In Review
In hindsight, I experienced a bit of the November blues. I slept a lot and had very little motivation. There also wasn't a job, kids, or deadlines to force me to function! There was no spark of creativity — for art, for crochet, or for this blog. But, finally, it came to me: a review of this blog project. I set out to write 52 blogs. That was ambitious! It was going well until the breast cancer diagnosis in March. That changed a lot of things for me.
However, as I review the blogs from the year (linked phrases are to their respective blog), my original intention held fast through everything. Remarkably so! I wrote, “This blog is a process of unfolding. For me, writing about things is a way of sorting them out and letting them express themselves so I understand them better. I hope that unfolding resonates with anyone who chooses this blog to accompany them and that they find some truth within.”
Writing these blogs felt like a healing activity during the cancer diagnosis, surgery, recovery, and subsequent treatment. It allowed me to process what was happening. Because it was coming from a raw and vulnerable place, it also reached a lot of people. I have heard from many of you that what I shared was thought-provoking, inspiring, and helpful. During that illness I let go of many responsibilities, but I kept other nourishing activities too: the online meditation course I was teaching at the time, occasionally leading meditation groups, and attending those groups regularly. Mindfulness, meditation, and all the love and support that I received saw me through an intense period. They were the reason I was able to demonstrate what many people referred to as grace. That grace was not a matter of personal strength, and rather the ability to open to the experience of the moment, to feel gratitude in the face of adversity, and to accept the love and support of many family and friends and even strangers. I've since learned that my example had a profound effect on some people. That’s the ripple effect in the universe — where love and gratitude can radiate in space and among us.
Each moment is profound because of that ripple effect and hence the importance of opening to feelings of gratitude and love instead of the likes of anger or greed. To advance softly and lightly like a daddy long legs uncertain of its terrain, to be that without substance, that which can enter even though there is no room. Because being contracted, heavy, or sharp due to fear, greed, hatred, or sorrow only collides with people and circumstances. Like the analogy I shared of the constellation, Orion, in which she is guarded and thrusting forth weapons. Orion who, from another perspective, contains a multitude of stars and is immeasurably vast. We are each that vast. Yet we so often feel isolated and small, limited by our minds that think they know what is possible. As I wrote in one of my poems: “I used to act as though the realm of possibility were in my head. / That was actually a realm of limits. / Possibility has no limits. / And I am nowhere (or everywhere) / in it.” And in another poem: “God is not bound by our concepts.”
In many traditions, the wisdom that knows/is our true nature is considered feminine because it is the womb of all things, of Life. When I’m guiding meditation on the breath, I use another analogy — of the wind playing in a field of grass and how that field of grass supports a big, wide-open sky. Breath meditation starts with attention on the breath as it comes and goes at the nostrils and moves to feeling the whole body breathing and then refining the awareness of breathing to one of mere sensation and movement. It’s a smooth slip into the analogy then, feeling the sensations of the body breathing as that field of undulating grass. That gentle movement supporting a wide open awareness as the waving grasses support the sky. In that sublime quiet, there she is. Genderless really, but that limitless valley spirit of the Tao is there. The source from which the fullness of life springs unconstrained by the limits of a conditioned mind.
It is a relief to realize that the thinking mind is not who we are. It’s actually an accumulation of a lifetime of familial and societal input, the collective unconscious, and the many archetypes in a million plus years of human genetic and psychic development. You may baulk, as I first did, at the idea that you aren’t thinking your thoughts. Fair enough; we have to act as though we do to be in relation to each other and the world. There is a lot of emphasis on being an independent thinker, sticking to our beliefs, and confidently asserting them in the world. It is startling to discover that the opposite is true! There is freedom when not bound by the thinking mind, letting that feminine wisdom remember itself, letting go into Life’s natural unfolding. Really interesting things happen when “I” get out of Life’s way. “Not I, not mine, not myself,” said the Buddha to his son.
Chickadee and Earth, 2018, mixed media 12x12”
The Buddha was giving him a teaching on the four Elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, a means of discovering that reality is not quite the way we perceive it. My take on these teachings: “One step follows the next. We breathe in. We breathe out. What if this breath is not different from the wind, not different from the whole earth breathing in and breathing out? And not different from all of life on earth, in its way, breathing. The oceans swell and recede. Is this entirely different from the pulse of blood in our veins? The warmth in our bodies is the warmth of the sun. The energy of the sun is in all living things. And the earth, the earth herself is beneath our feet, beneath our seat, in our bones, and in the food we eat.”
“It seems to me,” I wrote, “there is no need to fill a clay bowl with water. There is no need to light a candle to float in that water. There is no need to witness the movement of air that causes the flame to flicker. The body is our vessel and our ceremony. But that to go ahead and prepare a ritual offering anyway holds up a mirror to the sacred elements within and without. To our common ancestors, the stars, from whence these elements come.”
These teachings on the elements, and others, help us see the commonality in the eight billion human experiences — the desire for happiness, for less suffering, the capacity for love and compassion. The capacity for cruelty is common too — in big and small ways, but it is usually coming from a place of suffering or a misguided seeking for happiness. Who among us has not looked in the wrong place for satisfaction? Not lashed out when we are in pain? The cure for suffering is what the Buddha found, its cause, and its end. Striking out on that path, we find the wish for ourselves and all beings is, “may we not suffer too much.” To suffer a little is necessary to realize the truth of our circumstances — like the aphorism that God will not give us more than we can handle. When I fell and bruised my ribs, got the cancer diagnosis, fell again and put my back out, followed by the double mastectomy, and then complications, although I screamed at the universe once, and cried and got angry a few times, it wasn’t more than I could handle. It was actually a great gift. I wrote about getting kicked so hard, “I’m brought to my knees, totally devoid of argument, commentary, agency. Yet, in that empty space, there is something humbling, powerful, and profoundly still: reverence. For all of it.” The whole experience shattered more layers of my prickly, separate, reified self so that stillness and quiet could receive life in all its messiness and beauty. So that that feminine wisdom is close. (It’s always right here, but I/we forget!)
This is the Love that weaves itself throughout my experience and in the writing in these blogs: “It is ultimate happiness to feel this Love, to be it. It lives somewhere in all things and it makes sense of even looming tragedy.” The most recent challenge I faced — emotional turmoil brought on by medication — demonstrated so clearly how mental activity is not me. It was amazing to see how much my mind would swing wildly as a direct cause of the tamoxifen. The conditioned mind creates a facsimile of reality from sensory input including the thoughts generated within it. Negative mind states, for example, colour the world in a negative way. If we're not aware of this process, we believe what is projected. How often do we make a snap judgement about someone based on how they look or talk (how we see and hear them)? Beyond the projections of that conditioned mind is an intimacy with life as it really is. People and circumstances become surprising and joyful. This is called beginner’s mind.
Picking up on the thread of intimacy, I am exploring koan work. From the Zen Buddhist tradition, that originated in China as Chan before moving to Japan and elsewhere, koans open beginner’s mind. Koans are short stories of awakening, about awakening, or pointing to awakening. They are puzzling and non-sensical. They are meant to baffle the conditioned mind. They often pose questions that can’t be answered by thinking about them. Such as about a dog and Buddha nature. One is meant to hold a key phrase and use it as a mantra, or drop it into a meditation sitting, or pose it as a question in daily life. They act like a key to unlock the conditioned mind and open experiences of intimacy, immediacy, and freshness within the present moment. I will offer a course, Working Mindfully with Koans, this winter. It feels like this work will also be the subject of my 2024 blogs — but then who knows what will happen?! It may also be a focus for my solo art exhibition in April 2025.
There may be one more blog before 2023 ends, but I don’t know. It may come to me and it may not. I’m feeling my way forward, moment by moment or step by step or day by day. This year has gone by very fast. End of life will feel that way too, I’m told: “it all went by so fast.” Here we are in this brief dance of life. I have certainly found that being present for it rather than lost in thought is a beautiful way to live.
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I case I don’t write again this year, love and joy to you in this season of light!
