My friends at the Shambhala SunSpace blog asked me to write a New Year’s blessing for their readers. It runs today somewhere over there, and I invite you to have a look. Then I thought, why don’t I just record it and share it with everyone who’s listening? I hope that includes you and that you share it with all you love.
Here’s to your best new year!
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The Mother’s Winter Plunge is rising fast. Saturday, Jan. 16 in Scottsdale.
Nearly time. Barely room. Hardly wet.
Register now and leave all your regrets in 2009.
Perhaps it was
the new game the new speakers the new camera
the boxes the manuals the cords
the plastic the paper the ribbon
the fudge the cookies the cinnamon sugar
the sour cream in the enchiladas
the tres leches
one leche alone wouldn’t do
the coffee the soda the wine
the puzzle on the coffee table
300 pieces
a pair of rat terriers under your skin
27 pieces left and I can’t quit
although I’m done
marinated, roasted and fried
so in this idle between one holiday and the next
I’m ducking out as is my custom
to quietly come undone
because every year is the same and I know it:
happiness is simple
everything we do to find it is complicated.
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– Dogen Zenji
Merry California Christmas from my shore to your door.
“If you don’t see the Way you don’t see it even as you walk on it.” – The Identity of Relative and Absolute
In this week of returns and revelations, I’m leaving sand on your doorstep with a few repeat posts. Enjoy your time!
At the risk of shattering all illusions you might have about how a Buddhist priest is supposed to live, I will tell you that I am vacationing with my extended family on a remote, but not too remote, Pacific island. It is not too remote, considering it is the number one holiday air travel destination for Southern Californians, such Californians including D-list celebrities like the one we think we spied doing calisthenics on the stretch of lawn beside our own.
I find myself here because life, or dharma, provides in all ways visible and invisible. My family is hospitable, you see. We get along. We share. We like one another’s company. For at least a week, that is, when one particularly generous sister has sprung for a seven-day rental of a beachfront home with separate bedrooms, baths and high-speed Internet for all.
I am lucky. I am so terribly lucky, and I’ve done nothing at all to earn it. One night’s stay in a place like this and right away I realize how lucky I am. It takes several more days to realize that I don’t have to do anything to earn it. Don’t have to do anything for merit or reward. Don’t have to use the time wisely. Don’t have to busy myself producing something. Don’t have to crack open the computer and write something. Don’t have to double-back and finish up the project I left undone. Don’t have to hurry; don’t have to crack down. Don’t have to deny; don’t have to forbear. Don’t have to ponder, wish or strategize. Don’t have to be someone else, doing something other than nothing at all.
Every time I take a vacation, I confront the obvious truth in the plain sight of our language. To vacation is to vacate. Vacate my own timeline, my own agenda, my own expectations, my own grind, my own restlessness and deep-rooted exasperation. Renouncing my point of view is true renunciation. I can enjoy the hot tub without a second thought.
When I finally empty my head and open my hands I find my tongue with a native’s ease.
The hula could take longer.
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“If you don’t see the Way you don’t see it even as you walk on it.” – The Identity of Relative and Absolute
In this week of returns and revelations, I’m leaving sand on your doorstep with a few repeat posts. Enjoy your time!
The sandwiches are packed; the watermelon sliced. Today I take the kids to the beach. It is the one day every summer every year that we do this: at season’s end, the four of us, giddy to go, spit-roasted on return. With me: the two teenagers who were once my babysitter’s babies, plus the baby who was once my own.
I believe in cycles like this, in anniversaries and observed traditions. But then, what’s to believe? They come on their own, the returns and repetitions, as reliable as seasons because they are seasons. All of life is a season. We dance in a circle the whole way! The rhythm insistent and true – our part is but to hear the music and move.
Next week we end these short summer months with a true family vacation. Venturing up north, where the ocean is darker, the air misty, the forests thick. Yesterday I remembered that Big Sur was the last vacation destination my husband and I took before Georgia was born. Hardly a vacation, it was the place that the full catastrophe of my sickness was felt, and the shock of its sudden conclusion would bear down. We spent three days roaming and moaning the northern coast, and on return, I was hospitalized. Georgia was born too soon after. This Sunday is the anniversary of her coming home.
So I’m riding the waves and wind these days, again, and next week I’ll find myself back at the first of everything. All over again. Completely new.
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“If you don’t see the Way you don’t see it even as you walk on it.” – The Identity of Relative and Absolute
In this week of returns and revelations, I’m leaving sand on your doorstep with a few repeat posts. Enjoy your time!
We are weekending at a shimmery stretch of coastline known as Crystal Cove. It is one of my husband’s most sentimentally favorite places. We spent his 40th birthday here ___ years ago. It was the site of our first family vacation, when Georgia was nine months old, the disbelieving dawn of my awareness that I could leave the house for more than an hour at a time.
Back then, it was a week of firsts. Georgia crawled for the first time, putt-putting in a forward sway across the putrid shag carpet in our beach rental. We shopped nearby in Laguna Beach, where I stepped inside a clothing shop for the first time since giving birth and let a wise saleswoman cajole me out of my baggy sweat pants and back into a facsimile of me. I carried my cranky girl twice daily down the lonely curve of sand and saw for the first time how she dropped straightaway to sleep to nothing but the sound of the ocean.
Shwoosh
Shwoosh
Shwoosh
That discovery alone saved our lives every day and night for the next four years.
Shwoosh
Shwoosh
And now it is a weekend of returns and repeats. The cove of beach cottages has been lately reclaimed and restored, and although it lightly approaches the Disneyfication that passes as some kind of global standard of entertainment, it as raw and real as only the ocean can be. My younger sister, a recent transplant from Texas, now lives nearby and, more than that, genuinely occupies our lives. Enough proof for me that in this ceaseless cycle of comings and goings, there is a perfect order and rhythm that can never be foretold.
Shwoosh
Shwoosh
Shwoosh
On the beach nearby us was a young couple with a tantruming two-year-old wrangling out of their clutches as they tried to slather him with sunscreen. He roared and wailed above the pounding surf. I can see now how in the life of a two-year-old nearly everything is an outrage and an imposition; nearly everything is foisted at them with the rudest of good intentions. Now I understand the screams, although for most of that year Georgia and I went nose to nose in mutual mortification.
Shwoosh
Shwoosh
Today I heard the waves, the same old waves, anew. The ocean tells us over and over to accord ourselves with the rhythm of life, with the movement of life, like grains of sand on the beach, lifted up and carried back, sunken deep and then roiled forward again, staying nowhere, flung through air and water to what is but the next temporary abode, the impermanent address, and that it is only in this change itself, this perpetual unrest, holding nothing, that we can ever find true rest.
All that and hot dogs too.
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Christine Mason Miller (Swirly Girl) sent me a surprise package with this deck of inspiration cards. They are exactly what I needed, and I put them in a bowl on the kitchen table where I will choose one each day to forgive myself for the day before.
Last night at my library talk, a woman came in smiling and sat down in the front row. “I am a fan,” she said, and my heart unfurled like a welcome mat. Everything went okay after that.
My friend Jim in Mongolia (really, how many people can say that) asked me to record a dharma teaching for his English students, and then he posted the mp3 on this site. Have a listen if you haven’t heard the last of me. (You haven’t heard the last of me.)
Kindness is my home. It’s a really big home, and so nicely decorated.
I started at 8 a.m. this morning and finished the last load at 5 p.m. Today was laundry day; everyday could be laundry day. And at this dark hour, on this late day of this long year, some things are done but other things are not.
The holiday greetings did not get out. This will have to do.
In a few days we leave for a foggy stay at a nearby beach before coming home for Christmas and a breakfast of – naturally – banana pancakes. With that in mind, with you in mind, with everything done and undone still on my mind, I offer you this taste of my latest confection, the first audio excerpt of my new book, Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life. It may be something you’ve read before or heard me say before. Either way, I know in my bones on this chilly, silent night, in my holey socks and nubby sweater, with the dog asleep and the room aglow, just me telling you my homemade story amid the sounds of my house, that you will love it. My hope is that you will stir that love into your own holiday brunch, dinner, and every meal after. I’ll try to do the same.
The most we can do for one another is listen. You’ve already done everything for me, and more.
Happy holidays, friends, brothers and sisters, all. I love you.
Purchased the Wii she put #1 on her wish list for the last three years now that it has fallen to #2 behind hamster, the kind of retro hamster that – like the two fish, turtle and dog – requires someone’s mother to clean and feed it.
Encouraged her good dad to buy a little Christmas tree and found out three days later it cost $100.
Coerced my daughter into having a cup of hot cocoa with me at Starbucks despite her protests that, in 70-degree sunshine, she wasn’t very cold right now.
Raided her piggy bank to pay for the cocoa with every intention of repaying it.
Let my husband pick out a computer for her and he chose one that is better than mine.
Spent $160 on gifts at Target and allowed the cashier to sign me up for a store credit card to save 15 percent, a process that took 15 percent of the trouble it will take to cancel the credit card.
Soon realized that 15 percent of $160 isn’t nothing but amounts to less than nothing.
Learned that a plumbing leak requires replacement of the dining room ceiling before our Christmas company comes.
A ceiling over our heads instantly amounted to my greatest wish and blessing.
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When you’re as easily teased by Buddhist discourse as I am, you can see the same arguments over and over. Among the refrains I keep hearing are the ones I call The Biggest Lies in Buddhism.
I’m not a Buddha. You most certainly are; you may not yet realize it. “Buddha” does not equate to an imaginary celestial being but to an awakened one. When human beings live in their natural awakened state, undisturbed by delusive thoughts and emotions, they live as buddhas. Buddhahood is your birthright. You claim it every time you wake up to the present moment.
My ideas are as good as yours. That’s true, however, neither are any good at all. The practice of Buddhism is not intended to democratize personal views; it does not aim to equalize the worth of everyone’s self-reinforcing preferences; it simply transcends them. We practice Buddhism so we will no longer be blinded by what we think, and wake up instead to how things are.
Continue reading and leave a comment on Shambhala SunSpace
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I speed-read a short story collection last week, Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, which I cannot recommend. Despite that, one story in the book stuck. It was about the relationship between a cellist and his musical mentor, a woman who described herself as a virtuoso. The woman gives her protégé weeks of technical and inspirational corrections before revealing that she cannot play a cello herself. “We are both virtuosos,” she explained in pitch-perfect logic, “but my virtuosity has not been unwrapped.”
A wrapped-shut virtuoso. Does that resonate?
We dare not yet pick up our own instrument for fear of, well, everything. We are cautious, guarded, unprepared. Getting closer, we tell ourselves. Getting ready. Awaiting the moment of fulfillment, when our mastery will be revealed. In the meantime, our virtuosity is unchallenged, shielded beneath layers of tissue, inert, immobile, a precious empty ideal. Held in reserve for one day.
How to Unwrap Your Life
1. Do something you’ve been avoiding, without thinking twice.
2. This might mean that you need to mail the letter or send the proposal. It will put things in motion.
3. This might mean you need to make the call or send the resume. Go for broke.
4. This might mean that you need to tackle the hand wash cold.
5. This might mean you need to make a meal from whatever you have on hand in the kitchen, without restraint or apology.
6. This might mean a dog walk or a litter box cleaning.
7. This might mean forgetting what he said, she said, you said and everything that has been said before now.
8. No one can tell you a thing. There is no “how to do.”
9. There is only do.
10. Play as if your life depends on it. Without you, there’s no music.
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It was the first time we’d ever ended up at a restaurant solely on the basis of a Google search, and we were the only diners on a Saturday night.
Nirvana, the sign outside said.
Customers! the woman in the sari called to her staff as we stepped inside. This was no wannabe in a sari. This woman really belonged in a sari, the lonely hostess in a narrow room of empty tables and chairs. Our hearts were instantly broken, and we bored deep into the menu of unpronounceable names and inscrutable descriptions.
We ordered lavishly from the bespectacled man who came around. Her husband? Her father? And wine too, like a desperate blessing, a piddling unguent, to call forth the missing multitude. Before our food came another lost party wandered in. I’d seen them pacing back and forth in front of the window. This is our first time, they tossed the words anxiously into the void like a flimsy raft before jumping in.
Our food arrived on rimmed tin platters, mounds of rice orbited by silvery planets of fragrant sauces, like nothing I’d seen before, out of this world, a savory palette to paint the palate and we were overcome with awe and relief. I dipped a spoon into my bhindi masala and took one taste, then flashed a thumb’s up to the other table. Fantastic, I mouthed exaggeratedly, and they grabbed the rope and ordered it too. And we were then, all five customers and five servers, so effervescently happy to be together, to have spanned the bottomless gap, to be inside the door everyone else had overlooked or hurried past: the door to Nirvana.
***
This isn’t really the post I’d intended to write but reading it now I see how it must be. These are times that stretch all of our pockets: our hearts, our minds, our hands, our wallets. We have learned that there is no big bailout to save us, only small rescues and tin-rimmed kindnesses. And so I’m hanging a modest stocking here.
These are tough times to give, and tougher yet to ask. As before, I know of women who are waiting for help before they can give themselves a hand. Waiting for the impossible before they can see what is possible. I have a list of mothers who could use an assist to make it to the Mother’s Plunge retreat in Phoenix (heavenly Scottsdale, actually) in January. Perhaps you are one who can give help, or allow yourself to receive it. If you can fund either part or all of a $75 scholarship to the Mother’s Plunge, please contact me privately at kmiller(at)turningwords(dot)com. Likewise, if you need a rope to pull you across the threshold, a little extra help to make it happen, contact me as well. There is a small yet radiantly happy community of us who can attest that miracles happen when and where you least expect it. Everyone who wants to come is shown the way.
I don’t know how that happens, but I thank you, and I bless you.
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