Found Exhortation
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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The Fisherman and His Nets
Earlier this week, I took a wonderful class with my friend J, who is an Anusara teacher based in NYC. She started class telling a story of a fisherman. The fisherman had worked hard and long during the spring, summer, and fall and was looking forward to a rest during the winter months. He left his boat and went ashore, looking for shelter. He came upon a brightly lit house and was invited in by a friendly host. He was given a delicious meal and then brought to a beautiful bedroom with a fabulously made, soft bed with exquisitely scented linens. He got into the bed, but tossed and turned and could not sleep. Agitated by his inability to sleep, he left the house, went back to his boat, wrapped himself in his fishy-smelling nets and promptly fell sound asleep.
J interpreted the story as saying that our familiar patterns bind us and keep us from discovering and receiving true beauty and bliss. This interpretation resonated with the students; one called out in a conversation about the quantity of nets we have, that she could alphabetize hers, and we all laughed. I heard something different in the story, though perhaps it was because I had seen part of The Wizard of Oz when channel-surfing in my hotel room the night before. What I heard was that when we accept our work and our place, we find a place of true rest. When the fisherman realized that his place was on his boat — at home with his work, instead of seeking ethereal bliss — then he found peace and true rest (“there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”)
What is missing from the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, though, is that in later books, Dorothy goes back to the land of Oz, bringing her family and work (albeit that of a child) with her. She, in effect, integrates the importance of prosaic home and work life with being in a land of enchantment. In that, both interpretations of the story of the fisherman are partly true. We need not to let our old habits bind us, but we also need not to cast off work, home, and community as things that interfere with our discovering bliss. Instead, we need to find enchantment in our very being, as we live and work and relate in this world.
On the Way to Georgetown Yoga for the First Segment of a Weekend Workshop with Ross Rayburn
The theme of the Friday night session, in preparation for an active and somewhat athletic focus on healing for the remaining sessions, was making space to heal and to forgive. How timely.
On Seeing
When I paused to photograph this marker on a DC sidewalk yesterday, I wondered how many hundreds of people have walked past it–once or hundreds of times–without noticing it at all. I connected this sense of acute awareness with a conversation I had with Douglas Brooks in India, in which he said to me that he guaranteed that at that moment he was seeing more than I was seeing. He had experienced the place before, studied it extensively and intensively, and was still open to seeing. I did not take offense and none was meant. I am one who notices, but it is a given that study and experience, if one retains an openness to new understanding, maximizes the opportunity to witness.
Paul Muller-Ortega describes the expanding ability to see and understand in terms of the essential interrelationship between jnana and vijnana–book knowledge and experiential knowledge. One without the other does not permit for complete understanding. The two together, with ever-expanding and present openness is what leads to wisdom.
Thus, though I am one who tends to notice much of what is in my field of vision, I could not, on my first visit, possibly have seen as much in the immediate landscape as one who has devoted much of his life both to studying and experiencing it.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
