Forget Hard Work : : Play is the Light

The past few days I’ve been struggling with myself about my creative work. I’ve been working on some writing for a while now, and I’ve reached an impasse—I can’t see how to make it right, make it whole, make it complete. And so I started thinking about and longing to do “good” work, work that is a real contribution, work that (dare I say it) makes me feel “successful” (whatever that elusive term means). And so today, with all of this jumble in my mind, this craving to be more, to do something “worthwhile,” I sat down at the computer to write. I typed aimlessly, I stared at the wall, I moved to my art desk and picked up a pencil, I prayed. But nothing much came of it. I felt frustrated and annoyed. And every time I thought I had a beginning, the mean bullies inside my head came up and shouted profanities at me.

Then I remembered an idea that had sprung up in my mind a couple of days ago, while standing at the library, and had made me smile—an idea that involved drawing words (like I have been known to do) about a theme I have been thinking about a lot lately: the messiness of life. As soon as I put my pencil to the paper, everything lightened up. I felt the glee of it: doing something that feels like play to me. Ideas just came rolling out, and I quickly filled a page. No hesitation—just pure, simple, honest; exactly what I had been trying to do all morning with few results.

It’s funny how often I forget this: the magic of play. “Play” is that feeling that comes when you’re doing what you love to do and you laugh the whole time because it’s so simply, effortlessly you. It’s natural. You can spend hours trudging up hills trying to be the person you want to be, do the work you think is valuable, and get nowhere. Then other times you feel light and things just flow and happen in a matter of minutes. In the first situation, you’re trying to be somebody, you’re taking things too seriously and trying to do serious work. In the second situation, you’re just playing around and so ideas, sensing there’s an opening, come to play too.

For all the efforts to do “good” work, the truth is: the most genuine expression of what you can give/create/share/do in your life happens when you’re playing. Forget hard work. Forget putting your nose to the grindstone. We all do plenty of that, and I suppose there is a time and a place for it. Play is where the real light is. When you play, you become light. Instead of thinking of it as a frivolous waste of time (as society might have you believe), what if play is how you most deeply connect with life and give what’s most honest and true? Spend even just a few minutes every day doing that, and you can’t go wrong. You’re expanding yourself and the world.

Life is Messy

Every day when I wake up, I hope for a day filled with light. And every day I go to sleep looking back on a day that was really a mixed bag. My days are filled with Everything—one minute I’m sitting at work completely annoyed by a project that’s becoming tedious and frustrating, the next minute I’m riding my bike home and right there trotting down the path is a coyote. Thirty minutes later, the coyote just a picture in my mind, I’m at home beginning to think about what I’ll have for dinner.

This is real life. It’s nothing like the movies in my head or the movies in the theater. Sometimes it’s boring, crazy, sad, frustrating, awesome, heart-warming, painful. Sometimes I cry, laugh, scream, or sit quietly taking it all in. It’s a jumble of everything, and you never know what’s coming next. Maybe you have a general idea which direction you’re heading, but do you really know what your life will be like next year, next month, or even next week?

I find this hard to accept sometimes—I want to nail things down. I want to pin my future to a board like a moth so I can see what it looks like still, instead of always fluttering out there ahead of me, barely visible in its constant motion. I want every day to be full of light and ease and time well spent—days I can look back on and say, “yes, I really lived the life I meant to live.”

But then the wild beast of reality saunters in and dashes my plans for perfect lightness. It challenges me, pushes my buttons, and in general asks me to wake up from my fantasies of a perfect life and live what’s really happening, live in the raw truth. And the truth is: life is not any one thing—it is everything. It is messy. It is wild. It is all over the place. Some moments are easy, some are really hard. Sometimes you feel like the air, other times you feel like darkness.

In moments of understanding, I can see the richness of this. I can see how the darkness creates deep warmth in me when I look at it with kindness. And that life is just one big rollicking adventure when I let it be. But much of the time I’m just tangled up in the whole mess trying to understand which way is up and which way is down.

And maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s just the process of life to keep getting lost and found, again and again. Maybe this is the only way to understand that we can never really grasp life. We are a part of life, we are riding the waves of life. Life is sailing through us for the one little flicker of our one little life, but it’s so much bigger and wilder than us. So, of course it’s messy and unmanageable, and we can’t control it. Trying to control life is like trying to control the wind. You just can’t do it.

There is peace in this fact when you can feel it deeply. If you can’t control life, then you don’t have to even try. You can just sit back and enjoy the ride. However hard it may sound to let go of trying, I’m beginning to find that it may be harder to live your whole life trying to get control of something that’s uncontrollable. So, everyday I try and remember to pry my fingers off the steering wheel and see what happens. Sometimes my life opens up wide in front of me. Other times, I spend most of the day slowly lifting each finger, and when I’m finally hands-free, I clutch the wheel again and start the process over. This is reality. This is life. This is the big teacher. Lost and found, again and again.

Giving Thanks for Another Year of Wild Life

Hello! Hello! It’s been a while since I last posted! Over two months, which goes down in my record book as the longest I’ve ever been away from this blog since I started it back some years ago.

I’ve been taking some time to contemplate life quietly away from the internets. But today, walking home from the store (bottle of champagne in my bag), on this last day of 2012, I started thinking about all of the things I have to be thankful for from this year. And then I wanted to come and share them with you to say my thanks out into the universe and maybe spark some thankful reflections for whoever might drop by. So, here it goes . . .

~

I am thankful for another year of being alive. I do not say this lightly because more and more I am always thinking about how miraculous it is to keep breathing and keep waking up to the fact of my life. Here I am right now. Life keeps moving on.

I am thankful for my crazy, passionate, full-of-life family. Sometimes they drive me nuts, and I am thankful for that because it means that we love each other enough to keep showing up in each other’s lives and giving what we have to give, as best we can.

I am thankful for the 6+ years of dog-love my husband and I shared with our pup Lance. He died quite suddenly in October of a heart problem, and every day I am thankful to have shared my life with such a happy-go-lucky beast. Last spring when I was feeling so confused about my life, I took many long walks in the sun with him. At the time I didn’t know he wouldn’t make it to another spring. I am so thankful for that time.

I am thankful to live in a beautiful natural area. Every day I walk out into the big wide open space behind my house full of birds and plants and dogs, and sometimes even cows, and I am pulled out of my small self and reminded I’m a part of this larger world. In the winter, an enormous flock of geese takes up residence on the little lake nearby, and I love hearing their squawking and watching them come swooping in for a water landing in a big flutter.

I am thankful for the public library. It has been another year of my typical wide dabbling. I have surely checked out more than 100 books over the course of the year on topics as varied as cheesemaking, buddhism, hiking, poetry, the history of books and German language. Thank you public library for making my wide, whimsical interests and research possible FOR FREE!

I am thankful for cooking and baking and, of course eating. It’s never truly a bad day when there’s the chance to bake some chocolate chip cookies, eating cookie dough all the while, and then enjoy a warm cookie (or two) after dinner. And of course, the fact that I get to cook and eat dinner every day is what reminds me that everything is going to be OK.

I am thankful for art. It truly never goes away – even when I’m doubting the creative process and confused about where I’m going with my creative pursuits. All I have to do is stop and open a space for it, and the creative mojo comes flowing back in.

I am thankful for finding a way through the confusion about my life path that began last January. Through this confusion, I have been learning the lessons I have needed to learn for a long time. Lessons that I can feel opening me up to a wide, deep understanding that will inform the rest of my life.

I am thankful for the great possibilities of another year out in front of me. Who knows what will happen, and that is a beautiful thing.

Happy, Happy New Year to you!

The One Practice

I consume a lot of information about how to live a better/happier/calmer/more fulfilling life. I read books, listen to podcasts, read blogs, watch interviews, read magazines, and watch videos about everything from happiness to meditation to creating the life you want. In all of this consuming, I often get caught up in this practice and that practice, this new idea and that transcendent philosophy. This frequently leads to me trying to follow a million philosophies at once (head spinning) and/or desperately chasing whatever new idea comes along in an attempt to finally find THE KEY to being peaceful and happy all the time.

After trying the one million philosophies (and every time I pick up a new book, I still keep trying them—old habits die hard), I have begun to realize that there is one practice that cuts through everything. With this practice, you do not have to try to be: good, happy, virtuous, loving, peaceful. You just have to be with yourself how you are right now. The practice is: kind awareness.

I’m betting that you have probably heard of awareness. It is a very old practice—one of the core practices in Buddhism, which is where I learned about it and started practicing it. Awareness just means to be present to what’s happening, to take a deep breath and look into your current experience. I use the word “kind” in front of awareness to overemphasize the fact that awareness is not judgment, it is kind attention. This doesn’t mean you must force yourself to be kind, the kindness (or just a simple warmth) is inherent in awareness—when you look with curiosity at anything, there is a warm interest to it.

Maybe this just sounds like one more practice to try and force yourself to do. But here’s why I think it’s the practice that cuts through all other practices: when you are kindly aware of whatever is going on inside and outside of you right now, all of the other things come along on their own (happiness, calm, understanding, love, generosity). And on the flip-side, when you’re being kindly aware, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re happy or angry because you’re not judging how you feel, you’re just being aware of it. It’s like taking one step back, creating a bit of space (as if you’re standing in a supermarket watching someone else’s child throw a tantrum. You see it happening, and you feel compassion for the parent and the child, but you don’t get caught up in it. You keep on moving through your day).

Kind awareness simplifies things for me. It occurs to me every day, over and over again, that if I just put my effort into being aware, then everything else will take care of itself. This is often harder to do than I would like it to be. It’s not a flashy easy quick-fix, but then, really, it is. The moment you come back into awareness, there you are. The peace of it opens up. Even if you’re angry, you can begin to find some humor in it, or at least a bit of stillness.

To practice kind awareness, you do not have to spend hours meditating. All you have to do is take one moment, take a deep breath and turn your attention to what’s going on right here, right now. Watch the thoughts spinning in your head, feel how you feel. Let it be OK. Let it be just your experience.

I also like to remember that it’s called a “practice” for a reason—because we’re just practicing. There is no “fail.” There is just the continual honest attempt to return to awareness.

There are many people out there that talk about awareness (also referred to as “mindfulness”) much more profoundly than I do; Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, and Thich Nhat Hanh, to name a few big ones. If you check out any book written by one of these wonderful teachers, you will be sure to find awareness laced through and through.

Love Does That

Earlier this week I got talking to one of my coworkers about poetry, and she passed along to me this poem below. Reading it again this morning it occurred to me that all my life so far (except perhaps when I was a tiny baby) I have been the burro, and oh how much I want to start being the monk instead. Enjoy.

~
Love Does That
by Meister Eckhart

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,

he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free
and even seems to laugh,

because love does
that.

Love frees.
~

{from Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West translated by Daniel Ladinsky}

Walking in the Mountains

This summer, I’ve been out walking in the mountains . . .

It’s about an hour’s drive to trailheads, and then we go out walking, and walking, up higher and higher, until there is nothing but rock and water and sky.

{Took these photos with my Holga camera in the Indian Peaks Wilderness}

My Stomping Ground

I’ve broken out my old Holga camera these days and have been wandering around in the wild beautiful places near where I live.

I took my first roll of film right in my backyard, quite literally—these are the views of the natural space right by my house, where I take my dog walking in the mornings and afternoons. I walk out my door and across the parking lot and street, and this is where I am.

It takes my breath away regularly. I love the expanses of wild grasses and the light glowing across the fields and mountains in the morning and evening. I took these pictures one morning in June.

I’ve been spending my summer weekends wandering the high mountains near here and have taken two other (black & white) rolls of film up there. I’m hoping to get to a darkroom soon and print some up and share them with you. It is so phenomenally beautiful up there, and I have been loving nothing better than to spend days walking and looking. There’s something so basic about it, and the landscape above tree-line is one of my favorites—it’s so open and sparse; just rocks and tiny plants right up against the sky.

I hope you’ve been finding some time to spend somewhere beautiful! Happy wonder-filled day!