living dharma

I’ve thought a lot about home the last couple of years. I’ve been officially homeless for a bit less than two years now: I left Vancouver in early summer 2007 to head to Plum Village and my open-ended monastic inquiry. Since then, I’ve been more places than I can count. Beds and tents and sleeping bags and Spain and France and England and Holland and Canada and the United States and back and forth a bunch of times between all of them. Much of this time has been spent in Plum Village in a couple of different long stays. But all of this period has been so markedly different from the rest of my adult life, where I had my own home, my own stuff in my own home etc.

A few weeks ago I headed out of the wonderful small community I had been living in for the fall/winter, thinking and feeling pretty darn strongly I was bound for Plum Village. For good. As some of you know, a whole lot happened between then and now. And all of it happened bouncing around from Ottawa to Toronto to Guelph to Peterborough to Toronto to Ottawa (that’s Ontario, a province in Canada)….all of it living the most intense chapter I have lived in some time….all of it lived without the support of spiritual community; spiritual community being the thing that I have been so hugely surprised to find to be about as important to happiness, stability and nourishment as oxygen and clean water.

It was the combination of this intense chapter, the absence of healthy spiritual community (because I had left one!) and the presence of some enormous negativity – all this combined to really drain my reserves.

One thing I’ve been aware of since I started to live so differently a few years ago…I’ve been aware of how I’ve been building such great reserves rooted in a beautiful (if radically weird to most) way of life; spiritual practice, Buddhist teaching, simplicity, mindfulness and a pretty thorough departure from my former career and the formal economy (where is that formal economy these days anyway?). But, man, I sure used up a lot of that reserve these last weeks. Spent down that account. And even overdrew it a couple of times before finding my way back to some wacky break even point.

When I decided to come home, back to New Hampshire, I started to revive. Or I started to be ready to start reviving.

Got home yesterday afternoon. And was welcomed back with so much love and grace and ease and simple joy….it was like hooking up to the world’s gentlest I.V. drip….both arms, veins wide open and receiving. Home is mostly the feeling for me these days. The people. And yes this place is beautiful too. SOOOO good to be out of the city.

So many cliches. Pretty much all of them true. Sometimes it takes leaving to see a place. I’ve done so much leaving in my life I should be seeing perhaps more clearly than I do at times. Whatever! But – here I am, home safe and sound and filled with gratitude….filling back up on solidity, clarity, spaciousness, freedom too….some healing to be done from the hurts suffered in this round of intensity….and some gentle contrition too for the impacts of my whirling about.

I was driving from Peterborough to Ottawa today, across flat, cold country, with a biting wind outside the cabin of the red rocket (my mom’s Honda – I’ve been all over this bio-region in the red rocket while she sabbaticals in Europe).

Some of the ride is lovely. Some of it is real scrappy and not so aesthetically appealing. It was in one of those kind of endless stretches that I looked up and saw something I hadn’t seen in some time; a bald eagle.

In the +/- 20 years I’ve spent on the west coast, I saw bald eagles virtually every day. But I’ve been away from the pacific northwest for a while now.

So it was some kind of omen or totemic gift to see a lonely bald eagle soaring the winter winds as I moved down the road (again, still….over soon s.v.p.)….the omen whose meaning I do not yet know. But the gratitude for its provenance is here and now.

I’m one of those people who is fairly good at a number of things; endowed with a randomly distributed set of attributes that our society finds valuable or useful, from how I look to how I sound to how I put language together in persuasive ways etc. I never really had a sense of all this in terms of how I inadvertently became a perfectionist, starting at a very early age. The way the emotional architecture of my earliest days went left me always in search of ways to shore up the supply of love around and for me. It didn’t take my squishy little brain long to figure out that I might be able to “convert” my randomly distributed attributes into affirmation and approval, if not actual real unconditional love (that oft talked about if little practiced greatest of gifts).

Over the last weeks of self-created instabilty and pressurized decision-making….puzzling through (again, still – at higher and higher heat….looking to burn away all the confusion and come up with a hard cinder of clarity) the monastic/houselholder choice – in all of this I now realize how perfectionism has played through it all and how the fool in me (we all have one, even you) has brilliantly blown the perfectionist mask to dust.

Having changed everything in my life in the wake of a beautiful spiritual discovery (via my immersion in the practice as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastic community of Plum Village) – a discovery that has immeasurably improved and even saved my life, it only makes sense, in some silly way, that I would follow that path to its logical conclusion; the life of a monk. But/and my weakness for perfectionism has followed me into spiritual life, just as it dogged me in my much less happy pre-practice life….in some important ways I have been looking at monastic life as the truest and best way to express my spiritual self, live in radical simplicity and be of service. And part of that view (Buddhist teaching of course reminds us gently and firmly – over and over again – to let go of all views) has meant that I have set myself up for a great dualistic dance….I must be a monk or I am a spiritual failure….Good, eh?

Add to this the other big project I have been holding space open for (what I have come to think of as divine union, a partnership relationship with a woman) and we have the makings for a bit of a perfect storm.

So – on October 14 – when N showed up on a long bus ride and sat down beside me five days after I had left the monastery….to begin a conversation that continues to this day (growing more intimate all the time)….when that happened, my fool began to smile – patiently, a bit wryly – to the perfectionist in me….that persona looking for the perfect spiritual life or the perfect partnership life….the fool, being wise and unconcerned about my pride (in fact – quite devoted to annihilating same) allowed me to heat up the tension between these two choices….allowed me to manufacture a crisis that was subconsciously intended to surface the truth, the one, the only right path….and here the fool in me began to laugh quite hysterically at such a ridiculous notion, this grand one true path stuff is just too rich for him, mirthful madman that he is.

Anyway. All this stuff broke over the last couple of weeks. I over-shared with a number of people as my intense process played out. I was unskillful. I was child-like (in ways beautiful and not so much). I was – well – foolish.

Perfect.

Now I have taken everything off the front burner. Shaved another big slice of pride off my separate self. And learned so much in such a short time.

I have some friends who were watching this process; they were concerned I was on such a thorough ride that I might gift myself a full-on psych trauma and meltdown….thanks to the practice (which always, always keeps some part of me totally stable as some other parts of me are being ridiculous) – no meltdown. But a lot of material created or freshened up for review and learning.

In these bursts, I feel like I learn more in 10 days than I used to learn in 10 years, which is handy since the tranches of my available 10 year allotments are diminishing.

So. Yes. Back to gratitude. To the fool. For the practice. For the love and support that is here for me – scattered hither and yon across Big Mama. For my health. For the weird combination of courage, craziness and beautiful aspiration that fuels me through this period of life.

D bemusedly asked whether I was cooking all this stuff up, this rich chapter I have been living, so that I could have good material for the book (when I get back to writing it!)….no, not deliberate. But, yes, some good material….maybe if I can put it together in a humble and compelling way a few people might learn along with me.