This Part of the Journey

I just passed through another week of struggle. Fortunately, I have had a companion in a book I am reading, Norman Fischer's Sailing Home. I don't want to review the book here, but from the perspective of less than half way through, I can recommend it with all my heart.

What Fisher talks about with great eloquence is the fact of our journeys, the paths we must take away from our spiritual homes and back again. This is an essential journey and cannot be skipped if we wish to have any wisdom or comfort as we face the challenges of our lives. In reading his book, I have realized that the journey I am currently on is into the realm of the dead. I know that sounds like a downer, but it's just a journey and an essential part of everyone's path. Whether we like it or not, every life encompasses the death of people, other creatures and things that have meant everything to us, have been such an essential part of our lives that we cannot let them go without experiencing a sense of dislocation, as if the world is off-kilter and makes no sense. This is the land of the dead and is one of the stops on the pathway to freedom. You can only avoid this path by not loving anything or anyone that might go away (which is just about everything, of course). To love is to sign up for loss. This is not bad news.

Fischer points to one of the central tenets of Buddhist thought, the fact that in general we humans tend to think anything "positive" that happens to us is deserved and good, and anything "negative" that happens is bad and the result of something amiss. We arbitrarily assign things to these positive and negative categories and then believe our own classifications. Poverty is bad, wealth is good. Death is bad, health is good. Ugliness is bad, beauty is good. Rain is bad, sun is good. (I saw a graffito once that read, "All weather is good weather". This has stuck with me ever since as wisdom. Although I must say that a friend I shared this with replied, "Oh, yeah?", which is more or less irrefutable). When we convince ourselves that only what we like is proper for us to experience and what we don't like is the result of something amiss, we set ourselves up for (what else?) suffering. We must go through these experiences. Unless we die in infancy, before we develop this uniquely human ability to reflect on the possibility of loss, we will lose something we love, if only our blankey. Mommy will go to the grocery store; eventually she will die. Whether the small, reversible loss of infancy or the larger, irreversible loss of maturity, loss will come. Love will die. Dogs will die. Charms and tokens of our youth that we thought would protect us forever lose their power.

The actual Dave

My son once had a zebra named Dave that he loved inordinately. Dave was brand new and a very handsome little zebra. Dave went everywhere with Mitchell. Dave was the center of his universe. One day Dave could not be found. We looked everywhere, but Dave was gone. Many tears, much consternation; grieving. The next day we found Dave under some laundry in the basket (only Mitchell himself would have put him there).  But now Mitchell would have nothing to do with Dave. Dave had abandoned him and lost his authority as a totem of safety.

This sounds like a silly/sad story of a two-year-old's mentality, but how often have we mislaid our faith in places only we could have put it? Have we not given up on beliefs because we have found them to be limited or incomplete? Did we turn our back on teachers, mentors, friends, love, places, parents because we found they were not what we thought they were, without realizing that they never were what we built them up to be but something valuable and powerful nonetheless?

So this is my journey, a journey through the "valley of the shadow of death". Yet I shall "fear no evil", to borrow a couple of phrases from Christianity. The land of the dead is not an evil place, therefore I need fear no evil there any more than I need fear evil in the midst of pleasure. Both are necessary to being human. The prospect of death (that of others and my own) is not something to be endured until we get to the other side where the good times roll. Death is to be embraced and treated with love and respect, invited in for a cup of tea, allowed to sit in the best chair and drink all our wine. We must dance on graves or we will never learn the steps to the dance of joy.