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June 4 - July 28, 2025
For instance, we usually fall, quite unawares, into assuming that what we are thinking—the ideas and opinions that we harbor at any given time—is “the truth” about what is “out there” in the world and “in here” in our minds. Most of the time, it just isn’t so.
The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.
Accepting that things are as they are is a form of intelligence. It has nothing to do with surrender, passive resignation, or despair. The awareness that holds the unwanted, the unpleasant, the difficult, even the terrifying and the heart-rending, affords us a new degree of freedom to be in wise relationship with the actual. Awareness is intrinsically both a refuge and a source of strength and sanity, of wisdom and compassion, including an honest compassion for ourselves as sometimes frail, vulnerable, and wounded creatures.
When Thoreau says, “it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished,” this is waving a red flag in front of a bull for go-getter, progress-oriented people. But who is to say that his realizations of one morning spent in his doorway are less memorable or have less merit than a lifetime of busyness, lived with scant appreciation for stillness and the bloom of the present moment?
Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching
Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching
This was how I saw it: You could look at each baby as a little Buddha or Zen master, your own private mindfulness teacher, parachuted into your life, whose presence and actions were guaranteed to push every button and challenge every belief and limit you had, giving you continual opportunities to see where you were attached to something and to let go of it. For each child, it would be at least an eighteen-year retreat with very little, if any, time off. The retreat schedule would be relentless and require frequent acts of selflessness and lovingkindness.
The deep and constantly changing needs of children are all perfect opportunities for parents to be fully present rather than to operate in the autopilot mode, to relate consciously rather than mechanically, to sense the being in each child and let his or her vibrancy, vitality, and purity call forth our own.
Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it’s not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just may have a chance to keep growing.
These are all one question really. And the gut response is, We can, we can.… When you come right down to it, what else is there to do—for us, for our children and grandchildren and future generations, for all humanity, for the natural world, for this blue dot of a planet in the unimaginable and humbling vastness of space and time that the James Webb Space Telescope, out beyond the orbit of the moon, is revealing? If we can engineer such marvels, and marvel at what we are seeing and learning as we look ever farther into space and thus further and further back in time to close to the beginning,
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It is either “Wherever you go, there you are” or “Wherever you go, there you aren’t.” Both are true to a degree in any moment. But we can fiddle with the degreeness and so reclaim who and what we already are, and always have been, right here, right now… only temporarily forgotten. That is the practice.
