already home but still with errands to run

"Already Home" c. 2008 Miz Annie

7.5" x 10" mixed media collage w/ art papers,
magazine cutouts, & laser print on recycled pasteboard.
AEDM for Nov. 10.

"Spiritual practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better,” teaches Pema Chödrön. “It is,” she says, “about befriending who we are already.”

I am a huge Chödrön fan; I have a much-loved copy of When Things Fall Apart that I keep at the ready for when.... well...when things fall apart. And they seem to do so fairly often these days. One of the biggest lessons that Chödrön shares is that we rob ourselves of so much of our own lives, our own human experience, by disassociating from anything that falls into the spectrum of what we've learned to label as "bad." In other words, when we start to feel that a moment in time is horrible, painful, unbearable, even just frustrating, irritating, or mildly unpleasant -- we want to run. We don't want to experience those feelings so we throw everything else out with that bathwater. And each unpleasant moment we discard is a moment that will never come again. You might read that and think, "Well, good riddance to it!" as though our particular emotional state is all that exists in that moment of time. How egotistical! Are we that self-centered that we can imagine that those moments are all disposable, because they happen to be moments in which we are irritated? (or pained, or lonely, or __________ fill in the blank)

I admit that I am often very bad at this "being in the present" stuff. Yup. So many of my present moments lately are ones in which I'm in physical pain and sometimes all I can muster up is that everything else can go to hell. But I'm working on it. I'm working on remembering that each moment contains far more than my fleeting emotional state, or my fleeting physical state. It contains millions of people engaged in millions of activities and thoughts. Wars are being fought, songs are being sung, babies are crying or laughing or sleeping, and my dog is chewing a slipper. The moon is nearly full, the leaves are rustling in the wind, the neighbor is showing off his shiny new truck. So much is happening! And it will never happen exactly like this ever again! Sometimes my own spiritual practice consists of little more than the prayer "Please allow me to get out of my own damned way." Once I can do that, there's a little more room for the rest of the world to enter my consciousness. So that is why Chödrön says that the present moment is our greatest teacher; if we can manage to allow ourselves to just be in each moment regardless of whether we've labelled it "good" or "bad," and don't get caught up too much in reacting to it, we can let go of a lot of what we have come to feel as "suffering."

And again, just because I'm writing about it doesn't mean I consider myself remotely good at it. I most certainly am not.(1) I am particularly prone to living not from this moment but from some future moment when things are really going to kick ass! "I will sooooo be a better person," I think, "when my back doesn't hurt." I won't be so crabby (or irritated, or angry, or stressed out...) when I get a new job. Or when I win the lotto. Or when X, Y, or Z happens. I forget to look at all the other things that are going on in the current moment, and what I can do to move forward. Send another resume, ask for help with the housework, take the dogs for a walk to the store and buy a lottery ticket. It never fails that in the act of simply moving forward from that moment, instead of becoming the feeling of dissatisfaction and embodying it, I have honored not only my Self, but also that previously unbearable, seemingly disposable moment. Simply by allowing myself to be in it. By using it as a metaphorical home base and venturing out its front door.

Begin where you are; work where you are;
the hour which you are now wasting,
dreaming of some far off success
may be crowded with grand possibilities.

~ Orison Swett Marden ~

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(1) I suspect that the Buddha himself wasn't that good at it, or he would not have had to leave his wife and children and go sit under a big tree to "discover" enlightenment. But that's a topic for another blog. ;-)