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The Sky Is Just As Big Wherever You Are

The sky was luminous and beautiful early this morning when I headed out to teach. The air was scrubbed clear by the cold front that passed through in the night, leaving behind fluffy clouds to highlight the luminousity of the sun rising.

As I enjoyed looking at the clouds and light in the sky on my walk to Union Station to catch the metro to go teach, I thought about seeing the sky in Arizona next week. When I am there, I always feel a keen delight when I look at the sky. Then I thought that the sky is just as lovely here. It is that things on the land are bigger and farther apart out west that make the sky seem bigger.

When life is easeful and we are feeling spacious, then the inner place of meditation can feel more luminous than when we are struggling through the day. But just as the sky is just as big wherever we are on the planet, the inner space of meditation is just as vast and luminous no matter what is going on in our lives. The more we remember that and the more we look, the more we will have the opportunity to be lit up from the inside.

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    Best Possible Holiday Walkabout

    I may have a nagging cough from a cold that started over a week ago, and it might not have been the ideal of a walk in the woods with a beloved, but I had the best walkabout possible today.  The air was mild, and the rain held off until mid-afternoon, leaving plenty of time to get out and appreciate the day.  Enjoying that I did not need hat or gloves, I walked for a couple of hours around the neighborhood before I went to the Sunday jam to dance.  I picked up a few things that I needed, said hi to neighbors who were also out walking, and looked at trees and clouds and invited myself to be filled with gratitude for what I have.

    I was thinking about the exhortation to have the “best possible day.”  Before I started my walk, I got an email from a friend about setting a date for lunch, and she said that she’d had the best holiday possible.  I think it was in response to my wishing her such–the best holiday possible, that is.

    I’ve long stopped exhorting people to have a happy holiday or a merry christmas because I have no idea what might be going on with them (or, I do have an idea).  I have enough friends, neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances who are facing serious challenges–illness, difficulties with work or difficulties getting work, kids stumbling to get through life, relationship complications, elder care navigations, loss of a loved one, or loneliness–that wishing a happy holiday might be kind of clueless.  And then there is the state of society and the world.

    Thus, I wish that we are able to recognize and experience what we have that is good (while working to make healthier and more life-enhancing choices/changes for the things that are not good that can be changed) and bring out the best in ourselves in navigating all of life–the best possible holiday, day, year, etc.

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    Chanting the Names/Listening to the Silence

    Krishna Das reminding his listeners the reasons he practices and offers kirtan scrolled across my Facebook feed last week with this quote:

    “My path is to be in the living Presence; We have to find a way inside us, we have to find a way to open our hearts, to quiet our minds, to let go our fears and our selfishness, our guilt and our anger and jealousy; Everything is already present in our own hearts; By repeating these Names over and over, we are moving ourselves into that place in us; the Heart in us is deeper than any emotion or psychological issues; I don’t know if there is God, I know there is Love – Unconditional Love and I know I like to be in that love, and that maybe God; all you have to do is look, and chanting remembers us to look.”

    I am in a space right now where chanting is serving me to help remember the good, despite all that is going on that doesn’t feel particularly good or hopeful.  I don’t believe in “God” as an actual being (though I can no more disprove the actuality than anyone has been able to prove it), and history certainly proves the power of the idea of such a mystical being.

    Regardless of whether the very real ideas of God(s) represents an actual being, it has been my beautiful experience–studying with Krishna Das and others over the years–that engaging in practices that turn our hearts towards love and universality helps us be sweet living in relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the ecological fabric of the whole of embodied existence.  I chant because calling out the names in their universal multiplicity is a recognition, not dissimilar to what I have found offered in the silent collective worship of Quakers, that everyone has their own individual access to and ideas of the sublime, of the divine, of what brings them to feel a fullness of love.

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