Is the sky blue?

I think this may be my last entry about the Insight Meditation retreat.

Perhaps this is a good story to tell on Halloween: On the fifth day of the retreat, I was on my third or fourth trek around the trail loop at Pearlstone and I stopped in the path, looking to see if I could find the same spider webs I’d seen a couple of days earlier, “spinseling” the woods. As I stood there, at around 3 in the afternoon, a smallish raccoon came ambling down the path towards me. I stayed still, and it kept coming. It didn’t stop until it was about 6 or 8 inches from my foot. I think I moved at that point, and it finally stopped. We stared at each other for a moment, and I considered staying still until it moved. After all, this might be another deeply moving message for me. But then I noticed a not-yet-healed cut on its nose, and considered that raccoons are supposed to be nocturnal, and, though I noticed no foaming at the mouth, I took a careful step backward. It dashed off down a side trail. All my blogger mind could make of it was 1) when you stay still enough in the woods, animals approach you, and /or 2) when confronted with a wild animal that’s certainly a fighter and possibly rabid, discretion may be the better part of valor. (Let me know if you’ve got any other, more brilliant interpretations!)

The 5th day is often the most intense time in a week-long retreat – after days of practice, with only one more full day to go, but not yet close enough to the end for monkey-mind to start planning the return home. That evening, Tara Brach invited us to contemplate, “Who would you be if you no longer believed that anything was wrong? Who would you be if you no longer believed there was anything wrong with you? With this life? With life?” This struck me very, very deeply. I immediately felt it begin to rearrange my psyche and my soma. My chronically tight jaw and tongue would relax in response to the question.Yet, as a life-long social change advocate, I also resisted the idea. What about racism? Climate change? How could it possibly be right to try to let go of believing there is anything wrong with the world? It’s one thing to relax about healing the world, it’s another thing entirely to decide it doesn’t need healing. And what about cancer? Shouldn’t I be trying to heal from it? Doesn’t healing assume illness, and isn’t illness synonymous with something being wrong?

Still, I could tell that asking myself the question, “who would I be if I no longer believed there was anything wrong,” was a powerful practice, and I fell asleep asking it that night, and woke up asking it the next morning. After the morning meditation each day there is a brief question and answer period. Usually there is time for 3 or 4 questions, in a roomful of 85 or so people. That morning, I shot my hand up the instant the teachers opened the Q & A period, and was the first one chosen.

I told Tara that I’d been deeply struck by her question the night before, and that I felt the power of practicing with it, but what about racism and climate change? I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for and promoting ways to be an activist that aren’t based on fear and anger, but I wanted to hear her perspective on it. She thanked me for the question, and said it is one that goes deep to the heart of the practice. She reiterated something else she’d said the night before: That suffering is not bad, because it helps us wake up. It’s like a caterpillar that spun a cocoon, and has transformed into a butterfly, but has not yet broken out of the cocoon. Staying in the cocoon causes suffering. We are living in too small an identity, and suffering is the sign, the feedback, that it is time to break out of our small selves and inhabit a larger reality. So, instead of working to change the world by blaming people, based on our aversions, if we learn to not make anything bad, we take action out of compassion, out of love for others and the world.

The last couple days of the retreat there were also a lot of teachings and guided meditations about opening to that larger reality – to letting go of the “waves” of the small self, and relaxing into the “ocean” of awareness. I kept practicing this, and also kept asking myself “who would I be if I no longer believed anything were wrong?”

Before leaving for the retreat, I had been to see an occupational therapist who was my HMO’s one “Certified Lymphodema Therapist.” Lymphodema is a painful and somewhat disabling condition that is a possible side effect of removing lymph nodes under the arms. I am not at much risk for it, since I only had the two “sentinel” lymph nodes removed under each arm (the ones the cancer would have gotten to first if it was spreading via the lymph system). However, I wanted to get back to exercising at the level I’d been at before, and I wanted to be careful and smart about it. I knew I needed more PT than what they’d sent me home from the hospital with, so I got my surgeon to refer me to the CLT, who had given me a bunch of more vigorous exercises to do.

I was doing these exercises every morning at the retreat, and also bringing some 2.5 lb arm weights with me on most of my treks in the woods. (Picture me alternating between doing arm lifts as I walked, and paying deep attention to the woods…!) Anyway, that Thursday morning, the last full day of the retreat, I’d just left my room after doing these exercises. It was a walking meditation period, and instead of just walking back and forth, I’d gone to my room to do the exercises. I was also having some hip pain, a chronic thing I’d had before, that I knew could be helped by a certain kind of stair-climbing exercise that Guillermo had taught me. So, I was planning to do some stair-climbing next.

I was walking along this partially sheltered walkway that led from the guest rooms to the meditation and dining hall, and planning my route to maximize stairs. Suddenly I asked myself, “but who would I be if I no longer believed there were anything wrong – with my hip, with my body?” And, just as suddenly, I was stopped in my tracks by – I kid you not—the blueness of the sky.

The beams supporting the walkway are a sort of Golden-Gate-Bridge red, and the sky, which had been cloudy and rainy the previous day, was a truly startling shade of deep sky blue, which contrasted beautifully with the barn-red beam. I thought, maybe it’s just the contrast with the red. I abandoned my stair-climbing plan, and went out onto the driveway, and looked up at the sky from there. It was just as beautiful from there, and there was more of it to see.

I literally lay down on the asphalt at the side of the driveway (there still being dew on the grass) and stared at the sky. I laughed out loud, and felt like yelling to everyone, “It’s SO BLUE!!!!!” And such a gorgeous shade of blue!! It felt like a gift that’s been given to us, that the sky can be SO BLUE, and that we can appreciate its beauty.

In Buddhist teachings, the emptiness of the sky is used as a metaphor for the calm awareness we are practicing. Notice how thoughts and emotions are like clouds passing through, we are told, and be the sky. This calm, non-judging awareness has, I realized, felt to me kind of like a cool, “masculine,” scientific objectivity. Tara, however, was teaching us to bring loving awareness to our thoughts and feelings, which felt like a more nurturing, “feminine,” compassionate, less “objective” kind of awareness. The day before, she’d led a guided meditation about becoming one with the “ocean” of loving awareness. (This also resonates with my experience of some pagan/ native traditions, where the earth is seen as feminine, and the sky as masculine).

As I kept feeling the awe and wonder at the blueness of the sky, and gasping at the beauty of it, I heard my internalized father’s scientific voice explaining to me that it was just because of the wavelengths of light that enter the earth’s atmosphere, or some such… but, I told my dad-in-me, You DO love me, despite your masculine conditioning, and the sky made SKY BLUE for us, so it must be loving too! The feeling lasted for quite some time that day, and I still get glimpses of it now when I see a blue sky. It’s SO BLUE!!

We have a funny relationship to the blueness of the sky. We say “is the sky blue?!” as a “rhetorical affirmation”  – a phrase like “Is the pope Catholic,” to say the answer is obviously yes to something. However, we also use the expression “blue sky” as a metaphor for imagination, innovation, creativity, and the like, as in Apple’s Blue Sky program.

Perhaps noticing and appreciating something as obvious as the blueness of the sky is itself an important thing. As Emerson said in another favorite quote of mine, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” Now, I’m not interested in being proclaimed wise – but certainly feel like these meditation retreats are about just this: Practicing being able to see the miraculous in the common. And maybe we (or at least I) have to stop believing there is something wrong in order to do so.