Photo by Liz West
Fools gold or the perfect diamond. The ego swings between deficiency and excess. What is the middle way between these two extremes? How does one uncover the True Nature inherent to all sentient beings?
I find my own life pendulating between both sides. At one end, other mindfulness teachers attract a larger audience while I’m screaming on the inside for attention. My daughter idolizes my husband and looks past me with irritable tolerance. I am not welcome in certain homes and hearts because there is something wrong with me.
At the other end, I am a unique healer who offers compassionate, healing presence, a writer who articulates sincere reflections from the heart better than others. If someone else displays these traits, they are a threat to my very existence.
Over time, even a swinging pendulum will evolve towards a state of equilibrium, a still point. Where is this place of stillness for the ego? What is my name here? Who is writing this blog piece right now?
Mind and heart agree to meet in this moment. Mind agrees to project poignant memories free of a solid self. Heart agrees to the virtues of compassion, patience, trust. Bodhicitta awakens.
No teacher or student, no mother or daughter, no insider or outsider, no healer or patient, no writer or reader.
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Sometimes in nature or meditation, while writing, parenting, holding space for patients and class participants, or engaging with others, the bobbing ego rests. There is no need to move towards a state of deficiency or excess, but rest in the True Nature pattern intrinsic to the fabric of all life.
May 2018 be the year i come into the peace of wild things, resting in the grace of the world, sensing hearts beating, meeting, blossoming open like lotus flowers still anchored to muddy egos, yearning to be free.
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