Little Zen Teachers

In my 20's I attended an Al-Anon meeting every Friday at 4 p.m. for two years. Like clock work, I would leave work each Friday afternoon and travel to my fellowship of other men and women who were also navigating the tricky domain of a friend or family member's alcoholism. 

Those meetings in that period of my life were invaluable to me. And the lessons learned continue to help me walk through this world with greater compassion, wisdom and ease. 

One such lesson I learned from my time in "the rooms" is this: anyone can be your teacher. Anyone.  

Once I opened myself up to the possibility that each and every person I meet has the potential to teach me something, I swear, teachers were all of the sudden everywhere!

Including in my own home. Including the little guys who still stand below three feet. 

In that spirit, over the past few months I’ve been jotting down moments when my 6 year-old son has taught me little spiritual lessons just through the course of him being himself.

Here are just a few I’d like to share with you...

The Universe Says Yes

It was a hot summer evening and my son and I decided to take a drive to get some frozen yogurt.  On the way, we excitedly discussed what flavors we planned to eat and what toppings we might get.

However, when we pulled into the parking lot, we saw the whole frozen yogurt shop was dark and already closed for the night.

“Bummer,” I said out loud, and let out a sigh of frustration. Then I mused, more to myself than to my son who was sitting in the backseat, “well, sometimes I say yes, but the universe says no...”

But then my son, who so far had said nothing, spoke up:

“Yes, but sometimes we say no, and the universe says yes.  And sometimes, the universe and me say yes, but mom says no.”

In that moment, sitting there in the front seat of our SUV in my “tragedy” of not being able to have what I craved, I truly appreciated my son’s ability to make me smile with wisdom that I did not realize he already possessed.

That moment was far better than coconut frozen yogurt any day.

Letting Go

My son was standing in the doorway of our house with his hands on one wall and his feet pushed up against the other. He was trying to bend his body like a bridge to block my pathway through our small ranch house. 

I stopped in front of him and asked him to move so I could continue on my path of “extremely important” tasks and business that in the moment felt very urgent- I of course cannot remember what any of it was now...

Not remotely responding to my urgency, my son casually looked up at me and said: “what’s the magic word?” 

“Please,” I said rather rushed and curt.

“Nope, try again,” he said totally unaffected by my irritated tone.

“I don’t know, just tell me,” I said getting more frustrated.

But with nonreactive, calm, cool presence my son looked up at me and simply stated, “Mom, the password is ‘let go.”

This stopped me in my tracks as the wiser voice inside of me said,

“Pause. Slow down. Pay attention to what is happening here.”

And with just that one cue, awareness came back to me.

Acts of Kindness

It was a cool day in spring, and my son and I visited the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston with his godmother.

At the park entrance, each child who entered was given a number of pretend coins.  These coins were part of a fundraising effort for donors to see which animals the children would “vote” for at the zoo for more financial funding. Each coin was a “vote” to be dropped into the box of the animal the child liked best.

So, my son and I walked up to the display that held the pictures of the 5 or 6 animals that needed more funding, and we saw that each box had a transparent glass cover so that zoo visitors could see how many “votes” or coins each animal had received thus far.

I stood by quietly as my son took his time standing in front of each box.  He made no rush to put his coins in a box, and I thought he was looking more closely at the photographs of each animal that was posted next to the boxes.

After what seemed to be quite a long time of discernment, especially given that the whole zoo experience still awaited us, he took only one of his coins, and put it into the tiger box which was already nearly filled to the top.  Then, he took all of the rest of his coins, and put them into the animal box that had the least votes.

After doing this act of kindness, he very nonchalantly looked up at me and said, “I wanted to give that guy [he was talking about the animal that neither one of us could even identify] the most because he hasn’t gotten many votes so far.”

In that moment I realized that I had not even considered to “vote” the way my son did- to give the most funding to the most unknown specie that had the least resources.

Acceptance

It was summertime, and my son and I were on a little road trip.

We were only a little over an hour into it, and I was already starting to get restless, so I began to fidget.

First I played with my hairclip (while keeping my other hand on the steering wheel), and then I began to play with the radio.

As a turned the radio dial from station to station, all I could find were commercials.

Not getting what I wanted, when I wanted (I guess in this case it was a song that would quell my restlessness), my restlessness  then took a turn into irritation.

“Ugh!” I said aloud. “There is nothing on!”  I was saying this to myself, and did not expect a response from my son in the backseat.

However, my son, who had been calmly playing on his LeapPad in the backseat, looked up and made eye contact with me in the rearview mirror.  He then said, “mom, just deal with it.”

His statement made me pause, smile, and notice my non-acceptance of reality as it was, and how I was clearly making my suffering worse by resisting it further.

I looked back at him in the rearview mirror with appreciation as he turned his attention back to his LeapPad, and returned to his quiet attention.

Human Love & Divine Love

I recently heard a Professor of Persian & Comparative Literature named Fatemeh Keshavarz refer to human love as a metaphor for divine love. This perspective comes from her expertise in the writings of Sufi Mystics like Jalal al-Din Rumi and others. 

She said:

"To me, I think it's a statement by poets like Rumi and others like him that there isn't really a boundary between the two. It's the same thing."

The professor then went on to add  that there is another metaphor that can be helpful to understand how our human love and human relationships can in a way prepare us for our relationship with the divine or god.

Keshavarz said:

 

"There is another medieval Sufi, actually a bit later than Rumi, who says that you can't look at the sun directly, but you can look at its reflection in the water. Now, our humanly experience of love is that reflection in the water of our senses. And it's God's way of teaching us and guiding us from this to the actual looking at the sun when you have gained the ability."

 

This second metaphor of our human relationships being similar to looking at the sun through it's reflection in the water deeply resonates with me.

 

Now, if you had asked me 30 years ago, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago if I understood what Keshavarz was referring to in her above statement, I probably would have looked like a deer in the headlights because I would not only have no opinion on the subject, but neither would there be an internal response.

 

I have no memory of words like "divinity" or "god" being used in my home or anywhere else really in my childhood- perhaps with the exception of my recitation of the Girl Scout Promise.

 

As I've written before in this blog, you could easily argue my childhood and young adult experiences were remarkably secular. Not atheist. Not agnostic. Secular. God was a non-topic.

 

Interestingly though, as my own spiritual development has over-lapped with the birth of my role as a parent, now, metaphors that compare human love and divine love make perfect sense to me.  Like a truth that I've always known- I just didn't know I knew it.

 

The book shown in the photograph above was part of my journey of knowing.

 

If you haven't read it, please do.  Even if you don't have children yourself, I believe children's literature has messages that are universally appealing, and this is no exception.

 

One of the first things I loved about this book when I found it in a library book sale of used books, was it's dedication at the very beginning:

Isn't that beautiful?

And then of course, the words which follow, line by line, page by page, illustrate divine love as human love, human love as divine love.

They go as follows:

"Mama,' asked Little Bunny, 'if you had a wish,would you wish I never cried?'

'No, Little Bunny,' answered Mama, 'but it does make me sad to see you cry.'

'Would you wish I was brave all the time, and never got scared of anything?'

'No, Little Bunny,' said Mama. 'We all get scared sometimes.'

'What about when I get mad at you?' asked Little Bunny. 'Would you wish I never did that?'

'No, Little Bunny,' said Mama. 'I love  you when you are mad at me, and I love you when you are not.'

'I bet I know what you would wish,' said Little Bunny. 'You would wish I never made any mistakes.'

'No, Little Bunny,' said Mama, 'I love you no matter how many mistakes you make.'

'Even big giant mistakes?'

'Even big giant mistakes.'

'Well,' said Little Bunny, 'you probably would wish I looked different, wouldn't you?'

'No, Little Bunny,' said Mama. 'I wouldn't wish you to look any different than you do.'

Little Bunny was quiet for a moment. 'Mama, if you could make one wish about me, what would it be?'

'I would wish for you to be yourself,' said Mama, 'because I love you just the way you are."

Perhaps today we can all look out for those reflections of divine love in the waters of our relationships that we encounter in our day to day lives.  I will.

 

 

Kindred Spirits: Louisa May Alcott

“I had an early run in the woods before the dew was off the grass. The moss was like velvet, and as I ran under the arches of yellow and red leaves I sang for joy, my heart was so bright and the world so beautiful.  I stopped at the end of the walk and saw the sunshine out over the wide ‘Virginia Meadows.’

It seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond.  A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that  happy sense of nearness all my life.”

-Louisa May Alcott, 1845, author of Little Women.

The Mystery of our Minds

The more I learn about our brains and neurobiology, in my oh-so-lay-woman-way, the more I become convinced of two truths:

1.)  The human anatomy, and specifically the brain, is truly miraculous and worthy of nothing less than awe. And,
2.) We know as much about our neurobiological inner space as physicists know about outer space; which is to say, a teeny, tiny, speck of infinity. These frontiers are brand new.

I contemplate these truths in my very ordinary day-to-day life.

For example, before my husband leaves for work each morning at 6 a.m., he walks down the hall to our 6 year-old son's bedroom and gives him a kiss goodbye on the forehead.  Our son is sound asleep at the time, and never even stirs.

This morning, after doing his ritual goodbye kiss as usual, my husband asked me, "do you think he knows that I do that every morning?"

"Yes," I definitively answered. 

I added, "before I was a parent, I would have said 'no,' but now, since having multiple experiences of the children surprising me with their responses to the very subtle shifts, movements, moments that  they notice (consciously and unconsciously), I've become a believer in the mystery of the mind. 

Last Sunday I took my father-in-law for a walk in the New England woods.  My father-in-law was diagnosed this year with Alzheimer's Disease.  It is in the early stages, and he seems to be responding well to medication at this time- which is all the good news. 

But the bad news, at this stage anyway, is he no longer seems able to accrue new memories in his conscious mind.  Whether a pleasant, unpleasant or neutral experiences, the moments just do not seem to lodge into the ridges of his brain in a place where he can retrieve them when he wants to. 

Like in the "old days" when we would print out photographs of an experience we wanted to remember and put  them in a photo album, my father-in-law is not able to put anymore pictures into his album.  That function of his brain has seemed to have stopped working.

I was thinking about this new reality for him, and for our family, as we were hiking along, looking at the beautiful red, orange and yellow fall foliage.  I watched my father-in-law smiling and laughing as my son, who had joined us too, was chasing the leaves as they fell from the trees and was trying to catch them before they hit the ground, and I had the thought of the old saying, if a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there, does it make a sound?

My father-in-law was clearly experiencing joy in that moment,  and another truth I believe is the experience of joy does all kinds of good things for our brains in ways far beyond my abilities to comprehend.  But, I also wondered, was this moment being recorded into a memory for my father-in-law, somewhere no longer retrievable to him?  Is the memory now there, even if he cannot recall it?

Or, is this where collective memory comes into play? 

Mindfulness and meditation teach us, among other things, that we are interconnected.  We are not separate.  Therefore, in the very hardcore world of biological realities like Alzheimer's Disease, is there possibility for our memories (the good, the bad, and the ugly) to be held in collective consciousness, or in this case, the family albums of myself and my son?

I saw my father-in-law yesterday at my son's football game.  It had been 3 days since our near picture-perfect New England fall walk in the woods.  I know now not to say things like "do you remember?" to my father-in-law, I just follow his lead.  It seemed apparent that he had no conscious recollection of our day together, and so I did not refer to it or bring it up because lately he gets quite upset by moments of awareness that his memory is not what it used to be.

But I was left wondering, in all the mystery of the mind that is currently unknowable to us, is there any trace of our walk in the woods stored somewhere inside him? In his brain? In his body? In his cells?  Or, is it enough, that I carry the memory? And my son too.

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. As  I said, to me, it is a mystery.

Here's what I do know though.  The joy we all experienced in the moment, looking at the canopy of oaks, maples, birches, and pines, was why there are books titled The Miracle of Mindfulness that generations upon generations of people will read.