A Word to the Wise

I enjoy bumping into unexpected spiritual guidance, the kind that’s not in the curriculum. I never know when I’m going to discover a word or phrase that will sign on to be the teacher of my wandering mind for a spell, sort of like a mantra. The words then offer up their wisdom and their light with profligate generosity as if they’ve been waiting since the beginning of time to move in with me. I love when that happens but, mea culpa, I’m a serial monogamist when it comes to mantras. I have great affection for them while they’re around, but after a while, I’m outta there and tend to look up the block for a new love. They come and they go. No hard feelings.

In recent years, I’ve been making time off and on with the Hebrew word zeh as in Zeh ha-yom asah Adonai…..this is the day that God made. Zeh means this and is therefor always right in front of you and strangely compelling for a short, modest syllable.

But again I have a wandering eye. It’s possible that zeh has become somewhat threadbare from overuse. Or maybe I’m starting to treat it like an old shoe because it’s too familiar. Last week in sangha, a friend mentioned the Korean Buddhist teaching dead soon. We all laughed and I was delighted to note that it wasn’t at all a nervous laugh. It was a chuckle of recognition. To enjoy this two-word teaching, it might help if you are older, but in any case you will have to consider the English word soon. It is wonderfully indeterminate and can mean anything at any time. When, after all is soon? Tomorrow could be soon, ten years could be soon. Dead soon is a directive to come back to zeh. It is not in any way dark. It simply concentrates the mind on what Ram Dass used to tell us back in the day. Be here now. Does that sound old and tired? It’s about as worn out and commonplace as a glass of water when you’re thirsty.

Photo by Mariah Hewines on Unsplash

Now is a landscape with varied features. It is not always a meadow with wildflowers and cows grazing. Recently, mine has been scarred with potholes of confusion. This is the most challenging terrain for me. I pride myself on being decisive, but I’m willing to consider the possibility that it’s just this pride, the very first of the seven deadly sins, that’s got to go. Pride and its old buddy impatience. When I’m impatient, it’s because I think I know what’s supposed to happen and when. I’m burdened with the expectation that a clear path will reveal itself today, tomorrow. Sometimes you have to sit with discomfort and contradiction and it may take a while. It could be that before it settles, dead soon, the water will be murky, more of a mangrove swamp than a meadow. I will need to consult the heavens for direction and be satisfied with slow progress. Or maybe I need to abandon the idea of progress altogether. Progress, after all, is the new girl in human consciousness, a know-it-all who thinks the shortest distance between two points really is a straight line. She only arrived in town a few hundred years ago and immediately started bullying traditional spiral and cyclical forms of understanding, leaving us naked and afraid. Progress is a mean girl, a tyranny.

True understanding never unfolds along a straight line. Just when I thought I’d figured out that I could return to my condo in Minnesota on April 1st, a month ahead of my husband, and enter into a retreat in deep silence while I waited for the midwestern winter to loosen its grip, my son asked if I’d be willing to come even earlier to stay in his house with my seventeen year old grandson while the rest of the family traveled to Chicago. This was not the contemplative convent of the heart I had imagined. A seventeen year old boy is a blizzard of noise and yearning. But I thought of the language in Genesis, v’yehi erev, v’yehi boker, yom echad…And there was evening and there was morning, one day. The day that God made, arriving one at a time.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.