PART FIVE

For We Are the Ones

All that we do now must be done
in a sacred manner and in celebration.
For we are the ones we have been waiting for.

The Path

...in reality there’s nothing anyone can
give us. There’s nothing that we lack. Each
one of us is perfect and complete, lacking nothing...
But this truth must be realized by each one of us.
Great faith, great doubt, and great determination
are three essentials for that realization.
John Daidi Loori
Zen teacher

Great Doubt
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What’s the point?
Why me?
How do I get out of this?

Great Faith
I’m here for a reason
I trust that I can learn and grow
I trust that other people are worth the struggle
I know that every situation is workable

Great Determination
I’m willing to keep going
I choose to stay
I surrender to what is

Opening

In the dark time, there is a tendency to veer
toward fainting over how much is wrong or
untended in the world. Do not focus on that.
There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened
by persevering on what is outside your reach,
by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there...

We are needed, that is all we can know.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Writer

Two opposing movements determine a great deal about our capacity—either we open or close, we withdraw or step forward, we turn toward or away, we look inward or outward.

It’s very difficult to open and move beyond ourselves if the world is hostile and frightening. If we’re being attacked, misrepresented or in danger, we instinctively seek to protect ourselves. Whatever armor we’ve developed quickly wraps around us. We may hide behind harsh words and gestures, we may disappear emotionally. Anything to defend ourselves. In such moments, opening to the world feels dangerous and downright suicidal.

But armor can’t protect us for long. The more we protect ourselves, the less capacity we have. We can hunker down and develop stronger defenses, consumed by fear and aggression, but after doing this for a period of time, there won’t be much left of us. We will have cannibalized ourselves.

Opening to the world gives us strength, the will and capacity to persevere in hostile environments. But this doesn’t mean that we open ourselves foolishly, standing there like a target, accepting whatever people throw at us. This has been aptly named “idiot compassion.”

What we do open to is the information and messages we’ve shut out. We open to the people who still need us even as a few are attacking us. We open to what our work is now in the face of opposition. We open to the realization that this situation is workable. We realize that we have to open, no matter how fearful it may seem.

Fear always dissolves as we face it directly, We can be assured that things will be less fearful once we open. In the brighter light of undefendedness, we’ll be able to see the way forward.

Edge Walking

If you’re not on the edge,
you’re taking up too much room.
Bumper sticker

People who persevere walk the undulating edge between hope and fear, success and failure, praise and blame, love and anger.

This difficult path often feels razor sharp and dangerous, and it is. Scientists call it the edge of chaos. It’s the border created by the meeting of two opposing states. Neither state is desirable. In fact each must be avoided, no matter how enticing or familiar it appears. Possibility only lives on the edge.

Security is not what creates life. Safety, safe havens, guarantees of security— none of these give life its capacities. Newness, creativity, imagination—these live on the edge. So does presence.

Presence is the only way to walk the edge of chaos. We have to be as nimble and awake as a high-wire artist, sensitive to the slightest shift of wind, circumstances, emotions. We may find this high-wire exhausting at first, but there comes a time when we rejoice in our skillfulness. We learn to know this edge, to keep our balance, and even dance a bit at incalculable heights.

Walking the edge never stops being dangerous. At any moment, when we’re tired, overwhelmed, fedup, sick, we can forget where we are and get ourselves in trouble. We can lapse into despair or anger. Or we can get so caught up in our own enthusiasm and passion that we lose any sense of perspective or timing, alienate friends, and crash in an exhausted mess.

The edge is where life happens. But let’s notice where we are and not lose our balance.

Vigilance

Do not follow low practices.
Do not live carelessly.
Do not hold wrong views.
Do not prolong the suffering of the world.
Whoever moves from
carelessness to vigilance,
lights up the world
like the moon that emerges from a cloud.
The Dhammapada

Groundedness

I have no parents: I make the heavens and earth my parents.
I have no home: I make awareness my home.
I have no divine power: I make honesty my divine power.
I have no means: I make understanding my means.
I have no magic secrets: I make character my magic secret.
I have no miracles: I make right action my miracles.
I have no friends: I make my mind my friend.
I have no enemy: I make carelessness my enemy.
I have no armor: I make benevolence and righteousness my armor.
Samurai Warrior
14th century Japan

Do you know the ground you stand on? How well do you know its strengths, its pitfalls, the places that give you courage, the places where you get stuck? Do you know where to find your ground when things get bad? Do you pay it any attention when things are good?

Nobody gets through life ungrounded. But unless we know this and are conscious of the ground we stand on, we may be shocked to discover that what appeared as granite is, in fact, quicksand.

Ground has to be cultivated. We create ground by nurturing our convictions, by learning from our experience, by developing trust in ourselves and our world. These cultivation activities require hard work, as any farmer would happily warn us. We can’t let our attention lapse, we can’t just blindly push through our everyday lives and assume we’re staying grounded. We’re not—we have to take time to learn and reflect, stepping out of the fray to observe it periodically.

As much as we need to cultivate ground inside ourselves, we also need to be grounded in things beyond ourselves. This can be our faith, our love, our awareness. Whatever it is that calls us outside our narrow sense of self and invites us to participate in a world far more wondrous than any person can imagine.

Knowing our ground, and knowing it well, consciously attending to it and taking good care—this is the only way to withstand turbulence.

Even the most outrageous stream has a muddy bed that serves to keep it within bounds, enabling it to find its way to the sea.

Faith

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T. S. Eliot
Poet

The journey of perseverance begins with fire, with passion for our cause, with hope to change things.

As the journey continues, passion dissolves into weariness. The obstacles are larger than we expected. The insanity is more than we can bear. But still we travel on, one foot in front of the other.

And then there comes a point when we realize that we will not see our work bear fruit before we die. And that’s o.k. We feel content that we have planted seeds for some future harvest. That we have met good people. That we have learned many things. That we have survived this far and lived to pass on the stories.

We’re certainly not the first ones to have our dreams pushed so far into the future that we won’t live to see them. Consider Moses or Abraham or Martin Luther King. They each carried clear visions revealed to them by their God, but they also knew they would not live to see these promises fulfilled.

What led them forward was faith, not hope. Faith in the truth of their visions that came from a source beyond petty needs for satisfaction and accomplishment.

Perhaps holding true to the vision and not losing our way is enough for one lifetime.

Abandon Success

Do not depend on the hope of results...
you may have to face the fact that your work
will be apparently worthless and even achieve
no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite
to what you expect. As you get used to this idea,
you start more and more to concentrate not on the
results, but on the value, the rightness,
the truth of the work itself...
gradually you struggle less and less
for an idea and more and more for specific people...
In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships
that saves everything.
Thomas Merton
Catholic monk, writer, activist

Patience

The reward of patience is patience.
St. Augustine, born 354

Perseverance is a journey seemingly without end.

Yet it has a few destinations or rewards, one of which is patience.

It’s not that we start out patient. We don’t persevere because we are patient people.

We become patient because we have to. There is no choice––the work is endless.

Everyday we have to make a choice. Will we give up, or will we keep going?

When day after day we are willing to keep going we discover, quite to our amazement, that we have become patient.

And then we just continue on. Day after day.

Joy

In my grief I saw myself being held,
us all holding one another in this
incredible web of loving kindness.
Grief and love in the same place.
I felt as if my heart would burst with holding it all.
A Zimbabwean woman

People who experience true horror in their lives, or those who befriend them during war or natural disaster, frequently recount that joy was part of their experience. For those who haven’t been in these situations, the ability to feel joy in the midst of tragedy seems unimaginable. Perhaps they’re just putting on a good face, glossing over their terrorizing experience, or in denial or repression. We feel so badly for what they’ve suffered that we don’t let our sympathy be disturbed by the possibility that there also was human goodness in what they endured.

But joy is available in the worst, most dehumanizing situations. If we allow this fact, we can learn a great deal about our human spirits, about who we are.

Joy, like peace, resides only inside us. It is never manufactured by external circumstances. This is very good news, as external events, other people, and life in general become more harsh and difficult. But discovering what lives deep inside us, as our natural condition, requires fearless curiosity.

If we look deep into ourselves, what do we think we’ll find? Dark emotions, scary desires, endless negativity, unstoppable fear? Or do we expect we’ll discover joy? To investigate our interior, we have to trust that we’re more than a collection of very bad things. We have to have faith that, at our core, we’re essentially fine, whole, healthy. And we have to believe this about everyone, not just ourselves.

The potential for joy is always present in us but, like everything in life, that potential only becomes evident in relationship. We can’t analyze whether joy exists, or hope to discover it from a remote, isolated position. We have to be together. We have to be in service to one another to discover our essential goodness.

This is why people can discover joy even in the most horrific situations. They were together.

Fruition

Live to the point of tears.
Albert Camus

Where does all our hard work get us? What’s left when our work hasn’t shown any tangible results, when we’ve failed to achieve anything noteworthy, when we’ve been disappointed by people, leaders, friends, ideals?

A life of discipline and awareness, where we’ve exercised choice, served others as best we could, learned as much as we could bear—such a life yields a very rich harvest. The fruits of our labors are not to be found in the world, however. They’re inside us, in how we feel about self, the world, life, others.

If we rummage around inside ourselves, we might notice that there’s less fear, more curiosity. We might notice that there’s more space, that there’s room for choice, that we now contain a larger repertoire of behaviors.

We probably will notice that our heart is enlarged and that, even though it takes up a lot more space and demands more attention, it holds good things. The giant emotions of anger, grief, loss, fear, now cohabit well together. There’s enough room for all, and seldom does any one of them get out of hand. Our big hearts also produce a lot more courage. We’ve grown unafraid to open ourselves to the dilemmas of the world, and to work with them face-to-face.

Perhaps most surprising is our sense of comfort in the world. We’ve grown to feel we belong here, that life wants us here, that there are more than enough good people to be with and to struggle for.

We’ve lived fully, we’ve experienced joy, we’ve had some fun, and we’d do it all over again.

The Five Strengths

Lord,
There is a big devil called
Discouragement.
We ask you to send him away because he is bothering us.
Haitian prayer

Strong Determination

You continually reaffirm your strong longing to continue with your work.

You are pleased to wake up in the morning and pleased to go to bed at night.

Familiarization

You have developed your skillfulness.

You know what you’re doing, your work is a natural and familiarprocess.

Seed of Virtue

You have tremendous yearning to offer your work.

You do not feel that you’ve had enough of it or that you haveto do something else instead.

Reproach

You silence the inner voices of doubt, negativity, self-loathing, ego.

Aspiration

You are willing to serve any worthy cause that helps the rest of the world.

Adapted by M. Wheatley from Chögyam Trungpa
Buddhist teacher

Raven, Teach Me to Ride the Winds of Change

Perch where the wind comes at you full force.
          Let it blow you apart till your feathers fly off and
                    you look like hell.
                              Then abandon yourself.
                    The wind is not your enemy.
          Nothing in life is.

Go where wind takes you
                              higher     lower
          backwards

The wind to carry you forward will find you
          when you are ready.

                                        When you can bear it.

Margaret Wheatley

Time to Play

A busy executive was speaking to her six year old niece at the end of a particularly frustrating day. She’d spent the better part of the day trying to get a new printer installed. Nothing had worked, and she was exhausted and very frustrated.

On the phone with her young niece, she described in general terms how frustrated she was.

Her niece asked, “Did you try hard?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Did you try really, really hard?”

“Yes I did.”

“Well then,” said the six year old, “now it’s time to go out and play.”

We Knew

Well we’ve known
we’ve known
we’ve had a choice

          We chose rejoice.

Devendra Banhart
Singer/songwriter