​​Happiness
So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take 
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

I received this fabulous poem from a friend yesterday.  Such a depth of love and passion and a full embrace with life...

Oh Death by Gina Puorro

​Death asked me to join him for dinner
so I slipped into my favorite black dress 
that I had been saving for a special occasion 
and let him walk me to our candlelit tryst.
He ordered a ribeye, extra rare
I ordered two desserts and red wine
and then I sipped 
and wondered 
why he looked so familiar 
and smelled like earth and memory.
He felt like a place both faraway 
and deep within my body
A place that whispers to me 
on the crisp autumn breeze 
along the liminal edges of dusk and dawn
somewhere between dancing
and stillness.
He looked at me 
with the endless night sky in his eyes 
and asked 
‘Did you live your life, my love?’
As I swirled my wine in its glass
I wondered If I understood the thread I wove into the greater fabric
If I loved in a way that was deep and freeing 
If I let pain and grief carve me into something more grateful 
If I made enough space to be in awe that flowers exist 
and take the time to watch the honeybees 
drink their sweet nectar
I wondered what the riddles of regret and longing 
had taught me 
and if I realized just how 
beautiful and insignificant and monstrous and small we are 
for the brief moment that we are here 
before we all melt back down
into ancestors of the land.
Death watched me lick buttercream from my fingers
As he leaned in close and said 
‘My darling, it’s time.’
So I slipped my hand into his
as he slowly walked me home.
I took a deep breath as he leaned in close 
for the long kiss goodnight
and I felt a soft laugh leave my lips 
as his mouth met mine
because I never could resist a man
with the lust for my soul in his eyes
and a kiss that makes my heart stop. 

​Honesty is reached by the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, our world, or our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are born to be afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed even by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are but one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
 
The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we want to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.
 
Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not protection; honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where we are given no choice between gain or loss.
 
– David Whyte

​Sayulita, Mexico

I am sitting on this faded red tile deck in the heart of Sayulita. The central square is only a couple of hundred feet away. A few feet from me Jennifer is sipping her morning coffee.  One could paint a picture of a relaxing vacation in an exotic spot, with the ocean nearby and great ease. It looks idyllic doesn’t it?   Reality is more complex. There is a lot of noise in the street below and around us. There is a lot of construction nearby and often a rather huge and noisy truck passes by with clouds of diesel fumes.  There are lots of motorcycles, cars and golf carts as well.  Sayulita has become a significant spring break destination and until Saturday night the music from the clubs was LOUD until 3 AM. 
 
This trip has been a teaching in acceptance and disappointment. As Ruth said so many times, “Dahlink there is always a leak in the canoe”. 
 
We have been quite sick. On our second day here both of us began to feel unwell, and it quickly became intense GI illness with vomiting and diarrhea and remarkable and profound fatigue.  As days have passed we have discovered that there is a great deal of GI illness among both visitors and locals
 
Early on I remembered an old joke: “The last time I was afraid I would live was when I had food poisoning”. I remembered this while embracing the bowl and dry heaving.  What an experience of being in a body that is out of control and is taking care of business that is!
 
Around day three we experienced some humor around the fatigue. We wanted to change the sheets. There were clean ones on a chair beside the bed. All it would take would be to get up, pull off the old ones, stretch the new bottom sheet in place on the king size bed and then lay out the top sheet. We talked about it then napped a couple of times to gather our strength. Finally we did a count down. At zero we made heroic efforts and in just a few minutes we had the bed made. Then we collapsed for more napping.  
 
While lying here and surviving the days of feeling weak, nauseated and malaise I ponder, “where is the joy in this?
 
In all these decades of meditation practice I have long known how to “turn inward, toward the pain. Make the experience of pain the primary object and observe how dukkha is created not by the pain but by the resistance to it. Let the pain become the teacher of anicca, dukkha and anatta.” 
 
I can’t imagine how life would be without this liberating strategy.  And yet….where is the joy?
 
When I got well enough to leave the house I experienced one outcome of the retreat into illness. Everywhere I looked I experienced compassion for every person.  Whether they were serving coffee in a restaurant, carrying a surfboard toward the beach, setting up to sell their wares in the plaza or carrying a load of sheetrock, I felt love and compassion for every person as they made their way through these moments. I knew that inside they were experiencing dukkha and that they were vulnerable at any moment to becoming sick as I was or worse. Hmmmm these words are woefully inadequate. What am I trying to say? Being sick had changed me. It reminded me of my utter vulnerability and of the degrees of pain and suffering that are one bacterium away. It resulted in my heart being open and kind. Also in a certain cherishing the beauty of these people, each in their own way making their way through a human lifetime. 
 
That was another touching and odd part of the refined or honed perception arising out to the suffering. It was apparent that the bodies making their way through the world were not “who” was there. Something animated and brought life to those bodies. We were/are all visitors, travelling around in our earth-suits. Mostly we believe that we are these suits and the thoughts and emotions that consume us. Even a trace of freedom from identification with the stories and sensations and perceptions of our lives is where the mystery lives. 

Robert Beatty

Watch PIMC Teacher Trainee Erin Schneider MD as she speaks of her profound experience with the death of five love ones in a short period. Also, Erin is a Hospice Doctor who worked for 12 years as a doctor in Emergency Medicine. She speaks of how her spiritual practice illuminates her work with the dying and how her work with the dying contributes to her spiritual understanding. 

This guided meditation was recorded on retreat at Menucha Retreat & Conference Center a few weeks ago. It uses the power of mindfulness and imagination to go "back in time" to your birth and through your lifetime to bring yourself love and compassion as you have always wanted it. The past exists only now, so it is possible to interact with love and compassion with our past, bringing deep love to ourselves. 

I'm looking forward to another weeklong retreat at Menucha next month beginning February 23rd: Mindfulness with Love & Compassion. I'll be guiding nine participants through meditations, Dharma instruction, 1:1 meetings, and other practices. To learn more click HERE, and check out my Retreats page for other opportunities to explore mindfulness with me.

we rise early, silently, in the darkness before dawn
each brush stroke of sound
a meditation on the smallest of life’s tasks:
making the bed
putting on clothes
glasses off, contacts in,
jacket and hat
the rain drums its fingers on the roof impatiently as we move about
but each actions requires attention
its own planting, blooming, and dying
 
we make our way to the dharma hall
the inhospitable nature of the world evident
our houses, our places of comfort
subject to its dominion
it is not cruel, nor kind
it is indifferent
it just is
 
lights in the hall now, brashly against the morning
there is coffee to be made
tea to be poured
the warmth of a mug
pleasant to the hands
 
each moment is a wreath, both solemn and joyful
laid at the altar of awareness
which is always falling, dying with each breath
then rising, born again
 
here we sit silently 
listening, noting, 
drifting and returning
there is love here, great love
the kind of love that soldiers and farmers know
the kinship of sacrifice and fertile soil
loneliness and yearning for refuge
all things converge in the now
we breathe
rising and falling
rising and falling
soon we will join the dance hall of life
the rushing stream
the crowded confusion
the delusion of separation 
but for now
we breathe together
and await the arrival of the newborn sun
 
—Glen Gaidos 

​When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without, or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all these dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is You (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within Yourself. 
 
Pere Teilhard de Chardin
Le Milieu Divin   1926-27

“Broken means: does not function as it was designed to function. A broken human is one who does not function the way humans are designed to function. When I think about my own human experience, what honest people have told me about their human experiences, and the experiences of every historical and contemporary human being I've ever studied, we all seem to function in the exact same way:

We hurt people, and we are hurt by people. We feel left out, envious, not good enough, sick, and tired. We have unrealized dreams and deep regrets. We are certain that we were meant for more and that we don't even deserve what we have. We feel ecstatic and then numb. We wish our parents had done better by us. We wish we could do better by our children. We betray and we are betrayed. We lie and we are lied to. We say good-bye to animals, to places, to people we cannot live without. We are so afraid of dying. Also: of living. We have fallen in love and out of love, and people have fallen in love and out of love with us. We wonder if what happened to us that night will mean we can never be touched again without fear. We live with rage bubbling. We are sweaty, bloated, gassy, oily. We love our children, we long for children, we do not want children. We are at war with our bodies, our minds, our souls. We are at war with one another. We wish we’d said all those things while they were still here. They're still here, and we’re still not saying those things. We know we won't. We don't understand ourselves. We don't understand why we hurt those we love. We want to be forgiven. We cannot forgive. We don't understand God. We believe. We absolutely do not believe. We are lonely. We want to be left alone. We want to belong. We want to be loved. We want to be loved. We want to be loved.

If this is our shared human experience, where did we get the idea that there is some other, better, more perfect, unbroken way to be human? Where is the human being who is functioning "correctly," against whom we are all judging our performances? Who is she? Where is she? What is her life if it is not these things?
…
If you are uncomfortable — in deep pain, angry, yearning, confused—you don't have a problem, you have a life. Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.
I will not call myself broken, flawed, or imperfect anymore…” 

Untamed by Glennon Doyle (Page 92)