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Summer Mayne 14 Sep 23
There’s no place like home…when home is your own gentle heart.

I tell you it has been a road. Fevers and failures pave a sunny path to quirky seekers, angel mentors, and wicked terrible witches. All of whom are my insides talking to me from the outside.

I still run into green-warty-nosed-whatsits here and there...but now I look them in the eye like a mama bear who loves her own.

Mama bear love is the best protection from the wartiest whatsits.

A wicked whatsit once told me not to let the world ruin my heart.

Ha!

It wasn’t funny at the time but that is how I learned about whatsits-ruinits and how to avoid them.

Brick by brick, the path and all its creature teachers point us to our truth and we learn that we cannot be ruined by the world.

We can be tired, confused, sad, scared, frustrated and angry, but never ruined.

Life is nothing without risk and sometimes it takes a few beats to discern a whatsit from a wonder. That process is part of the mess in the masterpiece. A little less mess is appreciated—so we sharpen our skills and stay attuned to our wisdom. “Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space, which cannot be painted, cannot be marred, cannot be ruined."
—Buddha

Buddha is clearly saying don’t be a whatsit. And I say if you must be a whatsit, move to Whatsitland until you forgive your whatsit ways and return to your own gentle heart.

“I am larger, better than I thought,

I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me,
I can repeat over to men and women
You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.”
—Walt Whitman (Song of the Open Road)

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Summer Mayne 12 Nov 22
“I could say however, despite a sense of displacement, in those dreary winter days walking home from school, that the smell of the peat bog burning from hundreds of fireplaces sent me into a dizzy spell of unsummoned and unexpected happiness, watching as the spirals of smoke lifted up into the foggy leaden skies.”
—Priya Huffman

The perfect conditions appear, and perhaps we set down our devotion to intellect long enough to allow for unsummoned and unexpected happiness to meet us where we feel displaced.

All of our unimagined, real-time emotions indicating our ability to feel and experience what we came into earth bodies to feel and experience. Can we not find a tiny joy in the grief that speaks of love? A small satisfaction in the deep concern that wants the world to suffer less? Can we not find some bit of hope in the disappointment that cannot exist without desire? Desire: the ground from which we chose our lives. Maybe we did or maybe we didn’t choose to come to earth in the first place, but aren’t we choosing to be here now? Isn’t there always at least a sliver of appreciation and possibility in any integral choice?

And what about apathy? It is said to be worse than suffering but it is not the “death before the death” that so many spiritually-minded people speak about. Apathy is an attempt at shutting our humanity off so that when unsummoned and unexpected happiness (or suffering) knocks we cannot hear—and yet the song of love continues to sing through us just the same. So even apathy is temporary and relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things.

We would do well to relax. Relax our bodies, recalling our membership to the natural world. Recalling our earth body to the earth mind. We would find great relief in the occasion of breathing together as a community; to feel into our tender connection to plants, animals, and each other. It would serve us to devote a little time to simply being here on the ground floor of desire without asking for something outside of us to change.

What a gift it would be to find out that the best thing we could do for ourselves and each other, for the entire world, is rest in peace, walk in peace, work in peace, eat in peace. A peace beyond understanding requires that we trust in something other than our intellect. It requires courage. So with all your heart, relax and find that there is room for all the ups and all the downs, all the joys and all the sorrows, and they exist not one without the other. And you exist to know them.

“Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.”
—Aldous Huxley