speaking

"Drawing on my fine command of the language,

I said nothing."


--Robert Benchley

Relatedness

There were so many bits of wisdom in Sharon Salzberg's book The Kindness Handbook - a practical companion. My previous post on "neutral" was inspired in part by this book. Before I take it back to the library I wanted to post one more quote.

"When we send a neutral person lovingkindness, we are consciously changing a pattern of overlooking them, or talking around them, to one of paying attention to them. The experiment in attention we are making through these benevolent wishes asks of us whether we can practice 'loving thy neighbor as thyself' when we don't know the facts about someone's dependent, elderly parent, or at risk teenager, and so our heartstrings have not been tugged.

When we think of our neutral person, we haven't learned the story of their suspicious mole or empty evenings. We have no knowledge of their inspiring triumphs or their admirable philanthropy, and so we are not in awe of them. We aren't seeing their tension after a disappointing job interview, or their sadness after their lover leaves. We practice wishing them well anyway, not knowing any of this, but simply because they exist, and because we do know the beauty, the sorrow, the poignancy, and the sheer unalterable insecurity of existence that we all share.

Paying attention this way, we learn that even when we don't especially know or like someone, we are nonetheless in relationship to them. We come to realize that the relatedness is in itself like a vibrant, changing, living entity. We discover the gift of caring, of tending to this force of life that exists between us, and we are immeasurably enriched by that."

Greatness

A woman awake — a woman with a fierce and awesome commitment — is a fearsome confrontation to our mediocrity and casualness. Most of us, myself included, would rather defend ourselves against our own potential greatness, because we know the sacrifices that living such greatness would require.
— Regina Sara Ryan in The Woman Awake

To Practice This Thought: Identify the sacrifices you would have to make if you stepped into your own greatness.

I came across this quote the other day. It really struck me deeply. I don't think it has to be just about women, of course. I think the word that stands out most for me is "casualness". It says to me that we can be offhand about our gifts. We might even recognize them as gifts but can't quite bother to expend the energy to cultivate them or offer them up to a world in need of gifting.

Charter for Compassion

Fire

I grew up with the threat of fire blossoming in the night, rather than tornadoes or hurricanes.


I never lived up close enough to the dry chapparal of the foothills to be threatened but fire still filled my childhood dreams from time to time.

Recently the Tea Fire destroyed the homes of many in Santa Barbara including the home of my teacher Erich Schiffmann's brother Karl. Karl has written movingly about his experience.


Wildfires have always felt alive to me, like an animal stalking the hills. They are given names. Not the human names that hurricanes are given but names that tell of their birthplace. The fires slither and climb through the canyons and mountain tops in stark contrast to the dark night sky and the blackness of the mountains. You are at once amazed by the beauty of the flames and fearful of the danger and destructiveness. There is always wind, that blows hot and dry from the high desert to push the fires down toward the sea.

Here's something I wrote years ago when another fire, the Sycamore Canyon fire of 1977, scorched the hills that surrounded my home town.

through an ashen haze
the moon has risen
full and flushed
and cannot cool the scene.

a crimson corona traces the ridge
etching the canyons
with ribbons of orange
flaring and sighing
in this wind.

my back against the seawall
i seek relief
from this fevered heat.

salt smelling shore breezes
have fled
in the face of this
fire-baiting wind
that sucks the air dry
and curls the waves
back on themselves
before they can cool me.

i watch the flames
consume the blackness.

daylight will expose
the fired foothills,
chapparal
resin-boiled and seed burst.

but now

in the darkness
i face the night beast
of my child dreams
come to visit once again
and steal my sleep
with fear of being devoured
by its subtle rage.

More on neutral...

From my friend Daron's blog...

From Mary Gordon’s prayers for the un-prayed for: "For those whose work is invisible; for those who paint the undersides of boats; makers of ornamental drains on roofs too high to be seen; for cobblers who labor over inner soles; for seamstresses who stitch the wrong sides of lining; for scholars whose research leads to no obvious discovery. Grant them perseverance for the sake of your love, which is humble, invisible, and heedless of reward."

Neutral

I’ve been attracted to neutral lately…not so much neutral colors….I just painted a wall in my kitchen a warm spicy pumpkin color and my yoga room a rich green called “asparagus”….but neutral impressions. I’ve tried to…what is it…slow down? Pay closer attention?

What first got me thinking about neutral was a discussion on Erich Schiffmann’s online community board about introversion. The discussion tried to take a turn toward value judgment on introversion vs. extroversion but that was never the point. The pondering was really about do we introverts need to work against type to be offering up something to society? I’ll leave you to ponder that on your own.

Next I came across Sharon Salzburg’s book “The Kindness Handbook…A Practical Companion”. In it she deconstructs the Metta (LovingKindness) Meditation practice. The gist of it is that you develop your capacity for good will by offering it to yourself, to a loved one, to someone neutral, to a difficult person, to the world at large. This is an over-simplification, but it allows me to get to the point. She had some interesting things to say about the “neutral” people in our lives. These are people we come across daily. We may know nothing or very little about them. Sharon points out that they haven’t had the opportunity to tug at our heartstrings. Yet, they deserve our good will.

I began to ponder our attraction to the pleasing and aversion to the not so pleasing or uncomfortable. “Good” or “bad” they both attract our attention. I wondered if neutral is really neutral or is it just that some people, places, things, sensations just speak so quietly that its easy to miss them in the cacophony created by YES! and NO!

For me, the laboratory where I begin to focus my experiments is my yoga mat. I need to pay attention to the big physical sensations at first to make sure my body is safe from injury, to refine alignment…but once that’s taken care of…can I reside in the quiet places of the yoga posture? Just like the person with the big voice at a party draws our attention, the big sensations draw me in, but I choose to look around, to be in the midst of the “party” but to draw near to what is quiet. I’m not sure what I’ll find here in this place. It's human nature, perhaps, to turn toward the flashy stuff…the loud, the bright, the horrible, the exciting. I’m wondering if there really is neutral. Maybe it will come down to the difference between ATTRACTION and AVERSION and attraction and aversion.