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Nearly all the water was gone from the creek.  The large stones and pebbles in the creek bed, the skeletal remains of the sinewy current, were still moist.  They paved a hidden way through the trees, hemmed by walls of dark earth.

I stepped carefully, rounding each curve, always thinking it would be impossible to go further.  I found a small pool of water, only inches deep, cradling a commune of tiny black carp.  Their known universe had shrunk to the size of a tide pool.  One or two were golden orange.  One in particular was the size of my hand and a gleaming tangerine.  She hovered under a rock and, once in awhile, glided out into the open to watch her dainty comrades darting from stone to stone like they were dodging bullets.  Fish in a barrel.

Just beyond the event horizon of their shallow village, I spotted a dead fish.  She’d been trapped in a nook when the water level was dropping.  “If the water level falls any lower,” my friend said, “these fish will die, too.”

The next day, Tangerine was dead.  She must have needed more oxygen.

We’d been talking about generosity when we found the puddle.  I related an old fantasy of a world in which love abounds, and no one is left out.  Everyone frolicking in fields of flowers, dancing, singing, kissing, and skinny dipping in the river.

In such a world, I argued, generosity would flow easily, because the abundance would make the spirit of taking unnecessary.  Without a spirit of taking, giving would not feel like having something stolen.  The sense of poverty is what drives grasping and scares away generosity.

My friend pointed out that many people had tried to create the world I described, but it never worked.

They get scared, I thought.

As we sat on a rock waiting for another glimpse of Tangerine’s sequin glow, I offered an analogy.  You’ve been working a dead-end job for years, and one day you feel the call of passion.  You want to go out into the world and make a real difference.  You want to see the world change, so you quit your job and leap into the unknown with nothing but your passion and faith.

Soon, you’re faced with your own mortality, the vulnerability and transience of your small self, and you have a choice.  Continue forward, devoted to the greater love compelling your leap of faith, or retreat to the safety and security of a steady paycheck.

For those who retreat, the decision seems smart, and the movement into passion seems foolish and precarious in retrospect.  For those who continue, the world is changed.

For those who retreat, the world is scary, a place where poverty always looms around the corner.  The edges of the known universe shrink daily.  Abundance evaporates.

Those who continue find the inner wellspring.

We want to see the inner wellspring, to see the abundance, before we leap, but it’s only in the leaping that we develop the eyesight with which to see it there.  It’s only in the leaping that the heart opens wide enough to feel its own true wealth.

We sat in meditation.  I opened out into the space around me.  I listened to the rocks and the trees.  My mind became still.  After a long while, I thought, “I feel the Buddha nature of the trees and stones, but what about my friend sitting beside me?  Why am I leaving him out?  Where is his Buddha nature?”  I felt out into the space containing his form, and just at that moment, an acorn smacked my friend in the head.

I took my two boys to the beach, and we were on our way back to the car to retrieve some sunscreen. My six year old began to run ahead of my three year old. My three year old wanted to be first, so he started crying. He was crying and running to catch up, and running and crying. All the while, my six year old was laughing hysterically and running faster to stay ahead.

Hearing him laugh at his sobbing younger brother, I was very angry. When I caught up with him, I said firmly, “Remember to be kind!” Knowing how he valued the notion of love, I said, “I know you know all about love, so remember to be loving.”

He said, “I know all about love, but I don’t know how to love. I don’t know how to act loving.”

I was touched by his sincerity, and I empathized completely. Is this not the problem we all face when we set out to be more loving?

I said, “Well… don’t laugh when someone else is crying.” It was all I could come up with right then, and perhaps it was enough, but I think the most important thing my son did was to simply want to act with love.

I suppose choosing love does not necessarily mean you know what to actually do. It means that you wish you knew.

Two hands lift silt from the bottom of the shallow river and rise to the surface.  The sun shines into the water as the silt is carried away by the current.  The hands, glowing golden against the black river bottom like a treasure, gather another layer of silt and hold it just under the surface.  Slowly, the silt disappears again.  Impermanence.

An idea for a drawing congealed in my imagination, a sequence of sketches illustrating the above scene.  The silt dissolves into the current, and in the last frame, the hands themselves dissolve into the current.  Impermanence.

I pulled out some paper and sketched two open hands.  My six year old son was watching.  When he saw the outstretched hands, he immediately insisted that I draw a giant heart in both of them.  I drew a big, red heart.  My son took the drawing and wrote in the right margin: “I am holding love.”

I left it at that.

The next day, a friend who knew nothing of my imagined river scene loaned me Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the sculptor and naturalist Andy Goldsworthy.  Andy travels to different geographical regions and builds exotic creations using only the materials he finds in nature.  Rocks, leaves, even ice.

Soon, his creations dissolve back into the environment from which they came.  Stones collapse.  Twigs are scattered by the wind.  Ice melts.  Leaves and flower petals are carried away by ocean tides and river currents.

Yet, despite the transience of his creations, Andy reveals a deep continuity.  After building a large cone of stacked stones on the seashore, he said:

“The sea came in and the cone just disappeared and then was gone, but it was still there.  A work that I had only just finished making, so my contact with the stone was still very, very strong, so I was with it down there but I still couldn’t see it.

What I have touched on this… this… this time, is I haven’t simply made this piece to be destroyed by the sea.  The work has been given to the sea as a gift, and the sea has taken the work and made more of it than I could have ever hoped for.

And I think that if I can see in that ways of understanding those things that happen to us in life, that changes our lives, that causes upheaval and shock… [rubs chin thoughtfully]”

Impermanence does not mean giving up on our efforts to create something lasting.  Even if we build our house on the sand, if we build it with love as a gift to the universe, the universe will come in, like the sea, and make more of it than we could have ever hoped for.

In Buddhism, samsara refers to a certain way of experiencing reality that involves an endless creation of mental worlds, or mental constructs, to grapple with life so that we can find peace and fulfillment.  The process evokes suffering that ranges from chronic discontent to intense anguish, because the ultimate transience of things ensures that every mental world is punctuated with loss.

Sometimes I focus on these mental worlds and try to work out a solution, but you can’t argue with samsara.  Some things can’t be resolved on their own terms.  Like loneliness.  Loneliness is an experience that knows no logical resolution.  Even when loneliness is placated, circumstances will leave us solitary once again, and this knowledge makes it impossible to imagine any truly satisfying outcome.

But outcomes are not what anyone really wants anyway.  It’s hard to break out of the habit of thinking in terms of strategies for controlling experience, because any attempt to do so is often felt as a strategy for controlling experience.  The only solution is to step outside the bounds of the problem, or to quit thinking about outcomes.

Don’t fall in love with a person.  Fall in love with the Divine.  And if someone’s form can open your eyes and heart to the Divine and awaken that light within you, that’s wonderful.  The form will change, but the light will always be there.  The only reason this might sound unsatisfying at first is because we’re accustomed to focusing on the shapes in our perception and not the awareness itself which carries the shapes.  The awareness itself is more than we think.  I mean that very literally.

Loving the Divine is a very personal process.  The whole affair is entirely between you and God, or the one consciousness, or whatever you want to call it. The reason for this is obvious when you think about it.  If you wonder about how others see things and in particular, how they see you, your mind is postulating spheres of awareness outside itself, but all awareness is one awareness.  That means that you find your true connection with the minds of others not by looking outward but by looking deeper into your own.

You’re never alone.  Even at this very moment, your consciousness contains within it the whole.  You’re carrying all the love in the cosmos inside you, as though your mind contained an interdimensional portal to all existence.  Every now and then, you wander across the event horizon and glimpse the love-light of all beings, and it feels like opening the door to your back closet and discovering the light of a million galaxies… in your closet!  You were looking up into the sky, thinking you would find it there, but the whole time it was in the closet right next to you.

So the task is to pay attention to your own consciousness as though it were the only consciousness in existence, to momentarily set aside contemplation of minds separate from your own.  A bit of solipsism produces the paradoxical effect.  You turn your eyes away from the world for a moment, give it the cold shoulder and act like it doesn’t exist, and suddenly you see all of it more clearly than ever, because only then do you realize that when you look at the world, you’re looking at you.

If your mind awakens to the Divine within you, you will have found the object of your affections and every love you ever had or will have.  They all come from that light.  They are all emanations of that light.

So don’t fall in love with anyone.  First, fall in love with the presence in your heart, and then suddenly you’ll see that everyone around you is that presence.  Then you will be in love with everyone and everything, and no circumstance will be able to rob you of it.  Forms will come and go, but you’ll never feel separated from them.  You’ll sense a continuation that you can’t explain.

Yesterday, I went on a walk through the forest.  Somehow my attachment to outcomes had dissolved completely.  I felt as though I was new, as though I’d never been born, and the present moment felt like the only thing happening.  “Nothing else is happening,” I thought, somewhat dumbstruck.  Everything looked very beautiful.  I was astounded that trees were trees and plants were plants.  I couldn’t get over the feeling of complete, wordless awe that anything was in front of me at all.  I sat on a tree stump and listened to everything.  I leaned back and saw the stem of a plant in front of my face, and it was the most vivid thing I ever saw.  I held it in my hands.  I felt as though my consciousness had just been born.  I approached the massive trunk of a tree that had fallen across the trail.  I put my hands on the thick bark.  I was agog at the fact that it was there, not there across the trail, but there in reality, there at all.  What a wonder that anything exists.  I have had this as a thought, but yesterday I experienced it directly.

I can still feel it as I’m typing.  Nothing else is happening.  This moment, everything that is in front of you right now, contains everything.  The loving play of the divine mind.

OM GAM GANAPATAYEI NAMAHA

We’re moved by extremes to call forth great love and openness, but the small and ordinary things require our hearts in just the same way.  As we’re moved to show compassion to someone starving on the streets, we can be moved to compassion for someone hungry for a conversation.  As we might open to forgive a thief in prison, we can open to forgive a friend if they say something impolite or neglect to be considerate.  For the small things, forgiveness can feel like a dismissive wave of the hand.  “Okay, I’ll overlook this,” we grumble.  The heart is not stirred, because we hold on to the small entitlements, sometimes more than we cling to the large entitlements.  When forgiving the thief, the heart is stirred.  We feel the redemption of the thief, the unconditional love of the cosmos for the thief.  We can feel this for someone over a small thing and move forward open and pulsating with love.

This is fierce love brought into ordinary life.  Movie love, like a character compelled to make a heartfelt sacrifice for the sake of another.  She sets aside her own concerns without hesitation or a second thought, because she sees another in great need.  This determination and selflessness comes easily when the need is profound and acute.  Now how to bring this same determination, this same deep heart of service, into the small things.  Keeping the dishes clean and put away, being present when you’re tired, listening, buying coffee.  Rush in with gusto, your heart ablaze, to (as the Zen proverb goes) “chop wood and carry water.”  No need is too small to love big.

“What if you let go of every bit of control and every urge that you have,” asks Adyashanti, “right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment?”  If you did, he says, you would be “a spiritually free being.”

Yet, as he describes this freedom and letting go, Adyashanti emphasizes that authenticity is even more important: “The best thing that human beings can do for themselves is to always be absolutely, totally, and completely coming from an honesty within themselves, a total internal integrity.”  A student asks if one should stop asking questions, since questions are a form of control.  Adyashanti replies that if “you stop asking questions, that would be a rotten thing to do because then you would just be controlling in the opposite direction.”

This “controlling in the opposite direction” can make it difficult to let go, but authenticity, opening honestly to one’s own urge to control, enables true surrender.

I spent a good portion of my week looking forward to the weekend, to spending time at the beach, which sounded utterly sublime.  The day arrived, and all the paradisical imagery that filled my mind approached reality.  I was so excited!  As I walked toward the beach, I imagined what I would experience.  The beauty of nature, tranquility, a connection with spirit.

Gradually, I felt myself tighten around my expectations.  I was looking for a sequence of perfect moments.  “If I don’t relax,” I thought, “I’m going to mess it up.”  I needed to let go, but instead, my instinctive strategizing continued.  The focus was my sensory experience of the world, which is sensitive to the mind and heart, and so it’s important to have your mind and heart in the right place in order to experience the joys around you.  But that knowledge was tying me up in little knots.  I was compelled to manipulate my inner state in order to engineer the perfect moment, and that, of course, is not the sort of inner state that allows joy and love to enter.

How do you receive an experience without trying to mold it into your ideal?  How do you anticipate something wonderful without trying to control it?  We seem built to approach each new moment with an attitude of control.  We want to make it into our fantasy, and yet often what fulfills us most is to open up to the moment as it is and allow it to fill us in its own way.

I have heard some say that the pinnacle of “perfect moment” engineering is the strategic use of recreational drugs.  I recently heard a story of someone who spent his life mastering that strategy only to end up confronting his profound troubles in rehab.  At the same time that I was stepping onto the beach, this person was grappling with withdrawal from chemical paradise.  In rehab, the first step is to admit one is powerless.  Instead, he described his strategies for engineering the perfect recovery, unaware that he was still approaching the world with the same attitude that got him stuck there in the first place.  In that intense state of control is so much fear.  He is terrified of what the world would be like if he were not manipulating it.

What is the world like in the raw?  Au naturale?  What do we get when we’re not exerting control?  What experiences would we have if we truly let go?  The fear is that, if we let go, pain and suffering would rush in.  We would have to face all of our deepest agonies… like the pain of drug withdrawal, the pain of losing paradise.  Perhaps there is some truth to that, but resistence to authentic experience seems to be one of the deepest agonies of all.

I was lying on the beach feeling some tightness and tension in my body, a clenching in my orientation to my experience, and I realized that I could not make the tightness go away.  The harder I tried to let go, the more I clenched.  And the paradox became clear.

I was trying to control my experience by trying to stop controlling my experience.  My tightness IS my experience, I thought.  And so, I opened up to my inability to open up.  “It’s okay,” I thought.  “The universe is here for me, and I’m surrounding by nothing but love and compassion.  I can be clenched, and that’s okay.  Today, I will feel the beauty of nature through my clenching.”

In that moment, I felt my heart open wide and pulse with the heartbeat of the earth beneath me.  I felt so much love.  The energy of the earth and the trees and water circulated through my body.  I felt blissful and embraced.  Totally at peace.  I wanted nothing more than to allow the moment and everything around me to be itself.

I entered the water and touched its surface and let the current pass through my fingers like the flow of time.  Impermanent, yes, but eternal at the same time.  This moment was engineered, I thought, but not by me.  I gazed at the sky and glistening water and said thank you.

Your mere presence in this world is your offering of love.  You can love with being instead of with doing.  The problem of how to love is only a problem when you want to know “what do I do?”  How do I give to the world?  But your very self is your gift.

Osho wrote that love is “neither easy nor difficult, just natural.”  “Love is a natural state of consciousness,” he says.  “It is not an effort… It is like breathing!  It is like your heartbeat, it is like blood circulating in your body.  Love is your very being.”

Just as you are, the world witnesses and savors you.  And in being who you are, completely, wholly, consciously, you bless existence with you.

Once you’ve been burned, it’s hard to come close to the fire.  There is light and warmth but also the danger of being badly injured or consumed.  The metaphor is very appropriate, because it captures something crucial: why something we want so dearly and enjoy so much causes fear.  Pain creates a deep groove in the mind, tracks the mind will follow again and again if we allow it.  Then, as we come closer to the possiblity of having that same experience, the body trembles, anticipating another round of pain.

Of the many strategies for coping with such fear, there is only one that cuts to the core for me.  I can tell myself that everything will work out, and I believe that, and I can try to manage each situation with greater wisdom, and that is something I value, and I can take a deep breath, and all these things ease my mind for a time, but none of them dissolve my fears the way love does.

Fear requires a closed heart, and love opens it, and when love opens the heart, fear is impossible.  Fear balloons as one’s self-focus becomes more intense, and fear also encourages a stronger self-focus, so there is a feedback loop.  You concentrate on your individual survival, your own bodily integrity, and anxiety rises and spreads like a mold.  Then, anxiety shifts attention further towards one’s own survival, and this changes how everything looks.  We start to classify things into two categories: safe and dangerous.  As our mind becomes occupied by concerns about our self and potential dangers, it’s easy to forget to love.

So I take a moment and remind myself that I’m not the only soul with fears and dreams.  I’m not the only soul who needs love and compassion and tenderness.  Shifting the focus ever so slightly from self to other, like a crack in the curtains, a ray of light pushes through, so warm and beautiful, and it opens my heart.  Individual survival ceases to matter; danger ceases to matter.  It ceases to matter, not because I no longer care for my own well being, but because the danger turns out to be an illusion, and I find well being, paradoxically, in the unconditional wish to give it.

I run into the fire.  Although it seems foolish at first, somehow the love coming out of my heart forms a mist around my body, and I don’t get burned.  Instead, the fire moves straight into my heart and becomes even more love, until I think I’m going to burst, and the beauty of it makes me weepy with gratitude.

Our fundamental need is not to find some perfect person to satisfy our heart… but for our heart to open… and to stay open, unwaveringly.  Whoever can enable that in another, what a blessing they are.  What a beautiful blessing.

So why run into the fire?  Do it out of love, the way you would rush into a burning building to save a child.  You don’t think about getting singed.  All you think about is the beautiful child inside, and nothing else matters.  In that love, courage comes unbidden.