The early morning light lays on my face like a warm towel.
I roll over to check the time.
Seven a.
M.
On a Friday.
Also my day off.
A buoyancy sways within as I make my way to the bathroom.
The filling sound of my pee hitting the water in the toilet.
Bye babe,
I say,
Kissing my wife on the cheek.
Where are you going?
She responds.
I'm going to work out.
Driving that old cement road surrounded by KFC,
Taco Bell,
And Walmart.
Driving that road that many times,
In the privacy of my own head,
I had said,
God,
This road is ugly.
I would hate to end up living over here.
Driving this written off road,
Something else peeked through from the other side.
A welling up of energy in my abdomen.
A connection to the fabric of the beauty and divinity of all life.
Even this.
Even among this cemented altar to the consumer's gods,
The connection to truth and beauty was still present.
How are we to find the beauty in what's ugly,
The strength and the weakness,
The healing and the sickness,
And the sanity and the insanity?
One of life's greatest paradoxes.
In Zen Buddhism,
We are encouraged to embrace this paradox.
Many practices in Zen Buddhism are designed to ignite this feeling of paradox in its practitioners.
The Zen Koan,
For instance.
A Koan is a phrase given from a Zen teacher to a student.
One of the most famous Koans is,
What's the sound of one hand clapping?
Is there a logical answer to this question?
Koans are practiced by holding them in the field of your open awareness during meditation.
Suddenly the truth is revealed when we let go of our logical minds and see what's true.
That was rude.
My voice and chest tightened as my eyes squinted.
What?
My boss said,
Her arms crossing,
Protecting her chest.
I asked if you wanted a water bottle and you said,
I have one in a pissy voice.
Sounds like a small thing to get upset about.
Well,
I got upset about it only a couple weeks ago.
A man that can see the humor of our little storylines,
Meditates,
And does a podcast on Buddhism.
That also gets upset over something as small as someone's response to his gesture of water bottle kindness.
Yep,
Being aware of our stories and struggles doesn't remove us from them.
In closing,
I will leave you with this quote from Jack Kornfield,
A Path with Heart.
When the stories of our life no longer bind us,
We discover within them something greater.
We discover that within the very limitations of form,
Of our maleness and femaleness,
Of our parenthood and our childhood,
Of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons,
Is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long.
Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery and in it,
We can rest in the center of the movement,
The center of all the worlds.
