As we let go of a search for freedom. Or liberation or immortality or whatever word is as far away as the perfect wedding or train ride and begin to understand what we actually hold as incredibly more perfect because the million happenings have been smithing it from the beginning.
It is why we practice mindfulness. Not to get anywhere, but to be.
In meditation, we remember our community. It is each other. It is our ancestors and the people who will be walking down our street long after we return to our solid place in the ground. Our community is the family of living things, and we are carried by the same current.
This is why we built the CEC. To sit with each other in that ever-flowing current. To give and receive the encouragement and feedback that lets us know both which way to grow and if we are. It makes for a much better party.
If the impenetrability of the future makes you anxious too, it’s not surprising. Hormonally, it is the exact same recipe as excitement, and biochemically, you could never tell the two apart. In the humming cylinder of a CT scanner, waiting for bad news, or about to accept the award for “artist of the year”— the same cascade. As we learn to sit with it, this profound unknowability, and understand the provocations of our overactive human mind, we come to see our nature and what we are capable of: anything.
What do I believe? Peace is our natural state, and underneath expressions of violence or anger is a deep sense of helplessness. That when we war, we do it against ourselves. That conflict comes out of ignorance and self-hatred, a mistaken understanding that somehow sees life as less magnificent and precious than it is, and greatly underestimates the abundance we are born into.
Our dominant culture in the West seems almost devoid of ceremony. If there is a ritual, it would be in unboxing an Amazon package. We gulp our coffee. I sit in Zazen, too often, not in reverence for the eternal position, but as an item to check off on a daily list of them. The connection to the eternal, the collective wisdom of our ancestors, is frayed.