Miracle

I was touched by this Thought for the Day from Eknath Easwaran on Sept. 23rd

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle. Every square yard of the surface of the earth Is spread with the same. . . . What strange miracles are these! Everywhere . . . – Walt Whitman

Once when I was giving a talk I used the word “miracles,” and someone in the audience asked skeptically, “Tell us about one.”
Every moment you remain alive is a miracle. Talk to medical people; they will tell you there are a million and one things that can go wrong with this body of ours at any given instant. It is only because we haven’t developed the capacity for appreciating miracles that we don’t see them all around us. Life is a continuous miracle: not only joy but sorrow too; not only birth but death too.
But the most precious miracle of all is to see the divinity in every creature – when we see that the divinity in our hearts is our real Self, and that it is the same Self shining in all. -- Eknath Easwaran

Diversity

I’ve been thinking about Katie’s diversity meeting experience. I often talk about being three disadvantaged groups in one. Though I am tri-racial, I am automatically classified as an African-American by the color of my skin. I am female, and I am left handed. You may wonder why that last one matters, but it has caused me many problems in a country where most things are designed for right-handed people to use. My grandmother did not attempt to teach me how to do things left handed. She couldn’t. She told me that when she was a child, they tied the left hand behind the child’s back to keep them from using it. They thought the devil was influencing the child. I am fortunate I was not born during that time. I would have likely been a slave (as her father was even though his father was white) and might have had my left hand cut off. I certainly would not have had any rights to own property of my own or be a person under the constitution.

I feel fortunate to have been born when I was born. Even though the bathrooms and lunch counters in the South were still segregated. It seemed strange to me when I would leave New York and go to North Carolina and be in a completely different world. I made speeches in my 95% white high school when Martin Luther King was killed. I got to walk around in solidarity with the Black Panther Party for a short while in college. Despite this background, I have led a very privileged life. I can only recall one or two incidents in my life that I can say real prejudice was involved. My second husband was Irish and German with a smidgeon of French Canadian. In his family the First Nations (Canadian Native American) blood was a deep secret and never discussed. When we started dating, I warned him to let his family know about me in advance. He seemed surprised at the notion. He was really disturbed when he found out that they had family meetings about “the problem” and that his divorced parents were speaking for the first time over this quandary. Eventually his mother and I became good friends, and I became ‘the exception.” The exception to what they generally think about Black people. This has often been the position I am cast in as the only Black person in a larger group.

I have First Nations Canadian friends that are still recovering from the psychological trauma of being taken from their families and put into residential schools for their own good by the government. They are still trying to recover their identities and traditions that have been lost. The mixed bloods are in a twilight world where they still don’t fit into the overall culture, but don’t fit into the First Nations group either. They have created their own music, dance and cultural norms to give them a sense of place.

These people like me are neither white, nor red, nor black (in my case), and we really have no “place” we fit into in this world. I believe we do have the best opportunity in time and place in the history of the western world to find our own authentic voices in this multi-cultural melting pot that has become North America.

Is Life Sacred?

This morning my hospice client died. When the chaplain first called to tell me about him back in June, I had the feeling the relationship would be extraordinary. We feel in love at our first meeting. Not romantic love, but a meeting of souls that felt like a deep river running underneath our surface conversations and interactions. Before this, I never had a hospice client that I met with week after week. I only volunteered at The Denver Hospice Care Center weekly or monthly and most of the time, I never saw a client again. People who come to the care center were usually only there for a few days or weeks at most.

Last Tuesday, I was certain I would never see him again even though he seemed to have rallied that day. When the call came in this morning, I was in the middle of my meditation practice. Afterwards, I checked the message because something told me it might be about him. I went back to my meditation seat and cried, did tonglen practice for him and sat with the feelings as they came and went. Is life itself sacred? Is it something we should treasure and hold dear? When my first husband chose to disconnect his life support, we knew he would inevitably die. I had to sit by and watch day by day and could not help him along in any way. By law we could not assist the process. Yet weren’t we already killing him by denying him food and drink?

I believe in many spiritual traditions, life is treasured. Murder and suicide are taboo. When my mother was dying, I thought perhaps now I can leave the planet too. She was the most precious person in the world to me at that time. When I talked to a friend about my feelings, she was appalled and said, what about living for her? Wasn’t she enough reason for me to keep on living? When I eventually told my second husband (we divorced the same month my mother died) about my experience he couldn’t believe I wouldn’t have considered that everyone would blame him. In the midst of illness, I have considered again the question of why I would remain here and not put myself out of my misery. Clearly as much as I might love, staying for others is not enough. But perhaps holding all life to be sacred including my own is enough. Can I or anyone take a life even our own without some cosmic repercussions? Maybe I stay alive not out of a sense of sacredness but out a sense of fear, fear that I would have committed some great error.

In my MI interview, my instructor told me that she was praying for me to raise windhorse (my life force) and practicing tonglen for me. Perhaps what is enough is to know that my presence made a difference in the life and death of my client at the end and that maybe it will make a greater and greater contribution as I aspire and deepen my commitment to my bodhisattva vow. As I read the Sakyong’s Amrita practice this morning, he reminded me that my suffering is valuable as it deepens my compassion and capacity to minister to and care about the suffering of others.

Matters of Life and Death

Today I went to the doctor to try and figure out what is going on with my health. The good news is that the fact that I am not sicker and am still alive means I likely don't have lung cancer. Then on my way to see my hospice patient, my nephew called to tell me I am going to be a grand auntie. My hospice patient wasn't expected to live to this week, and I was happy to know that he was still alive. So there was new birth and two reprieves in one day.

The visit with my client was astounding in such very simple and to me very sacred way. He had rebounded and just today was out of the bed and eating for the first time in ten days. His daughters had arrived for a visit and the rabbi said maybe he wanted to hold on for Rosh Hashanah. People often hold on for the last loved one to show up or for religious holidays. My client said he had bought into other people's ideas about when he was supposed to die and had decided he wasn't ready yet. He wanted to get out of the bed and feel alive while he was still alive. We talked about how blessed he was to have an amazing support group from his spiritual community and our hospice. As he pondered these blessings, he started crying. I held his hands and told him how blessed I felt to have met him and been on this journey with him. Then we cried together about our blessings. We talked about God, light, love and many sweet things. I didn't cry for him, but cried with him out of a shared sense of awe at the journey we were taking together. His dying of cancer in particular has made these weeks of waiting for some answers particularly sharp for me.

Today I got an email from a friend who is courageously moving through treatment for colon cancer. She wrote:
"I heard last night that Patrick Swayze died after 2 years of cancer treatment. Stage 4 spread from the pancreas to lymph nodes to the liver. (similar to her own progression) I know that I have my unique relationship with my healing and with my faith, but hearing this just scares me, like I'm fooling myself. Friends said to reach out when it gets hard, and today, it's hard."

Nothing feels more sacred to me than being with someone in the midst of moments like these: the joy of my nephew over his news, the poignancy of my client's last days and the angst of my friend. These moments of human joy and human agony are often the most powerful connectors to our experience of God or the divine.

Irony as I posted my blog I got this advertisement. Ah the sacred and the profane.

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Humans Sacred?

I was going to comment on Bretsky's post about holding humans as sacred and it became a whole post in itself as I thought about it. If I don't see all beings as sacred, if I am not as willing to die for a tree or for an animal as I am for a human, then do I really hold anything as sacred.

I once participated in a program with Barbara Marx Hubbard. She holds the position that we are all cells in a larger body, the universe. So we are part of a sacred collective. It seems to me at times that human beings act more like cancer cells in this body than benign cells. Like cancer cells, it seems as if we don't care if we kill our host in the process of getting more of what we want or having things our own way. It seems that our collective and individual contempt for other beings is what allows some humans to destroy rainforests and kill animals for their fur or tusks. We are certainly on the path to destroying perhaps a whole planet and the life forms that inhabit it.

Ego Consciousness

Plotkin says, "Our distinctive ego-based consciousness -- made possible by our reflexive self-awareness -- engenders both our crisis and our opportunity. Ego consciousness is our greatest liability as well as our greatest power."

It seems for the past week everywhere I turn, there are writings on ego. Campbell's opening myth of Minos is about the destruction caused by his ego-based clinging to the bull for his own benefit. Plotkin seems to say that it is our ego clinging that keeps us trapped in adolescence. It seems the major journey of ours is to somehow grow out of thinking that one more thing is really going to satisfy our craving for something that seems almost beyond satisfying, something that many of the books I am reading lately say can only be satisfied by "God." Certainly it seems that it is a longing so great it is like a vast and boundless blackhole in my own soul. The journey to satisfy that longing brought me to Naropa.


In Diane Eck's book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras she talks so much about the richness of the ritual life in the Hindu tradition. Like Gena (see her post), I have mostly avoided rituals and excessive displays of both personal and religious fervor. It almost seemed frightening to me in some cases. I certainly had a lot of judgment over the excessive fervor and emotional displays I experienced at Baptist services and funerals. When I finally chose a church, Ichose Unitarianism for it simplicity and lack of rituals. Eventually I felt a longing for something more elaborate after all. I begin now to wonder if these rituals are not ways in which get outside ourselves and our attachment to our own egos, that perhaps participating in more ritualistic practices would shift my own focus from my needs to a deeper connection to that which I am longing for.


The rituals of taking the refuge and bodhisattva vows had something of this quality for me. On retreat this summer, Gaylon asked me what I thought of all the chanting and oryoki practices. Since chanting has always very rote to me, it is hard to see the purpose in it. Yet when I think about how it connects me to 2.500 years of history, lineage and practioners that have succeeded in moving beyond their egos, chosing a Tibetan form of Buddhism with all its rituals and practices beckons me to give it a chance to work its magic in my soul and to move me closer to the mystery that I am seeking.