My small act of insurrection this month is getting food stamps, which I qualify for, but is also a means of there being less government money for the insanity of the US military complex. And! Roy and I did our grocery shopping at Trader Joe's... (Brookster, in your honor I am devouring a box of Barbara's shredded oats which I'd forgotten about since HA.) Delicious nutritious Food Not bombs!
Community life is really hard. Some days I want to escape from being around everyone. When my superiority/ego/ideals rise to the surface... which is more often then I'd like... I am reminded of how a true community is not easy work. In order to create beauty in Chinatown we have to cultivate an atmosphere of contagious love (something like what must've been happening among 1st century Christians) but that love comes at a very high price-- all of us working on ourselves, building friendships where we learn to truly trust and sacrifice for each other. It requires incredible patience, and willingness to see people without holding on to my idea of them (or their motivations)-- allowing people to change not binding them to a version of their self. It requires noticing the constricting of my heart, the narrowing, enduring together, sharing (the material and immaterial things of life.) Love reaches past the tit-for-tat of reciprocity and asks for a life of dying to the self so love can be reborn over and over. How much am I actually committed to that? How invested in honesty, in learning to walk uncomfortably until the way becomes clearer am I? How willing am I to admit to failures, to take responsibility for my action, to not delegate the difficulties of communicating uneasy things off on others?
Today I went with Rick & Roy to the Buddhist Temple for Buddha's birthday. The dharma talk was thought-provoking. He talked about how difficult it is to be born in human form, but how the celebration of the birth reminds us how miraculous our own life is, that we are here to become human. There are six or seven realms in their cosmology (though its metaphorical)... something like hell, then the realm of the hungry ghosts, and animals, and titans/warriors, then humans, and heavenly... (the titans or warriors are people who by being obsessed with power are lacking full humanity or something like that) and the heavenly can also be negative in the sense of being so spirit-minded we sit in a content bliss while others suffer... but the uniqueness of being human, of a realm where is suffering and birthing-- is a beautiful thing-- the only realm where we can learn to be conscious and awakened. To often we live in the other realms, live hellishly, live as wandering, hungry ghosts, searching, live as warriors consumed with lust for power.
Rick wrote a poem that I've been dwelling on that contains these lines... "You smile at me and say: Love is the sweetest of all paths! I turn on you a stern glance and ask: how much pain are you prepared to endure? ... we would rather crucify Love than walk this world under Love's burden of pain." Many days I do not desire Love at all. To follow Jesus is more difficult than any endeavor. Recently I have been asking myself how I can survive the stories I carry... how to be faithful to the vulnerability of others-- to remain open, to keep baring my heart to the moment... when that looks like talking to a 20-yr old pregnant heroin addict about parenting, or helping an ill and drunk woman clean shit off her shoes and scrubbing the bathroom floor while she tells me how she was molested for years of her childhood, or a woman showing me the scar that runs down her neck where a jealous boyfriend cut her? Love is a tricky thing-- accompanying myself and others through the different realms.
There is a 'dharma gate' called "the intuitive tolerance of the complete incomprehensibility of all things." Yes. Yes.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
oh Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in You.
"I just wanted some change, so I wouldn't have to sell this" she says near tears, motioning to her crotch and before I can speak up she's whirled away. I had to stop and breathe for a moment because "Molly" breaks my heart. She's an artist, and mentally-ill, and childlike, and sometimes uses and is very broken by the traumas that have occurred in her life. Last week while I was trying to coax her along, she was telling herself a personal narrative in third person (interrupting herself with the waving of an American flag- she was a "military brat"), "Why didn't "Molly" get to go on vacation? My sisters did. I know they had to send me away because they didn't know how to deal with me... one day she's gonna be the first person from Chinatown whose dual-diagnosed and not on medications... red, white, and blue, red white, and blue... and a user... to graduate from college with an art degree..." she went on for awhile and then her voice breaking she said in a summary that revealed so much, "and then her family will be proud of her."
"Molly"... ugh. Somedays I do not want to open my heart fully to life where grief and beauty lay entwined in each others arms. It is too much. I often feel so raw here, agitated, sorrowful, angry, ecstatic, calm-- all my emotions nearer the surface. It isn't easy to be here, the other day after a frustrating meeting I went to Rick's office and I could feel the emotion in my quavering voice and I realized how I needed to stop and breathe. Serving others can be an illness, a monster of ego and need to do becoming more important than the individual-- then the unsexy, gross, painful agony of loving broken-selves (my self included.) There is also rage... the ghettoizing of the poor, the way Chinatown was created to distance the un-desirableness of people experiencing homelessness from downtown, the way our society can discard the elderly... it is awful.
Greg asked me the other day, "how do you pray?" and I find that lately they are mostly quietness (like meditation)- a sense of God being present with me, "dialogues with silence" I am beginning to understand that. In response to Mark recently I wrote, "I am anchored by the desire to live through my own eyes, to be witness to my own experience of the world and what it means for me to encounter God and others in this life. I think of the symbol in the womb of my woman ring-- it represents both Spirit and Encounter. I am me... its hard to articulate this but that anchors me-- to respond to my own nature and to communicate with God so that I can be my self without the distortions of my limited perspective, my sins, my insecurities, etc.) I feel held. I do not know how to say it... but I get this sense sometimes of concentrated being, of a solidity... I feel held, held by a Love that is expanding, that is leading me from the deceptions and distortions that destroy me, and it is slow, painful, devastating. This is still true, "God will break your heart." God will break your heart. And yet, there is always and yet...I think this is the feeling of salvation, of redemption, of earth's own desiring pulling inside me like a tide. The conviction that "all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Trust. Slowly it emerges, tender and yet the roots dig, dig... it is not love that rescues us but Love, maybe loving... learning how to die, learning over and over how to undress our death-styles. I have faith in this: that we survive by our small deaths; being reborn.
Fromm wrote, "The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.... all of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action... the religious task of man... is not to think right, but to act right, and to become one with the One" ... "the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of loving."
Meister Eckhart: "If therefore I am changed into God and He makes me one with Himself, then, by the living god, there is no distinction between us... Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here- but it is not to be so. God and I: we are one. By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him."
"Molly"... ugh. Somedays I do not want to open my heart fully to life where grief and beauty lay entwined in each others arms. It is too much. I often feel so raw here, agitated, sorrowful, angry, ecstatic, calm-- all my emotions nearer the surface. It isn't easy to be here, the other day after a frustrating meeting I went to Rick's office and I could feel the emotion in my quavering voice and I realized how I needed to stop and breathe. Serving others can be an illness, a monster of ego and need to do becoming more important than the individual-- then the unsexy, gross, painful agony of loving broken-selves (my self included.) There is also rage... the ghettoizing of the poor, the way Chinatown was created to distance the un-desirableness of people experiencing homelessness from downtown, the way our society can discard the elderly... it is awful.
Greg asked me the other day, "how do you pray?" and I find that lately they are mostly quietness (like meditation)- a sense of God being present with me, "dialogues with silence" I am beginning to understand that. In response to Mark recently I wrote, "I am anchored by the desire to live through my own eyes, to be witness to my own experience of the world and what it means for me to encounter God and others in this life. I think of the symbol in the womb of my woman ring-- it represents both Spirit and Encounter. I am me... its hard to articulate this but that anchors me-- to respond to my own nature and to communicate with God so that I can be my self without the distortions of my limited perspective, my sins, my insecurities, etc.) I feel held. I do not know how to say it... but I get this sense sometimes of concentrated being, of a solidity... I feel held, held by a Love that is expanding, that is leading me from the deceptions and distortions that destroy me, and it is slow, painful, devastating. This is still true, "God will break your heart." God will break your heart. And yet, there is always and yet...I think this is the feeling of salvation, of redemption, of earth's own desiring pulling inside me like a tide. The conviction that "all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Trust. Slowly it emerges, tender and yet the roots dig, dig... it is not love that rescues us but Love, maybe loving... learning how to die, learning over and over how to undress our death-styles. I have faith in this: that we survive by our small deaths; being reborn.
Fromm wrote, "The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.... all of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to the the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought, but in right action... the religious task of man... is not to think right, but to act right, and to become one with the One" ... "the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of loving."
Meister Eckhart: "If therefore I am changed into God and He makes me one with Himself, then, by the living god, there is no distinction between us... Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here- but it is not to be so. God and I: we are one. By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him."
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Community & Love
Living in community is never easy. "As long as we are on the earth the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because love is the resetting of a body of broken bones" (Merton). Chinatown is the current residency of my heart and energy, but I am also part of this interfaith community and wondering what that means in our daily living together. What practices can bind us together while strengthening our personal traditions? Lately, I have been doing zazen (seated meditation) and for now it is the most natural and nurturing ritual for my faith.
The other day Kate said to me, "People are always saying Jesus loves you. Why don't they just say I love you?" and in that way begin to embody the radical love of Jesus, instead of projecting the difficulty of loving away from the self? Love as a word has lost nearly all its meaning in our language. Love isn't simply pleasant, love is a crown of thorns. It requires the work of opening up to vulnerability (including negative emotions) and learning to face our shadow sides, to sit with the deep, deep still, to speak honestly and bravely, to remain humble. As David Foster Wallace said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
We are all unskilled, messy lovers and I am finding that living in this community is bringing to surface my own lack of understanding of what it means to love others and challenging me to struggle, to live by my own small-deaths. I am asking myself again and again, "what does it mean to love?" (to love my community on Soledad street, to love the people I live with, to love my scattered-lovers, to love God, myself, my environment.) Mm.
(Reflections on Love: "Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition.")
The other day Kate said to me, "People are always saying Jesus loves you. Why don't they just say I love you?" and in that way begin to embody the radical love of Jesus, instead of projecting the difficulty of loving away from the self? Love as a word has lost nearly all its meaning in our language. Love isn't simply pleasant, love is a crown of thorns. It requires the work of opening up to vulnerability (including negative emotions) and learning to face our shadow sides, to sit with the deep, deep still, to speak honestly and bravely, to remain humble. As David Foster Wallace said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
We are all unskilled, messy lovers and I am finding that living in this community is bringing to surface my own lack of understanding of what it means to love others and challenging me to struggle, to live by my own small-deaths. I am asking myself again and again, "what does it mean to love?" (to love my community on Soledad street, to love the people I live with, to love my scattered-lovers, to love God, myself, my environment.) Mm.
(Reflections on Love: "Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition.")
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