for Konda Mason           
           

Let's say that spiritual practice, by whatever means we construe it, originates in our desire for authentic connection to what is real. Let's say that we practice in order to know how best to live, how best to respond to the world—in the world.

Our desire for connection is deep and trustworthy; and the connection we hunger for, the wisdom we seek, is both a birthright and a privilege; it is both intrinsic to our nature and also remarkable and rare—particularly in this time of systemic violence, deception, and greed.

Today I saw the bluebirds in the meadow beyond the gate. They will winter here, flashes of blue in the muted colors of dry winter grass. In the evening I hear Canada Geese in a dark sky. I imagine the wetlands and lakes where they will stop on their long journey south. Every year more and more have been paved over, or drained, or poisoned. I hope the journey will be a safe one. I pray.

Today, like yesterday and tomorrow, one hundred animal and plant species will become extinct forever. Around thirty thousand every year! Their destruction is not caused by any arbitrary cataclysm, but by our disconnection from the world, the spin of our collective thoughts and actions.

Today also, like yesterday and tomorrow, countless human beings, the majority of the population on this planet, will experience poverty, starvation, slavery and dehumanization in ever more desperate forms; the direct result of policies and practices and assumptions that we ourselves condone or ignore.

In the morning, in the chaparral, among the manzanita and ribbonwood trees, the goldfinches are singing. I walk over dry ground which last spring was a carpet of wildflowers, blue and white and gold.

Be careful that your spiritual practice is not just a way to dispel the pain. My teacher said, “ Don't think the pain will lessen, it will get worse!” Perhaps the pain grows with our love.

The coyotes run with the moon in the night and I am glad to know that I not alone. I am not alone, as I walk along the river of moonlight, as I walk the road to your house, as I walk the road to your heart .

Do not hope to become someone other than yourself. Do not imagine that you will wake up one day to find that the person who was living in your skin, the person who made you so uncomfortable, has disappeared. Do not attach yourself to some belief system in order to become immune to the world's ills; or as a way for you to forget the part you might play in the world. You are more powerful than you know. Do not avoid the risk of disappointment. As Joseph Brodsky said, “Disappointment makes you a better poet,” which means, disappointment opens the door. The same is true of grief, and rage, and love. Just be there!

In winter the ravens flock. All day they fly complex patterns low to the ground. They are so improbably large, and so awkward on the ground. In the air they are as graceful as eagles. People say that ravens are the spirits of ancestral shamans. I believe it. They are my friends, ever watchful. Your house sits on their land.

Strip yourself of entitlements; uncover them. Be neither rich nor poor; straight, queer, black, white or brown, young or old, gifted or bereft. Only lies can protect you from raw uncertainty. Read the history from every side. Turning your back on oppression and exploitation will not help you.

The truth is not an entitlement for you to dispel uncertainty, irony, ambiguity, complexity and contradiction, or numb the pain of living in these times. The truth is not a commodity, a concoction of palliative axioms. Yoga is not a sedative. Meditation is not a sedative. Gaza is real; Baghdad is real. Colombia, The Central African Republic, South Los Angeles, are real. The list is as long as you want. All of it is real.

The individual is a half-truth, and so is the arrogance of any religion, or religious construct, that proposes a singular resting place. Allow yourself the conceit that all living beings depend on you. To care for them, to be present, to be alive for them is what you were born for.

My friend asks: “What courage, what love, was it that led us to be born in this time of devastation? What is calling us into life, as we turn now to sustain our gaze on the beauty and bitterness of the world in these times?” She telephoned today. She told me about the depleted uranium that was used in the shells to penetrate the armor of Iraqi tanks, in '91 and in 2003. It has a half-life of four-and-a-half billion years—as long as the life expectancy of the planet, and as long as life has existed here. Tungsten is the non radioactive alternative. In fact it is even better at busting through tanks and smashing human beings into unrecognizable aggregates of flesh and fluid, but it is slightly more expensive; and does nothing to promote the nuclear industry, or solve the problem of the disposal of accumulated uranium waste, which is now spread out across Southern Iraq like so much invisible deadly manure, deadly water, dust, wind, deadly food. How many Iraqis and Americans are already sick? Children with tumors the size of their heads. GI's shipped out in secret. Veterans told they suffer from battle fatigue, or hypochondria, when they face a lifetime of illness and likely early death. She said, “We enter mythological time. Our task is to imagine that this is real, to know that this is actually happening.”

 
At midday, from my window, I look out at the oaks, grasses and wild buckwheat. We spin through the ocean of the Milky Way on earth's journey, inventing words to make sense of it. The poet says that all movement is a sign of thirst; that most speaking really says; “I am hungry to know you.” I live here with ravens and rattlesnakes, wildcats and goldfinches, and with all the beauty and promise of a city of several million humans. What more could I want? Where else would I go?

One of the great expressions of the genius of Indian thought — of human thought — is the Bodhisattva Vow. It is the promise to undertake spiritual practice not for oneself alone, but for the benefit of all living beings. It is the instinct to let go of anything that might accrue for a merely personal benefit. It is giving everything away, every imaginable benefit that spiritual practice might bring, and living with the remembrance that there is no separation between us, that we are the same person.

The owl suddenly appeared as I was walking one summer evening. It circled a few feet above my head.

. . . Your touch awakens memory, and fire, and pain, and happiness. The world is alive in me.

 
Three times it circled, and then flew into the last light of sunset.

I will let go of the world, but I remain. This is my freedom. This is my love. I am the child on the tee-shirt who says, “Not with my planet you don't!” I am Maha-Kali, I am the sword of Manjushri that cuts through any notion that we are separate. I am the poet without a name. Time beyond time. I am a bird that crosses oceans and always returns. The source, and the conclusion, the seed, the flesh, the pith, the skin.