Life in the Real World

I was enchanted to read a description recently of our local metaphysical expo:

It is a place where love and light fill every crevice and then spill over the top into the real world.

Actually, what more needs to be said?  One could just rest in that image.  But it did get me thinking about that term, "the real world."

There were years when I'd go on the AMA Samy retreat at Grailville and experience it as a place of love and serenity.  Arriving home after all the goodbyes had been said, I'd feel my responsibilities descend on me like big gray backpacks full of cement.  The world I lived in was populated by difficult people and too many things to do (that is, things I thought I had to do).  My need for creative time always felt squeezed.  Play time, forget it. These problems stood waiting for me like a home invader behind the kitchen door.

Here I am using that interesting word again:  problem.  It seemed clear at those times that the sunny silence of retreat was time spent with the absolute, and real life was a mess. 

Depends on what you mean by a mess.  Yes, much of life, lots of it, is out of your control, and some of it involves conflicts.  People let you down or undermine you, other people don't return calls, important meetings are cancelled, you fall and your life is changed.  You are an organic life form that ages, gets sick, dies, and so does everyone else. So does the siding on the house.  Everything keeps changing out there.  The sunflowers from the wedding die.

But the digital pictures survives - above is one from Cassie's wedding - as do the memories. And there are many opportunities here for connecting, receiving with gratitude, giving.  I have faith in the possibility of a life in which love overflows.

I am remembering a line from Robert Frost's Birches , which is, now that I think about it, about this - bliss, grief, nirvana, samsara.

Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Samsara (not the Movie)

The Wheel of Life

"Working only to improve our samsaric life is the misstep of ignorance." 
~ Farmer Monk

 A blogging friend wrote that line in a comment today, and I thought, That cuts like a diamond. That's where all the self-help get-your-life-together books go so wrong. That is it. It doesn't matter what's goals you meet, what's right in your life, if you are not spiritually grounded.  Centered, wise.

I'm going to back up here and explain, because it's sort of heavy-duty Buddhism.  Samsara is. . .
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. . . and there I stopped writing a month or so ago.  Now I know why, for I just looked up samsara on Wikipedia.  Many Buddhists and others have contributed their own understanding of this term.  Right away I can see that any definition I give might occasion corrections from those people who are missing out on their life's work, to be fact-checkers.  So you can look up samsara if you like, or be contented with the general idea that samsara is partying, success, money, winning, worldly gain - the hedonic treadmill.  And it's a fact many people don't learn until they're dying, that happiness is not found out there. 
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I had to stop writing there again, when I realized the irony of my own vivid hope today that Western psychiatry could swoop in and help me out of this depression, which has reached the disability stage, limiting what I can do.  And indeed, my shrink just returned my phone call, and is recommending a change of medications and a light box.  So two actions, and both might help me. From out there.  From in here, there's always the placebo effect.  It is very good for me when someone I respect says, "I know how to fix it."

In here, my own job is not to ruin my life when I feel like this. Like yell at someone who will never forget it. Put things out into the blogosphere that I am going to have to (try to) delete. Given the generally bleak prognosis for a rapid-cycling bipolar, just not cutting yourself, that's doing pretty good, I guess.

Absolute and Relative Worlds

Tintinnabulation by Robert Green

I already wrote a poem this morning, and here it is.  It's interesting that it is times of upset and confusion that generate poetry.  August is that for me, and this morning I'm afraid I'm coming down with an infection.  I wrote my friend, It feels odd, as if I went back into a very familiar room that has a certain scent and quietness, like a Victorian novel in which nothing much happens.

The title of the poem refers to a Tibetan Buddhist concept that there is a world of timeless eternity (great natural peace), and then the small messy world of us (samsara, its relentless pounding waves), but they are not really any different.  They are mingled (nice word).  It is easier for me to think in the common metaphor: we are lotus blooms with feet in the mud.  There is a jewel in the heart of the lotus. 

     Absolute and Relative Worlds
                          by Jeanne Desy

Nature goes on, vast and nonjudgmental, 
turning leaves into heaps of trash -
it is as if a song is playing far away, 
deeper than my own tintinnabulation
quieter than the soft pervasive tone
of the central unit.  It is a stream of songs 
about the rising waves, the Western wind,
being asleep in the deep.  It is faint and blue . . .  
it is interrupted by the cat, who is nervous
because Tom is in the shower, 
and the door to her box is closed.

Tibetan healing mandala