but couldn’t the same be said of us? Do we not bring rivers of creative causation to this flowing moment, rivers arriving from countless sources? Our bodies, are they not a river of genetic instructions, helixes, cell types, inherited traits informing how we live and respond moment to moment, informing our most intimate experiences? Are not our thoughts a current, our feelings a river? From what unseen springs do they come? Our very capacity to think and feel is a river of creative causation that made its way to us from our ancestors and the old ones before them, a river moving us now in our every inclination.

And the care we feel for each other, what is that but a current? Was our caring nature passed to us by the caring hands that coaxed us from the womb, or by the care of long generations of mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, doing their best to assure warmth and sustenance for their young ones? How else did this caring nature come to us?

And these words we speak and hear and read, they come to mind so easily, yet the etymology of each one is a rivulet, a brook, a stream that flowed through countless lips, merging with others into the great river of our language that now we speak and hear so casually.

And what of the rivers of learning we’ve received, the guidance, the skills of speaking, the forming of words, the quiet study, the opening of our intelligence, the learning from mistakes we made, and the teachers, mentors, parents, siblings, friends, writers, artists, scientists, philosophers—each one a riverbank of the river they received and passed to us, all of it flowing and present in us now, a vast gift of guidance helping us on our way.

And with us too are the rivers of loneliness and hurt, despair, rivers of dying and the fear of dying, violence and woundedness, rivers of grieving, loss, all of it coursing through the generations and present in us now, creating, and birthing, our compassion.

Oh awesome rivers of time and rapids, slow meandering oxbows, quiet eddies, falls, rivers of causation and creativity flowing to us from the past, yet equally from the present, equally simultaneous, equally across time, connecting everything in at-once-ness, informing our present with all presents, even the future whose becoming will be born of ours, whose river arrives from ours and informs our own even now, one river with all rivers, all at once, at once!

When fear for the world is heavy upon us, or loneliness presses in, or we doubt ourselves and our power and purpose, let us remember the gift of the rivers we bring, the rivers that make us, the vast wild jubilant rivers we bring from the mountain springs.

The Benediction of the Old Ones

N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 0

In mid-life I would often wander through a beloved forest a few miles from my home, a forest with no paths except for the thin trails left by deer, and though it felt like I was wandering aimlessly, I would typically find my way to one great tree towering up at the end of a ridge, and there I would sit with my back against her, happy to be a small animal nestled against her trunk, imagining myself to be one of her familiars.

I called her the “grandmother tree,” and to be in her presence was comforting to me, and steadying. I got in the habit of bowing to her when I arrived at her grove. She was an old-growth hemlock, the only one of that age that I found in this forest, the rest having been logged successively over the preceding centuries. The loggers had probably spared her because she was at the end of the ridge and difficult to get to, or because they hoped she would seed new growth, or perhaps, like me, they simply felt awe in her presence. The grove she rose from felt hushed and sacred.

The human world I come from, on the other hand, esteems the new, the latest, the modern. To be young is to be desired. To be old is to be past one’s prime. Usefulness and exuberance are honored, and old people are judged to have neither.

Now, having had the good fortune to arrive at the brink of old age myself, I’m beginning to sense there’s something numinous possible at this end of life, a transmutation—while not guaranteed—from one’s personal journey in life to something quite beyond the personal, something vaster and more meaningful.

When he was my age, the great writer Hermann Hesse spoke of this numinous possibility that is the province of the old:

"And the truth is, even if presumably in our younger years we have experienced more intensely and more dazzlingly the sight of a blossoming tree, a cloud formation, a thunderstorm, nevertheless for the experience that I’m referring to, one does need great age, one needs the infinite sum of things seen, lived through, thought, felt and suffered, a certain frailty and proximity to death in order to perceive, within a tiny revelation of nature, the God, the spirit, the mystery, the coming together of opposites, the great oneness. Of course, young people can experience this too, but less often, and without this unity of thought and feeling, of sensual and spiritual harmony, of stimulus and awareness."

Hesse is describing, in my view, the interiority of the elder—not the elderly, who may or may not be elders—but the unique capacity of the elder to hold the dream of life in its wholeness, simultaneously presencing the ages she or he has experienced, the grief and exultations, “the infinite sum of things seen, lived through, thought, felt and suffered.” It’s a rarefied state, bemused by the personal entanglements of our lives yet fully embracing them.

I feel this state, or “numinous possibility,” is an invitation to take our place among the old ones, the ancestors, by whose commitment and sacrifices our species has survived, and how we the living have been graced with life. It’s a current that’s trans-historical and trans-generational, a kind of spirit nourishment that gathers from the long generations of those who came before and streams through the millennia to us. Now it is our turn, those of us entering elderhood, to become part of that invisible stream of sustenance.

Taking our place with the old ones, becoming part of their sustaining power, is not a task we can apply ourselves to. It’s not work. It’s more like a presencing and a bestowing, like the grandmother tree was to me. She was old, the elder of the forest. There was dignity in her bearing, a quiet presence that was her gift.

Many old things—not only animate beings—carry this kind of dignity and blessing. Think of a mountain or a canyon. Think of a cathedral or an ancient stone circle. We go to these places and are touched by their “infinite sum of things seen,” the weather they’ve endured, the passing of people worshipping, the seasons they’ve known. They too are elders to us, nourishing us.

And so it is with the old ones of our species—not only the elders still alive but all the elders of the past whose “infinite sum of things seen” flows through time like a benediction on us. We are invited—we who are proximate to death—we are invited to join this benediction. All that is asked is our whole-hearted presence and love.

The History of Love

O C T O B E R 2 0 2 0

As the story goes, 13.77 billion years ago the universe was born from a “point” of near-infinite temperature and gravity, a point described as a “singularity” appearing before time and space had any meaning. And then, woosh! from this impossible-to-comprehend love the entire universe of energy-matter expanded in all directions, which it apparently keeps on doing even now. Yet as it expands there’s another movement — the energy-matter obeys a call of mutual attraction, a drawing together into stars, galaxies, planets, and us wondering about it all.

One of the things we wonder about is the nature of these two “forces” of expansion and attraction — what are they? what moves them? The “woosh” emerging from the singularity — what propels it into becoming? And conversely, this attraction — what causes it? What’s inside the “wish” of isolated particles to come closer, to draw together into stars and planets, you and me? We’ve named that wish “gravity.” Astrophysicist Brian Swimme calls it allurement — a sexy word for something so vast!

The woosh and the wish — let’s play with these words — the woosh is the divine, holy halleluiah! and the wish is its desire for intimacy and connection. The woosh in the Koran is Allah’s universe-creating decree — kun faya kun — Be! and it is! and the wish is Allah’s statement overheard by Mohammed, “I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known. Hence I created the world so that I would be known.” The woosh in Buddhism is the light-body of the Buddha called the sambhogakaya; the wish is the Buddha-body of everything we see around us, the nirmanakaya. In Christian mysticism the woosh is the flight of the Holy Spirit everywhere, and the wish the incarnation of Christ as the world.

All these metaphors — a singularity, a Big Bang, Be! and it is! Buddha bodies, Holy Spirit, Christ, the love to be known — ultimately they’re all poetry, flinging us into a wordless space where we might glimpse what we’re made of, what calls us, and what guides us.

From this perspective we witness the history of the universe revealing both the forces of unimaginable generosity — the woosh — Here! a universe for you! — and the desire within it — the wish — toward connection, inter-relation, intimacy. Generosity — the gift of becoming; intimacy — the joy of communion.

What can we call this but love?

The history of the universe is the history of love. We can feel how the universe’s love story is alive in our own experience, in the feelings of expansiveness and intimacy that simultaneously appear in our hearts when we love. We might think these are strictly personal feelings, our own good luck, but in fact they’re the life of the whole universe as it comes into being. As above, so below. As everywhere, so here.

I realize this vision of a universe made of love may seem like wishful thinking, especially as we witness in our time so much selfishness and injustice, and so much of the beauty and life of our planet being destroyed.

But it is not a wishful vision. It’s evident in the history of the universe, in its boundless generosity and its desire for communion. We’re made of it. We’re made of its generous and intimate love. Knowing this is true, not just intellectually but in our bones, in how we experience our becoming moment by moment, can give us the courage to carry on, no matter what happens. The force — of the entire universe! — is with us.

The Beloved Community

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0

In the early 20th Century the American philosopher Josiah Royce coined the term “the Beloved Community” as an ideal of social harmony brought into being by those loyal to goodness and truth. Later, the notion of the Beloved Community became central to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., who envisioned it as the ideal human community of love, solidarity, and justice that was “not yet” but that would eventually be actualized through our commitment to nonviolence and the sacredness of life.

It’s a beautiful notion — the Beloved Community — stirring in us a sense of hope that humanity is indeed evolving toward a promised land. And it is just this towardness — “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” — that inspires us, encourages us, and gives us the strength to believe we shall overcome some day no matter how bleak things look at the moment.

I say “amen” to that. We need hope, we need the faith in ethical progress that this vision offers us. But because it’s a hoped-for ideal it can also feel a little abstract; because it’s “not yet” — while the dysfunction of human societies is in our face — we can doubt that it ever will be.

I’d like to suggest that we might understand the notion of the Beloved Community as not only a beautiful future ideal toward which we are called, but that it’s also a reality that’s here, now.

The Beloved Community is all around us and within us. It’s how our bodies function — the community of our organs and blood, nerves and bones, all functioning together in a wondrous wholeness. The air we’re breathing, the water we drink, the food we ate at our last meal, are testaments to the Beloved Community we are part of. Everything is working together; everything is hand-in-hand.

The trees on the hillside draw sustenance from the earth through their roots, from the air and sun through their leaves. When their individual lives end, they give back to the soil and to the bugs and birds the richness their bodies have collected. The Beloved Community. When we walk on a path through a forest and feel calmed by the beauty of the dappled light, we are welcomed into the Beloved Community of beauty. When we say “thank you” to a stranger at the grocery store, those words rise up from our gratefulness for a small kindness, and — for a moment — the ideal society we hope for is made real.

From age to age, mothers have cuddled and sung to and protected their babies. The Beloved Community. Every day the distant giant planet Saturn attracts stray asteroids that enter our solar system, shielding planet Earth from devastation. The Beloved Community. Scientists look for ways to produce clean energy, poets look for ways to express wonder, children laugh as they’re carried on their father’s shoulders. The Beloved Community. It’s here, and at the same time, it’s not yet.

When we perceive, even for a moment, how we are held in the community of life, how we are sustained within the vast web of all our relations, we gather strength to carry on and to serve the advent of the vision we dream of. Yes, the web of our relations can be torn — we see evidence of that every day — but with care it grows back.

Each act of kindness, selflessness, generosity, compassion, and communion heals and creates the Beloved Community. These acts, however inconsequential they may seem to us at the moment, are like seeds that contain within them our not-yet realized goal. As theologian Paul Tillich describes it in the language of the Old and the New Testaments, “the coming of the Kingdom of God [the Beloved Community] does not come in one dramatic event sometime in the future. It is coming here and now in every act of love, in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy.”

Our ancestors, for all their failures and wars and missteps, longed for what we long for, and succeeded in bringing us to life and to this recognition of the better world we are capable of. We can draw strength from this gift of our ancestors — it’s a strength that’s here, now. The generations of humans to come — our unknown descendants depending on us and cheering us on — we can draw strength from their encouragement too. It’s a strength that’s here for us, now.

Let us take heart in the Beloved Community, not only as a hopeful vision of the future, but as a vivid reality that arises "in every manifestation of truth, in every moment of joy, in every experience of the holy." It's both a reliable compass that will guide us through the dangerous times ahead, and it's here, now, our good home.

Crying

A U G U S T 2 0 2 0

NOTE: Our dear friend, Murshid Kiran Rana, Sufi teacher, musician, adventurer, warm heart, was admitted to the hospital last week with a serious recurrence of the cancer he had successfully evaded nearly a decade ago. Prognosis is uncertain at this point. From the hospital Kiran wrote me this letter — its honesty and tenderness so touched me that I wanted to share it with you in place of my usual essay. May we all send him our healing blessings and our gratitude for his beautiful spirit.

Crying

by Murshid Kiran Rana

I'm crying a lot today.

It started when I got upset that the arrangements I'd made to have Jeanne be met downstairs at the hospital didn't work right. And I got mad at the young nurse I'd never met before who came in to give me chemo round #3. She left the room and went to talk to the manager and didn't return. So I got off the bed and grabbed the rolling drip towers on wheels and walked out into the ward.

The lady at the big reception desk said, "You need a mask to be out here!" Of course, I do... Thank you, I said, got it and babbled something about needing to find out who would go down to the main reception area to relieve Jeanne of the package she brought me and nobody was getting back to me and I already started asking about this yesterday, and....

She picked up her keys, asked for a name and description and went down. Like that, it was solved... and I dissolved. I don't know why, I sniffled and wheezed a bit, then I cried. But I managed to wrap it up handily.

Back in my room, the male nurse, Paul, came in to do chemo #3. I asked him to tell the younger nurse, Ahn, sorry from me. Then we settled in. After 30 minutes when he was gone, a lady knocked and waited to be invited in.

"Did you get a pick line yesterday?" she asked. I did, I said. "I go around once a week and check on those," she said. Check away, I said, and while you're at it will you check my lifeline? "I'm sure it's a good one," she replied.

"These look good" she said, checking the pick line and the drip lines. We both said a few more words I forget. As she was walking out, she turned and said, "I'll pray for you." I wanted to reach out and take hold of her hand for a moment, to acknowledge what she'd done there, but my eyes flooded, and I couldn't look up. She left as respectfully as she came.

I sat for a while pushing back tears, then thought how ungrateful that was, and let them flow. But what am I crying for? my heart kept asking. It’s not just about me, or my life, or that this could be the beginning of a more definable end. I was crying for something more, for the greater hurt, the hurt we all feel and live and inflict — me in my anger at blameless Ahn — I was crying for all the nameless, perhaps blameless, pain there is.

And then it dropped deeper, and I knew I cried for all the caring that continually tried to do something about the pain that was just there. I cried for people taking the chance to care, to move pain into relief, into some kind of healing. I cried for that conscious and unconscious movement so many make every day to care for and share love with others, that action of the generous heart. That’s why I'm crying.

But then why cry? I asked again. And immediately I knew. It was the beauty of that movement to love that shattered me. Broke it open, painfully open. And quickly, quickly, I knew it was the pain of the beauty, how generous it is, so human and true. And that hurt so much, that feeling of the beautiful human heart that cares helplessly and embraces pain, and I had to stop with the half-crying and just burst open, crying piteously, helplessly.

And then, something arose. My heart was asking, Are you capable of being there? Being that caring? That quick, loving, human, and true? And I knew that question would hurt me again and again, for how often have I not been worthy of what it asked? And then at that moment I realized I can simply start to redeem myself at any and every moment, at any and every time.

For that promise, too, I am crying today.

Good Work

J U L Y 2 0 2 0

There’s a lot of hard talk these days about societal collapse. People are getting scared. Young people are seriously worried about what the future holds. There’s the specter of climate change, pandemics, economic breakdown, species extinction, air pollution, soil depletion, the scarcity of clean water, increasing racism, xenophobia, refugees, the proliferation of arms, despotic governments, systemic injustice, overpopulation — the list goes on and on.

It feels distasteful to me to recite it again — you already know all of this — why spend your precious time reading about it again when there’s not much you can do about any of it? This sense of hopelessness and disempowerment is what I want to speak to here — the feeling that we can make no substantial change in this juggernaut of social and ecological collapse. I believe we can contribute to real change, and that we do, every time we turn our hearts, minds, and bodies to what I’m calling here good work. What’s good work? Any work that heals. Any work that protects and nurtures life in its wholeness. Any work that contributes to the beauty and flourishing of the community of life on earth. It’s that simple.

The challenging practice for each of us is to ask of whatever work we find ourselves doing: “Is this good work? Does it heal? Does it protect and nurture life? Does it contribute to the beauty and flourishing of life on earth?” We must ask it of our careers. We must ask it of the work our company or institution is engaged in. Does this work nurture life? Does it contribute to life’s beauty and to the possibility of joy and communion? These are demanding questions; they quickly reveal how much of what we humans do diminishes life rather than nourishes it. I realize this may sound simplistic and even naïve, especially when whole books could be written about what I’m trying to express in a few hundred words. We know the vast economic system we’re part of is enormously complex and all-encompassing, dedicated as it is to resource extraction, growth, consumerism, and militarism, with profits going to the rich and powerful. It’s easy to feel caught inside this remorseless, churning machine, and even if the work we’re doing isn’t good work, we can feel that we simply have no choice. We need the job. We need to provide for ourselves and our family. When that’s the case, of course, do what’s necessary, but don’t stop there. Make it your life’s intention to find good work. Keep looking. Get creative. As soon as it’s possible to do so, abandon whatever life-defeating work you’re doing and find work that serves life. If you’re a young person just starting out, dedicate your talents to finding and creating good work, work that helps build a better world. No matter how small your gesture may seem, it’s the only difference that will make a difference. And one more thing, now that I’m giving advice: even good work can become anti-life if we treat it as drudgery. Sweeping the floor, chopping vegetables, washing the windows — these tasks definitely nurture life, but that nurturing can be betrayed by our attitude if we resent doing them. The other day I was trying to fix a small leak in the plumbing in the crawlspace under our house, a task I felt fine doing, until I had to wriggle under a pipe on my belly through the dust and cobwebs, and suddenly I cursed, feeling irritated and sorry for myself. The sound of my curse stopped me. I lay there in the dust and realized what I was doing — I was making good work into bad work. I was letting a challenging situation for my aging body infect my spirit with annoyance and self-pity. That’s all I needed in that moment, that realization. My irritation vanished. I kept wriggling along, got to where I needed to be, and fixed what needed fixing. Good work, all of it.

The point I’m hoping to make here is that in the face of all that’s going wrong, all that’s mean and destructive and unholy, neither complaining nor giving up will change the trajectory we’re on. Our very best chance of making a better world is for each of us to find and create good work, the work that needs to be done. There’s so much of it!

Human Being

J U N E 2 0 2 0

How marvelous this creature, the human being! What a wonder and privilege it is to be one!

I know it doesn’t always seem that way — we humans can be vicious and cruel, short-sighted, selfish, and petty — so to say that we’re marvelous can sound absurd. But perhaps in this strange, nervous, pandemic time when we’ve had to pull back from close contact and have become so wary of each other, perhaps it would do us good to remember, for a moment, the miracle at the heart of what a human being is.

This miracle is a constant theme in Sufi teachings and poetry. Ibn ‘Arabi, the great 13th Century Sufi mystic and metaphysician, described the human being as a barzakh, an “isthmus.” Human-being is an isthmus between the seeming polarities of matter and spirit, body and soul, the dense and the subtle. Like the Isthmus of Panama where the vast continents of North and South America meet, the isthmus that is human beingness is “the Towering Station” amongst all barzakhs. Ibn ‘Arabi:

The barzakh is between-between,
a station between this and that,
not one of them, but the totality of the two.
It has the towering exaltation,
the lofty splendor,
and the deep-rooted station.

This is what Rumi calls “the majesty that lives in the deep center of everyone.” I suspect it is a majesty that lives in the deep center of everything, in the tree and the mountain, the rabbit and the hawk, but in the barzakh of human being it can be known, and once known it becomes a source of wisdom and loving kindness. Rumi:

You are a joining point of sky and ground,
soul as witness, green compassion.

The binary name human being itself reveals the miraculous barzakh we are. Human is a word derived from humus, earth — the human is an earthling. Our extraordinarily complex and wondrous bodies are born of the earth — skin, bone, blood, and brain — a living system of matter and energy. The second part of our name, being, points to the ineffable quality of the creature we are: call it spirit, or presence, or awareness. Our nature of being awareness cannot be objectified in the way our earthling bodies can. Together, the two words suggest the barzakh we are: human-being — “a station between this and that, not one of them, but the totality of the two.”

It’s fairly easy to sense this in the moment: first you can know yourself as body, manifested as the sensuous organism of matter that you are, and you can know yourself as a locus of awareness, an ineffable presence, clear and ungraspable. You are human, being. An isthmus “between” matter and spirit, it is in this “Towering Station” that the seeming duality of matter and spirit can be recognized as not-two. As Rumi invites us:

Come out here where the roses have opened.
Let soul and world meet.

This is the miracle of human-beingness. In the place of meeting, in what Rumi calls “the spirit-form we are,” a wondrous alchemy becomes possible. Our spirit-being enlightens our earthling-nature, and our earthling-nature gives clear spirit a field of sensate beauty and impermanence in which to love and play, become attached, suffer, and with any luck, recognize “the towering exaltation” within which it arises.

One of the most profound and beautiful expressions of this earth-spirit-human-being miracle can be found in the concluding passage of Rilke’s Ninth Elegy. Here, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, Rilke is praising to the angels the “Things” of the earth, and reveals how they become “invisible” in us, in our love and amazement and gratitude:

...And these Things,

which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.

Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, invisible? Isn’t it your dream to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent command? Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over—one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first. You were always right, and your holiest inspiration is our intimate companion, Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being wells up in my heart.

The Other Side of Death

M A Y 2 0 2 0

Let’s talk for a moment about death. It’s a dark and fearsome subject for many of us, especially these days when we’re all trying to hide from a fatal pandemic that’s stalking the land, and every headline and news report counts the dead and reminds us we could be next. Death, usually in the background of our lives, is now in the foreground.

The desire to live, to avoid disease and death, is baked into our DNA — and it’s a good thing it is. We mourn the death of those we love and do our best to save people we’ve never met from death. The cruel deaths of war are an abomination to us. It’s understandable that death has a dark and fearsome reputation.

But what is it? What is death? Is it possible to understand it in another way, along with its dark reputation?

We may find some clues in the words of spiritual mentors, contemporary and past.

You probably know the story of the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, that when he was dying his disciples pleaded with him, “Master, please don’t die! Don’t leave us!”

Ramana replied, “Don’t be silly, where could I go?”

Whenever I’ve repeated that story in a gathering, the reaction of nearly everyone has been an immediate smile or laugh. We get it. We get the joke.

What do we get? What do we know? After all, death is the big goodbye, the last farewell, the end of life.

Or is it? Why do we smile when we hear Ramana say he’s not going anywhere?

When we look at death from the standpoint of our individual lives, it certainly looks like death makes people “go away,” depart, vanish from life. But Ramana wasn’t looking at death from the standpoint of his or our individual lives. Our particular lives do end; we have to accept that. Rather he was looking at it from the standpoint of our original, ever-present nature that doesn’t go anywhere.

That may sound very spiritual, but what does it mean? What is our “original nature?” Is it alive? Is it not subject to death?

In Tibetan traditions, guidance is read aloud to those who are in the process of dying or who have just died, as in this verse by Padmasambhava:

Thine own awareness,
shining, void, and inseparable
from the Ground of Radiance,
hath no birth,
hath no death,
and is the Immutable Light.

As Ramana Maharshi testifies, we don’t have to wait until death to recognize the Immutable Light that is our original nature. The essence of our awareness right now has no birth, no death. When we get a glimpse of this truth directly, an old tension that’s been stretched tight in us relaxes and opens.

A profound gladness fills the human psyche
when it knows the part of the self that does not die.

— Coleman Barks

And from Rumi:

We have such fear of what comes next. Death.
These loves are like pieces of cotton.
Throw them in the fire.
Death will be a meeting like that flaring up,
a presence you have always wanted to be with.

This presence is our original nature, present here and now, yet hidden from us because we’re entranced with the phenomena that appear in it. The profound gladness that fills our psyche when we recognize what we are, comes from the realization that it’s not simply “our” original nature but it’s the original nature of everything, of the All, of the One. We can’t fall out of it, even when we die.

Or as Thich Nhat Hanh says it:

Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the wave realizes
it is water. At that moment, all fear of death disappears.

And Rumi again:

Let sadness and your fears of death
sit in the corner and sulk.

The sky itself reels with love.
There is one being inside all of us, one peace.

Sufis often meditate on one of the Names of God called Al Hayy, the Alive. Al Hayy means that “God” — the pure awareness that is our original nature and the original nature of everything — is Alive. Rumi’s one being inside all of us is Alive. It’s an Aliveness not dependent on organic processes, and as such it is not subject to death. When our individual lives end, our original nature doesn’t. As Sufi Inayat Khan told us, “It is death that dies, not life.”

When you experience this directly (through spiritual practice or through a moment of grace) or if you simply accept it on faith, your attitude toward death changes. You still do everything you can to avoid death and you still grieve the loss of loved ones, but death is no longer dark or fearsome. It’s a homecoming. You understand and can say with Walt Whitman:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

In the Shelter of Each Other

A P R I L 2 0 2 0

Pandemic spring. You’re told to go inside, close the door and wait. You do what you’re told. You wait. The children are restless with the door closed. They want to go out, they want to go back to how it used to be, but you’re not sure it ever will. Something’s different this time.

The telephone rings. How are you? Are you okay? Do you need anything?

You hear the waitress two doors down lost her job. She has a kid and no other family to speak of. You’ve seen her at the bus stop, but now there are no buses. You begin to feel smaller than you were, and helpless.

Outside spring sweeps brightly through the neighborhood, unconcerned with people, waking the ground and the budded twigs and all the air between them. You open the door and look out. No sign of danger. You take the kids for a walk.

A robin hops on a damp lawn, tilts her head as if she has a question for you. We promise, you tell her, not to come too close to anyone. She looks nervous and hops away.

You see others walking, a few, separated by space. They’re being careful too. They look as alone as you feel, and you share that without saying anything.

Days pass. People are hurting. The numbers rise. You hear of coffins in a cold warehouse waiting for the earth to take them, and for some reason you think of the person who keeps that place swept and respectful. You think of the waitress reading a book to her kid for the third time.

You get quieter, or wish you could. When something gets you annoyed, you notice and back off. What’s the point? You tell your kids that we’re all helping to flatten the curve and you do your best to explain what that means. They ask questions and you hear yourself talking to them in a way you haven’t before.

At breakfast there’s talk of selfless people caring for others, countless millions of them in countries you’ve never been to. You want to applaud them like the Brits did from their doorsteps, a magical applause sounding like a sudden spring rain falling on all the roof tops and gardens.

It’s odd but you feel like taking care of someone or something, do some little kindness you haven’t done before. You clean the fridge. The kids ask if they can make cookies and bring them to the waitress.

You speak on the telephone to a friend and after you hang up you remember that you forgot to say the one thing you really wanted to. You call back.

One night, turning away from sleep, you get up before light. You make a cup of tea and sit by the window. An image comes unbidden of an old man struggling to breathe and a masked nurse entering the room. You wonder what it’s like to die like that, or to die in any way at all.

You try to imagine dying, letting go that last time, saying goodbye that last time, dissolving into God knows what, and you feel suddenly a tenderness flooding your heart, a tenderness for everyone and everything in this world, and the feeling keeps expanding, opening out from you, a beautiful, inexplicable radiance flowing into the air around you and into the sleeping house and into the space between the houses and between the budded twigs and out beyond to the approaching dawn. It’s as if the foreboding of death has turned into something so precious and dear you feel the whole world is wrapped in it and is sheltered in it, a warmth, a caring holy love and thankfulness, and you know it’s not just rising from you but that’s it’s trying to rise from everyone, and you don’t understand it and you know you don’t need to.

Dawn comes, and another day, and another. You feel different. You feel bigger than you were. Kinder. Then one day the all-clear sounds.

Doors open. Neighbors come out of their houses. They’re smiling. Something’s happened to them like something’s happened to you. We’re not what we were. We greet strangers and shake hands. We say, How are you? It’s so good to see you! You must come over for tea! The waitress comes to thank you for the cookies and all the other things you left on her doorstep. Up and down the street, people are chatting and laughing, kids are running around, the trees are waving.

It feels like the beginning of the world. A robin on the lawn looks up and sees you, and now she’s just as happy as you are.

World Worry

M A R C H 2 0 2 0

A disturbing litany of disasters confronts us in most woke writings these days, and for good reason: our planet and human civilization are encountering conditions in which the earth’s capacity for nourishing life is endangered at a magnitude unknown in human history. You know the litany: polar bears lost on melting ice floes, songbirds vanishing, soil depleted, poisons in the air and our bodies, countless trillions of plastic fragments floating in all the oceans, forests burning and diseased, extractive industries gouging into mountains, a fierce ambition in human economies to grow past all limits, populations of refugees fleeing from social and climate disruption, and ever-increasing injustice, distrust, polarization, and domination of the many by the few. All of this is stirring in us world worry, a sense of foreboding that is draining the vibrancy of human culture as well as our physical, psychological, and spiritual health. We see a menacing cloud over the future and feel helpless to do anything about it.

World worry is not something we can avoid. Even if we try to shut it out and just devote ourselves to the demands and pleasures of our personal lives, the storm gathering over us and over our children and their children is a portent we can’t ignore for long. While we may realize that world worry is sapping the energy from our lives, at the same time we feel if we don’t worry about what’s coming down, we’ll take no action to forestall it. Releasing our world worry would mean giving in, giving up.

How can we be with this? What is our responsibility in this fateful time? What is asked of us?

And then there’s this troubling question: Can we be awake to the enormous ecological and social disruption that’s happening now and that’s ever increasing — disruption that, I repeat, is on a scale that no generation before us has had to face — can we be awake to it and still live happy, beautiful and fulfilled lives?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and no easy fixes. As the days and years pass, each of us will have to contend with this intractable challenge in a manner suited to our own lives. Here are a few thoughts of my own in response to these questions — culled down to three basic “principles” — offered not as definitive answers, but more as a starting point for your own contemplation and questioning.

Keep an Undefended Heart
In my own life I try to accept my world worry not as a looming horror that makes me want to shut down, but as a “necessary angel” that keeps my heart open. For example, at the moment I’m aware of the 900,000 Syrian refugees escaping the fighting in northwestern Syria; many are without shelter, huddled in the freezing weather. I’ve been to Syria many times and I feel connected to those people. Though I know I can’t really imagine the desperation of a father or a mother trying to keep their children from freezing, or the scale of suffering there (900,000 people!) and everywhere in the world, I know if I close my heart to it, my own life and the greater life I am part of will be diminished. Even though I’m in no position to do anything about their suffering, that very helplessness becomes part of theirs… and somehow within it we share a mutual presence. That might sound like a feeble response that makes no difference, but consider the opposite — if I closed my heart to their suffering, refusing even to be aware that it’s happening, would I not be abandoning those people a second time? My helpless caring matters.

I wonder if the extreme of world worry, when we become overwhelmed by the anxiety of knowing the earth’s life-support systems are collapsing, isn’t in itself a kind of defense, a way to defend our hearts from being present. Being overwhelmed, we curl into anticipatory grief and the certainty that everything’s hopeless.

I think here of the prayer-words of Etty Hillesum a year before she was murdered at Auschwitz: “These are times of terror, my God. Tonight for the first time I stayed awake in the dark, my eyes burning, images of human suffering parading endlessly before me. I am going to promise you one thing, my God, oh, a trifle: I will not let myself weigh down the present day with those fears that the future inspires in me…”

Those are the words of an undefended heart, open to the hurt of the world without letting that hurt crush her heart’s presence. An undefended heart is in this way the requisite condition for survival, maybe not physical survival but survival of the most noble aspect of the human spirit. If, in the end, the earth’s human experiment does fail, at least we will have succumbed with our hearts alive and loving.

Find What Matters
When we experience our world worry not through the lens of fear but through our undefended heart, something very intimate changes in us. Our life comes closer. Worry and despair open into compassion. Our undefended heart reveals to us that we are the world, undivided from it. Then, in the moments of our lives, we do our best to be faithful to what matters. As the novelist Barbara Kingsolver once remarked, “In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”

Making things “right,” in however small a way, asks that we discover, in each life situation we encounter, what matters. Finding what matters isn’t an intellectual exercise, like making a list. It’s more alive than that, more immediate to our moment-to-moment experience. For example, we might say that “kindness matters,” but the living quality of kindness is something that we must find and open to, again and again, as we live.

Given time, this “finding what matters” becomes a natural, intuitive move. It doesn’t need to be thought about, although sometimes thinking can help us remember what’s at stake. Say you find yourself getting irritable about something — at the moment that you notice your irritability you might ask yourself, “What really matters here?” This question might come verbally like this, or it may be a subtle shift in your heart. Either way, it creates a pause, and in that pause you make things as right as you can.

In my own life I experience this process of “finding what matters” in the day-to-day situations that arise — in how I respond to and care for others, care for my household, care for my health, care for the work I do. In fact, finding what matters is the very yoga I try to follow as I write this essay and look for the next sentence or word. What matters here? In an earlier part of my life when I designed houses for a living, the same questioning guided my design process — what matters here? What is the life that wants to happen here? How can this design be faithful to that?

But finding what matters isn’t only something that’s active in the details of our lives, it can also guide us in their larger trajectory — what work we turn to, how we determine our life's priorities, and what we give our energy to. Here our question about “what matters” resonates deep into the future, not only in our own lives but into the lives of our descendants, into the seventh generation. How will what I devote my life to nourish the life that is to come?

But whether in the details of our lives or in the fundamental directions our lives take, finding and following what matters is the very current that will heal the world. We can be sure of that.

Do the Beautiful
Following what matters is the essence of the Sufi principle of ihsan, which translates as doing the beautiful.* When Dostoyevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world,” he was saying, among other things, that beauty matters. Here beauty is not simply understood as something that has an aesthetically pleasing appearance. The beautiful act — doing the beautiful — is an act that fits what a situation calls for, an act that arises spontaneously when the heart recognizes what matters. The beautiful act nourishes and calls forth the life that is nascent in a situation.

Doing the beautiful doesn’t come about from thinking or planning. It happens naturally to the degree we have devoted our life to “undefending” our heart and finding what matters. “Let the beauty you love be what you do,” Rumi famously told us, an advice we cannot remember too often. In the context of transforming our world worry — our concern for the perilous condition of the planet and human civilization — into a path of healing, I cannot think of a more succinct instruction.

Here we might find an answer to the question: Can we be awake to the enormous ecological and social disruption that’s happening now and that’s ever increasing, and still live happy, beautiful and fulfilled lives? I believe this is exactly what we must do. I don’t have any illusions about the suffering and loss we are witnessing today, or the magnitude of the threats facing the community of life on earth in the future. But if a world abundant with life is to be seeded by us, it will not grow from anxiety or despair; it will only thrive in the fertile soil of our undefended hearts, finding — and doing — what is beautiful.

Original You

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 0

Some fifty years ago, my Sufi teacher — probably in one of his darker moods — told us young students gathered around him, “We do what we do, either in vanity or in vain.” I think that at that particular moment his proverb was a good way to puncture our self-centeredness (vanity!) and our romantic ideas about becoming heroes and making happy endings (in vain!), but now, after having lived these intervening years, I believe there’s a bit more to the story.

Yes, whatever we do is “in vain,” in the sense that the results of all our actions are impermanent, everything comes and goes, civilizations rise and fall, dust returns to dust. The recognition of the impermanent nature of everything has forced humans throughout history — from the ancient Hebrews to Samuel Becket — to question if there’s any meaning to our lives at all. All is vanity and vexation of spirit, saith the Preacher. In the past two centuries especially, writers, philosophers and many others have struggled with the dilemma of meaning-making in what they’ve felt is a meaningless universe. Although some of them have succeeded in suggesting ways we might cope with life despite its background of meaninglessness, that background still guarantees that whatever we do, it is ultimately in vain. This is vanitas — Latin meaning “emptiness,” as in empty of meaning.

And then there’s vanity, the preoccupation with self. My teacher was pointing out that the function of vanity isn’t limited to having excessive beliefs in one’s attractiveness, abilities, or importance (as it’s usually understood), but that vanity can be seen in a wider sense as the function of the ego project itself. In the relentless current of impermanence, we humans build our identities — unconsciously for the most part — as we react to the insecurities of our lives and try to fill the sense of lack we feel inside. We try to make ourselves into something substantial and defensible, something real. Some manage this without too much stress to themselves and others, but the effort is never without feelings of unease and separation, and often becomes neurotic and dysfunctional. When vanity’s dysfunction shows up in its extroverted forms it’s pride, haughtiness, conspicuous consumption, dominance, patriarchy, etc. When it appears in more introverted forms it may become meekness, self-consciousness, anxiety about being accepted, self-doubt, or loneliness. Either way, the vanity of the self in this view is characterized by its self-preoccupation and self-centeredness.

I recently came upon a phrase of Nietzsche’s that hints at another way to look at all this, although I doubt he would have interpreted it as I do. He said, “Vanity is the fear of appearing original…” How might we understand this little phrase?

One aspect of Nietzsche’s aphorism is about appearance — our vanity is about how we think we appear to others, or let’s say, it’s the image we have of the image others have about us. (A psychiatrist friend of mine once told me, “The ego is how we imagine others see us.”) We picture ourselves reflected in the mirror of other peoples’ estimation, and we get anxious about how that might turn out.

But Nietzsche’s definition goes further. He says vanity is not only our fear of how we might appear to others, but it’s our fear of appearing original. How might we interpret this?

If you ask yourself what you’re like when you’re “original,” what’s your intuition of the answer? Where do you go in yourself to look? When I ask myself that question, several things seem to happen. I get quiet. I stop thinking. I don’t pretend I know the answer. I don’t refer to ideas I might have about how others see me. It’s as if I go to where I start, in the moment. Whatever “I” am becomes synchronous with the present moment (at least for a moment). I don’t try to act “as if” I’m original — there’s no space or time to do that. I feel that I’m happening spontaneously, along with everything else. What I think and feel and do doesn’t first check to consider how I’ll be perceived by others — I just happen, unique and original.

I think that by opening to our originality in this way, we have the basis for a profound and extremely effective practice. It’s a practice that has the power to free us of our self-consciousness and social insecurity almost instantly. If you’re feeling constrained by vanity in any of the ways I’ve mentioned, go to your “original you” — how you are happening in the moment. It’s not complicated. You don’t have to think about it. You may notice that your “original you” has a kind of innocence to it, almost a delight, although it’s not naïve or amoral. It sees the whole picture without getting attached to a particular interpretation of it. It is free to respond sensitively and compassionately because it is intimately connected to what’s happening.

But why are we afraid of appearing original? I think there are countless answers to that, piled up from our early years when we felt others’ eyes on us, when we felt judged or praised or ignored or tried to fit in — whenever we tried to anticipate what we could do, or how we could be, that would please others. In some of us, this effort reversed itself into resentment and rebellion, just as it drove others of us into painful self-consciousness and shyness.

Perhaps our fear of “appearing” original has an even deeper source, one that’s not just about imagining how we appear to others but about our uneasiness with the indeterminate quality of freshness and spontaneity that being “original” challenges us with. From our long habit of self-preoccupation, freshness might very likely feel threatening, an unknown place that’s too uncertain, too open, too vulnerable.

Yet when we look to the great beings in human history whom we most admire for their holiness or compassion or creativity, we see that their genius arose from their lack of fear of being original. Vanity did not restrict them, especially in their most compassionate or creative actions. And in our own lives, the moments when we have felt most alive, most in love, most creative, most connected and generous, were they not the times that we, too, were most originally ourselves, when we were unafraid to show up in the moment without self-consciousness or self-preoccupation?

To the extent you are able to be your original you, your freshness corresponds to the universe’s freshness and its instantaneous creation. You don’t need to seek for more meaning — that’s meaning enough. Your freshness occurs with the universe’s ceaseless becoming, and is one with it. Being original you, you are purely unique, just like every tree and leaf is original and unique, every drop of rain, every wave. And being original you, you have no fear about how you appear. Fear has nothing to hold on to — you’re original!

The Sacred Duration

J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0

You told me that when you were a child, “God was always there,” meaning that the little girl you were back then knew God was always in the close background, very close, if not always felt as brightly as that time you remember lying on your back looking up through the trees at the sunlight pouring through, all holy and golden, or the time you sat alone by the pond’s edge and tossed a pebble in and felt the circles spreading across its surface like some mysterious grace in the movement of things, or the times at night in the dark of your pillow when you mumbled a prayer under your breath and waited, and then the sacred presence came and felt like warmth inside you and you fell asleep inside it — those were the times when God broke through, closer than close, but the rest of the time, or most of it anyway, “God was always there” you said, just behind things, and you knew there was nothing you had to fear.

Then you told me that as you grew up those bright moments of closeness happened less and less often, and the certainty that God was always there became thinner and other things intruded until you were left with a longing for that closeness and certainty, looking here and there, in a lover’s arms, in a wise book, in a group of praying people, and sometimes it would come, but only briefly, as brief as a breath, and then disappear again amidst all the normal things, and the longing would return, calling you, calling for the trueness you could barely remember, and you wandered on, somehow staying faithful to it even when you couldn’t remember what it was.

Your hair is white now and though you know so many words and so many wonderful and terrible things about the world, your faithfulness and longing for that trueness has brought you back finally to the same quietness you knew looking up through the sunlit trees, and by the pond’s edge, and in the waiting on your dark pillow, a quietness not acquisitive but peaceful, that knows the sacred duration of God is “always there” in your own duration which is as spacious as this moment.

You know that the duration of the sacred is all of time and all of space. You know that we only call it “God” because we don’t know how else to describe it. You know that we only call it “sacred” because we need a word to say how it touches us with relief and awe so intimate and beautiful we could burst for the love of it. You know it’s always there. You know it’s always here. You know we can’t bear it too long, it’s too much for us, and so it’s given in these little moments of sacred duration that we cherish.

The World's Mirror

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9

There’s a Zen story that goes like this: A donkey wanders over to a well in a courtyard and looks into it. What he sees is a donkey down there looking up at him. At the same time, so the story goes, the water in the well looks up at the donkey and sees itself reflected in the donkey’s eyes — it sees water. What is seeing what?

Of course, it’s a silly story — we know the donkey is the donkey and the water is the water, and yet what’s pointed to in the story is a crack in that arrangement where something else can be glimpsed. Something else?

If you were to imagine for a moment that the world you’re experiencing is a mirror — like the water in the well — it’s possible that you’ll get a hit of a sensation that feels something like transparency. First you imagine that the world “out there” is your reflection — that what you are seeing and feeling in the moment is actually reflecting what you are. And then curiously enough, you may be visited with a sense that you are neither this nor that — that you are transparent.

Try it for a moment: look away from this page and imagine that what you are seeing and feeling is your reflection looking at you. Include not only the visual field you’re perceiving but your whole emotive and ever-changing experience that comes with this moment. No need to think about it, just let what you see and feel in the moment represent a vivid reflection of what “you look like.” Do that several times. Now close your eyes and imagine that the sensations you’re aware of — your breathing, your body sensations, the sounds you hear, the thoughts that come by, and “your whole emotive and ever-changing experience that comes with this moment” — imagine that all this is your reflection looking back at you.

If you can manage this, you may receive a sense that the “you” you consider yourself to be, loses its privileged position. You may feel yourself both as the immediate world of your experience, and simultaneously not that. You may have the equally curious sensation that the properties of the world you are perceiving — for a moment at least — lose their “thatness.” You sense they’re not other than you… and since you are transparent, they are too.

Rumi’s poetry is filled with reports of this same experience — here are a few examples:

We are wisdom and healing,
roasted meat and the star Canopus.
We are ground and the spilled wine sinking in…

We look like this, but this is a tree,
and we are morning wind in the leaves
that makes the branches move.

Silence turning now into this, now that.

* * *

You’re sitting here with us, but you’re also out walking
in a field at dawn. You are yourself
the animal we hunt when you come with us on the hunt.
You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you’re wind.

* * *

The raucous parrots laugh,
and we laugh inside their laughter,
the two of us on a bench in Konya,
yet amazingly in Khorasan and Iraq as well.
Friends abiding this form,
yet also in another, outside of time, you and I.

* * *

The whole of existence is a mirror whose essence you are.

* * *

We know that the essence of a mirror is transparent. It doesn’t show up as anything in itself yet in it everything shows up. In the same way, we are the world’s mirror, and as we have just glimpsed, the world is our mirror. When we look into the world’s mirror even for a moment, we see that the world is us and we are the world. This glimpse reveals how everything is intimate and happening together, and how you and I and the whole world, all its beauty and all its ugliness, are one body. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his beautiful poem:

Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone…

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda…

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion.

Looking in the world’s mirror can open our heart’s door. Dare we leave it open? We might think we would be overwhelmed by such vulnerability, but to the extent we experience ourselves as transparent, there’s nothing in the way that can be overwhelmed. We can simply be present and responsive in whatever way is appropriate. We can be, as Rumi says, “the jar that pours.”

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

The Welcoming Practice

N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 9

The Welcoming Practice is a fusion of guidance from several mystical traditions: Christianity, Sufism, Zen, Advaita, and Dzogchen in particular. It has its most direct antecedents in the Christian Centering Prayer practice as developed by a number of Catholic mystics (Merton, Keating, Menninger, Pennington, Bourgeault, and others) inspired by the 14th Century text The Cloud of Unknowing and the practices of earlier desert ascetics. However, this Welcoming Practice is a distinct variation drawing from the praxis of several traditions, which is one reason I’ve started calling it the Welcoming Practice — it welcomes these various forms of guidance that are united in their devotion to the same mystery.

The Welcoming Practice has three aspects which I call: Bow Inside; Consent to Silence; and Welcome Love. Though I’ll describe them here in sequence, you may find that when you engage in this practice these three aspects mingle and occur within and through each other, and are not as separate as they might sound in this description.

Bow Inside
It can happen that when you sit down to begin your meditation practice, a subtle pride sits down with you: See, now I’m a meditator, now I’m doing my practice. I’m a proper Sufi (or Buddhist or Christian). This subtle pride, which may be hard to spot, is a veil of identity that can obstruct one’s simple presence. When you sit down with your identity as an adherent of a particular tradition, you can’t help but see through its lens. To “bow inside” means to relinquish that identity as best you can, to give everything away that you think you know or have. As an early Sufi advised, “Put your forehead on the prayer mat and don’t presume.”

The “move” of bowing inside isn’t a physical movement, although it can have a kinaesthetic feel to it. Like a physical bow, this bow is a move toward self-effacement and unpretentiousness, a giving-over of one’s insularity: “Take me away from myself!” as Ibn Arabi cries in his beautiful prayer. To bow inside means to offer yourself in all humility, in your simple presence, during the sacred moments of this practice. Just your clear presence, nothing more.

In her wonderful descriptions of Centering Prayer, Cynthia Bourgeault points to a single line in The Cloud of Unknowing that suggests the essence of what I mean by bowing inside: it is to have, as the anonymous author of The Cloud writes: “Naked intent direct to God.” It is this “nakeding” that is the interior bow, an unclothing of your personhood to its simplicity and readiness, for in this practice you are inviting “God” to be with you, to open yourself to the unspeakable mystery of the numinous. To welcome its presence you cannot come adorned with self-identity; you have to come naked. Here you may wish to replace the word “God” with some other signifier that means the same thing — Naked intent direct to Pure Awareness, or Naked intent direct to Buddha Nature, or Naked intent direct to Silence.

Consent to Silence
“Consent to silence” is Father Thomas Keating’s concise instruction for this process of “nakeding.” To consent is to allow, to open to the openness that is silent, that is the background of every moment of our lives. One way to consent in this way is to recognize that our very capacity to listen is silent. Whatever listening is, it is silent. This is why the Advaita nondual teacher Jean Klein advises, “Listen to listening.” We recognize that pure awareness itself is silence. God is silence. Or in Father Keating’s words, “Silence is God’s first language.”

Now to the degree you have managed to bow inside and to consent to silence, you will soon experience distractions, mostly in the form of thoughts, or perhaps images, emotive currents or bodily sensations that draw your interested attention toward them. This is not a failure. In a way, it’s the heart of this practice, for each thought or sensation that attracts your attention gives you a chance to let it go, to relax the tension that your attention fixes upon it. That relaxing is the key. It will present itself as an opportunity again and again. Each time you notice you’ve attached your attention to some property that appears, relax. Consent to silence. As Zen master Dainin Katagiri points out, “… just put aside all kinds of imagination fabricated by your consciousness. Don’t attach to thoughts and emotions; just let them return to emptiness.”

Let the silence swallow them up. Consenting to silence means letting whatever has captured your attention return to emptiness. You don’t have to do anything to make this happen. As it is pointed out in Dzogchen texts: “All thoughts are self-liberated.” They vanish by themselves as soon as you relax your interest in them. This is why Sufi Inayat Khan called meditation mystical relaxation.

Welcome Love
At first I hesitated to use the word “love” to describe this aspect of the practice, since love is a word that so easily can seem sentimental or denote personal affection. In saying that, I don’t mean to disparage sentiment or affection — praise them! they are human resonances of the “divine” love that gives us this moment that blossoms everywhere as everything. To welcome love in the context of this practice means to welcome in our hearts a glimpse of this divine love — though again, to use the word “divine” may be just as perilous as using the word “love,” for it seems to imply a divinity or entity from which love is dispensed, and then we are caught in thinking dualistically about what is in essence not dualistic. Divine love is the radiance of Being, not something that issues forth from a God that is made into something separate in our minds.

But how can we welcome this vast, unspeakable love? Happily, it emerges by itself and welcomes us to the degree that we have consented to silence, which means we can’t make it happen through our insistence. And yet, “we can put ourselves in the way of it,” as Ibn Arabi tells us. Here we can take to heart an instruction from Plotinus, speaking of the same unspeakable love:

Let those who are unfamiliar with this state imagine, on the basis of their loves here down below, what it must be like to encounter the being they love most of all.

“Imagine what it must be like…” — that’s where we can start, in the imagination of the heart, not the mind. By grace such imagination breaks us loose from conceptions of love, and then divine love like an awesome wind takes over. Here we can no longer talk in prose — Sufis are especially enamoured of this kind of love poetry, and the 11th Century Persian Sufi, Abdullah Ansari, in his Book of Love, goes so far as to say Sufism is simply another word for love:

Love is the mark of the Tribe, the title of the Tariqah (Way)… It has three degrees:

The first degree is a love that cuts off disquieting thoughts, makes service enjoyable, and offers solace in afflictions…

The second degree is a love that incites preferring the Real to all else, elicits remembrance on the tongue, and attaches the heart to witnessing it…

The third degree is a dazzling love that cuts off expressing, makes allusions subtle, and does not reach description. This love is the pivot of this business…

I quote these love words to remind us that in this Welcoming Practice what we are inviting ourselves to be in the presence of is so awesome, sacred, and of a radiant, loving mystery so unknowable that we can only bow inside. To me, this practice has the capacity to take us beyond the quiet composure of recognizing nondual awareness — it passes through that doorway, yes — and then reveals to us a loving sacredness that is at the same time infinitely awesome and purely intimate.

Outrage and Love

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 9

A Personal History

I recently celebrated my 75th birthday, an event that rang like a gong in my heart, making me look up from the current procession of my days and back at the trajectory that my life has traced through those years, looking — as often happens for those fortunate enough to live this long — looking for patterns and meanings that might tell me what this has all been about. There are many ways the story could be told, of course, but one pattern in particular stands out for me just now that I’ll try to describe here, on the chance it may reflect something in your life too.

To put it most simply, throughout my years I have been drawn to, astonished by, and in love with beauty — the beauty of nature and the beauty of human potential — and outraged by its desecration. Since I have a fairly mild nature, the feelings of outrage that have arisen in me have often been disturbing and difficult to know what to do with.

I remember when I was eleven standing with my friend Jack watching bulldozers crash through the woods we loved and where we had played for years. We were heartbroken. They cut down the trees, poured asphalt roads, and started building rows of identical tract houses. One Sunday afternoon when the builders were gone, Jack and I broke into a construction shed on the housing site. Using the picks and sledgehammers stored there, we demolished the shed. I remember vividly the moment when my sledgehammer smashed the electrical fuse box and sparks exploded from it. It wasn’t long before a car sped onto the site and a man jumped out shouting, “Hey you kids!” Jack and I ran for our lives and the man never caught us.

Coming of age through the 1950’s and 60’s I was witness to the spread of suburban America across the landscape, the ugly highway strip malls and seas of parking lots, the “temples to consumerism” as they’ve been called, and I wanted more than anything to retreat from all that into the remaining wild and beautiful expanses of nature. I wanted to go where there were, as I told my parents, “God-made things” and not “man-made things.” As soon as we graduated from college, my young wife and I headed to an uninhabited island off the coast of British Columbia where we lived off the land for a summer, hunting and fishing, and for the next two years I made elaborate plans to move out there permanently. But eventually I saw that my repugnance for what humans were doing to the natural world and my attempts to run away from it were limiting whatever my life was supposed to be about. I didn’t know what that was, but I stepped warily back toward the human world, hoping I’d find out.

At that time the Vietnam War was raging, and I was soon to be drafted into the army. I couldn’t imagine traveling halfway around the world to kill people I had no argument with. Once again, I felt in an acutely personal way the brutality humans were visiting upon — not only the natural world — but each other. I read a poem by ee cummings — “i sing of Olaf glad and big” — about a pacifist who was beaten and tortured for refusing to fight in World War I. A line in that poem jumped out at me in which Olaf says: “there is some sh_t I will not eat.” That expressed my revulsion perfectly, and I became a conscientious objector, refusing to kill anyone. The whole long experience only deepened my sense of estrangement from society.

Another story that reveals this same struggle in a different way: A few years later — by then it was the early 1970’s — I traveled alone for a month through India. I was intent on witnessing how life was experienced by people who had none of my privilege. I wanted to toughen my tender sensibilities and break through what I felt was my provincial American consciousness. India was, and remains, a good place to do that.

Toward the end of that month I spent a week in Calcutta, and accompanied by a hardened but slightly bewildered guide I had hired, went to the worst places he knew of in the city. We climbed through the vast dumps where people lived in cardboard huts among the trash. Using him as an interpreter, I spoke with mothers and kids living in that stink and asked them about their lives and hopes. Out on the streets we spoke with beggars and lepers. I remember one symbolic moment when a shiny black sedan passed us as we squatted on a curb trying to talk with a beggar, its tires splashing us with filthy water. We went to Mother Teresa’s Kalighat Home for the Dying where I told the nuns I was a reporter from the Des Moines Herald and that I wanted to write a story about their work — could they show me everything? They did.

After that week in Calcutta I felt brutalized. The fragrant beauty I had known in nature, the noble beauty I was sure humans were capable of, all of it felt assaulted in my heart. Waiting for my train out of Calcutta in the cavernous Howrah Railroad Station, I sat dejected and depressed on a wooden bench as far from the crowds as I could find. A little man, neatly dressed, sat down on the other end of the bench.

He looked over at me and said, “I believe you are from which country?”

I was in no mood to talk with anyone and didn’t look up. He repeated the question. I muttered in as unfriendly a way as I could, “Merica,” hoping he’d get the point that I didn’t want to talk.

But then, quite slowly, he asked, “And how… do you find… Calcutta?”

Something in me snapped. I wasn’t aware how tight I had become, how not only the squalor of Calcutta but the whole saga of the desecration of nature and human beauty that my young life had witnessed to up to that time, how much it hurt.

I turned to him and glared. “It outrages me!” I shouted, surprising myself and him.

The man sat up straight, slid down the bench, and asked me what I meant. I told him in a flood of words, tears in my eyes, and he was obviously touched. In what I now see was one of those choice points that reveal one’s destiny, the man told me he was part of an armed insurrection that was active further up in Bengal State, and asked if I wanted to come with him to see what they were doing. Perhaps I would join them? I confess I was tempted. Visions of making a heroic stand against the forces of injustice and greed rose up in my mind. But thankfully I had family waiting for me back in Delhi — and I was scared — so I said I couldn’t join him.

Something began changing in me after that period, maybe because I had entered my mid-thirties and had children. Though my marriages back then were falling apart, the very fact of having brought children to the earth made me responsible for doing whatever I could to make things better for them, and for children everywhere. Unbeknownst to me, the love I felt for my kids’ simple beauty and their potential began to change my way of being in the world, at first slowly and hesitatingly, and then more confidently.

Up to then, my outrage had been reactive. It had made me want to pull away from society; now it began to make me creative and engaged. Over time I became a teacher — first teaching people how to design and build homes that were sustainable and beautiful; later teaching human-scale urban design, and then deep ecology, and then training environmental activists, which led me to work with indigenous tribes in Southeast Asia helping them preserve their land rights. With my wife Rabia, we worked on projects to advance peace and cross-cultural understanding in the Middle East and Central Asia. We created anthologies of prayers for the earth and for life, and the work continues still to this time.

The outrage is still here, for sure, but now it’s more like a source of energy than a source of disdain. When I watched young Greta Thunberg at the U.N. the other day express her outrage at world leaders for not doing everything in their power to stop the climate disaster looming over life on earth, tears came to my eyes. Her outrage was love. Her outrage swept all of us together in its love — it didn’t pull away as mine had done for half my life. Perhaps that’s the moral of this story: Know that your outrage against the desecration of life on earth is a sign of your love, and let that outrageous love of yours join with others to create a just and beautiful world.

Edgewalking

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 9

What is your edge? What limits you? What limits your capacity to be spiritually present and awake? or to be intimate and loving? to be generous? to be forgiving? to be patient? to be creative?

Engaging in this kind of inquiry isn’t easy. The edges in question are not visible, but they describe and constrain our lives nevertheless. How do we recognize the edges that constrain us? How do we open beyond them?

For starters, let’s back up first a few billion years and consider the origins of life. It seems that the earliest forms of single-celled life were made possible by the creation of a membrane, an edge, that allowed the chemical reactions necessary for life to develop in a protected environment. The membrane was all-important — without it the chemistry of life would have been swept away in the primordial seas.

The microscopic creatures that came to life inside their solitary membranes were enormously successful; for a couple of billion years they were the only form of life on earth. But then something extraordinary happened — they began to cooperate. In effect, they opened beyond their own edges, they began to relate to each other, and their meeting allowed them to evolve into multicellular organisms. This miracle ultimately resulted in the vast diversity of life forms we know today — including you and me with the 37 trillion cooperating cells that make up our living bodies.

I think it’s fair to extrapolate from this extraordinary process in the evolution of life to our own evolution as awakening beings. We might think of our individual self-sense, our individual identity, as analogous to unicellular life forms. For example, I maintain my me-ness by the edge I create around what I consider to be me. I believe I’m inside here, inside my identity-edge, and everything else that is not me is outside. This gives me a degree of coherence and some capacity for survival, but just like a unicellular creature, the edge that I create limits what I can become.

How do I create that identity-edge? By constantly reinforcing it with stories of various kinds. It’s as if I’m inside a room and the walls of the room are papered with stories and reasons that I tell myself. For example, if I become irritable, I tell myself I have good reasons for being irritable. I paste those reasons on the wall and they reflect back at me my point of view and assert my identity as being the one with that view. If I’m judgmental, I paper the walls with the reasons for my judgments. If I feel I’m unworthy and not as good as others, I paper it with reasons to justify that feeling. Over time, I become defined — and confined — by those reasons.

So how can we free ourselves from the confinements we create? What is asked of us? I think it’s important to remember that we don’t actually abandon what we are when we step through our identity-edge. We don’t go somewhere else. After all, the unicellular creatures did not abandon the life they harbored when they opened beyond themselves. They shared it, becoming more life.

Let’s look closely for a moment at these edges that limit us — what are they really? Are they solid? Impenetrable? Look, for example, at what limits your capacity to love someone close to you. Yes, you love them, but you know you could love them more — there’s an edge to your love and it’s made of various reasons — the person is not perfect, they don’t respond the way you’d like, they don’t fulfill your expectations, etc. But thinking of that person right now — do these reasons really make an impenetrable limit to your love? Is there really an edge there?

Or look at what limits your capacity to be spiritually present in your life — the edge you make between your self-sense and the open awareness of your true nature. You may create that edge by continually sorting your experience into what you like and what you dislike, or by restlessly doing one thing after the next to cover your feelings of groundlessness, or by any number of other avoidances (described at length in the book The Open Path.) But when you look for that “edge” between you and the open awareness of your true nature, is there really an edge there?

Questioning the edges that limit us like this, walking, so to speak, right up to them — we can’t find anything solid. When we stop asserting the truth of our stories and just look at them, they change. They’re no longer an edge that limits us — they’re permeable — they become an opening, a way, a path. Taking this path is what is meant by edgewalking.

Edgewalking can feel risky, at least initially. We don’t know what will happen when we let go of our insistence about the truth of our stories, or the need for our avoidances. We sense a spaciousness, a non-definitiveness. When we experience this spaciousness, this openness, we’re edgewalking. We don’t know what will happen next but we’re fully present to what is. We’re curious, creative, and caring. This happens naturally, without effort.

Edgewalking means moving from the known and preconceived to the unknown and the fresh. It means embracing paradox — on the one hand, recognizing the ways we continually create the edges of our self-identity, and on the other hand, seeing through their illusory limits. It means being humble and confident at the same time. It means being aware of our own limitations and the limitations of others while ever practicing compassion and forgiveness for all of us.

To me, this is a critical point about edgewalking. We’re not trying to be super-human here. We’re not trying to pop out of the world of limitations and edges into some rarefied, spiritual dimension. We live ordinary lives, extraordinarily. As individual beings, we walk the edge between being an individual and being a community, recognizing the edge we “walk” is permeable. As mystic beings, we walk the edge between the absolute and the relative, recognizing the same — the edge is permeable, open — we are form and emptiness; embodied human beings and, at the same time, we are beyond embodiment.

This is what poets do, and artists of all kinds, when they practice their art. They play at the edge between the known limits of the medium they work in, and the unknown and limitless. This is what great physicists do, and astronomers, philosophers, and shamans when they ask ever deeper questions. This is what you do when you forgive someone for an old hurt, or when you don’t react defensively when you feel blamed. You walk right up to that edge of hurt or defensiveness and recognize it for what it is. This is what you do when you realize your restless thoughts and actions are your way of avoiding being present, of being the simple loving awareness that you are. You walk right up to that edge and see it for what it is — a path beyond itself.

Sufi Tao

A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

Once, a young seeker asked an old Sufi woman, “Mother, tell me, what is the way of the Sufi? What way do you follow?”

She replied:

The way we follow does not lead.
It is like a wind that has no origin
and that seeks no destination.
It flows everywhere without moving,
never straying from this moment.
The way we follow is holy and alive
but to call it a way is to make it a thought,
suitable for the mind but not the heart.

The love-wind we follow teaches without instruction.
It reveals a path without pointing.
Accepting what arises, it holds on to nothing,
holding on to nothing it embraces all things.
Following the way, one is gentle
and does not defend or claim to know.
Not knowing,
one goes the way in wonder.

The way has no abode yet it is home.
In the evening friends gather and sing.
At dawn they go their own way without leaving.
Having no abode they are free.
Free, they are unafraid of rejection and death.
Unafraid, they give comfort to the comfortless.
If someone asks them who they are,
they say, a friend.

The way we follow does not separate or declare,
nor does it draw attention to itself.
Loving, it has no need to possess.
Intimate, its secret remains secret.
Though it is most holy, it is not special.
It belongs to all beings and is never withheld.
No one and nothing is outside of the way,
but few know it.

To know the way is to be the way.
Kind, the way is naturally kind.
Curious, it laughs with amazement.
If you do not know the way, be kind.
If you do not know the way, be curious.
Then like a leaf warmed in the sun,
in autumn you will turn gold, then brittle,
then earth, and never stop living.

Notice that when you turn your attention to the presence of this very moment, there’s a little gap. It may only last for a few seconds. It’s when you relax from doing anything at all, when you stop reading these words, when you’re in-between thoughts and you’re not busy judging what just happened, or planning what might happen next.

Notice that in this gap there’s no sense of “you.” Your memories are not there, your language is not there, your attitudes about things are not there. Of course, you could bring up a memory, or a word in your language, or an attitude you have, but in the simple presence of this moment, none of that is present. Even your name is absent, even your gender, even your religion — there’s just this empty, open, clear moment, and it’s selfless.

Learning to relax knowingly in this present moment, even for periods of a few seconds, purifies us. It’s like when we were kids on a hot summer day in the back seat of the car, rolling down the window and letting the wind blow against our face. Eyes closed, smiling.

It doesn’t take being an advanced practitioner to let this happen. It’s not even scary, since this gap is familiar and doesn’t carry the big name of “ego-death” with it. For a moment or two, you know yourself without your identities and attitudes — you’re just here, without being “you.” Empty and fresh and present.

These little moments of purification are available to us at any time, and the more we refresh ourselves in them the easier it is for us to realize that selflessness is not something frightening or obliterating. It’s our natural state, and we’ve known it all along.

Living in the Zero-Point-Now

J U L Y 2 0 1 9

I want to talk here about living in the zero-point-now and what the future and the past have to do with that, and right off I should warn you that I’m going to try to do this by using the narrative voice of a 17-year-old boy named Herman who’s the main character in a novel I’m reading, since his voice isn’t concerned with run-on sentences and he free-associates better than I do. If you get confused about who’s talking, me or Herman, just imagine it’s Herman, even though you know it’s me. Actually I was a 17-year-old boy once so it’s not such a stretch.

The thing I especially like about Herman is that his voice just hums along like this, and even when he doubts himself he does it in the same humming-along way and doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks, even if he says he does. Speaking of humming along, and to turn to our subject, isn’t that what the future does? I mean, here we all are in the zero-point-now, and instantly it turns into something else and keeps humming along, and yet all the while it stays the same: the zero-point. So how does “now” know what to do next? And where does “next” come from?

I used to think I was in charge of what comes next, or at least what should come next, and I’d get in a tangle talking to myself about what I liked and didn’t like and how things should be changed, and then I’d walk around being the person who had that attitude. I still do that more often than I care to admit, but I want to tell you I’ve found a fast way out of the tangle, and it’s easier than it sounds.

The zero-point-now.

That’s it. I just say those words and they remind me to drop everything I’m talking to myself about and everything I’m complaining about or wishing was different, and I just step into the zero-point-now, which isn’t hard to find since it’s always where I left it. It’s right here where everything that’s about to happen starts, and when I’m here “in” the zero-point-now I don’t know what’s going to happen next but that’s perfectly fine. It’s like not knowing where the ping-pong ball is going to bounce on the table but playing it as best you can, which means letting the zero-point play it.

If I start talking to myself again and having an attitude about how things should be, the zero-point-now vanishes almost immediately and I fall back to being a person with an attitude and I get caught again in the tangle. But the good thing is, it doesn’t seem to matter how often this happens since the zero-point-now is always here to untangle things if I just remember what’s happening and say “zero-point-now,” and step into it. Well, it isn’t really “stepping” because I don’t actually move anywhere, but I think you know what I mean.

I once asked a writer friend of mine how he came up with what happens next in all the stories he writes. He told me, just imagine that you’re at the theater and a play is about to start. The house lights go dark, the curtain rises, a man in a scruffy suit enters stage right, looks over his shoulder and then says… Listen to what he says, my friend told me. Write it down and keep going — which I take to mean don’t try to make it up yourself, just be part of its appearing. The curtain rises, something happens, but there’s no need to claim it’s you dreaming it up. I can’t even claim it’s me who’s dreaming up the next words in this sentence — they just appear no matter how much I think it’s me doing it.

So where does what’s about to happen come from? The past? Does the past make the future? It certainly has something to do with it, otherwise there wouldn’t be any words to come next in this sentence. All these words are just echoes of earlier words, all the way back to when they were nothing but the grunts and coos of some old girls sitting around a fire cooking a rabbit in a long-ago forest. Now that I think of it, this pencil in my hand was made in the past by someone who’s doing something else now, and this chair I’m sitting on, and the cloth of my shirt. I have no idea who stitched my shirt together, this piece to this piece. It happened in the past, in someone else’s zero-point, but here it still is, wrapping around me in my own zero-point-now. That’s wild. All the zero-point-nows that have ever happened — the zero-points of the making of my shirt and the dreaming of the words and everything else — are a part of this zero-point-now!

Still, even though that’s true, it’s not the whole story. Something else is happening that isn’t just cause and effect — the past isn’t just pumping out the future. But however it works, it’s not something I can figure out and tell you about. It’s something magical. Spontaneous. All you can do is step into your zero-point-now and be part of its spontaneity and feel it for yourself. You’ll feel that everything that happens, spontaneously changes, while at the same time the zero-point-now spontaneously happens without changing, which is a way of saying the zero-point-now happens without happening.

One last thing — and maybe this is the most helpful thing about all this: the more I get to being in the zero-point-now, the more I seem to disappear. Try it yourself. It’s not scary, like being obliterated, but something for sure disappears. I step into the zero-point-now and poof! no more me with an attitude!

And then? All I can say is — I get happy! Everything seems fresh and clear as a bell. I feel free, wide open, at ease and ready for the ping-pong ball wherever it comes from. I can’t say for certain this will happen for you, but it might. Anyway, that’s what I have to say about living in the zero-point-now, and what the future and the past have to do with it.

** For the real Herman, read Pierre Delattre's extraordinary novel, Korrigan's Shadow

A Tenderness Toward Existence

J U N E 2 0 1 9

Like you, I too have stood by a window and stared out at nothing in particular and sensed the presence of my long life there with me, and felt a tenderness toward existence I couldn’t describe, a tenderness toward my own existence and yours, a tenderness toward all that has happened in my life. It seems to be a sense that arises of its own accord, a simple revelation of what matters.

Like you, I too have held a baby wrapped in a soft blue blanket, her little hands waving in the air, and wondered, like you must have, at how her fingers were formed, the little hinges in them and the miniature fingernails, her hands reaching up, clutching the air. Somehow my wonder could touch her and hers could touch me at the same time.

Like you, in the garden I too have pressed seeds into shallow furrows and covered them with warm earth and patted the earth over them, and for a moment felt myself, as you must have, suspended between heaven and earth, as if something so much bigger than us was smiling to see that this simple act had been done right.

Like you, as a child I too stared at pictures of old battles in a grade-school history book — the charging cavalrymen, swords upraised, trampling the bodies of defeated enemies. My little heart recoiled, like yours must have, not understanding why people would do this to each other.

Like you, I too have held a lover’s naked body to my own and felt the same tenderness toward existence at the heart of our desire, a tenderness shared and wondrous and forever unspeakable, yet unlike the desire, complete in itself.

Like you, I too have stood over a casket and beheld the body of someone dear to me lying there, completely still, and felt this same tenderness so enormous I couldn’t bear it, although I did.

Where does this come from, this tenderness that seems to live in the space of our hearts? Like you, I have witnessed it in people in every culture I have ever visited. Sometimes it seems to be absent, especially in the greedy and the powerful, but even in their eyes we can see a glimmer of something hidden, something hurt and afraid that feels the absence, and is wounded by its loss.

A philosopher once said, “All desire is the desire to be.” Is that where our tenderness comes from? Our loyalty to life, to being? Perhaps our tenderness toward existence is both at the beginning and at the end of desire. It calls to us, we seek it, and we arrive in its presence in these moments of wonder — at a baby, at a tiny seed in the earth, at the violence of history, at the embrace of a body, at the power of death. Without it we would be lost. With it, we understand everything that matters.

(Note: I have borrowed the phrase “a tenderness toward existence” from the poet Galway Kinnell.)

Letter to a Newborn Girl

M A Y 2 0 1 9

Little One,

I’ve just had a letter from your father telling me that, although you were born two weeks ago, you still have not been given a name. How wonderful! You come fresh from the place where names are not needed, and it’s good that you can carry that quietness about you a little while longer. In that place there’s a blissful secret most of us can no longer remember. I think we would bow at your feet if you could tell us about it, if you could remind us what we have forgotten, but of course, you do not know words yet and that’s just how you remain wiser and holy and inscrutable to us.

But soon you will start to learn words. You will learn to say what you feel and want, and with that saying you too will forget what is so natural to you now. Or perhaps you will be lucky, and a current of the bliss you come from will continue to stream through your heart — I pray it will! This world you have arrived into is a serious place, often tragic, and remembering the beauty of your origin can be a great help in the years to come.

I’m an old man now and I have a lifetime of experiences behind me; you, you’ve just hatched out of the egg and are as innocent as the morning! Because of that, I suppose it’s only natural that I should want to give you some advice that (I hope) might help make things easier for you as your life unfolds. I know advice from one’s elders can be tedious, and even a little pointless, considering that each of us is unique and each of us has to find our own way. So I’ll just name five lessons here that have served me well in my own life, and you can do with them what you wish.

Know you are safe. That’s the first lesson and for me it’s been the bedrock of my life. When I’ve been uncertain, when I’ve been afraid, when accidents have happened, I’ve somehow been reassured deep down that all shall be well. Even though “knowing I am safe” has mostly supported me in the mundane challenges of my life, it has ultimately freed me from the fear of death, which is no small thing in the drama of being a mortal. We’re safe. Everything is all right forever. We are made out of light. I think you know that yourself now, as the infant without a name that you are. One day you may doubt it — that’s part of the drama — but if you remember nothing else from this letter, I hope that, when things get rough, you will remember this: Know you are safe.

Here’s another lesson that’s been dear to my life: Walk in the open air. That’s a way of saying spend as much time as you can in nature, in the open air, in places that humans have not built on and paved over. The natural world will teach you, heal you, and replenish your soul with its beauty. It is, like you are now, fresh from the generosity of the Unnamable. When your love for wild nature is alive in you, you will find it is an inexhaustible source for your creativity and for your caring for others and this beautiful planet. Walk in the open air.

Another: Pretend you can do it. I know that sounds a little odd, but I can only tell you it’s been the way I’ve learned all my life and how I’ve managed to do things I never imagined I could. One day you’ll hold a pencil in your hand and you’ll want to draw a tree — just pretend you can do it and start drawing. Or you’ll kiss a boy for the first time — pretend you can do it. Or you’ll be asked to lead a meeting and you’ve never done that before — just pretend you can do it. Of course, you’ll make mistakes, your fingers will miss notes on the piano, but just try again, “pretending” or believing you can do it, and slowly by slowly you’ll learn how.

One more: Be interested in everything. Be a generalist. Neglect nothing that is part of life. Be curious and amazed by things. Listen to others. Welcome new ways of seeing, but always think for yourself. Gain skills that have nothing to do with each other, like repairing a broken chair, fasting in the wilderness, speaking Portuguese, consoling people in distress, singing. As societies get more stressed in the years ahead because of climate change and the host of dangers facing us, being a generalist will serve you and others well.

Lastly — and I name it last because it’s the most resistant to description — Follow your love. Do what you love. Love what you love. I can’t say that love will protect you from mistakes or sorrow — it hasn’t done that for me — but in its mysterious way it makes everything worthwhile. I’m not talking simply about love that’s affection or passion — although it’s that too — but love that continually moves to heal what is broken or has been separated. Follow that. This world you have come into is full of hurt and distrust and density (as well as beauty!), and your love is the gift that will heal it.

Little one, you are about to start on a great adventure. Follow your love. Be interested in everything. Pretend you can do it. Walk in the open air. Know you are safe.

With love from your old friend,

Elias

Wildness

A P R I L 2 0 1 9

Mother Nature — how accurate that we call her a “mother,” the mother of all this life around us. To call Mother Nature mother means she’s “woman,” though not a woman, but womanish in her way which is wild, untamed, fecund and free-spirited. She follows no path; she moves everywhere. She stirs the oceans into unruly waves, she tangles the grasses like unkempt hair. She’s wild. Womanish wild.

And yet in her wildness — how does she do it? — she’s perfectly skilled and careful, fashioning each feather in the sparrow’s wing, just so, the dapple on the forest floor, the veins in a leaf. From her womb everything is born, elegantly made but unscripted, perfectly formed but set free — wild. The sparrow flies in quick arcs and dips, unmanaged by anything, the shadows on the forest floor play by themselves, the veins of one leaf are never the same as another’s.

We humans have done our best to tame Mother Nature, make her predictable like ourselves, fence her. We’ve built roofs above us to keep her wild rain from our faces. Good, we need that, we need some safety. But have we gone too far? Have we forgotten something?

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau walking away, looking over his shoulder at the roadways and towns following him. “How near to good is what is wild!” he said. “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.” He writes:

“Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in…"

We who are so concerned with saving the world — and ourselves — perhaps we can learn something crucial to our task from our wild mother, from how her wildness is both perfect artistry and perfect freedom. So let us ask again: how, indeed, does she do it?

Not by planning certainly, though she remembers everything that has happened and creates from that wholeness. Her wildness, extravagant in the extreme, is somehow frugal too — a million sperm for one egg, every raindrop of the trillions brought back to the clouds, every falling leaf put to use. Her law above all is life! — she proceeds always towards life. Even death, which seems to us so final and tragic, is to her alive.

And if we turn our attention to the most insignificant, small-scale sounds and movements of her wildness — do they tell us anything? Things like the sounds of water flowing over rocks, the turning of a hawk’s head, every rustle in the forest, all give evidence of… what? Responsiveness? Perhaps that’s it, her responsiveness is her mother-way, her nature, her Tao, exactly appropriate and always spontaneous.

Spontaneity! Every instant she is present and becoming something new — it’s as if the moment is hers and is the source of her intelligence. What does that say to us? Could we touch that spontaneous intelligence too? Now? Perhaps it’s closer than we think.

And what else? So much! We could sit at her feet and learn forever. Her fierceness teaches us caution, her indifference, humility, her nurturing, love. But let us note here just two more ways of her wildness, both of them obvious and both nearly lost to us.

First, so clear to see, she is beautiful. It is not an accident. Her beauty, in part, is how well she makes everything fit — sky to earth, river to land, tree to forest, mother to child. See how the dawn’s first sunlight touches the sides of the trees! How the small blue eggs fit in the nest! How blessed we would be if we could make our doings, our cities and commerce, fit so well to her!

And then there’s this — can we say it without sounding grand? — her wildness, as ordinary as rain splashing on a leaf, reveals the holiness we have longed to know and to be intimate with. Her wildness is holy wildness. Her presence is sacred presence. Her ways are sacred ways. In their wild evanescence they disclose the wholeness, livingness, responsiveness, spontaneity and beauty that can teach us what we so dearly need to learn.

The Voice in Your Head Sutra

M A R C H 2 0 1 9

It is told that once in a land far away and long ago, a being appeared who was radiant with presence. When that being spoke, each listener heard the truth they longed for in a language they could understand.

And so it happened that people gathered to be with that being and to ask for help.

One morning at such a gathering, a person stood and asked, “Dear being, please instruct me how to stop the voice in my head, for it continually talks and complains and has opinions, and will not leave me in peace.”

The being answered, “Dear one, it is not necessary to stop the voice in your head, nor is it even possible, for your head has been taught language and likes to use it, just as the bird likes to sing and the cricket likes to make cricket sounds in the evening.”

“But,” replied the questioner, “the song of the bird and the cricket is pleasant, while the voice in my head is not. It complains about me. It makes judgments. It is worried.”

“If that is the case,” answered the being, “this is what I would advise. Simply ask the voice in your head to be your best friend. Your very best friend — one who cares about you and wants only the best for you, one who will not blame you no matter what mistakes you have made. Ask the voice in your head to love you that well. And ask that it be curious too, and creative with what happens in your days. Above all, ask the voice in your head to be kind.

“That is my advice. Make the voice in your head your kindest friend. When you fall, it will help you up. When you are despondent, it will comfort you. When you hurt someone, it will help you ask for forgiveness and make amends.”

“But,” the questioner replied, “what if I ask the voice in my head to be my kindest friend and it refuses?”

“Ask it again,” answered the being, “and again and again. Ask it kindly, for it needs a kind friend just as you do.”

The questioner stood silently for several moments and then said, “Dear being, I have just done as you suggested. I have asked the voice in my head to be my best and kindest friend.”

“And what did it say?” asked the being.

“I could not hear it say anything,” replied the questioner. “But now I am not sure who it is who longs to be treated kindly, and who the voice is who I have asked to be kind. Are we two?”

The being smiled, and then the questioner smiled, and then the whole congregation murmured to themselves, and understood.

The Intimacy of the Many and the One

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 9

When I was a young traveler on the spiritual path I longed to be one with the One. I imagined there was an end to this journey, a final Homecoming into Divine Light when my little self would vanish into God’s Self. The Sufi invocation, “Toward the One!” was my heart’s prayer, my marching orders, and I took it literally.

Of course I delighted in, and was mesmerized by, the world of the senses, but my metaphysical view was that this world of Manyness, however beguiling, was a weight around my spirit’s ankles; I thought spiritual freedom would be achieved when the beguiling world no longer held me down.

Maybe by the grace of growing older, that view has changed. It no longer feels like a matter of “here” and “there” — that our lives are like attendance in a school of Manyness where we’re prepared for graduation into Oneness.

I’ve come to sense that it’s much more subtle, and more magical, than that. Manyness and Oneness are not two, even though they’re not the same. They are intimate and simultaneous, like wetness is to water or the dance is to the dancer.

The Oneness I thought I was going toward is not far away — it’s not waiting for me to be enlightened or to join it after I die. It’s just as present as the paper on which I write these words. The sensations of my body and the feelings and thoughts that flow through are expressions of ever-present Oneness. Even to say they are “expressions” of Oneness is a little misleading, since that word implies some separation in both space and time between that which expresses and the expression itself.

Trying to understand this intellectually is not so important, although it can be fun if you enjoy metaphysical speculation. What has been more important for me is to absorb this mystery into my moment-to-moment experience.

I will try to explain how this happens for me, as briefly and as simply as I can, in the hope that it may also be helpful to you.

Looking directly at my moment-to-moment experience, I recognize that inseparable from this moment is my awareness of it and my presence with it. My aware presence is not outside of this moment. It’s right here. In fact, I can’t really claim it’s “my” aware presence — whatever is unique to me as a human being — my personality, feelings, thoughts, memories — are contained within this mystery of aware presence.

When I look for what aware presence actually is, I don’t find anything definable in the way things that appear in the world are definable. Aware presence doesn’t show up like that — and yet whatever it is, it’s obvious and self-evident: aware presence is always right here. The things I perceive keep changing while this aware presence neither moves nor stays still — it’s simply not in the dimension of space or time in which things move or are static.

If you’re still with me, you may already intuit that what I’m calling “aware presence”— this indefinable yet utterly obvious field in which everything appears — is identical with the Oneness I longed for as a young seeker. The “One” I wished to move toward is not waiting at the end of the spiritual quest. It’s here, intimately present in the ever-changing display of phenomena. And it doesn’t require us to abandon this world of Manyness to perceive it. We are it.

Let me quickly add the obvious: we’re not only the Oneness revealed through our aware presence, we’re also creatures of Manyness — each of us so unique and particular, each of us appearing as this living changingness, moment to moment, each of us impermanent and dear.

This may seem like a contradiction — our experience as impermanent and personal beings (the Many) and our recognition that we are beyond personality (the One) — but are these two really in opposition? Are they even in some kind of “relationship?” As Yeats famously asked, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

There’s always the risk, when talking like this, of getting lost in abstraction. As I mentioned above, what has been most important for me is to absorb this mystery into my moment-to-moment experience, opening to its intimate revelation again and again throughout my days.

It’s always surprising, always fresh. The dance of the One and the Many, of aware presence and ever-changing experience, is not an abstract exercise — not at all. It’s the most intimate and loving play we can experience, right here and right now.

Beauty Will Save the World

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9

When I was young I’d watch my mother preparing lunches every morning for about thirty black kids who went to a free pre-school near us. Their families had scarcely enough money to feed their children, so my mother raised money or used her own to buy the bread and peanut butter, the eggs and mayonnaise and milk for their lunches. The house would fill with the smell of cookies baking early in the mornings. Then she’d pack it all in cardboard boxes, carry them down the back steps, put them into the trunk of her car and drive off to the school. She’d feed the kids, wipe their noses, sing little songs to them, and then drive home. She didn’t make a big deal out of it.

My mother is long gone now, but when I remember those scenes — her hands buttering the slices of bread all laid out in pairs on the counter, or lifting the boxes into the trunk of her car — I feel their beauty — there is no other way to say it. How beautiful were her simple, honest movements! I don’t mean beauty in the sense of pleasing appearance, but something both within and beyond appearance. Goodness.

Plotinus said it well: “There is no beauty more real than the goodness one sees in someone.”

My mother died on New Year’s Day twenty-nine years ago, and yet — how wonderful! — this feeling of her beautiful selfless offering, this goodness which wasn’t actually “hers” but was something greater which she gave herself to, is alive now and resonates in my soul.

I know if my mother, a practical woman, could hear me talk like this, she’d give me a look and tell me to help carry the boxes. She wasn’t trying to save the world; she was just doing what she could because she could.

But the beauty I recognize in her actions did save the world. It’s what always does. For me, this is the meaning of Dostoevsky’s enigmatic line,“Beauty will save the world.” Recognizing this good beauty in the actions of people around us, we are touched by a force that transcends the outer forms of what we usually think of as “beautiful.” Indeed, those more tangible forms of beauty first trained us in beauty’s mystery and power, and continue to do so. But they hold the potential to lead us to an even more profound recognition of the possibilities of human evolution and the human spirit.

I realize that using words such as “beauty” and “goodness” in these nervous and cynical times risks being dismissed as mere sentiment and superficiality. Our culture is entranced by the fearsome, and has come to value a tough-minded realism and even pessimism as more reliable ways to negotiate through life. But if healing from the dark condition of human selfishness is to come, it will not come from that kind of contraction.

I believe most of us can recognize in our experience the “beautiful goodness” I’m pointing to. It doesn’t mean that the people who have revealed it to us (or even ourselves) are always beautiful and good. We rise to it, and fall, and rise again. My point is that this very beauty, and the goodness that is its source, is what heals and “saves” the world, and that we can take heart in that truth. It is true — the Good, the True, the Beautiful. We can have faith in it, for it is ultimately of cosmic proportions — what some have called the Divine Breath that continually brings everything into being.

But to come back down to earth, and to the image of my mother buttering that bread, I’ll end here with the words of a grace she liked for us to sing on festive occasions, since this is New Year’s Day and we need all the grace we can get. It’s sung to the melody of “We Shall Overcome.”

All our food is good today,
all of life is good today,
everything that is is good today.
The future is open for us to create
so let us all give thanks today.

2019 - 2020

Notes from the Open Path

Notes from the Open Path - 2020

Notes from the Open Path - 2019

You Bring Rivers