My weight today is 209 pounds.
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One of my favorite poems (and thanks to the superb dharma teacher Heather Martin for introducing it to me) is this from Hafiz:
Whereas the sage...the sage has made for himself a world so large, a consciousness so expansive that he must "duck his head when the moon is low". The vastness of his being is that large, yet he is physically no larger or smaller than any of us. We must understand that we are all sages, that if we were to realize how very vital we are, all of us would have to duck our heads when the moon is low. What the sage does with his time is not stay busy, not build cages, not worry about worthiness or the next item on his to-do list. He drops keys. Faster than the small man can build them, the sage is dropping keys to open those cages. I like to imagine that the sage has a gentle smile on his face as he drops these keys. It is not his intent to frustrate the small man, but he cannot stand to see the prisoners remain locked up.
And what of these "beautiful, rowdy prisoners"? This is our own true nature yearning to be free of all the shackles we have placed on it. These are our griefs, our joys, our misbehavior, our love, our dancing spirit, our reckless abandon, our compassion, and our pleasure. These are lusts and disappointments and angers and fears. When we are acting as the small man, we think we can keep these rowdy prisoners caged, but we can't, and the small man is constantly frustrated by their repeated escapes. He thinks of them as recidivist, while the sage knows they have never been anything but free.
Make no mistake: you are both the small man and the sage. This poem is not to be read to mean that you are a small man aspiring to be a sage or (we should be so lucky) a sage who used to be a small man. We are all both, because our fear causes us to build the cages, but our wisdom demands that we drop keys. But we can aspire to spending more time as the sage than as the small man, and using our wisdom to know when we are in the cage-building business so we can call a halt to the construction. We can laugh, smile at our futility and sit down to a nice cup of tea instead. Being a sage is not hard work; it is the manifestation of the relaxed and open mind. It is peace itself. It is nirvana.
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One of my favorite poems (and thanks to the superb dharma teacher Heather Martin for introducing it to me) is this from Hafiz:
The small manHow often are we the small man, building cages for our fears, for those we dislike, for every situation we encounter that makes us in the least uncomfortable? We even build cages for our dreams and hopes. In the process we build cages for ourselves, narrow little boxes of what we believe is possible or right. One of my favorite examples is the idea many of us have that we must always be doing something. If we don't we are being lazy or shiftless. Somehow we have come to the belief that we are not inherently worthy of sucking breath on this earth, and to justify our existence we must be busy, as if we are saying to some unseen authority figure, "See? See? I do, too, deserve to be here!" News flash: there is no such authority figure and you don't have to be doing all the time. To come to rest is one of the most profound and beautiful things we can do. To do nothing may be the most productive thing we ever do.
Builds cages for everyone
He knows,
While the sage
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the beautiful, rowdy prisoners.
Whereas the sage...the sage has made for himself a world so large, a consciousness so expansive that he must "duck his head when the moon is low". The vastness of his being is that large, yet he is physically no larger or smaller than any of us. We must understand that we are all sages, that if we were to realize how very vital we are, all of us would have to duck our heads when the moon is low. What the sage does with his time is not stay busy, not build cages, not worry about worthiness or the next item on his to-do list. He drops keys. Faster than the small man can build them, the sage is dropping keys to open those cages. I like to imagine that the sage has a gentle smile on his face as he drops these keys. It is not his intent to frustrate the small man, but he cannot stand to see the prisoners remain locked up.
And what of these "beautiful, rowdy prisoners"? This is our own true nature yearning to be free of all the shackles we have placed on it. These are our griefs, our joys, our misbehavior, our love, our dancing spirit, our reckless abandon, our compassion, and our pleasure. These are lusts and disappointments and angers and fears. When we are acting as the small man, we think we can keep these rowdy prisoners caged, but we can't, and the small man is constantly frustrated by their repeated escapes. He thinks of them as recidivist, while the sage knows they have never been anything but free.
Make no mistake: you are both the small man and the sage. This poem is not to be read to mean that you are a small man aspiring to be a sage or (we should be so lucky) a sage who used to be a small man. We are all both, because our fear causes us to build the cages, but our wisdom demands that we drop keys. But we can aspire to spending more time as the sage than as the small man, and using our wisdom to know when we are in the cage-building business so we can call a halt to the construction. We can laugh, smile at our futility and sit down to a nice cup of tea instead. Being a sage is not hard work; it is the manifestation of the relaxed and open mind. It is peace itself. It is nirvana.
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