On my way to practice this morning, while watching the nearly full moon suddenly emerge from the fog over the ocean like one of those immense battleships on display in any one of the films in the Star Wars franchise, there is more bad news. It is difficult to reconcile what comes across the airwaves from the radio in my car turned to low and the small miracle that has just surprised me outside my window. In another ocean, far from me, where the very moon I stare at in a brief state of wonder not so many hours ago hovered above this other body of water, forty-two people have died. Seventeen of the dead are children. All drowned in the Aegean Sea.
A modern Greek tragedy. With too many Acts.
The Aegean Sea is described as an embayment of the Mediterranean Sea, which makes it sound navigable, safe, a sure harbor worth trusting with one's life. It sits between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. Across this deep blue, peaceful, ancient sea approximately 850,000 Syrian refugees sailed last year from Turkey to Greece. These refugees have been seeking asylum in Europe and beyond. For the past five years, civil war has ravaged their homeland, and more than 2.2 million Syrians have made Turkey their temporary home. But I imagine the lights from the island of Greece, like the moon that transported me this morning, have been attracting the Syrians in Turkey with the promise of something better. In huge numbers, these refugees have been steadfastly risking that ocean passage since May of last year. They want to reach Europe, America, Canada. Like immigrants from other generations and around the world, they risk the ocean. They understand, as Rumi did, they cannot afford to be timid; they need a new place to call home. So, they set out. This is their journey, their pilgrimage. This is their connection to God.
One of the cartoons among the newspapers of the week showed a crowd of people at a crossroads. At the point where the roads diverge is a sign that reads ANSWERS. The two directions to choose from are "Simple but wrong" and "Complex but right." At the embarkation point of this latter path is a bookcase filled with books. One person stands adjacent to the bookcase, a book in hand, ready to commit himself to the significantly less-traveled complex and circuitous path. The first path diverges sharply at the site of the bookcase. This path is crowded with people. In a short distance, the path ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff, over the side of which those who have followed this path continue on and into the abyss.
The cartoon makes me think of Robert Frost and his snowy woods and the road that diverged there, his dilemma and his choice. Thank goodness there is always a choice, but it is not always easily made.
This is just what our teacher cautions us to remember as we practice longer with a pose, preparing ourselves for the one day when the pose will at last be easy. "Easier, but not easy," our teacher counsels, pulling us back from our desire for comfort, for what we might wish to label simple, understood, conquered. What he would like us to remember, I suppose, is that the journey continues. That the ten thousand idiots Hafiz wrote about, the ones who have so long ruled and lived inside, are still alive and well and willing and able. The journey continues. After the pilgrimage, we are still the pilgrim.
In her book The Place that Scares You, American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has a different take on the crossroads on display in the aforementioned cartoon. According to Chodron, the crossroads is an important place for the spiritual warrior, the pilgrim, you, who are on the road, in other words, any and all of us who have decided to cultivate choice. Simply put, if we have chosen the journey, then we have opted for the ability to make choices along the way. And because ability is such a magnificently human quality, we will be visited from time to time by anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness. At such times, the clear choice is not always so. So, we remain in the middle, in the in-between state, at the crossroads. For Chodron, this is the place--the place that scares us--where the magic can happen. She says that it is at the crossroads where our solid views begin to dissolve. It is a reminder that this journey we are engaged in is not one way or the other. It is important that we remember that we do not live our lives teetering between either being caught up or free. Like when I still catch myself thinking, When I am finally free of (insert favorite way of being all too human)....
Pattabhi Jois's favorite axiom "Practice and all is coming," does not mean the journey will be easy. Easier, with time, using the proper tools, cultivating the proper habits, but not easy.
There is a scene in the movie The Hours where Meryl Streep, playing a mom, a friend, a lesbian, is lying on her bed with her daughter, who is played by the actress Claire Danes. Mother and daughter are in the midst of preparations for a party. Streep's character has a premonition of something not right, of some bad thing happening before the night is through the party over. She and her daughter have been carrying manuscripts into her mother's bedroom--Streep is a book editor at a Manhattan publishing house--in order to make room for the guests who will come later that evening to gather in the very small, beautiful apartment. Streep winds up lying down on the bed and pulling her daughter close. She calls up a memory of a day when she young and was conscious of being happy. Streep's character tells her daughter that she thought, now I am going to be happy, and that there would always be more of this feeling that had seemed until then elusive. What she later came to realize was that it was happiness, in that moment.
This is one of the paradoxes of being human. We want it all. We have a difficult time understanding that we spend much time in the middle ground, in the in-between. This is the place where our lives unfold. It is the place, our teacher reminds us, where we come back to practice. This is where we really live. It is the place where Pema Chodron insists we can experience the clarity of the present moment, the only moment there is, a place called enlightenment.
A modern Greek tragedy. With too many Acts.
The Aegean Sea is described as an embayment of the Mediterranean Sea, which makes it sound navigable, safe, a sure harbor worth trusting with one's life. It sits between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. Across this deep blue, peaceful, ancient sea approximately 850,000 Syrian refugees sailed last year from Turkey to Greece. These refugees have been seeking asylum in Europe and beyond. For the past five years, civil war has ravaged their homeland, and more than 2.2 million Syrians have made Turkey their temporary home. But I imagine the lights from the island of Greece, like the moon that transported me this morning, have been attracting the Syrians in Turkey with the promise of something better. In huge numbers, these refugees have been steadfastly risking that ocean passage since May of last year. They want to reach Europe, America, Canada. Like immigrants from other generations and around the world, they risk the ocean. They understand, as Rumi did, they cannot afford to be timid; they need a new place to call home. So, they set out. This is their journey, their pilgrimage. This is their connection to God.
One of the cartoons among the newspapers of the week showed a crowd of people at a crossroads. At the point where the roads diverge is a sign that reads ANSWERS. The two directions to choose from are "Simple but wrong" and "Complex but right." At the embarkation point of this latter path is a bookcase filled with books. One person stands adjacent to the bookcase, a book in hand, ready to commit himself to the significantly less-traveled complex and circuitous path. The first path diverges sharply at the site of the bookcase. This path is crowded with people. In a short distance, the path ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff, over the side of which those who have followed this path continue on and into the abyss.
The cartoon makes me think of Robert Frost and his snowy woods and the road that diverged there, his dilemma and his choice. Thank goodness there is always a choice, but it is not always easily made.
This is just what our teacher cautions us to remember as we practice longer with a pose, preparing ourselves for the one day when the pose will at last be easy. "Easier, but not easy," our teacher counsels, pulling us back from our desire for comfort, for what we might wish to label simple, understood, conquered. What he would like us to remember, I suppose, is that the journey continues. That the ten thousand idiots Hafiz wrote about, the ones who have so long ruled and lived inside, are still alive and well and willing and able. The journey continues. After the pilgrimage, we are still the pilgrim.
In her book The Place that Scares You, American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has a different take on the crossroads on display in the aforementioned cartoon. According to Chodron, the crossroads is an important place for the spiritual warrior, the pilgrim, you, who are on the road, in other words, any and all of us who have decided to cultivate choice. Simply put, if we have chosen the journey, then we have opted for the ability to make choices along the way. And because ability is such a magnificently human quality, we will be visited from time to time by anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness. At such times, the clear choice is not always so. So, we remain in the middle, in the in-between state, at the crossroads. For Chodron, this is the place--the place that scares us--where the magic can happen. She says that it is at the crossroads where our solid views begin to dissolve. It is a reminder that this journey we are engaged in is not one way or the other. It is important that we remember that we do not live our lives teetering between either being caught up or free. Like when I still catch myself thinking, When I am finally free of (insert favorite way of being all too human)....
Pattabhi Jois's favorite axiom "Practice and all is coming," does not mean the journey will be easy. Easier, with time, using the proper tools, cultivating the proper habits, but not easy.
There is a scene in the movie The Hours where Meryl Streep, playing a mom, a friend, a lesbian, is lying on her bed with her daughter, who is played by the actress Claire Danes. Mother and daughter are in the midst of preparations for a party. Streep's character has a premonition of something not right, of some bad thing happening before the night is through the party over. She and her daughter have been carrying manuscripts into her mother's bedroom--Streep is a book editor at a Manhattan publishing house--in order to make room for the guests who will come later that evening to gather in the very small, beautiful apartment. Streep winds up lying down on the bed and pulling her daughter close. She calls up a memory of a day when she young and was conscious of being happy. Streep's character tells her daughter that she thought, now I am going to be happy, and that there would always be more of this feeling that had seemed until then elusive. What she later came to realize was that it was happiness, in that moment.
This is one of the paradoxes of being human. We want it all. We have a difficult time understanding that we spend much time in the middle ground, in the in-between. This is the place where our lives unfold. It is the place, our teacher reminds us, where we come back to practice. This is where we really live. It is the place where Pema Chodron insists we can experience the clarity of the present moment, the only moment there is, a place called enlightenment.
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