The Art of Living

The Journey

~ David Whyte (House of Belonging)

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

Painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.

Sometimes everything

has to be

inscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

small, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving

you are arriving.

I’ve read this poem over and over again in recent days. It’s become a sort of antidote to the sound of morning or evening commuter traffic rolling past my window, the bustle of my wife’s preparations for the work day, the unceasing chatter of my mind as it strives to answer unrelenting queries, “What now? What next? What are you doing? What will you do?”

Snippets of memories from my days training as a farmer in Alaska begin to recede. The memories themselves seem like “the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out.” I struggle to discern what’s written in the ashes of my life – a life composed of surprising and complicated leave takings and homecomings, of passionate pursuits and searching, of dignified and undignified labor, and of longing for the grand and revelatory arrival, of “something new” to be revealed.

Instead, I am invited to practice patience. I must be satisfied with a little more uncertainty. I must dwell still longer in possibility.  The late John O’Donohue’s brief piece “The Question Holds the Lantern” captures the current beneath my restlessness, the themes of this journey between life as it was and life as it is being revealed, this pilgrimage that has not yet culminated in arrival - not yet:

"Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns.  Now you realize how precious your time here is.  You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language.  You see through the rosters of expectation, which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity.  Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change.  You want your work to become an expression of your gift.  You want your relationships to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells.  You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits."

All around me, people are busy. They are consuming and computing, communicating and conniving, proposing and posturing and posting, and doing, doing, doing.  The rare few are making, creating, mending, tending.  Perhaps (who knows?) fewer still are praying, nurturing, truly healing themselves, other people, our planet. Far too many seem self-defined by their doing and owning. They tally their worth as so many meeting minutes, emails, documents, tasks and activities and things. There is a relentlessness to their pace, an insatiable need to fill space and moments. Stillness is shunned. There is no time for rest, inactivity, reflection. Always and only a dull roar of busy-ness.

I listen to the flow of traffic, alternately uncomfortable with and envious of the elegance of being linked to one’s activities or products, of being identified as the role one occupies:  web tech, business analyst, lawyer, nurse, accountant, clerk. Inwardly, in my heart of hearts, though, I long to break free of this identity with activity. I want to find a new way of being and loving and living in the world. I want to move at a pace that accommodates my desire to spend time each day – free from guilt and self-reproach – to linger in wonder and awe, with poetry and precious people. I want to observe, to commune, to dwell in gratitude. I want to honor the “being” in human being, to acknowledge and appreciate the breathe of life that unites all created things by pausing long enough each day to experience fully this in-breath and out-breath, to remember its connection to inspiration.

I also want to work and to earn my livelihood in a way that expresses my intention to honor people and relationships, to care for creatures and the land, to open my heart even wider to love and understanding. I want to heal and tend and mend and grow. I want to build and contribute, to repair and reclaim. I want to make whole and create anew, ideally working side by side with others who share this desire.  

So I am learning to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. I am learning to listen to the whirr of traffic and din of impatient and frenzied hurrying with gratitude that I can choose to be still. I am slowly learning to idle at a more gentle RPM, one that allows for noticing and appreciating and tending. I am savoring the particular purple of the morning glories outside my window, nestled side-by-side as they are with the hot-orange berries of pyrocantha. I’m learning how to follow the quick, precise movements of the hummingbirds; the patient, graceful arcs of the red-shouldered hawks; the impossibly slow steps of the great egret; the awkwardly determined plodding of the black-necked stilt. I am making my own awkward, determined path to my yoga mat more frequently, and learning there a new form of stillness and patience. I am practicing the hard labor of surrendering to what is and allowing what will be to take shape in its own time, in God’s time.

When I need it, which is often, I reach for poetry to comfort me. And I take comfort from Lynne Ungar, who both asks and answers me:

And you—

what of your rushed and

useful life?

Imagine setting it all down—

papers, plans, appointments, everything,

leaving only a note:

‘Gone to the fields to be lovely.

Be back when I’m through with blooming.’

After all, I believe we are planted here - in these bodies, on this earthly soil – to bloom. We are meant to grow and thrive. And when our small patch of home soil somehow becomes polluted or toxic or absent nourishment, we must enrich it. Sometimes that entails turning it over entirely, amending it with nourishing contributions from near and far, and then allowing time to work its usual magic.

I long for the arrival. And also, I am gradually finding peace in the longing. . .

But perhaps God needs the longing, wherever else shall it dwell,

Which with kisses and tears and sighs fills mysterious spaces of air -

And perhaps is invisible soil from which roots of stars grow and swell -

And the radiant voice across fields of parting which calls to reunion there?

O my beloved, perhaps in the sky of longing worlds have been born of our love -

Just as our breathing, in and out, builds a cradle for life and death?

We are grains of sand, dark with farewell, lost in births' secret treasure trove,

Around us already perhaps future moons, suns, and stars blaze in a fiery wreath.

~ Nelly Sachs  

(Translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead, in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, ed. by Aliki and Willis Barnstone)

Turning Towards Darkness

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are. ~ Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)

Winter has always been a difficult time for me. It feels as if the darkness creeps inside, insinuating itself in my patterns of thought, shrouding my typically clear-sighted and optimistic perspective. Perhaps this is why I lean so heavily toward the light – rejoicing in the full moon; savoring the slow, glorious ascent of the sun; sparking the candles on my meditation altar into flame. My eyes linger on the dew clinging to the grass at my sit spot beside Richardson Bay, thousands of glittering diamonds of sunlight. I marvel how the Bay itself turns its green face upward, basking in the millions of yellow light particles of yellow both infusing and radiating from it. I sit bayside, watch the sky dance across the spectrum from deep indigo, to light purply blue, to azure, to cotton candy blue lightened by sunlight. My spirit mirrors its lightening. I feel ready to greet another day.

Yet even on these sunlit, blue-sky winter days, there’s still a small lump in my throat,  heaviness in my spirit. Some old grief keeps company with me. Perhaps you can relate? For me, it’s linked to my current state of profound unknowing about my future, with its attendant confusion, uncertainty, and fearfulness. It’s prompted, too, by disheartening evidence of entrenched, devastating societal racism; widening economic inequality; drought and other damaging repercussions of climate change; and a global environment characterized overwhelmingly by divisiveness, violence, cowardice, and greed. Lodged in between these personal and planetary woes are the tribulations faced by loved ones:  my dear friend slowly being consumed by cancer; my neighbor, an overwhelmed nonprofit Director, who’s working herself to a pulp; my little brother, digging out of debt and struggling to provide for his family of four; my parents, navigating the complicated effects and decisions of old age. At times, the darkness paralyzes me in the headlights, all bewilderment and fear. It threatens to overtake me completely. I feel my heart thrumming beneath my skin, my mouth dry and jaw set, the hair on my neck standing on end. I’m inclined to run – but to where?

Years of meditation practice are helping me to see and greet the darkness for what it is: a wise old friend. I’m learning to turn toward, rather than run from, the sorrow, the fear, the confusion, the disappointment and anger. I’m striving to practice in my life what I do each time I sit to meditate:  to acknowledge and be with what is. Thursday evening, I observed the five o’clock sun cast its soft light on a deep green stand of hundred-foot eucalyptus trees, its rays reflecting off their slender trunks, turning them to silver. The spectacle was made more magical for its backdrop of slate gray rainclouds. Ponderous and threatening though they were, I saw them also as the containers of desperately needed rain, essential contributors to the spring planting season, harbingers of the summer and fall harvests. The slightly chaotic pre-storm weather also brought a Black-crowned Night Heron out to roost on the railing of a skipjack in the harbor:  regal, stoic, introspective, unruffled by rising wind and falling temperature.

So, too, the darkness within and around us – including the solitary darkness in which we immerse ourselves in meditation – holds invaluable riches. From this deep dark well of emotion I connect with an unbounded spaciousness, a limitless and all-pervasive reservoir of love. It both enfolds and inhabits me. When I drop fully into this well of love, I grow in empathy with all who hurt, who struggle, who feel abandonment or shame or deep sadness. I rediscover, to quote civil rights activist Vincent Harding, that:

"We are not alone in this struggle for the re-creation of our own lives and the life of our community. It has long been written and known that those who choose to struggle for the life of the earth and its beings are part of an ageless, pulsating membrane of light that is filled with the lives, hopes, and beatific visions of all who have fought on, held on, loved well, and gone on before us. For this task is too magnificent to be carried by us alone, in our house, in our meeting, in our organization, in our generation, in our lifetime... we are all a part of one another, and we are all part of the intention of the great creator spirit to continue being light and life."

In meditation, we are invited to transcend the darkness by connecting with the selfsame strength characterized by the Holy Trinity:  the gift of a human life; the vastness of our capacity to give and receive love; and the intuitive knowledge of “more-ness” – the certain knowing that we are so, so much more than our thinking, fretting, obsessing small minds. The simple act of uniting body, mind, and breath in space and time is all I need to transform suffering into peace, turn darkness into light. For me, companionship on the journey and these nuggets of truth provide powerful motivations to practice.

The poet Mark Strand’s Lines For Winter echo this encouragement to be with what is, to lean into the darkness so far that we burst through to the other side – to self-acceptance, empathy, and an ever-growing tenderness that we might offer our troubled world and its inhabitants.

Tell yourself

as it gets cold

and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself --

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going.

And you will be able

for once to lie down

under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

~ Mark Strand  ~

Finding Peace in the Longing

The Journey

~ David Whyte (House of Belonging)

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

Painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.

Sometimes everything

has to be

inscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

small, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving

you are arriving.

I’ve read this poem over and over again in recent days. It’s become a sort of antidote to the sound of morning or evening commuter traffic rolling past my window, the bustle of my wife’s preparations for the work day, the unceasing chatter of my mind as it strives to answer unrelenting queries, “What now? What next? What are you doing? What will you do?”

Snippets of memories from my days training as a farmer in Alaska begin to recede. The memories themselves seem like “the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out.” I struggle to discern what’s written in the ashes of my life – a life composed of surprising and complicated leave takings and homecomings, of passionate pursuits and searching, of dignified and undignified labor, and of longing for the grand and revelatory arrival, of “something new” to be revealed.

Instead, I am invited to practice patience. I must be satisfied with a little more uncertainty. I must dwell still longer in possibility.  The late John O’Donohue’s brief piece “The Question Holds the Lantern” captures the current beneath my restlessness, the themes of this journey between life as it was and life as it is being revealed, this pilgrimage that has not yet culminated in arrival - not yet:

"Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns.  Now you realize how precious your time here is.  You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language.  You see through the rosters of expectation, which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity.  Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change.  You want your work to become an expression of your gift.  You want your relationships to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells.  You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits."

All around me, people are busy. They are consuming and computing, communicating and conniving, proposing and posturing and posting, and doing, doing, doing.  The rare few are making, creating, mending, tending.  Perhaps (who knows?) fewer still are praying, nurturing, truly healing themselves, other people, our planet. Far too many seem self-defined by their doing and owning. They tally their worth as so many meeting minutes, emails, documents, tasks and activities and things. There is a relentlessness to their pace, an insatiable need to fill space and moments. Stillness is shunned. There is no time for rest, inactivity, reflection. Always and only a dull roar of busy-ness.

I listen to the flow of traffic, alternately uncomfortable with and envious of the elegance of being linked to one’s activities or products, of being identified as the role one occupies:  web tech, business analyst, lawyer, nurse, accountant, clerk. Inwardly, in my heart of hearts, though, I long to break free of this identity with activity. I want to find a new way of being and loving and living in the world. I want to move at a pace that accommodates my desire to spend time each day – free from guilt and self-reproach – to linger in wonder and awe, with poetry and precious people. I want to observe, to commune, to dwell in gratitude. I want to honor the “being” in human being, to acknowledge and appreciate the breathe of life that unites all created things by pausing long enough each day to experience fully this in-breath and out-breath, to remember its connection to inspiration.

I also want to work and to earn my livelihood in a way that expresses my intention to honor people and relationships, to care for creatures and the land, to open my heart even wider to love and understanding. I want to heal and tend and mend and grow. I want to build and contribute, to repair and reclaim. I want to make whole and create anew, ideally working side by side with others who share this desire.  

So I am learning to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. I am learning to listen to the whirr of traffic and din of impatient and frenzied hurrying with gratitude that I can choose to be still. I am slowly learning to idle at a more gentle RPM, one that allows for noticing and appreciating and tending. I am savoring the particular purple of the morning glories outside my window, nestled side-by-side as they are with the hot-orange berries of pyrocantha. I’m learning how to follow the quick, precise movements of the hummingbirds; the patient, graceful arcs of the red-shouldered hawks; the impossibly slow steps of the great egret; the awkwardly determined plodding of the black-necked stilt. I am making my own awkward, determined path to my yoga mat more frequently, and learning there a new form of stillness and patience. I am practicing the hard labor of surrendering to what is and allowing what will be to take shape in its own time, in God’s time.

When I need it, which is often, I reach for poetry to comfort me. And I take comfort from Lynne Ungar, who both asks and answers me:

And you—

what of your rushed and

useful life?

Imagine setting it all down—

papers, plans, appointments, everything,

leaving only a note:

‘Gone to the fields to be lovely.

Be back when I’m through with blooming.’

After all, I believe we are planted here - in these bodies, on this earthly soil – to bloom. We are meant to grow and thrive. And when our small patch of home soil somehow becomes polluted or toxic or absent nourishment, we must enrich it. Sometimes that entails turning it over entirely, amending it with nourishing contributions from near and far, and then allowing time to work its usual magic.

I long for the arrival. And also, I am gradually finding peace in the longing. . .

But perhaps God needs the longing, wherever else shall it dwell,

Which with kisses and tears and sighs fills mysterious spaces of air -

And perhaps is invisible soil from which roots of stars grow and swell -

And the radiant voice across fields of parting which calls to reunion there?

O my beloved, perhaps in the sky of longing worlds have been born of our love -

Just as our breathing, in and out, builds a cradle for life and death?

We are grains of sand, dark with farewell, lost in births' secret treasure trove,

Around us already perhaps future moons, suns, and stars blaze in a fiery wreath.

~ Nelly Sachs  

(Translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead, in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, ed. by Aliki and Willis Barnstone)

Discerning the Path

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God

Or many gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel

Abandoned.

If you can know despair and see it in others.

I want to know

If you are prepared to live in the world

With its harsh need

To change you. If you can look back

With firm eyes

Saying this is where I stand. I want to know

If you know

How to melt into that fierce heat of living

Falling toward

the center of your longing. I want to know

If you are willing

To live, day by day, with the consequence of love

And the bitter

Unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have been told, in that firm embrace, even

The gods speak of God.

~ “Self Portrait” by David Whyte

Good morning.

I’ve returned often in my musings to my quest to live an authentic life. I define an authentic life or a life of integrity as one that flows seamlessly, ineffably from the values I hold dear:  from my desire to practice compassion wholeheartedly and live in greater harmony with all living creatures, and from my wish to live in an awakened, attentive state, where my awareness of God’s presence in everything and everyone becomes the firm ground of my speech and action. To use David Whyte’s phrase, I want to “melt into the fierce heat of living/Falling toward the center of [my] longing,” as that Center is God. I want to live a life centered on love, on mending and connecting in a world that too often fixates on fomenting hate, on fostering and sustaining differences and separation –between white and black, rich and poor, plant or animal and human.

As the poet suggests, though, this striving to live in the world in a way that expresses God’s plan for my particular life and that reflects these intentions frequently brings me into contact with the world’s “harsh need to change [me].” Here, I think the poet intimates both the paradoxical need to be changed – to be opened up, again and again, to the utter pain and almost unfathomable beauty of the world – but also the broader culture’s fundamental push toward the often unquestioned ideals of acquisition, consumption, accumulation, and allied activities that prove to be imposing obstacles to living of deep, compassionate relationship and interdependence.

In his book, The Three Marriages, David Whyte identifies meditation as an essential practice for living into what he calls “The Big Questions” of life. These questions probe our human sense of disconnection from other beings, our frustration with change or the impermanent nature of things, and our fear of dying. They are intimately connected to the quest to live a life that acknowledges and respects our interdependence with all living things. He frames these questions as:  Why do I feel different from everything I see? Why does everything I hold in my hands constantly slip through my fingers, and why can’t I live forever?  I think each of us can likely identify with some permutation of these:  Why do I feel alone/isolated/lost/abandoned? Why do I treat that person as my enemy? Why must I lose my job/my spouse/my child/my health? What will happen to my spouse/my children/my material legacy when I reach the end of life? 

Meditation, says David Whyte, “is the practice of dwelling in [an] underlying un-anxious all-seeing, all-appreciating un-defensive self that does not care whether it lives or dies, while not taking our eyes off the world.”  He describes it as opening up the door of the world and keeping it open, all the while maintaining a “fierce attention” that eventually comes to see and embrace, without judgment, the inherent nature of all things:  to evolve, to change. In meditation, we begin by noticing the ways our thoughts are constantly coming and receding, never stagnant. We learn over time to allow for this changeability without appraising it as good or bad; to acknowledge that it is the nature of thought to be volatile. Meditation trains us to bring this fierce awareness and this quality of non-judgment to other aspects of our lives, so that – more and more – we feel less bothered by life’s inherent bent toward change. More importantly, through meditation, we begin to glimpse the underlying quality that is unchanging, the essence that is found in all things and all people. It’s as if we learn not to see individual drops of water, but the ocean itself.  We begin to hear not just the cello or the flute, but the entire symphony as one complex and perfect thrum of harmony. We can see that our own humanity is tied to recognizing and acting as if that homeless youth, that gun-toting or drug-dealing thug, that dirty politician is also a fragile, flawed human being with the capacity to evolve. I conceive of this ocean as a greater capacity to notice the vastness that moves within and unites all of us:  the Divine.

Ideally, this deep and significant realization that flows from our commitment to awareness gives us the courage to act in ways that reflect our connectedness to all things and all people, that embody our desire of not harming and doing good. Meditation also provides an ever-present touchstone to which we can return when we lose sight – as we so often do – of the unchanging nature of God’s love for every speck of matter that makes up the universe; indeed, of God’s essence itself, which is love. Mediation is the doorway through which we again make contact with God’s indwelling presence, which is unchanging and timeless and food enough for each of our journeys.