WELCOMING SPRING – I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN
After some nagging resistance, spring has finally come to the Northeastern US. And with that comes a sense of renewal and joy. We feel the freedom of stepping out of our clunky winter garb. We scurry like birds building nests to clean our homes, shop online, fill the fridge with healthy options and renew our gym memberships working toward that illusive beach body. And for moments we are aligned with all that is possible and good.
But, I beg your pardon, but there is also the dread provoked by that change. Along with the roses, there is a little rain sometimes. This post is about stepping back, creating space, and accepting the entirety of our experience. “Good, bad, happy, sad” the poem goes. “all things vanish like the imprint of a bird in the sky.” The very things that excite my brain about spring also terrify me. The flower’s bloom is spectacular when we have the space to notice. Perception is a cosmic blessing in a singular moment. Yet, the flower is the result of the immense struggle as it made its way through the earth. Does the seed dream of the flower to be while it is busy fighting through the darkness? And when it does finally bloom, it opens and connects to the world around it for a brief and glorious moment. And then, before long gone. Yet, in its brief tenure, its beauty is its practical connection to the world. Bees are attracted to the flower, bears, and humans use flowers in their springtime mating rituals. We are part of a connection to life. And we are blessed by the flower in the perfect moment of our noticing. And yet, we go on to immediately worry about the next thing more important than our life, and the flower will remain and eventually wilt and die behind us. What does the flower know of its coming death? The law of Karma is not the cycle of reward and punishment that we imagine. Karma is the dynamic interplay of cause and condition within a vast and interconnected web of reality. While it is impossible to fully grasp its totality, we can nonetheless step back a bit and see things from a wider perspective. The beauty of spring also heralds the coming winter. All of life returns to darkness. Along the way, we have the opportunity to pause and see the world around us, of which, we are only a small part.
A moment of perception is divine. Its a connection to the beauty and the possibility of life. And yet, it passes and leads us back inevitably to the struggling darkness. Maybe we can pick the flowers so the moment will last? Or take pictures? Or post the pictures so everyone will share the moment with us? We can post pictures of ourselves with the flowers to prove something to ourselves and everyone else. Yet, the moment is gone before we snap the camera. All flowers will die alone. And yet, they are not alone in that. There is a saying that we are not unique, therefore we are never alone. The flowers will die and we will too. Like everything else. And this is what connects us to the grander cycle of our planet. This moment of renewal continues whether we are here to see it, sell it or keep it. We can try and document the moment, but picking the flowers only makes them die more quickly. Trungpa Rinpoche used the analogy of a flower in the forest to illustrate mindfulness and awareness as two foundational components of meditation. MIndfulness, he said, was seeing the flower. Awareness was seeing the space around the flower and deciding whether to pick the flower or not. When we recognize the flower, our mind pauses just enough to connect to a world beyond the circular discursive thinking behind which we generally hide. We are making contact. The flower is doing its job. Awareness is the space around the flower that allows us to see its beauty and our relationship to it. When we don’t have space for mindfulness we might trample over the flower in our haste. If we don’t develop awareness in our practice and our life, then we might trample all over our preption by trying to cling to the moment for our own aggrandizement. The flower will die. We will die. And, in both cases, the cycle will continue. So each time we notice the flower, we are glimpsing something larger, if we allow the space to see that.
Each moment of perception can connect us to the larger space. And when we are aware of that moment, we are invited to open to the space of life around us. We grow on our journey, one perception at a time until we turn our mind from clinging toward openness. Our reluctance to just let the flower be, or allow the moment to be, or each other be, or ourselves be, is because the moment will end. Sunlight will devolve into darkness. And we will again dissolve back to the eternal. This is so frightening to us. It’s important that we make something of ourselves. Maybe we can erect statues of ourselves and the flowers we have seen. But ensuing generations may be offended and tear the statues down. Maybe we can make statues out of sand, as the Tibetan monks do with their mandalas. They make these intricate and elaborate works of temporary art that are swept away at the end of the ceremony. In this way, the monks are pointing to something more eternal than ephemeral human statements. But, we are so frightened to let go. This causes great pain as it is not the way of our world. On our planet all things come and all things go. And to stand apart is to create friction with the movement of time and space. And so we suffer. We refuse to let go and we suffer.
Then we see a flower again. And we have an opportunity to be one with the planet. Not something more important and standing alone, but someone less important that is nonetheless part of everything.