Tag: religion

Fear of the Dark

Posted in meditationTagged , , , , , ,

“Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

I have a clock that projects the time and temperature onto the ceiling of my bedroom so that lying in my bed I can open my eyes and when they finally focus, I can see what time it is without so much as moving a muscle. It’s a pretty silly gadget but I’ve had it for more than 10 years and since it continues to display the time, I can’t very well justify getting a new clock. But it has to be dark enough in the room to see the numbers so I was surprised this morning when I awoke at 5:24am and could see it on the ceiling. The 16-hour days of summer have passed and even though it took me a couple more minutes to adjust to that and get myself out of bed, I loved getting up in the dark, it has an extra layer of quiet.

When I was younger, my sister used to call my “Pollyanna.” Which I think was a compliment but our relationship is fraught so it’s hard to tell for sure. Whether she meant it kindly or not, she definitely was using it according the Meriam-Webster definition “a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything.” In other words, I’m a little bit sunny – or maybe a lot.

So it’s taken me a long time to appreciate my dark sides. Like how uncomfortable I am when things are edgy and pessimistic. And my inability to foresee that things just might not work out. The era of COVID has been a terrible time to be an optimist – I’ve been wrong on every prediction of when things would go back to “normal.”

Just as I’m enjoying the shorter days, I’m also learning to accept that I can be both light and dark. In fact, sunniness without some down time is exhausting. There’s very little I can do about my optimism which seems to be innate but as I’ve learned to listen to my fears, anxieties and wounds I’ve found a deeper humility by leaning into all of me. As I help my kids name their frustration, disappointment, envy and jealousy, I am finding it easier to name mine. The other day when I was feeling envious of a professional colleague who seemingly has no trouble promoting themselves, something that is very difficult for me, I named it and instantly felt more human.

When I rolled out of bed in the dark this morning, I found it more accepting of my sleepiness and more sacred in the quiet. Somehow, it’s easier to bring all of me, light and dark, to the meditation cushion when the sun hasn’t yet come out. The candles I light every morning glow brighter in the dark and I’m starting to discover that I need to accept both in order to fully see.

The Other Side

Posted in meditation, ParenthoodTagged , , , , , ,

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.” – Buddha

Last weekend I took my kids to a swimming beach in a very wealthy suburb of Seattle. It was beautiful – the grounds perfectly maintained, a recently built dock of all the latest materials so no one would get a splinter, a cabin as beautiful as you would hope for a restful lakeshore vacation for the lifeguards to use when they were off rotation and a play structure with no graffiti. It felt like an idyllic break from the signs of homelessness, addiction and lawlessness that are so evident in Seattle these days.

Within 10 minutes of peeling off our top layers and getting into the water I heard a father chastise his son, who looked about 10-years-old, “You are just a dumb kid.” And because I’ve read so much about how shame doesn’t work, especially in parenting, I felt shocked because I can’t recall hearing someone shame their kids in the six years I’ve been a parent. I’m in no way claiming that it doesn’t happen in the big city but just that I haven’t heard it.

We moved on to the play structure which was almost deserted except for two other kids. My daughter breathlessly ran over to where I was standing told me that a little boy who was about a year older than my toddler was punching my son in the stomach. The child’s mom was about 50 feet away, completely uninterested, so I walked over and the child had taken a lap around the structure and was now pushing my son. As I carried my son away from the child, I thought again how odd that was both to have kids touching each other these days and to have parents totally tuned out. These little incidents reminded me of the adage that money doesn’t solve everything.

My dear dad spent fifteen years as a senior pastor in a Presbyterian church in a very wealthy community before he retired. I remember the gist of many sermons he delivered to the very generous and lovely congregation was that quite often the problem with money is that it makes us think we don’t need faith. Whew, that at least is one problem that I don’t have. 😊

As I drove back to my middle-class neighborhood, I was thinking about our universal humanity. That I with my kids, the homeless heroin addict on the street and the wealthy patrons at the park on the other side of the lake all have hearts that ache for love, lungs that long for clean air, and backs that get tired when they carry too much. Maybe we only differ in how far we think we are from suffering. It made me remember again that there is no way to drive away from suffering but instead I just have to meet it, in me and in others, with as much faith and empathy as I can muster.