February | 2017 | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

afternoondelight

1. Spending time with lovely humans. My favorite kind are the ones who are curious, smart, kind, creative, and funny, and I got to hang out with a couple of them this week.

2. Good food. Linden Street Cafe (formerly known as Cafe Ardour) has some seriously yummy food and drink. Eric has also been cooking some really good stuff for dinner, which means I get the bonus of some amazing leftovers for lunch too.

3. Having a short car. Seriously, yesterday was a sloppy mess with no signs of stopping, and I really really needed a spot in the parking garage so I didn’t have to clean my car off again, but there were only two faculty spots left: one was for an electric car and one for a short car.

shortcarparking

4. Ringo Blue. I love both my dogs equally (for different reasons), but the adorableness of Ringo is sometimes more than I can handle.

bignose

takingabreak

5. Sam. That being said, the sweetness of Sam is often just as hard to handle. Whenever my three boys get back from a walk, he’s the one who always has to come find me right away, check in. And in the morning, after he gets breakfast and goes potty, if I’m still in bed, he jumps in, gives me a kiss, and then curls up next to me. How hard he tries to protect me, even when he doesn’t need to. How patient he is. How he hides from the washing machine. How he runs out of the room if someone sneezes or coughs.

It’s hard to get a good picture of a black dog.

Bonus joy: Some really good documentaries, a good week at work, pay day coming soon, snow (even though I’m kind of over it and need some sunshine), my “new” bathroom (which is over a year old now), snow tires, wool socks, clean sheets, soaking in a tub of hot water, laughing, really good writing, the technology that allows me to connect with people I love even though they are far away, knowing I’m good at what I do, being able to say no.

1. Truth: It’s not good to get comfortable in knowing. Just because I know something doesn’t mean I should stop learning, allow that knowledge to become fixed, solid, unmoving. Getting comfortable with what I think or believe makes me stagnant and dumb. Things are constantly changing, as they always and will continue to do, and good people are doing research, finding and sharing new information all the time. I must stay open to this, curious, because if I stay stuck in my current state of knowing, eventually I will be wrong.

2. Truth: Resisting change generates suffering. Resistance to new wisdom eventually turns aggressive, violent. Holding on too tightly to what I want to be the truth, wanting it to remain even when its nature is to dissolve and fall away hurts. And depending on how tightly I cling, how violently I resist, I can become a danger to others too.

3. Truth: Not knowing is better. There’s a teaching in Buddhism, “only don’t know,” which recommends cultivating a state of not knowing, of curiosity, and resting there. The poet Rumi describes it as a field, “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” and says “when the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” Pema Chödrön says,

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.

One wish: May we cultivate a state of curiosity, opening ourselves to new possibilities for compassion and wisdom, letting what we knew, what we were so sure of, so certain about, fall away without resistance.