Hope is a Choice

Recently I have been collecting images, stories and quotes that give me hope because I've come to believe that hope is a choice- something I do with intention and attention.

Somewhat akin to that Fred Rogers (1928-2003) quote from his classic children's television show
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood that aired in the United States from 1968-2001:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'

Except I'm looking for the hope, instead of looking for the helpers.

This started about a year ago when I was at an out-of-state training and I saw this sign outside the public restroom.

This was the first time I had seen any gender inclusive sign of this kind, and I was blown away with hope and gladness in my heart.

Then, on another occasion, I was at my local pharmacy looking for a greeting card, and I saw this whole new row of cards available for same-sex couples.

"Wow!" I thought, and again, a huge smile spread across my face.

Then just yesterday, I was uplifted yet again when I heard a story on NPR about a camp for girls ages 8-18 called Girls' Rock Camp Alliance.

The news story featured girls from various parts of the country (though there are camps also in other parts of the world like Buenos Aires and Tokyo) talking about how the lyrics to a 1993 song called "Rebel Girl" by a girl punk band called Bikini Kill was empowering them as young females.

Song lyrics like:

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
She's got the hottest trike in town
That girl, she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah...

When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her hips, there's  revolution
When she walks, the revolution's coming
In her kiss, I taste the revolution.

Or another news story I also heard on NPR called "A Tennessee Farm Grows A New Generation of Social Justice Activists" about another summer opportunity for teenagers and young adults called Freedom Schools--run by founder of the Children's Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman--that in part empowers Black youth to organize literacy campaigns in Black communities.

I know to some, these may seem like small glimpses of a larger picture that is much more troublesome, and that may be true.

However, it may also be true, that when you put all these hope-moments together, it can feel like something more.

So I'll close with these quotations by 20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet (1929) that I also have collected in the last year.

Perhaps you too may want to put them in your basket to find meaning in times that can feel confusing and hard, at best, in order to choose hope- again and again.

May it be so.

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors: if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.  And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience...

So you mustn't be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, and misery, and depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?

A Retreat with Lama Surya Das Part I: Arriving

At a time when more and more of us are ever more hostage to our beeping phones and our blinking machines--our agendas, in short, and the chatter and clutter of the world--a monastery represents a new kind of liberation. It fills up the spaces that information can't touch, and it speak to those parts of us that feel we cannot engage with the surfaces of the world until we have built a solid foundation from which to put those surfaces in place.

-Pico Iyer

As I carried my luggage from the parking lot into the monastery turned Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York, and then up to my second floor shared room, I was deeply reminded of the writing and speaking of Pico Iyer.

Though admittedly a bit of a fan, what I have appreciated most about this British-born Indian man who now primarily lives in Japan and made his early career off of international travel writing, is his ability to so beautifully articulate our periodic need to go inward.

On his website, picoiyerjourneys.com, he even has two different side-by-side tabs titled "outerworld" and "innerworld" right next to his "welcome," which to me demonstrates the equal value he places on both.

I share this need to go inward as well.

And I also have some people in my life, as Pico Iyer has also written about, who don't entirely "get" why an ordinary suburban working mom like me would voluntarily go into silence to spend 8 days in a non-air conditioned old monastery without access to electronics, and then spend her long days engaging in various contemplative practices from 6 in the morning until 9:30 at night.

(I even had some people offer a judgey kind of response to this retreat, sending a little mom-shame in my direction because I would not be taking my 5 year-old daughter and 10 year-old son along for the ride.)

But mostly it is more of what Mr. Iyer wrote in a 2006 article titled "The Secret Journey," about his decision to retreat to a Catholic monastery on the California coastline a few times a year:

My friends, a little concerned about my defection--how could I be turning my back on them, and on the smiling self who's telling them wild stories of North Korea and Tibet and Bolivia?--find ways to tidy up my betrayal, and say (I'm sure), 'He's gone off to find himself. He needs time to rest. He travels so much, the poor thing is in desperate need of peace and quiet. He's just taking a break...He just needs to unplug...'

What I don't tell them is that I don't go there just to catch my breath, to be away from the phone, to breathe in one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the world.  I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home.

Yes. 

Though not an experienced practitioner of contemplative retreats by any means, and yet having done a few, there is deep resonance in that last line in particular: I go there to become another self, the self that we all are if only we choose to unpack ourselves and leave ourselves at home. 

Specifically in this last retreat, which was my first with Lama Surya Das who is a Western Buddhist teacher and writer of the Tibetan lineage, I absolutely did peel away multiple layers of self (or ego) over the course of the 8 days; or perhaps I should say, multiple layers of self were peeled away from me? 

(More on that later though...)

For now, I'll just say, as I was arriving on that first day of a retreat titled: "The Natural Great Awakening: Dzogchen Center's Summer Meditation Retreat," I fairly immediately began to allow all those outer labels, that efficiently and objectively describe "me" but for certain do not define Me, to fall away which for some, including myself, can feel like a form of liberation.

Or as Mr. Iyer wrote in the same 2006 article:

I won't necessarily call this a pilgrimage, because, as [Thomas] Merton says, I'm not off to find myself; only to lose it.

I'm not off in search of anything; only--the words soon become fanciful--in pursuit of the state that is beyond searching, of being found...

You could say it's not a pilgrimage, because there's no movement involved after I step out of my car...But all the movements and journeys I have taken around the world are underwritten, at heart, by this: this is who I am when nobody is looking. This is who I'm not, because the petty, struggling, ambitious 'I' is gone. I am as still, as timeless as the plate of sea below me.

And it is all metaphor of course.

So even as I sit here writing, finding words to describe something probably not meant to be written about, and I prepare to move into the rest of my very day-to-day routines of commuting to work, seeing clients, bathing children, watering vegetables, and making lunches, I try to allow that "who I am when nobody is looking" to come forward and perhaps be with me, at least a little, as I move through my day.

Perhaps you can too.

May it be so.

Poetry 158: You Don't Have to Slay the Dragon

You Don't Have to Slay the Dragon

(In dedication, reverence and gratitude to Lama Surya Das)

I've descended down
to where the blue
dragon flies hover,
the forest deer
take their morning
sip, and
the trout gather in a
sea they forget is there.

I've come to release
my Protector;
the oh-so-loyal
guardian who has
served me so well.

Without her,
I would not have been
able to clean house
of that which
harmed me, and would
continue to,
if not for her joyous effort.

I'll admit, she does
seem somewhat reluctant
to let me go;
sweetly reminding me
of the way my favorite
Jewish auntie mothered
me in a way I didn't
know existed.

Don't let go too soon.
Don't let go too late.
Good advice I think.

But now,
the time has come.

So let me take  your
faithful body
in my lotus hands,
and most lovingly
express all the gratitude
that one can expess
for life itself.

Then, I will lay you down,
and re-ascend into the living
world, all the while,
carrying your lessons
and love in my pocket,
as I walk and breathe
in a life closer
to my own.

May peace be in your
heart dear Protector.
Know, thanks to you,
I have more
peace in mine.

With all my
love and blessings.

-Me

Poetry 157: Parenthood

Parenthood

 

I see my young
walking barefoot in the
grass.

Pulling blueberries off

the bushes out back.
Looking for already
ripened tomatoes.

In these moments

I feel that invisible,
yet fantastically tangible,
cord between us
pull tighter.

 

I know this time
is brief,
when the borders
of our suburban half
acre will keep you in.

I know the goal

is to help you grow
in skill and wisdom
before you move out
into wider circles.

 

Yet my mammal
instinct seems
so damned hardwired
to just pick you up
by the scruff,
and carry you back
through time.

 

I don’t-

of course.

Instead, I decide

to let my animal self
sit just quietly
in the shadows of
our shaded lawn.
Carefully watching
your every step.

 

Preparing to
let you go.

 

-Me