useful yet difficult to succinctly translate into English. Some favorites are "uovo di Colombo - an idea or solution that seems obvious only after you realize it," or "sohbet - conversations dedicated solely to mystical, meaningful subjects." There are so many that I love - in Japan, a shrine for broken sewing needles where they are laid to rest in a block of tofu to thank them for their life of service to us. Instructions whispered to a dying person to help her transition peacefully through her journey after death. A broad sense of taking things lightly because we see how life really is. They are all fantastic, and grab me because they touch on something that I knew existed but at the same time did not know.
The one that is bobbing in my ocean of consciousness right now is dharma, a word that I forget is only really familiar to Buddhists and Hindus. We use it in Zen, and more broadly in Buddhism, to denote something like the teachings that can be gleaned by paying attention to the way of reality. However, in my little book of phrases, it is translated as "each person's individual journey through life, and their own way of finding it." I think this is meant to reflect more of Hindu perspective (with which I am not deeply familiar), yet it speaks volumes to me at this moment.
The little boy in the picture above is me, around 1981. I'm on a pony (or is it just a small horse?) accompanied by my dad, who to me looks really young. He is 43 years old in the photo, and I was going on 4. I was the last of his children (five in all from two marriages), and I was lucky enough to have him in my life for all of my childhood. We went to Chincoteague, VA many summers of my early life, and I think this must be from one of those trips. I look happy, like the day might have been endless and drenched in the smell of ponies, dust, straw, and the nearby ocean.
Today, in my thinning collection of hair, I run my fingers gently and look out the window at the late summer sky. I have just finished a year of living at Zen Mountain Monastery, where I have been a practicing student for several years already. The year was so full, like extra life was lovingly crammed into a box of space and time. Sometimes it was graduate school for my soul, sometimes it was a kindergarten time-out to learn real patience and love for the traces of my old, wounded inner child. I think I sat around nine hundred hours of meditation, which encompassed every experience I could imagine under the sun. I got dusty and dirty with outdoors work, but spent the majority of my work time holding down the basic bookkeeping for the place. The whole year was full of light and shadow, and, as we sometimes invoke in zen, in the end it was nothing special.
How did I end up living in a monastery for a year? I know it begins back at the Big Bang, which helps me feel more humble and integrated with the unfolding of the cosmos. Billions of years of time have led up to the fact that I'm here writing this, and you are there reading this. This present moment is just as full and complete for every other person and thing in the world. We're not exceptional, us humans, but we are very lucky to laugh and love, to do our best and fall down and get up again. What a gift, to live this one wild and precious life!
When I look at that picture of me and my father, I wonder just how many people touched my life in ways that I cannot even recall. How many people steered me towards goodness and kindness with their own actions? How many wordless teachings came to me through the endless intersections of lives along my journey? I remember reading the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching in the beginning of college, and how much it blew away everything I thought I knew about living my life. What led that Asian philosophy professor to go to Penn State to teach her course that opened the door for me? How is it that we recognize the good, the beautiful, and the true things in life, yet it sometimes take a lifetime to be able to break bad habits and cultivate good ones?
I started out writing this post as a reflection on my year in the monastery, to try to sum up what I have learned. That is, of course, not even close to possible. To touch it lightly, though, I suppose what I've gained is a little more loving spaciousness, the ability to let the world and myself be just as they are. In that space, I can pay more attention and slow down a little more. When life is speeding up and tight, I can't really perceive what I need and what needs to be done. In the spaciousness, I can let things take as long as they need to take. And in that space, there is kindness.
There is a door at the end of the hallway, open just a crack, with sunlight coming out. You push on the door gently, and it opens bit by bit. It takes a while to step into the Light Room, but it is very much possible. In that room, it seems that life is what it always was, and you are who you always were. It's just that the perspective has shifted, broadened, and grown deeper through a loving acceptance of what is.
Not that we can expect life to always be smooth or easy, but we can meet it with grace, patience, and enthusiasm. And we can learn to do it in any moment, in every moment.
