has never spoken to anyone, they are Czech, her birth tongue. He senses, without words of his own to articulate it, that this is a private moment, how she places herself into her day. The unexpected intimacy moves him deeply. Though he witnesses it again over the years, this first touch of an inner other stays with him—what it is to be with another without judgment, to enter their vulnerability, a sudden unsought intimacy that eliminates “other.” It is the intimation that the “light itself” has no boundaries.
Your Miscellaneous Way
Occupying your own skin with joy,
I watch you
listen to yourself living,
discovering each day
how much less of everything
steadies you into being.
The End of Linear Certainties
To have something to say is to be a person. But
speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is
an intensely relational act.
—Carol Gilligan cited by
Kate O’Neill in Buddhist Women on the Edge
Each day at work I encounter what Isaiah Berlin calls, with only a little melodrama, “the inflamed desires of the insufficiently regarded to count for something among the cultures of the world”—in this case the culture of working in an academic research library. There are 200 employees here. Our work is largely service. Each of us would like our work to count for something, for ourselves to count for something. Usually we do not experience either. There are many people who are lonely and afraid. We recently survived a strike by unionized support staff with all the attendant acrimony. Yet the administrators are not bad people. They are really quite ordinary. It often seems to me a case of loneliness in Herder’s sense: “To be lonely is to be among people who do not know what you mean.” However mindfully we witness our own experience, if it does not include that of others, we remain lost in it. A shade is not the whole dark. But the arrogance of our Western linearity, where we hold to the singularity of our own experience of the world, denies a deeper relativity we all sense that gives the lie to any single moral and intellectual universe.
Buddhism does not interpret, does not place values, which are necessarily conditional. To say the end of truth or morality is the beginning of nihilism is just another duality, a mere pairing of concepts. It is a way of copping out—saying nothing matters; I’m not responsible.
A person has every right to say, “So what? How about me? I’m more than this. I’m less than this. You don’t know what I am or mean.” But we all have something to say and a need to be heard, a responsibility to listen. To listen, to hear with an open heart, we have to know forgiveness, perhaps Christianity’s greatest single gift to the world, and its most ignored. In a prayer we recite regularly, the Bodhisattva’s Vow, we are admonished to be warm and compassionate toward those who would turn against us. Even if they abuse and persecute us we should see them as teachers. But the real test comes when you change the pronoun from them to us. “Even though we may be fools . . . if by chance we should turn against ourselves . . . by our own egoistic delusion and attachment.” If you can forgive yourself, “who can be ungrateful or not respectful, even to senseless things, not to speak of a man or a woman”—or ourselves. Here we find the beginnings of understanding what it means when there is nobody to forgive . . . when first we forgive ourselves.
We Forgave Each Other at an Early Age
Not the path
overgrown with dead summer grasses,
not the chilled cedar swamp
not the imperfect strategies,
not the grief,
not the world—
two old hawks
high over the darkening fields.
“What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, was not the real thing?” Tolstoy writes someplace. I’ve been asked that if this were true of me, could I forgive myself? For what? Living a lie? Coming to the place where I could face the lie has been a long journey. We are asking for something not wiser, better, or more perfect, but for something authentically real for us as human beings, real as we are real, imperfect, incomplete. This humble and humbling attitude has the effect of allowing us to revere what is.
Too Old to Unfurl the World
Step by step we taste the ground.
Step by step we taste the ground.
The sound of a name
the name of a sound.
The request of the soul
is closer
than we are to ourselves.
During the winter we sit down to breakfast half an hour before sunrise. Through the window by the table, in the grey light under the cedars, I watch juncos land on the birdfeeder’s metal roof and slide down the new powdery snow to the feeding bar. At first they seem startled, but then they do it again and again. Small winter birds sledding at breakfast. May we find each other in this experience.
The Whole Household Is Pending
Dishes rattle in the sink.
Cupboards slam and the smell of food
rises from floor to floor.
So, say, then, from the heart
that you are the perfect day
and in you dwells
the little ruined light
that does not fail.
In a direct, linear way we see desperation approaching, wordless, enveloping, inevitable. But it is not inevitable. We have a choice how to respond, unless we have given over our choice to addiction. The wisdom by which we are able to realize in ourselves the truth of a thing must not be only intellectual. It needs an element of attentive affection. One of the names for the Buddha—any Buddha—is Tathagata. It is usually translated as “thus come.” It also means, at the same time, “thus gone.” It makes no difference. At the turn of this paradox, just as we suspect that birth was the death of us, in the midst of total uncertainty, we can love.
Loathe to Leave You to Your Death
When you are no good,
when you are fodder,
when your ground is soiled,
when the precious child leaves you
without looking back,
when your truth is falsified
by terror and death,
when all doors are ashes
and all walls are deaf,
when your breath tastes like iron,
when you will never know
