you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
The poet David Whyte wrote the above. The words mean a lot to me, probably would at any age, but I’m at this age, past 71, and this is what they mean to me now:
I told my sangha that I’m letting go of my leadership of Green River Zen Center as of January 2022. If a few thought they were falling off their chairs (or cushions), I can say I was already down on the floor, rattled and looking up, blinking in the light, wondering what happened. It took a while for me to decide, and I questioned it a few times later, but each time I became reconvinced that it was right.
You’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live.
I never drowned in Green River, the group is too small. But I pay deep attention to anyone who wishes to walk this path with me at his/her side (in our group it’s mostly her). Gratitude spills from my heart for the many teachers I’ve had, who took on the role in response to their vow not to let the Buddha seed be discontinued. I think we did it out of love.
I still hope to continue to teach; at the same time, the transition has begun. I say over and over that we teach what we ourselves have to learn. What is the Buddha Way about? Bernie used to say: It’s about becoming a mensch. That becoming never ends.
It used to be that, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin’s famous aphorism, I was the fox who did many things. Now I want to be more like the hedgehog, who does one thing, and that is a fuller, deeper, slower life. I’m nowhere as beautiful as the bright yellow leaves outside my office, but in a funny way, I’m more attuned to love and beauty than at any other time in the past.
When the sun is out it makes the yellows and oranges very bright, but when it’s gray the colors shimmer. That’s what I look for now: brown contours surrounding the color, the way the branches lean towards my office as though commanding: Come with us.
“Don’t you think I should prune those branches?” Jan the gardener asked me a while ago.
“No,” I said. Let them come closer and closer. I want to be intimate with this trinity: life, love, death.
I want to write more. Time and time again I sit in front of the white screen and have no idea what to write. But I’m not paralyzed as I was long ago, the years have brought faith and trust. And soon the fingers begin to type, first slowly and tentatively, then with more confidence, and after a few paragraphs a crazy, sacred energy is streaming through my body, carrying me along. Or maybe not, because I’m gone.
[T]o take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
Maybe there is a special one hand still in my future for me to hold and love, maybe not. Right now I’m aware of the many hands stretched towards me, hands of family and of old friends, dharma buddies I’ve ridden with together along some strange, heartbreaking routes. Like Ulysses, I want to egg them on: Tis not too late to seek a newer world, so push off and, sitting well in order, smite the sounding furrows. Love has taken us down so many mysterious paths, where laughter and grief converge and become one.
My non-Jewish housemate told me about her brother. He drank, had medical problems, and finally died at a young age. He loved to sing, she said, and had a special voice. He searched everywhere for venues where he could sing, often without success, but he wouldn’t give up. Once he saw an ad by a synagogue for an assistant cantor. He’d had Jewish friends, knew some of the liturgy, so he went for an interview and was offered a job. They assumed he was Jewish, of course.
He served as the assistant cantor in the synagogue for a few years, mastering the Hebrew prayers and the old melodies. When the cantor retired he was hired to take his place.
“What happened to him?” I asked her.
“He was found out and had to leave,” she replied.
“How?”
“In the bathroom,” she said.
They couldn’t grasp a non-Jewish cantor leading Jewish prayers. Had they fully understood that God is love, maybe they would have kept him on.
you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
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