Late Saturday afternoon, I sat in the temple listening to Tyler read a passage from a book:
You are given a chair to sit in, but instead you break it up for firewood in case you should get cold, or you use it for a torch to help you look around a corner. Forget the future. It is only a dream. Sit in the chair. Find your rest. If you forget the future, you will have no trouble with this moment - this now. Anything that disturbs you is in the future. Sit down and there is no trouble now - or now - or now - or now. Make your life a series of nows. That is how you were meant to live.
Do not make a goal of inner peace. Peace is the absence of war, the cessation of hostilities, the end of striving. You go spinning around, fighting with yourself, with others, or with life itself. If you stop the fight you will find peace. Peace is not something to achieve. You cannot fight your way to it. It is something you do. You always have a choice: to fight or be at peace.
You stop the fight when you stop acting as if you are different than you are and stop longing for what others have. You try to be someone else because you do not think you have the strength to be yourself. But you do.
Being yourself means being old when you are young, and young when you are old. It means not looking at the peak when you start to climb the mountain. Being yourself means trusting in your ability and using all the strength you have. Being yourself means not dissipating your energy on petty things. When there is striving, cleverness, and wanting, there is no peace.
Come now. Wash your face. Walk out into the garden. Sit here in your chair. Rest. Be still. While you have been in the mud, the tree and the wind have been dancing together. Look at them. How beautifully they move together. No matter what happens to them, all will be well. For they are being themselves. They are not acting like things they are not. Neither are they denying what they are. You are a wind to a tree, and a tree to a wind. Be yourself. Do not live beneath your nature and all will be well with you.1
I’m not sure if it hit me so hard because we’d just meditated and listened to the monastics chant, making me the equivalent of human putty, or if it was because I was just tired. But for whatever reason, this particular passage really landed.
As I thought more about it over the last few days, I realize it’s because I see myself in these words. I’ve written of my entanglements with old identities and the challenges I experienced shaking free of them. Letting go of things I don’t want to let go of has marked much of my time living with chronic illness. And yet the phrase “letting go” doesn’t begin to reflect the fight I made, the grasping involved.
The passage above helped me see for the first time how little peace there has been amongst all of the fighting. Fighting to hang on to things that I love, but fighting just the same. I brought the same tenacity that helped me qualify for the Boston Marathon after ten years of running marathons to this experience of chronic illness and I’m now able to see that tenacity is never what was needed. Surrender, acceptance, and presence, yes. Tenacity, perseverance, and striving, no.
Wrestling and clawing for every inch of my old life defines much of the last eight years. I see that now. All of that effort was mostly a waste - of time and of energy (energy that I have very little of), especially since how I define a good life has expanded so much since I’ve been sick. Having a fairly debilitating chronic illness helped me see systems of oppression in ways I could not before. In many ways, the sick version of me is much more liberated than the one who was well.
This weekend I spent time with two of the women I met on the trip to Sri Lanka in June, they were fellow travelers like me. Spending time with them, and others I’ve met in the “after”, helps me to stay grounded firmly in the present. While people that I’ve known for longer help me remember that I’m the same person I was before, friends who’ve only known me in the after prevent me from getting too caught up in a past that is very much in the past. Both/and. May we all be blessed with community that keeps us both rooted and looking to the sky.
In reading Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, I learned how trees communicate with each other, creating diverse ecosystems that share resources for the betterment of all. Through symbiotic bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi, trees of various species are connected, with other plants in the understory participating too. Trees share resources when they have them, take resources when they need them. It's a relationship of reciprocity.
In the midst of all of the give and take, at no point does a Douglas fir try to be anything other than a Douglas fir. It does Douglas fir things, while periodically helping paper birch when it can. It does not try to become a paper birch. It provides carbon to paper birch as a Douglas fir. I can see that I lost my knowing for a bit. I keep saying that I’m a different person from before, but that’s not true. I am starting to think of myself as one of these trees in the forest, a tree who ebbs and flows with the seasons and the wind.
Perhaps before was summer, a time of growth and abundance, a time of plentiful resources. Perhaps the after as I’ve known it so far is winter, a time of rest and contemplation (so much contemplation). The season of fall, a transitional time marking summer becoming winter, was very brief in the experience of my chronic illness. So brief that I didn’t even realize I was moving into winter. And winter has lasted so much longer than I thought possible. It’s been almost a decade of wintering.
The thing is, I love winter. It’s my favorite season. I love the dark, the cold, and the snow when we’re lucky enough to get it. What would it look like to embrace whatever time is left in this season of winter? And also, if it is winter, that means spring is coming. Spring being a time of renewal and tiny bursts of color, a season of hope and possibility.
I’ve long taken inspiration from trees. My first tattoo was a juniper tree and I later named my business after the same tree. But I’ve never thought of myself as one. I have often felt more at home among trees than I do with people and metaphors help me access understanding. So I’m going to play with the idea of thinking of myself as a tree, a tree in winter. A tree that doesn’t need to be anything else then who it already is. A tree that can support others in the forest by just being myself.
And about all of that fighting and struggle, now that I can properly see it, I’m going to work to stop battling. There has been so much wonder and delight in the after and it’s overshadowed by how I’ve resisted letting go. Truly letting go. When I feel myself reach for tenacity, I’m going to look for surrender.
Until next time,
Kim
Excerpt from Notes from the Song of Life by Tolbert McCarroll
I love this!!! Thanks. 😊