Who is this 'I'?

Scientific research is finding that our consciousness, the ’I’ and the ‘me’ that we refer to, is not a physical (or ethereal) form in our body but the relationship, the interactivity, the conversation between different parts of the brain. When researchers anaesthetize someone and study their brain activity, comparing it to the waking or dreaming brain, the difference is clear: The anaesthetized unconscious brain activity is very limited and centralized, while the conscious brain looks like lightning in different parts of the sky, call and response; like birds in the forest calling from one tree to the other.

This discovery is not all that surprising really. As we meditate and become more aware of the nature of our being in the world and in our own thoughts, we see that it is all about relationship. There is no solidity, there is only interaction. We know that even our bodies are not truly solid, but a series of processes that renew, repair and replicate cells. Nothing about us is the same as it was seven years ago, except the processes that organize matter to keep our bodies looking pretty much the same over the years (or doing the best that they can given external causes and conditions such as gravity, inadequate self-care and exposure to sun rays!)

Ever since the discovery of the atom, science has told us there is no solidity anywhere. What we perceive as solid – the furniture in the room, for example – is just an arrangement of molecules not totally unlike our own, and within each molecule, within each atom is mostly space. It’s convenient for functioning in the world to organize and perceive all this separation. Different creatures organize and perceive differently, based on what works best for getting their basic needs met. We would not recognize the world the bee sees as it buzzes towards flowers. We may not even exist in that world, so unimportant are we to the scheme of things from their point of view!

This idea that perceiving solidity in our surroundings and in our being is a kind of choice we’ve made as a species is unnerving. And it’s totally optional whether we are curious about exploring beyond this convenient way of perceiving the world and ourselves. We crave solid ground to stand on, to be sure of and to trust. But if we are curious and do sense that there is another way of seeing then we can begin to explore the possibility of trusting in this fine network of inter-relational activity.

You don’t have to hang out in a science lab to do your research, but can come to it within your own experience. Buddhism and other world religions support this exploration, this direct experience of some difficult-to-define way of being in the world. (At some point we will explore the concept of the Net of Indra, an ancient Buddhist model that supports the current scientific findings. But it deserves more time than I can give it now.)

But why would we want to explore this non-traditional way of thinking? Perceiving the world as solid works very well for us, does it not? Yes, but to over-rely on just this way of seeing, this way of being in the world, comes at a high price. When we resist opening to a more relational way of perceiving, we give up our sense of connection with nature and with each other. Instead we cling to the idea that being solid we are somehow protected and impervious to change.

As we age, most of us begin to see the false supposition of this presumed imperviousness. We may not be comfortable with it, but we see that this solidity we imagined isn’t true. Our bodies change as they age. Our parents and other loved ones die. If we stay with this view of solidity, we feel isolated and lonely. We feel we are going through a whole set of causes and conditions, and that we each have to face these difficult challenges alone.

So what good news when science shows us that indeed we are not solid, not separate, not alone! What a relief that the ‘I’ is a lively intricate set of patterns in a constant state of interaction. We are released from isolation and can dance in interconnection.

But what does this really mean to us in our day to day activities? It means that if we shift our focus from the solid to the interactive network we will find more vitality, creativity and joy.

If we sense our connection to each other, for example, rather than get stuck in defending the solid person we believed ourselves to be or judging the solid person we thought someone else to be, we can relax and release our fear. There is no ‘other’ to defend our separate self from. There is only this ongoing pattern of dancing molecules, of interactivity of thoughts, emotions and sensation.

In practical application, we focus not on another person but on the natural connection with them. Instead of seeing them as solid, isolated and locked in, we accept that they are fluid, connected and fascinating ever-changing expressions of life. This flushes out our harsh judgments about them, held over many years. It allows them to be in the space of our open embrace and to dance in the light of our awareness. What a difference this makes in our relationship!

We know from our own experience how it is to be with someone who thinks they know us, who thinks they have our number. We feel pre-judged without any room to fully be ourselves, that ever-changing fluid self that cannot be contained. So how much richer would our relationships be if we allowed for the ever-changing fluidity of others?

How often do we find ourselves bored in relationships because we think we are dealing with known quantities? We are not known quantities! Each of us is fluid. But when we are in the company of someone who sees us a certain way, we may fill that pre-defined shape just as water fills a glass.

So in this practice we notice when we are holding relationships in containers of pre-judgment, and if we can notice we are doing so, perhaps we can gently shift our focus to the fluid nature of being itself. This shift is enhanced through the use of metta – sending loving kindness and well wishing, staying with that outpouring of love without agenda.

Opening to hold the person in an open embrace, sensing in to the lightness, the spaciousness, we can be surprised by the interconnected quality of life responding to our openness.

This subtle shift into a more fluid way of perceiving life can happen in any moment, so we can relax and allow for it, rather than setting it as a goal and trying to achieve it. And even if it happens for only one brief moment, even if we only get a whiff of it, so to speak, it’s important to know that because it is timeless, that one whiff, that brief glimpse, can permeate our whole being. Just like a tea bag dipped in water, once introduced, however briefly, it can flavor our whole life.

Through our awareness practice we bring a quality of noticing. We can notice when some fear-based emotion knocks us into seeing ‘other.’ We can sense in our bodies the constriction, the rigidity, the tension that indicates how solid and separate we hold ourselves to be. And with time, this noticing will enable us to infuse breath, metta and spaciousness into any constriction, bringing wisdom, compassion and balance to the fear we feel.

In this way, we shift back and forth from seeing separated solidity and the fluidity of interconnection. But because the former has an increasingly false ring and supports us less and less (and in fact seems to get us into pickles more often than not!), it becomes easier to shift to this richer more joyous perception, this net of interactivity that is the true self, within our brains and between all beings. We resonate with it, because it rings true.

Third Noble Truth: The Good News

All this suffering! Is there any end to it? The Good News it is that through insight, through seeing how we make ourselves suffer, we also begin to expand into seeing the optional nature of this self-inflicted suffering. The Third Noble Truth is simply that there is an end to suffering, according to the Buddha. It’s the good news. The oppressive tangle of our suffering can be seen for what it is, and it can, through insight and compassion, be made more spacious so that we can find joy in simply being with whatever arises.

Yes, we are still confronted with tar-babies, and maybe we still get entangled in the sticky tar from time to time; but through the regular practice of meditation, we are learning to notice when this is happening.

When we notice, we remember to stop struggling and simply be with our experience, as uncomfortable as it may be. Through the practice of meditation and the development of spacious awareness we find our center, our inner access to a sense of equilibrium and ease.

When we were reviewing the First Noble Truth in class a while back, I read from Wes Nisker’s article in Inquiring Mind magazine about what he called ‘Firsters’ and ‘Thirdsters.’ He claims to be a Firster. For him, having The First Noble Truth’s reminder that there is suffering in life is not just a first step to awakening, but a gift that keeps on giving, sufficient for a lifetime’s practice. He doesn’t have much patience for those ‘Thirdsters’ as he calls those who want to be remade into enlightened beings.

Because of the interpretation so many of us put on the Third Noble Truth, it can become a tarbaby in itself. We are attracted to its promise, and may feel compelled to see it as some distant goal of happiness and enlightenment. We get caught up in it and it just becomes another way for us to suffer. We want it. We want it so badly. And we want it now. The wanting is an ache we cannot satisfy. Succumbing to the dazzling promise of the Third Noble Truth can actually keep us from ever experiencing it.

The Third Noble Truth is not about some future version of us, someone who will be so much more calm, peaceful, kind, compassionate and enlightened. The Third Noble Truth is about the promise held within each moment.

Each moment holds the gift of sight. Okay, most moments we may ignore it. But the gift lives fully in each moment, whether noticed or not. This moment for example, as you sit here listening or reading this talk, you have the capacity to be fully present, to sense in to your body, to notice what is true in your experience right now – pain, beauty, emotion, thought – and in that noticing is spaciousness.

The Third Noble Truth is not a destination; it is an ongoing ever-present totally accessible present. When we make it a destination, one more vacation we have to save up for, make time for, one more thing on our to do list or our bucket list, then we have lost touch with its true nature. It becomes a fairy tale, a Shangri La, a Wonderland or an Enchanted Isle.

It is none of these.

The Third Noble Truth is about what is inherent in each of us: our Buddha Nature. This naturally arising way of being in the world is not in some cave on a mountain top in the Himalayas that is beyond our reach. It is always present.

We expend a lot of energy ignoring it, discounting it, pooh-poohing it, but it is there. Here. Now. Always. It is a light that shines within us, one that we may keep carefully shuttered, but from time to time we are able to see things more clearly by the light through the cracks of our shutters. We get a glimpse of insight, an intuitive hit or a moment of clarity. Learning to trust what is revealed by the little light we allow, we begin to notice the light more. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine.” Such a great song! It’s impossible to sing it without the heart feeling full. When we sing it, we are setting an intention that resonates deep within us. When we act out of that intention to allow what is naturally arising within us to express itself by showing compassion to ourselves and others, by trusting what the light reveals to be true and stepping out of the shadows, then the shutters begin to open even more.

The light shows us the lay of the land, reveals the tar-babies for what they are before we get suckered into entangling with them.

We can remind ourselves that the Third Noble Truth is not a distant promise but a constant presence shining its light within us, patiently waiting for us to open the shutters of our hearts and minds.

Here is a chant from the Heart Sutra:

Gate, gate
paragate
parasamgate
bohdi svaha.

It translates loosely as:
Gone, gone,
gone beyond,
gone beyond the beyond,
into awakened mind. Aha!

Chant this for a while, staying fully present in your body with all your senses or just the rising and falling of your breath. Be present with whatever arises, without expectation.

This present is not an intellectual maze you must master, but a simple, even subtle, shift of attention from the belief that we are the thoughts we think, the labels we’ve accepted, or the emotions we feel. This is a shift into expansive ease and open awareness of the spacious nature of being.

We access the present moment through the portal of sensation. Simply sensation. Simply being.

During meditation over the past months, we have been allowing for this subtle shift from thinking in labels, compartmentalizing ourselves and the world around us, to accessing an infinite spaciousness as we experience pure sensation without tagging any particular sensation with the label ‘itchy foot’ or ‘achy back’, for example. Instead, we sense in to the energy field of being, the being that isn’t demarcated by the ‘edge’ of skin.

The Third Noble Truth is not a promise of some heavenly pain-free existence, but an invitation to discover the unlimited nature of our being, the compassionate ease of feeling one with nature, one with all beings; knowing it, not as knowledge we learn from books -- although science now supports it -- but knowing it deeply, from personal experience.

The last time we were studying the Four Noble Truths, my post on the Third Noble Truth was a sharing of something I wrote many years ago, an exercise called The Dance of the Seven Veils. The Third Noble Truth invites us to discover who we are under all the veils we wear.

Fix-it? Forget it!

We were discussing the Second Noble Truth, and how we can each notice the way we create suffering for ourselves through clinging, grasping and pushing away our experience instead of holding it in an open compassionate embrace. A meditator said that she was noticing this, but that she hoped that the Third Noble Truth was going to offer the next step: How to fix what we notice.

I said that the noticing is all there is. Now this may have been a tad disingenuous because of course the Buddha offers the Eightfold Path (The Fourth Noble Truth.) I suppose it could be regarded as a fix, but I see it more as a circle of light with which we surround ourselves in this practice. Each aspect of the Eightfold Path is a guidepost shedding light that helps us see where we have strayed too far from the core of consciousness and compassion. But the Eightfold Path itself does not fix anything; it simply brightens our way so we can notice. The noticing itself is the one and only step in this process.

The minute we try to fix whatever arises in our thoughts, we are caught up in the stickiness of suffering. Our ‘noticing’ is fault-finding and once we have found a fault, like a fissure in a tooth, we want it ‘taken care of.’ We want it drilled, filled and made perfect.

This is a reasonable response, a naturally arising thought from our creative brain activity. But in this regard, when it comes to releasing from tight constriction into a spaciousness of mind, you can see that this fault-finding fix-it methodology is more likely to shut us down, make us feel defensive and constrict us, rather than open us to feel more and trust in the process. Thus our desire to fix ‘the problem’ undermines the process.

The only tool that is up to the task is this ‘noticing.’ At first our noticing might be rather coarse, full of judgment and attitude, like “Oh there I go again with my big mouth,” or “Yup, I see how angry I get at the least little thing that person does.” Even this has some consciousness to it, some willingness to acknowledge what is happening, or why things are happening as they are, even if we are harsher than we need to be. If this is where we are, we can acknowledge that this is considerably more skillful than not noticing we’ve said something offensive or not noticing our own anger or what seems to trip our trigger.

The next step is not to ‘fix’ what we have noticed, but to refine the quality of our noticing.

Noticing is polished to a rich sheen through meditation practice, both concentration practice and metta practice. This is why we practice and why it is ongoing. The practice is the way we keep our tool of noticing polished.

At first we might think that meditation is a place we go, a retreat we take to get a breather from the hectic life we lead. And if it offers this, that’s lovely, but it is not the purpose of meditation. The core purpose is to develop and refine the ability to see with clarity and compassion whatever arises in this moment.

You can think of the knife-sharpener or the silverware polisher performing a vital service. This is a good way to think of meditation because it takes away the allure of thinking it is about having a mind-blowing experience. It takes away comparing one meditation with another. It is just the practice of being as fully present as we can be in this moment with as much compassion as we can manage right now.

It is just polishing our ability to notice what arises. There is no bad or good meditation, only this taking the time to do the task, to do the practice. If it creates inner peace, sparks creativity, etc. all to the good. The knife sharpener at his grinder and the silver polisher with her felt cloth also may experience this quieting down of the mind. And all the while the knives get sharpened, the forks get polished and the food is well cut and served. Just so, with meditation practice insight, we polish and refine our ability to notice what is arising in this moment and to hold it with acceptance, wisdom and compassion.

And through this practice we can see how the quality of our noticing shifts from, “Oh God, there I go again” to something along the lines of, “Ah, thinking. Noticing a tightness in my jaw when that thought arises. The emotion that arises with it is a sort of_____. Hmmm, the associative images that are arising are ______. Making space in my field of awareness for this to simply arise and fall away.

This kind of inner process could be called a dispassionate curiosity. Although the subject is personal, we are willing to allow for the possibility that it is inherently human, that we –though unique and individual in our own ways – are dealing with a universal stream and we are constantly testing the waters. It is not our job to fix the water, but to become more skillful in navigating in it. We can only do this through noticing the nature of the tides, the undercurrents, the weather, etc. We tune in. We notice. We notice everything.

So through our regular daily practice of meditation this quality of noticing gets polished up into a tool of self-exploration and expansion, rather than a weapon of harsh judgment that cuts us to the quick and leaves us to find a hole to hide in while we lick our self-inflicted wounds.

As you give yourself this gift of meditation, trust that whatever noticing you experience is sufficient for now. Yes, with regular practice, over time the noticing will become more insightful, but judging your state of noticing now as lacking is just another sticky dukkha delivery system, just another tarbaby to get caught up in. So trust the process, trust that as long as we live there is the polishing.

Let your light shine.

Holding Your Life in an Open Embrace

This was a speech with visual aids. I will try to get permission to use the photos I shared in person, but until I do, imagine:

(A black & white photo of a little girl holding on tight to her three dolls, with a distrustful scowl on her face.)

Here’s a photo of a little girl with her dolls. What a lucky little girl to have three dolls! She should be happy. But when I look at her, I don’t see happiness, I see fear. Maybe she’s afraid someone will take her dolls away. Look how tight she’s holding them. She is planning on defending them.

Of course, holding them this tight she can’t really enjoy her dolls, can she? Enjoying her dolls would be holding them in front of her, looking in their faces, talking to them, singing to them, feeding them, dressing them…maybe having a tea party and inviting other children over with their dolls to play.

But she can’t do any of that because she has to hold on tight to these dolls for fear of losing them.

We can all recognize ourselves in this little girl. We all cling to something, afraid of losing it. Whether it’s our possessions, our money, our relationships, our career, our beliefs, the way we see ourselves, the way we see the world – we hold on tight because we don’t know who we would be without them, and we are afraid to find out.

But just as this girl can’t play with her dolls when she holds them so tightly, we can’t really enjoy our lives and all the wonderful things in it when we hold them in such a tight grip.

What happens when we hold on so tight in a relationship for example? When we clamp down on the one we love, begging them to spend more time with us, pay more attention to us, tell us they love us. What happens? Usually we suffocate the love we hold so dear, we strangle it, we squish it. It turns to nothing in our hands.

So this tendency to grasp and cling to what we care about isn’t really a very effective strategy. At best we can’t enjoy it, and at worst we might actually cause it to disappear.

(A black and white photo of another little girl.)

Now here’s another little girl. She’s not happy either. She’s got her pouty face on and her arms folded. But instead of holding on to something she loves, she’s focused on something that hasn’t measured up to her standards, her expectations, her desires. Maybe her mother said she couldn’t have ice cream before dinner, and she’s determined to be miserable about it for a good long while. Or maybe she’s just arrived at a party. Maybe she’s been fantasizing about this party ever since she got the invitation three weeks ago. She imagined the entertainment, the cake, the friends who would be there, how much fun she would have. And here she is and something is not right. It may be the most fun party in the world, but she is stuck on the one thing that’s lacking, the one way in which it doesn’t measure up. So she can’t enjoy herself.

I’m sure we can all recognize ourselves in this little girl too. We’ve all had experiences that didn’t measure up to our expectations. We’ve all at times let that disappointment ruin the whole experience. We’ve all had trouble enjoying this moment because we’re still caught up in what happened last week, last month, last year, and we’re letting it color our whole experience.

The Buddha defined these two ways of being – this grasping and clinging and this aversion as the primary causes of suffering. He acknowledged that there is unavoidable pain in this life, but that most of the suffering we experience is optional, actually caused by these two tendencies.

But it’s not our fault that we’re like this. Like all animals we are programmed to go after what is pleasurable and avoid what is unpleasant. This is the basis of our survival instinct. We are attracted to bright colors and nature made the brightest color vegetables the most nutritious. We are attracted to the mates that will best help us procreate for the survival of the species. We are programmed to avoid the big sharp-toothed roaring bear who might maul us to death.

Our human brain is a little different however. With our highly developed cortex, we can dwell in the past, remembering in incredible detail all that has happened to us. And we can imagine infinite futures, so we can spend a good portion of our time in a state of planning and daydreaming. Now this is an amazing skill to have! Without it we would not have literature, history, inventions, technology, ever evolving architecture, design and the arts.

But we’ve been given this gift without a user manual, without a warning notice that spending too much time in the past or the future instead of staying in the present moment is hazardous to our health and our happiness.

But the brain is still evolving, still developing, and part of this development is tuning in to awareness, consciousness, rediscovering our ability to be in the present moment.

The primary purpose of meditation is to create this ability to be present, to come into balance, to open ourselves to what is arising in this moment and be able to savor it without grasping and clinging.

(A full color photo of a little girl holding a frog in her cup hands in such a way that she can see the frog in front of her. She has a look of curiosity and a smile on her face.)

In this final picture is a little girl who is living in the moment. You’ll notice that this photo, unlike the other two, is in full color. That’s because she is in the present, the only place that is real. The past and future are just thoughts.

She is holding a frog in her hand and she is holding it in open cupped palms, what I call and open embrace. She is able to fully enjoy the frog. She knows that the frog could jump out of her palm at any moment, but she knows that she will still be okay. The frog is not the source of her happiness. Her ability to be with whatever arises is the source of her happiness.

So this is what I hope for all of us: That we take responsibility for our own happiness, by learning how to be present with our experience, how to hold life in an open compassionate embrace.

Nature: Honoring Our Wisest Dharma Teacher

Like all animals we are programmed to go toward what is pleasant and to back away from what is unpleasant. Our chemistry is set up to flush our brains with a sense of pleasure when see something valuable for our survival – a brightly colored vegetable that will nourish our bodies or an attractive potential mate with whom we might procreate and continue the survival of our species. In the same way, we are set up to be flushed with fear when we come near anything that might threaten our survival, and programmed to run, hide or do battle with it.

This system has worked pretty well for most species. The fact that we are not extinct seems to imply that it is working for us humans as well. But when we look around we can see how much misery we as individuals continually cause ourselves and others, how our collective behavior, especially over the last two hundred years, has brought many species to the brink of extinction and beyond. We can see how many cultures we have lost, how much devastation and degradation to the environment we have caused. Given all of this, it seems that we have, in fact, lost touch with our natural survival instinct.

While few of us are proud of this course of events, many of us are so uncomfortable with the emotions that come up around this knowledge that we avoid it, push it away or deny it. We cling to what we have that tells us we are doing well. But we need to be with what is arising in our experience. We need to face it with clarity, compassion, courage, integrity and equilibrium in our words and actions.

This is not easy when we are coping with remorse, guilt, shame, disgust, dread, anger, wishful thinking and denial. So let’s look at how it is that we as a species got so off track so that we are in a constant state of fear and looking for every possible distraction to keep ourselves from effectively coping with what is arising in this moment, personally and globally.
Humans have a highly developed pre-frontal cortex, a more recent brain development that enables us to imagine the future and dwell in the past. With this addition to the brain, our species is uniquely able to remember, record, celebrate and sometimes even rewrite its complex history. We have created architecture that doesn’t just shield us from the elements but satisfies our longing for beauty. We have developed institutions for self-governing, education, edification and socialization. We have created literature, visual art, myths, beliefs, theories, science, deep understanding of the world we live in, all of which we are able to transmit from generation to generation through writing, and through audio and visual recording. We have created means to carry ourselves around the planet, and to communicate instantaneously with people in any part of the world.

Wow! One little tweak of the standard mammalian brain and we get all this! When you think how we humans start out the most helpless and naked of creatures, without the benefit of fur or feathers, claws, speed or strength, without even the ability to stand or walk until a year into our existence. And yet, through the two gifts we have – our opposable thumbs and our highly developed brain – we have compensated for all our other lacks. Perhaps we have over-compensated!

We not only can fly like birds, we fly to the moon and beyond. We not only can dig like moles and gophers, we dig deep into the earth, mining its resources. We not only can build nests, we build cathedrals and soaring skyscrapers.

In this over-compensation there’s been the creation of separation from wild nature. Many people in the modern world go from their insulated homes with interior garages by way of their cars – isolation chambers on wheels – into the basement garages of their workplace with its non-open-able windows, and never leave the building because there’s a company cafeteria for food and a company gym for exercise. At the end of the day, having returned home, they can go to bed without ever once having breathed fresh air or felt the natural outside temperature.

Cut off from nature, we get out of synch with the natural rhythms. We lose touch with the seasons, the tides, the phases of the moon, the myriad ways nature has always cued behavior in creatures.

The cost of being so out of synch with nature is high on a personal level and devastating on a global level. Out of synch with nature, we make misguided ill-informed choices that cause misery for us, the planet and the rest of the species who inhabit it.

Instead of the circular rhythms of nature, we have created a linear view of passage of time. We do this in order to accommodate our unique human ability to dwell in the past and imagine the future. But you can see how it gets us out of synch with the rest of nature. We have isolated ourselves, believing ourselves to be a species apart, and yet everything we do affects all other species and the planet. We have denied this connection, and deadened ourselves in that denial. Why?

Perhaps we think that in our encapsulated state we are protected from the vagaries of life. If we can set up a routine, a series of habits, and just keep them up, maybe we can keep the threat of change at bay. We don’t want our state of denial to be punctured, and we intuitively know that walking out into the wild will do just that. It will bring us to the basic truths inherent to life on earth. It will remind us of impermanence with every fallen leaf and every fallen tree. It will put us face to face with our own mortality, with the fact that our bodies are no different from those of any other creatures on the planet.

But if we stay in the wild a little longer, we start to understand that the fallen tree feeds the forest. We see the cycles of life with no moment in that cycle better or worse than another. We see creation, destruction and decay all serving the whole. We see that change is the only true constant, and that the natural rhythms of the earth and the stars bring a deeper comfort, a deeper sense of connection, than all the constructs we’ve created to ‘protect’ ourselves from this intrinsic truth.

Meditation, like a silent walk in nature, functions as a tuning fork that re-attunes us to the natural rhythms of our own nature. We learn to find a balance that allows us to use the gift of our highly developed brains without running amuck into seriously unskillful behavior. But it is not enough to meditate. We need to give ourselves as many opportunities as possible to be in nature. When we attend a meditation retreat, it may be hard to know how much of the value of the retreat was sitting on our cushion, and how much was the slow walks we took, communing with trees, grasses, lizards and birds.

In a couple of weeks Will and I are heading out on our annual camping trip up into the mountains. It’s not that I love pit toilets, going without a shower, dealing with mosquitoes and other potentials for discomfort. It’s just that my daily walks in nature get me into nature for short periods of time before I retreat back into my isolation chamber and check my email. Yes, in the summer we have a wonderful screen room where I can sit for awhile reading and enjoying the birds in the waterfall. I am so fortunate! But then I go back inside. So camping is like a forced nature retreat to get me outside my box. If I don’t occasionally take myself far from the comforts of home, my habitual nature sends me back into the house for something to eat, a more stable temperature or a whole slew of other reasons. When I’m camping, there is no inside to go to. And that’s the idea!

But after a few days I am ready to come home. Just as after a meditation retreat, I am ready to return to my regular life. I return with a more balanced, attuned understanding of my place in the natural world. The wild world has so many lessons to teach me, has so many answers to any question I might ask. It is an ever ready dharma delivery system, providing truth after truth, and requesting only a deep and abiding respect in return.

I had an employer once who was a devoted follower of the nineteenth century political economist Henry George, who believed that property should be taxed more heavily in its undeveloped state to encourage development and improvements. This kind of thinking, this seeing nature as a kind of blank canvas for human creativity to unleash itself, is still alive and well in the 21st century.

I was reminded of it last weekend when a dear relative of mine was visiting from rural Washington. She told a story of her neighbor whom she asked to stop driving his four wheel drive ATV all over her grassy meadow.
“But you aren’t using it,” he said, totally baffled by her request. After all, she had allowed his horses to roam the meadow without complaint. In his world view, an open meadow is not a rich vibrant network of living systems but a vacant lot serving no purpose until a human designates one.

Thank goodness there are people like Dr. Marty Griffin, a friend whose 90th birthday party I attended this week also. He put his well-developed brain, his deep sense of connection and any other resources he could find to good use to save wild nature, particularly the Marin and Sonoma Coasts. The Audubon Canyon Ranch, that amazing nesting ground for blue herons on the Bolinas Lagoon that he founded decades ago, has just been renamed The Martin Griffin Preserve in his honor.

Through spending time in nature in a meditative way -- really being present for what arises in our experience, being open, receptive and curious -- we start seeing and understanding the role of wild nature in supporting all life, including our own. And we start seeing our role in the natural world. When we insulate ourselves from nature we have a distorted view of the world and who we are in it.

So, what is your relationship with the wilderness? Are you muscling through it, focused on burning calories and building endurance or on getting somewhere? Are you talking with friends or listening to the music plugged into your ears, staying in sensory disconnect from the nature that called to you?

How many questions do you have that nature could answer if you opened yourself up and listened? About impermanence, about comparing mind, about judgment, about connection, about self-acceptance, about just about anything!

Over the coming week, if you haven’t already done so, add to your meditative practice at least a few minutes of being completely alone in nature. You could spend a few minutes star gazing before bed. You could sit in your garden and listen to the birds. You could ask your walking companion to participate, each taking at least five minutes to walk in silence at a distance from each other. The minute we are alone, that powerful energy field of another human dissolves and frees us to really sense our connection with the rest of nature.

While experiencing nature, let go of any sense of goal. The desire to capture nature in a photograph or a memory can deplete the power of the moment fully experienced. The hope to recreate a past experience or to make this somehow an ultimate experience gets in the way of simply being present for whatever arises. Noticing all the thoughts that pass through, and letting them arise and fall away too. Letting go of a need to judge the experience as to whether it measures up to your idea of what a moment in nature should be. This is not some romantic notion. This is simply the reality of this moment.

Unplugging, creating silence and solitude, breathing and releasing tension, opening to whatever is in this moment: What a gift!

I’ll end with the a poem by Li Po, titled Zazen on Ching-tnig Mountain:

‘The birds have dissolved into the sky.
The last clouds have faded away.
Here we sit, the mountain and I,
‘til only the mountain remains.’