Earth, Hearth, Home

      The sky has returned to the thin egg shell of robins’ egg blue that covered the desert all summer. Though the days are warm again, the chill of this morning’s air makes it almost too hard not to connect with feelings. In the dizzying bright coolness of a new day I feel autumn and that is not such a bad feeling if one feeling is all the heat of the day, which will lay on this land like a suffocating blanket, allows.

     With a kiss I draw Movie from the back field. A change has come to her as well. Last year when my soul was soaked by the energy of the shame and the violence of the people surrounding me, which in turn expressed itself through me as the energy of pain and anger; Movie barely tolerated me. Now she is, as is my soul, is more open, coming easily when I call her with kisses. I lean on the fence in the morning light and watch her swaying, swaggering walk, a belly full of hay, hoping for more. Her movement is like the morning exercise of some wise fat Taoist master full of the meaning of life.

     I thought of my years of Buddhist practice while I watched Movie sway across the field. I was reminded of moving meditations learned in the practice of Gung Fu, Tai Chi and Qigong. I learned a style of Qigong called Wild Goose Heart. In the cool morning, as I watched Movie dance across the field, I thought about the differences I felt then as I focused too hard some days on my own enlightenment – my head feeling like it would explode at times because of the analytic chores of Buddhist Scripture, and then other days my soul soaring like a wild goose as I sat in meditation, or walked in meditation through woods and field, freed from life as text.

     I realize now the chore of those scriptures was as much about making me realize that life cannot be lived as text, that one cannot catch the wild goose in the net of the mind. Peace, enlightenment, joy has to come to one who is freed like the wild goose is free. Life not as ruled by text but as spirit freed from text. I know my Christian friends panic when my thoughts return to the Buddhism I learned and practiced for so many years. They panic because they, as good friends, fear for my soul, fear that I will be lost and burn in hell. I have no such fear.

      Last night I watched one of Kathryn’s programs with her – a gay Hispanic woman is confronted by her father verbally throwing Biblical scripture against homosexuality at her, convinced, and trying to convince her, she was going to hell. She, with even greater power threw back the Beatitudes. Powerful stuff the Beatitudes. I wondered as I watched this exchange what Christian faith would be like if we threw away the Old Testament and the Acts and the Epistles and only had left the good news that Jesus taught. In my heart I know it would look like the deeper regions of Buddhist and Taoist Practice I explored, practices of tolerance and peace and oneness with life, not finding heaven out there somewhere but finding both heaven and hell in the human heart and opting for the peace of Heaven.

     I can easily understand why so many think that Jesus must have studied in Tibet before he came to Galilee to teach. The Beatitudes are “the core” of Buddhist life practice and seem like an anomaly preached in the context of the legalism of the Judaism of Jesus’ day – or the legalism of fundamental Judaism, Christianity or Islam today. (I doubt if Jesus studied in the east, though it is historical fact that there were Buddhists teachers in the area of Judea and had been for two hundred years. We forget that the Hellenic world that followed the death of Alexander was as cosmopolitan as America is today. For those doubting such a connection I have added a link to provide some historical information.

(http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/history/hellenistic.htm)

     The Buddhism I practiced was a Buddhism infused with the teachings of what came to be called the Beatitudes. They are very much two religions walking similar paths. It is a shame that one, the Christian, is not tolerant of the other, the Buddhist. When one moves deeply into Buddhism one soon discovers the Beatitudes of Jesus and the teaching of the Siddhartha Gautama are the much the same. One eventually discovers that Buddhists believe that what Christian call Christ is in all of us, all too often a flame unlit.

     Christianity, no more so than Judaism or Islam, at least the fundamental versions which rely too heavily on the Old Testament or upon textual Scripture, is not tolerant in the main of views other than its own. These three faith walks are like three old men walking on the same road side by side refusing to acknowledge the existence of the other or of any other travelers on the road. They trap the soul, the spirit, through the regulation of the conduct of life like out of control traffic cops until life’s journey becomes an angry bitter feud about how one should walk the path. Chinese Confucianism is like that as well and I find it interesting in the “East” the two paths – the path of social behavior and the path of spiritual awakening – diverged into two parallel roads. I suspect there was good reason for that. It surely does not seem to work to create a spirit filled and tolerant life in the West when we take the legalistic ethics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and try to apply them to the spirit filled life.

     I have found that when one simply lives the the spirit filled life it creates good behavior the way that Chrysanthemums create flowers, it simply happens and one cannot force it.

     These thoughts came to me in a moment then were gone, like geese soaring across this brilliant dry sky and I was left with the knowledge that life in the chill of the morning air was more than enough. As Movie finished her dancing Tai Chi walk across the field I heard dogs barking, sounding in the distance like geese. From the front of the property the morning traffic rushed past farms, strung like pearls along the lane. Each car sounded like the soughing of a sea wave rolling in a syncopated rhythm onto a beach. All of this in a moment reminded me that each moment is its own enlightenment into heaven or hell. The choice is up to us.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours,

and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles

of the rain are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are,

no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese,

harsh and exciting – over and over announcing

your place in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

In His Service – Whatever we choose to call Him as you live there and in doing so, respecting whatever path He calls each of us to walk upon to Him.