Category Archives: reflections

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strands

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I attended a talk the other day, given by a hospital Chaplain who spoke about weaving the threads of body and spirit together.  This, he said, is the role of the Chaplain.  It struck me that when we do this we are joining together what “man tore asunder.”  Descartes, Spinoza, and all those heavy hitters of mind-body dualities are well beyond my capacity to weave together in this thread of thought but it is giving me a hint of the challenges about to face me in writing the next section of my thesis.

As I plod through the sections on burnout and spiritual well being, I feel very much like that spider in the picture.  Strands of knotted thoughts secrete out the tips of my fingers sometimes gluing them to the computer keyboard as I frantically try to keep the unrelenting winds of work and other demands from tearing it all apart.  Practice is helping.  Just this one word, just this one sentence.  It helps too that the old habits of academic writing are still lurking around the edges of my awareness.  One day, one hour, one word, one moment – and slowly I’ve come to the end of the dreaded, mind-parching “literature review.”

However, I’ve actually learned some things, acquired some insights to the nature of burnout and the corrosive action of being in organizations that cannot live their mission statements or manifest their values.  That, it turns out, is the realization that precipitates the exhaustion and cynicism we associate with burnout.  Interesting, isn’t it?  An incongruence in values that leads to a physical depletion and the arising of the judgmental mind. And yet, for so long we’ve focused on the physical nature of “work-related” depletion, missing the crucial role of the heart/mind which says, “This, this is not right.”

Is this what faced Siddhartha?  Raised in a life sheltered from the reality of poverty, illness, and death, a royal corporation that enjoyed an ease not available to those outside the palace walls, how did he meet the incongruence between his unquestioned values and what he witnessed on that fateful ride outside?  Was his disillusion and release from the trance of privilege a manifestation of this clash of values?  Did he Occupy Kapilavastu?  Methinks he did – and more!

The mythology of his intense emotional reaction after seeing illness, aging, and death suggests he felt the weariness of unrelenting hedonism and the cynicism of the worth of the path he tread.  I think he felt the rift in a place beyond the simple mind/body fracture point but it would be years before he would experience it.  It was only after determined rejection of the body which brought him to the brink of death that he wove together the threads of body and spirit, heart and mind.  It would take years and many teachers before he would know deep in his being that the most dangerous gap is between his wisdom and his choices.

If the Buddha’s life is an exemplar of ours, there are questions raised from his direct experience of incongruence that are worth asking.  Is this where you are – this place where the threads have been torn from your fingers, spun but not anchored?  Is this where you see most vividly the vastness of the canyon between what you believe in and what you are living?   Is this where you can feel the futility of continuing to feed the delusion that your victimhood is your privilege?

What now?

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a little bit karma, a whole lot dharma

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Karma starts with a little face in window.  It sits there day after day, looking in.  Not longingly. That’s a projection of what I’d likely feel if I sat on the other side of bug mesh and glass.  But it’s a cat, so I feel free to project a modicum of manipulative abilities into its intention.  At the time, we had three cats in the house and had made a pact that soon we would be a feline-free zone.  Given the average lifespan of a cat, it was a pointless pact as at least two of them are likely to out live us.  We also made a pact to honour the universal truth that not only should one never feed a stray, one never names a stray.  To name a creature is not to own it but to form a relationship with it that commands responsibility.  Unfortunately, naming a cat is pretty much a non-reciprocal command of responsibility.

Pumpkin, then, became a fixture on the porch by the kitchen door.  We learned from the neighbour that she is 11 years old and has a tendency to get pregnant a lot.  But as an older cat none of her litter survived.  I think visiting us has been a bit like collecting Air Miles or some Feline Point process because she’s not only earned ear-scratching rights but also her own food bowl – which she shares with the occasional blue jay and raccoon.  And she’s socialized a little too. But kitty karma is a tricky thing.  Well-fed and topped up with love, Pumpkin thrived – which means other things can happen that were not part of the original deal.  Meet Sprout. I’m beginning to understand a fine point of the first Bodhisattva vow: Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.  True, at one level it is very much about fostering relationship in this moment, a relationship that in itself fosters transformation.  But it is also generational.  Those ten directions – in front and behind, to the left and right, above and below – are also temporal.  That moment in which a cat became Pumpkin began a karmic accelerator to this moment when a pair of eyes stared up at me, fierce and willing to take me on (I have the scar to prove it).

Steve Hagen writes in Buddhism is not what you think:

Zen is not about arriving at some end point in the future.  In fact, there is no such thing.

The future is immediate, here.  There is no way to understand or grasp what is about to happen, now or at any time + now.  There is no way to truly know what we set in motion, except that we do.  And that kitten, about a hand span of feisty fur, is the best authority on that Truth I have.