Month: July 2017

Homelife

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This morning is bright and breezy. The shades slap in against the screens. It’s cold, 30 degrees below the forecast high. It’s summer. Fire season. Dry and windy.

Yesterday I picked and froze another few gallons of raspberries. There should be a word for them this time of year like pride of lions, or murder of crows. They are an army of jewels, gumdrop sized, purple shading to red, fragrant and sweet, and hot with juice. They are a monstrosity of joy. Relentlessly ripening.

In the afternoon I worked on continuing to fire-proof our yard, cutting the dead and dying grasses, raking pine needles and cones, instant tinder, and hauling it by handcart halfway down our driveway far enough away from the house to be less of a hazard. It was hot and dry and dusty. But the yard is an oasis of green: grass, garden, aspen trees, tall stately pines, all ringed by golden grass hills.

That’s where the fire was three years ago. It swept across the hills behind our house and ran downhill to a few feet from our garden, stopped by a trench hand dug by firefighters. It melted the irrigation hoses into black, geometric tattoos. We spent a day dousing brush fires around the yard, watching the groves of aspen and cottonwood along the irrigation line burn and smolder. It was heartbreaking.

But. We were spared the great loss of home. And now we tend it like our bodies. Like our selves. How can I explain how dear this is? The privilege to live here in this precious nook above the Valley floor. To hear by seasons the river, the aspen leaves’ inimitable breath, the birdsong of early morning and in winter a silence so brilliant it sings.

It is perhaps a cliche to say “chop wood and carry water,” but if it is a cliche, it is also true. We live on, in, and through this landscape. We feed it, and it feeds us. There is always work to do, the work of living so close to nature. Our best efforts are fragile and flimsy and need constant attention. We are here but a short while and by the grace of God. So another day begins.

Exit 0: Coming to the End of Suffering

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New Jersey, where I grew up, is bisected north to south by two major highways, the Garden State Parkway and the Turnpike. If you’re a South Jersey Girl, like me, they take you home from metropolitan environs of New York to the rural, marshy farmlands of this small, coastal state. The terminus of the Garden State Parkway, Cape May, the southernmost tip of the state, is Exit 0.

I was thinking of this recently while pondering the frequent refrain of students of spirituality: I want an end of suffering. I was struck by the image, both a little trite and at the same time extremely accurate, of life–especially spiritual life–as a journey. We could say that life is a journey to liberation for, as all life ends in death, with its unknowable terrain, at death we are free from life and all it brings. The ancient Greeks believed, as spoken by Sophocles’ chorus at the end of Oedipus Rex ,”Count no man happy until he dies, free from pain at last.”

For most seekers, suffering is something to be avoided at all costs through a variety of bypassing behaviors. And yet, paradoxically, we cannot come to the end of suffering until and unless we have passed through it, not by it. To evoke my journey metaphor, if we go through life in the express lane, never taking the roads through the small towns of suffering, we have no experience, no understanding of it. We haven’t seen its byways, tasted its flavors, smelled its odors. It’s not possible to live without suffering, so to pretend to do so by avoiding or ignoring it, is to pass through life being only partly alive.

In the work of Trillium Awakening, we teach students how to live fully as themselves. Our tools of greenlighting, holding, and feeling deeply with and as the body, develop our capacity to live the paradox of our limited humanity and our boundless divine nature. Resting in this paradox brings about a Second Birth into a life of authentically being who and how we are. And as we arrive at this portal of embodied awakened life, we continue to integrate our experience of suffering, which has helped to shape us into the human beings we are. We arrive at our destination: a deepening ability to fully feel all that life holds. And yet the journey is not complete.

Second Life is a process, an unfolding, a continually expanding capacity to be with what is. Like Exit 0, which is both a beginning and an ending, Second Birth is a portal, a culmination of one process and the beginning of another. And suffering is part of the landscape we traverse along the way. It becomes a part of our lived experience, more familiar so that we can open our hearts to it with vulnerability, compassion, and trust in the nature of Being. We cannot live and be completely free from pain. To fully awaken as embodied consciousness does not give us a free pass from life’s often unfathomable and painful mysteries, but it does give us more heart, greater sensibility of the nature of our aliveness. It gives us a way to trust in Being.