1. Truth: Some days, some situations, some people can be so difficult that you want to give up. Sometimes pausing or taking a deep breath helps me, or trying harder to see things from another perspective, being curious and asking lots of questions, but honestly much of the time I have to walk away, take a break, remove myself. I have to, otherwise I might react, respond, reach out and pinch somebody, do something I’ll regret later.
2. Truth: More and more I’m realizing days have their own rhythm and I can’t change that. I used to try and push past it, force my way through it, struggle against it, attempt to control it. Now I am beginning to understand that there’s no sense in fighting it. If the energy of a day is “let’s get some shit done!” I work with it. If the energy of a day is “nothing is going to work out so you might as well relax,” I work with that. It’s all workable.
3. Truth: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground,” (Chögyam Trungpa). Life is suffering, but freedom is possible. Nothing is okay, but everything is fine. Eric saw the first Pasque Flowers blooming and someone else sighted the season’s first rattlesnake. Life is tender and terrible, beautiful and brutal. I’m going to keep my heart open, as much as I can, and keep trying, not give up.
One wish (or many): May we have faith in our basic goodness. May the confidence in basic goodness that we cultivate give us the courage to do what has to be done. May we all find someone or something in our lives that is our soft place to land. May we love and let go.
Sam and Ringo hiking on Deadman Road, image by Eric
1. Kickstarter project: Broken Saviors, “Broken Saviors is an original graphic series that explores what happens when humanity becomes the subject of a global ‘nation building’ endeavor conducted by a mysterious race of aliens who claim they’re here to save us.” Written by my good friend and CSU colleague, Todd Mitchell. Issue #1 of this alien invasion epic is available now and FREE!
Even if you grew up with parents who loved each other, and their kids, it’s very hard and erratic here. And if you grew up around alcoholism, or mental illness, you developed ways of surviving that much terror and craziness, which have–let’s say–not served you in later years.
You grew up with a clenched fist in your stomach, agreeing not to see what’s going on; tip-toe-ing around, not trusting yourself as a reliable narrator, trying to rescue people who were 30 years older and hundred pounds bigger. Scared, alone, small.
You grow up waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But I think God only has one shoe. Love never fails; never not once, eventually. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not ever overcome it, at some point. Never not once.
We can begin anything we do—start our day, eat a meal, or walk into a meeting—with the intention to be open, flexible, and kind. Then we can proceed with an inquisitive attitude. As my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, “Live your life as an experiment.”
At the end of the activity, whether we feel we have succeeded or failed in our intention, we seal the act by thinking of others, of those who are succeeding and failing all over the world. We wish that anything we learned in our experiment could also benefit them.
28. Wisdom from Lori Deschene, “We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love.”
