Clear as Mud

Prema's most recent post at River's Grace stirred my thoughts and my dreams last night. Here's what I've been puzzling through.

So often I see either/or, black or white, even where all colors exist, overlap, and entwine. Prema reminds me that relationships are the practice, they are the stony path we're asked to walk. Like Christianity and Buddhism, relationships and The Learning peacefully co-exist in our hearts if we allow and accept the simple truth: Many paths. One God.

Why do we watch tv and eat junk in moments we could be practicing? Because in the daily flow, we forget who we are. Too often, I forget what truly feeds me and reach instead for what's easy and close at hand, no matter how hungry it leaves me.

One of the ideas that most affected me in Prema's post: "the one in whose glance and grace I found (or returned to) my place."

Another: "Every sunrise. . . a new beginning. . .a gesture of remembering again."

Prema expresses so beautifully the knowledge that before we had faces, before we took on these bodies and these stories, we knew our place. Our learning is not acquiring new information, it is shedding that which is not Truth. Every sunrise brings opportunities to remember.

In these lives, the ones we've chosen this time, we do not exist only in meditation caves, where teachings are clear and understandings are not challenged or polluted. No, we've chosen paths that include toddlers and husbands and sisters and editors who demand that we bring forth our understandings and live them in the light of day, out where the winds tear apart our calm and disperse it to fields of new mown grass like dandelion fluff on an April morning.

But if we stop, if we remember our place, we find that those same winds that blow the Teachings away from us also return essential truths to us. This is the cycle of destruction and creation, Shiva and Vishnu, the vibrational syllable that founds one world as it takes another apart.

Entropy, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, tells us that the moment a thing comes into existence, it begins to be destroyed. We gain an understanding, recognize the spark in someone's eye, meet ourselves in meditation and at that very nanosecond, the understanding begins to slip away. Our path is learning not to clutch at that which is always changing.

We have attracted to us the teachers we need for this learning. That is why they stir us up so vehemently. Our strong reactions to them are not deviations from the path, they are the path.

God, I hope I remember this. Again and again and again.

Thanks, P. You are a Light unto my path.