Spinseled into the whole

So if you read my last post you’ll know I was trying to practice feeling as fully alive as I could a few days into the retreat. The problem is that trying is a problem. It’s not just Yoda, but many other Buddhist teachers who say so (George Lucas’ Yoda, who famously said “Do. Or do not. There is no try,” was supposedly partially based on this Tibetan Buddhist teacher from Dharmsala, India, whom George Lucas met prior to making Star Wars.)

The reason trying is a problem – or striving, or grasping – is that when I have my attention fixed on some way I want to be that’s different from how I am right now, I am exactly not being how I want to be, which is to be in the present with loving acceptance of whatever is here right now. They say that intention, or “inclining the mind” in the direction you aspire to, and then paying attention, is what matters. You sort of have to trick the mind in order to non-strivingly arrive at this acceptance-of-where-you-are-which-is-where-you-want-to-be rather than trying to be where you’re not. It’s kind of like trying to see the Pleiades constellation – you can see it better if you don’t look directly at it.  

I did have some lovely moments paying attention in the woods. I tried deliberately thinking to myself as I walked in the woods, “this could be one of my last times in these woods, or any woods for that matter,” and noticed how poignantly attentive it made me to the beauty of the day. And it occurred to me that maybe we wouldn’t have mid-life crises if there weren’t so many years between our youth, when we are doing nearly everything for the first time, and our old age, when we begin to wonder, will this be the last time?

It is said that the Buddha recommended to his disciples that they contemplate their mortality every day, or every moment of every day. Don and I have sometimes practiced with the Buddhist “five remembrances,” a set of phrases that you repeat to yourself:

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

Between my mother’s untimely death in 2006 at the age of 66 (she was out for a walk and was hit by a car driven by someone who had had 2 drinks) and my sister-in-law’s extremely untimely death in 2008 at the age of 37 (pancreatic cancer), and practicing the 5 remembrances, I had become a lot more cognizant of this mortality thing even before my diagnosis. I would sometimes lie in bed and think with some disbelief, but some equanimity, “something’s going to get me, or Don, one of these days…”. As a result I think I wasn’t as completely blindsided by my diagnosis as I might otherwise have felt. And I didn’t really have any feelings of “why me?” And that reminds me of another Buddhist story, about the woman who begs the Buddha to bring her infant son back to life and he says he will if she can bring him mustard seed from a house in the village where the people have not known death … but I digress!

I was going to tell you about one of the lovely times in the woods. I was so enchanted by some of what I saw that I felt I had to make up new words to describe it. I wrote in my journal:

“Splickering” – the play of light reflected off a sunlit stream onto the undersides of leaves

“Limmering” – the way freshly-fallen leaves shoot the rapids, get caught temporarily or forever, and line the stones in the stream bed in fall

“Loughing,” pronounced “luffing” – when leaves fall steadily and straight down from the trees, like snow, as in, “it’s luffing out today”.

“Spinseled” – the way the woods are decorated in tiny, sparkling cobwebs everywhere at this time of year

How do I join myself to this splendor?

Stopping, seeing.

How am I splickering, limmering, loughing, spinseled inside?

And,

I turn and see it, bit by bit – as if learning to see a new color that has just joined the world. First, a leaf caught suspended in mid-air. Then, high, high up, a long, tall strand of it, with side-loops waving off of it, shining brightly in the sun. Then another. Then, catching my breath in its gauzy, intricate cradle, a small, perfect web in the barberry. I fall to my knees in wonder – and am suddenly able to see them everywhere. Shimmering amongst the brush, their tiny, nearly invisible architects scurrying. I feel a small prick on my neck, and stand quickly, off balance. I regain my footing and stand still a long, long time. And then – on my arm - I see a glimmer.

See, you could not catch me in your little net, nor eat me, but I stayed still long enough you decided I was a tree, and spinseled me into the whole.