February 28, 2024
I wrote this last week, wanting to dig down deeper and share something honest with you, something visceral and true. I read it now, and it feels like fiction, or someone else’s story. Clarity has returned today, self-doubt gone on hiatus. But last week it was like this:
It’s dimmer now, the usual contrast and clarity have gone opaque, the corners are softened, the way forward obscured, like walking in fog, or waking from an afternoon nap. Is it morning or evening? What did I miss?
At other times the light is brighter, not so much providing meaning or reason, but rather illuminating the comings and goings, and the illusory abiding in between. It’s temporary.
So, I trust this fog will lift, and then surely return again, as it does, and I’ve taught myself to let that happen without my interference, commentary, or preference. Being alive in the midst of it is enough.
Hozan Alan Senauke, recovering from a massive heart attack, referred to his pain saying something like, “This is just like zazen. It doesn’t help to move.”
So, I am foggy, a little depressed, more than a tad bit anxious, not knowing or caring why, uninterested when or if relief will arrive like a friend with Irish whiskey or a new Bond movie. But that’s not true. I do long for that perspective, for relief. The truth is, I surely wish for the light, ease, and comfort, for the fog to lift and the Golden Gate to emerge in sunshine. But my life is fog today, and it’s the only one I get, so here we sit, together, the fog and me.
I recently read that in a blizzard, buffalo turn and move into the storm, knowing that it’s a quicker way to get to the calm side versus running away from it. In our intimate life practice way, this is how we do it. We say, “The way through it is just that, through it.” It being life’s recurring unpleasantries as well as those beloved pleasantries that always come to an end or turn to vinegar like the expensive Bordeaux we forgot to cork last night. Our most cherished pleasantry will finally end, but that timing and those circumstances are a mystery, and we’d dearly desire to just not discuss it.
This willingness to go through things is not denial, or stoicism, or being a metro-macho samurai. It’s much simpler than that. We merely remain still. We simply stop resisting or clinging. As my dear friend Sammy says, “let come, let be, let go.” She’s right, of course. But my complexity-maker wants more. “Why, why, why?” But there is no reason, no meaning to it.
So, what I wrote is aspirational, a process and a practice more than an arrival or an accomplishment. Sometimes I resist, sometimes I surrender, always I go on.
We lie back, Hozan and me, still as stones, looking up at the sky, likely through the fog, tears flowing as the Golden Gate emerges.
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