The only true antidote to always wanting more, as this 8th Century reminds us, is to be aware of, and rooted in, our inherent completeness, an awareness which will contradict the arising feeling of never being satisfied.
There is a solitary brightness without fixed shape or form.
It knows how to listen to the teachings,
it knows how to understand the teachings,
it knows how to teach.
That solitary brightness is you.
Linji Yìxuán, Chinese Zen Buddhist monk, died 866
What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol (The Divine Voice). You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process. At this stage of the game, I hear it saying, ‘Leonard, just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage. More than at any time of my life, I no longer have that voice that says, ‘You’re fucking up.’ That’s a tremendous blessing, really.
Leonard Cohen’s wisdom as he gets older and is more aware of his mortality
photo taken from leonardcohen.com
More on the basic feeling of lack, which if we do not attend to it, makes us feel as if life is not offering us enough, or that we are not making enough of it:
The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered,
‘Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived’.
Contentment seems more about switching off, at source, some of the driven aspects of our personalities,
rather than achieving that “more” which we think will fulfil them.
It is related to a quality of not-always-leaning towards something else:
A person is satisfied not by the quantity of food,
but by the absence of greed.
Gurdjieff
photo timothy krause
I had one or two conversations this week which led me to reflect on how to live life where we find ourselves, when there are so many places elsewhere that seem more attractive, more lively, and have more to offer. Sometimes the place where we are can seem so small and limiting. Then I came across these thoughts from the always stimulating Parker Palmer and he sums up what I was thinking, and says them much better than I could ever do. So I simply offer them here for reflection:
I love this poem, and it needs little commentary from me.
Behind it lies a question many of us ask ourselves from time to time: Given my small, ordinary, un-famous, and fleeting life, what can I do that’s of true worth and value? Then it offers an answer that I find simple, real, moving, and doable.
I re-read this poem occasionally and ask myself, “Using everything I have — including my own ‘costly gifts of hunger, choice and pain’ — what can I do today to keep raising the ‘modest shrine to meaning’ I’d like to create with my life?”. Maybe it’s planting a tree, maybe it’s a random act of kindness to a stranger, maybe it’s offering comfort to someone who’s hurting, maybe it’s writing a thank-you letter to a mentor who saw your potential and drew it out…
There’s always something meaningful I can do to honor the gift of life in myself, others, and the world around us. Just do it!
Leonard Nathan, So
So…
you aren’t Tolstoy or St. Francis
or even a well-known singer
of popular songs and will never read Greek
or speak French fluently,
will never see something no one else
has seen before through a lens
or with the naked eye.
You’ve been given just the one life
in this world that matters
and upon which every other life
somehow depends as long as you live,
and also given the costly gifts of hunger,
choice, and pain with which to raise
a modest shrine to meaning.
Parker Palmer, Your Life is a Shrine to Meaning
The creator of the universe loves circles: time and space are circles, the day is a circle, the year is a circle, the earth is a circle. But when creating and fashioning the human heart, the creator only created a half-circle, so that there is something ontologically unfinished in human nature.
Absence and presence are sisters. The opposite of presence is not absence, the opposite of presence is vacancy. Vacancy is a void, a space which is hungrily empty, whereas absence is a space of spatial emptiness, but there is a trail of connection toward the departed one, the lost one, the absent one. To feel absence is to feel connection with the one who has gone.
John O’Donohue, The Presence of Compassion
photo: james petts
