Coming Home
I just came back from a journey home after six years away and it was a transformational, healing adventure. It was an opportunity to put my spiritual practices at work, accepting, allowing and being present in the midst of a flurry of activity. One of the things I noticed is that the idea that we have of who someone is, their attitudes, personality and characteristics is often stuck in the past, inflexible and fixed for all time. A decision we make about who each of our beloveds is, fits nicely into a neat and tidy box. There is no room for any spiritual evolution, growth and maturity. People are who we said they are back then and that’s the way it is. Period. End of conversation. Knowing this about my loved ones and me too allows for loving compassion and kindness, for gently updating and being in the present with an internal conversation, judgment and evaluation going on beneath the surface of our interactions.
There is a German folktale about a man whose ax was missing. He suspected that his neighbor’s son had taken it. He was a lazy boy and looked like a thief. He walked like a thief; he talked like a thief. But then one day the man found his ax while digging in the field. The next time he saw his neighbor’s son the boy was industrious and helpful, and he walked and talked like any other boy.
What happened to this man is what happens with us all too often. We act on our assumptions and judgments as if they were fact and proceed with this “truth” before us in all our interactions. We see the people and events in the world through the colored lens of our beliefs. When we can step back and look with clear vision, we see other possibilities. And in an instant our reality and our relationships are transformed.
One of the most important philosophical questions that humanity has wrestled with for centuries is Who Are We? Who am I? Are we spirit, are we flesh? What is the core of my being, the true nature of my being? Am I so shaped by my heredity, genes, DNA, and by my life experiences that I cannot change, develop and choose a new path? Is my path etched in stone and predetermined for all time or is there flexibility and freedom to choose at all times?
In Zen monasteries there are many tasks to be filled to run the order efficiently and the students are given these roles as a part of their practice of discovering wholeness. There is the cook, the gardener, the keeper of discipline, the librarian, the maintenance person, etc. The students are assigned these roles for a year or two so that they come to know themselves in that role. As the cook the student may see himself as the nurturing presence preparing the meals with great care and reverence. The keeper of discipline may be called upon to awaken the sleepy students and correct those who are lazy in their practice. The roles will then shift and the cook may now become the person who cleans the toilets and then the gardener. From being at the hub of activity, the student’s task will shift to a solitary one. And so one’s sense of self remains flexible. Thus the roles that we play remind us of the impermanence of life and that change is part of being human.
I have experienced that we do change; we can become more of the perfect being we were designed to be. As we practice holding to our vision of what is possible and focus our attention there, we can bring forth what it is that we want and who we want to be. We can be the loving force for change in the world. And we can change our perception of who the people are in our lives. We can see their words and actions from a new prospective – from the prospective of a strategy they adopted to get them through tough situations. We can give our selves and every one of our beloveds some slack, relaxing and enjoying our time together. Then truly we have come home again.
