Category Archives: reflections

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perfect offerings

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You know that eternally beautiful song Anthem by Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

I don’t remember when the light began to get in.  It might have started when I realized there was no one who could save me.  Except me.  Over the years, my life became privileged: a loving spouse, a beautiful daughter, an amazing career, a home, friends (two-legged and four).  And still, the split endured keeping me from truly connecting with what was right there in front of me.  Until one day.

The horses we had were housed in a barn on the edge of a stream.  It was early Spring and the snow melt had begun.  Walking back from the barn, I felt my body stopped by an unfamiliar sound.  It took a moment before I realized it was the sound of the stream rushing through the culvert in the small ravine.  I’d walked that path every morning for ten Spring seasons and never heard it.  Slowly I looked around as if I’d come to this place for the first time in my life.  And, in effect, I had.  Everything seemed brilliant in the sunlight – the snow, the sky, the pine and spruce trees.  I slid down the slope to the stream which was wild with enthusiasm for the renewed life it had, released from the clutches of ice and cold.  Sinking into the snow and mud, I knew no one could hear this stream except me.  No one could see the sky or the trees except me.  No one could feel the chill soaking wet of the ground except me.  And I could not give this perfect moment to anyone – no matter how badly I believed it would  help them.

The crack through which the light entered was the sincere desire to prevent suffering.  Over the years, when life did not fit my belief that doing good had good outcomes (that’s the “Just World” hypothesis we tend to hold), I modified my experience so that the belief held.  Good didn’t happen for others because I wasn’t good (read: worthy) enough which only caused me to ramp up the intensity with which I tried to “do” good.  Community was also important so I fell into sangha-building as yet another means of “doing” good.  The disasters accumulated and the slope became more slippery than that Spring slide down to the stream as the perfect offerings became warped and unrecognizable.  As did I.

I had to “die” in those waking moments I mentioned yesterday, to die to these perfect offerings.  The reality of perfection is that it is never about beauty or love but rather about fear.  And only when I allowed myself to be consumed by the wolves of fear was it possible to fully experience my life.  Unfiltered.  Raw.  Broken open.

I wrote to my coach about a lovely experience this is currently unfolding in my life:  If we die in every moment, then I have died happy for several in this day.  That, in all its simplicity, is life.

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the split that isn’t

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For as long as I could remember there were two things that defined my waking moments.  The first was a disappointment that I had.  Life was intense and filled with drama much of which orbited around my parents’ adjustment to Canada.  The result was a home filled with arguments, recriminations, and unrelenting themes of powerlessness folded in with the normal stuff of being a family.  We laughed, cried, played, yelled, teased, ranted, proclaimed, and blamed.  It seemed normal but the growing hole inside me said differently.  And it was the suffocating silence from this empty space that gave rise to the disappointment each morning of having to deal with another day, another futile attempt to sew together the split between one culture and the other, one parent and the other, one way of life and another.

Very few people who show up in my office describing being burned out have had an unremarkable childhood.  Somewhere in the lineage of their experiences, there has been some form of trying and trying to adapt.  And often we do.  We find ways to meet the demands and find the resources to navigate around the obstacles.  And just as often, it takes decades of doing this before the demands outstrip the resources and we crash.  But not before we lose the wholeness of our life.

The second thing that defined my waking moments was that growing hole inside me.  There was a scene in the movie “Death Becomes Her” where the character gets shot but instead of dying she has a huge hole in the middle of her body.  The humour aside, it summed up my daily experience of “self.”  It felt as though all the efforts to be what was needed in the moment (which is different from discerning what is needed) had slowly eroded away the core of my being.  I’d say it was a teenage angst but it lasted well into adulthood and was resilient to most forms of therapy.  In fact, I think I scared off a few therapists unwittingly by talking about it.

At some point I learned that I had to safeguard who I (somehow) knew I was and who everyone else needed me to be.  In the early stages, I understood that this was just a strategy to keep the external forces from becoming chaotic.  But, just as children forget about magic, I forgot.  The two worlds seemed very separate, even disparate, and in my mind that was reality.  I served in one and tried my best to recuperate in the other.  My passions for photography, art, and writing became secret arts I practiced in the dark.  My love of reading “heady” books became something I hid between Gothic Romances and historical fiction (read: bodice rippers poorly disguised as history).

Mostly, I came to believe that there were two of me: the one who performed and one who loved.  And that split was the most dangerous of all.