Journal

Here are the daily questions, thoughts, provocations that get batted around in Lezlie-land:  sometimes wacky, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes shamefully self-indulgent.  Hey! It’s a journal!

Gratitude

Monday, 07 December 2009 14:34 Written by Lezlie Laws

. . . to  two dear friends.

I’m returning to The Wise Heart this morning, after a month-long hiatus from it.  I’ve missed it. This morning I read the first half of Ch. 23, Kornfield’s description of the Middle Way.  And once again, I enjoy the remarkable experience of thinking that the universe has constructed experience specifically for my benefit. This reading could not have been more perfect for me at this moment in my life.

So first, before I summarize what he has said—for summarize is about the most that can be done, since what is says is so pure, so clear, so devoid of ornament, leaving nothing to do for those of us who depend on mere interpretation to get us through life—I have to speak directly to the two of you.  I want to express my deep gratitude to both of you for your friendship and especially for the support and wisdom you have shared with me in the last two weeks.  From both of you, I have received wisdom, compassion, and love that the Buddhist principles exhort us to embrace.  From both of you I have received comfort.  With both of you, I feel safe and cared for.  This is a gift beyond the capacity of my humble words to express.  But please know, as I read this chapter this chilly, rainy morning, and really felt the enormous insights it holds, I thought of both of you with every sentence.  I thank you from the bottom of my pitiful little heart for your presence in my life.

So, right off the bat (again) Kornfield speaks directly to me with the quotation from Sutta Nipata:

At one time I had wanted to find someplace where I could take shelter, but I never saw any such place.  There is nothing in this world that is solid at base and not a part of it that is changeless.

I should restrict my comments to just this single quotation, for it is the heart of so much misguided thinking in our world.  I am certainly a victim of the belief that shelter can be found, firm footing is around the corner, permanent comfort is at hand.  In fact, I could probably trace most actions of my life to this belief.  I have worked and studied and controlled and striven in virtually every arena of my life to find solid ground.  To arrive.  To feel successful or secure or happy or worthy or lovely or even just OK.  All of these actions some form of attachment or aversion.  Most of these actions relying on controlling or changing things on the outside in such a way that I gain comfort, albeit temporary.  Push and pull.  Drive and stop.  Grasp and let go. Be still, take action.  Speak, be silent.  I have volleyed back and forth between various forms of anxiety and ecstasy.

     The middle way, of course, cautions against such behavior, suggests there is a space, a point of being, where we “come to rest between the play of opposites” (368).  Kornfield says, “Learning to rest in the middle way requires trust in life itself” (368). 

      Just now, I’m reading the works of Jon Katz who writes beautiful of this challenge in Running to the Mountain.  He describes his own struggle to seek solitude and spiritual growth and simultaneously reside in the world of family, bookstores and pizza palors.   His is thoughtful and sometimes hilarious personal journey that revolved around buying a rustic cabin in upstate New York and trying to be in the world but not of it.  Thinking he was going to have scads of time and energy for the creative life, he finds himself overwhelmed with maintaining decent living conditions on his mountaintop.  Chaos reigned for months. 

     I can identify.  Thinking I was in clear, open, white space, ISo now, I’m faced with a large personal challenge that seems an annoying deterrence from the work I had planned to do at this point in my sabbatical, in my life.  My health issues put me at the brink of distress, of disunity.  My body is acting oblivious to my own natural good will for myself.  Ha.  And here comes Kornfield saying be “open to the way things are . . . learn to embrace tension, paradox, change . . . instead of seeking resolution” (369).

    So what to do?  Faced with a circumstance over which I would love to assert control, to find quick resolution, I am forced to recognize the middle way and find well-being right where I am. The relentless “fixer” has to stand down.  What a practice.

Kornfield concludes this section on the middle way by say that we can “bring fearlessness and trust to any circumstances” (373).  I know this moment in my life is an opportunity to really get this lesson.  But I also know that I can trust that I don’t have to get the lesson alone.  You have both said this to me.  I have fellow-students right by my side, comforting me, guiding me, encouraging me, and teaching me. 

Side Dishes on Thanksgiving Day

Thursday, 26 November 2009 18:22 Written by

Poet Chase Twitchell’s rules for writing and living are: 

Tell the Truth. 

No decorations. 

Remember death.

Her poems are getting skinnier and skinnier. 

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Ray Bennett, M.D. has written a book called  The Underachiever’s Manifesto:  The Guide for Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great. 

I bought a copy.

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Every time Karen and Arthur Blumenthal go on a trip, they pause before they leave and ask one another this:  “What is our mission?”  They answer:  “To fall more deeply in love.”

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Mick Quinn says that enlightenment is “your relationship with the experience you are already having.”

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The bodhisattva’s prayer >>

May I be a protection to those without protection,

A guide for those who journey,

And a boat, a bridge, a passage

For those desiring the further shore.  -- Shantideva

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In a recent interview, writer Mary Karr talks about her experience teaching poetry to women at a group home in Minneapolis.  She says of her students, “In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.”  She had grave doubts about their ability to respond to poetry, but she plunged in and read them a poem by Pablo Neruda.  At the end of her reading, she says, “a big silence held us.  Then applause broke out.  Feet were stomped.  A few ladies got up to hug each other again.  If there’d been pillows, they’d have all started whacking each other.”

A pillow fight:  the perfect response to a poem.

Intentions

Sunday, 27 September 2009 13:42 Written by Lezlie Laws

For the anxious, there is the need to strive.

For the unknowing, there is the need to understand.

For the hurried, there is the need to run.

For the unready, there is the need to rehearse.

For the confused, there is the need to talk. 

For the incomplete, there is the need to gather.

For the insecure, there is the need to succeed.

 

Allow everything.

Reside in mystery.

Sit still.

Embrace spontaneity.

Be silent.

Give yourself.

Accept yourself.

Breathe.

Surfing

Monday, 21 September 2009 16:27 Written by Lezlie Laws

Last night, at a party at Phil Deaver’s house, Carol Frost said to me, “Some things are just a mystery.  You won’t be able to explain this.”   She was listening to me attempt to console a colleague who had just experienced the break-up of a year-long relationship.

     I kept thinking about those words late into the night, and hearing them helped me see a pattern—my enormous need for explanation. Yes, yes, there it is again.  Fairly relentless.  Maybe part of the reason I became a teacher.  Somewhere along the line I caught the assumption that things can be figured out, or at least grappled with in some coherent manner.  This assumption, taken to its worst conclusion, becomes a desire to fix things.  So like last night, as I was watching my colleague’s sadness rise and fall through the evening, big tears welling, I so wanted to help her, to say something that would make sense of her experience, or give her some kind of guidance, some understanding. There must be some way to frame this event that makes it acceptable.  It's a pattern of mine, of course, one that rises in me like a relentless wave. I'm learning how to ride that wave.  I try to practice benign silence.

     As I rode through the night, I assumed Carol was right.  Of course she’s right, I thought, impatient with myself.  Love is a mystery.  You can’t even get love issues straight for yourself, so why are you trying to figure it out for a thirty-year-old woman?   Some things are simply mysterious.  I wanted to rest into that conclusion.  In a way, it would be easier.  Just give up trying to understand. There is no figuring things out, Lezlie, just accept it.  Carol’s face was so serene when she spoke.  Her words must surely be true.  In the early morning hours, I could feel myself in calmer waters.

    But now, it’s Sunday, and sunny outside, and the day is urging me forward.  The old need is rising again.  The doubt returns as that wave begins to build.  “Is Carol right?” I wonder.  Must we resign ourselves to this dark room of mystery?  Or is that an easy way to avoid doing the work?  I have this fear of not making the appropriate effort to know what can be known, to live what can be lived.  When do I succumb to mystery and when do I push toward understanding?  Or. . . do I reside in the middle of those two positions?  A surfer riding the enormous, unfathomable force of a wave but bringing my own facility of balance and focus to the board. 

    

Visually Challenged?

Monday, 14 September 2009 11:45 Written by Lezlie Laws

I have to admit that the first time I read The Wise Heart I pretty much skimmed through Chapter Eighteen, called “Sacred Vision:  Imagination, Ritual, and Refuge.”  For some reason, I have never been very good at visualization, and though I’ve always been deeply attracted to ritual, I’ve not been very interested in sacred images. So the chapter just didn’t do much for me.  The second time through has been the same.  I have very few highlights in the chapter (a sure sign that not much is connecting), and I pretty much skimmed through the chapter with little engagement.

But something interesting has happened in the last day.  On Thursday, Mary Ann posted principle eighteen on our Wise Heart Way blog:  “What we repeatedly visualize changes our body and our consciousness.  Visualize freedom and compassion.”  And there was something about seeing the principle against the beautiful bright background of our Wise Heart Way site that allowed this principle to bore a bit deeper into my mind.  I’ve been thinking about it since then.  Not anything profound, for sure, just thinking about visualizing and wondering just how does one visualize freedom?  What does compassion look like, I thought.  I seem to be visually challenged cause I just can’t get there.  I put the book away, waiting for the beginning of next month to plunge into Chapter Nineteen, “Buddhist Cognitive Training,” something I can get my teeth into.

This morning, I woke up at my usual time, around 5:30 a.m.  I lay in bed saying my prayers and letting my mind catch up to my body.  As is my wont, I caught myself thinking about the day before—rehearsing conversations I’d had, seeing tiny moments from the day, scanning through previously experienced emotions or thoughts.  I try to catch myself in these early morning reveries (sometimes they are more like obsessions) and get back to the present, back to the breath, back to the prayers, but eventually the mind navigates its way back to rehearsal of the past.  An annoying pattern, for sure.

But then, for some reason, I thought of principle eighteen:  “What we repeatedly visualize changes our body and consciousness.”  And I realized that I’m not visually challenged; but I’m visualizing events that have already taken place.  How can I change if I’m constantly visualizing the past, I wondered?  What would happen if I started visualizing the day ahead of me instead of the day behind me?

So I started.  Right there in bed, I decided to see myself as I want to be in the next twenty-four hours.  I see myself moving through a yoga class with strength and agility, absolutely pain free.  I see myself with my doctor this afternoon, and he’s telling me to calm down about the knee; it’s healing nicely.  I see myself sitting in front of my computer, pounding out the revisions of Twelve Doors, feeling creative and pleased with my words.  I see myself being helpful and attentive to a student who is struggling with a writing project she’s doing for me.  I see myself calm and happy and deeply responsive to experiences that arise.

Well, it’s not quite what Kornfield was talking about in this chapter.  If you read the practice exercise he gives on page 292, you’ll see that he’s going for a much deeper sort of visualization, working with a sacred image.  His practice directs us toward compassion, courage, purity, and luminous radiance.  But for right now, I’m going to start with a baby step and strive for visualizing my future self instead of re-watching my past self.   In fact, I think I’m going to try an experiment, and for the next fifteen days visualize the specific ways I see myself in the future.  Want to join me?  It might be fun to see how such a practice would begin to change our daily experiences.   If nothing else, it will make my morning wake-up more interesting since I won’t be watching a movie I’ve already seen!

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