So before I went on retreat,
We spent about four weeks establishing mindfulness together.
And why?
Why do we do this?
You know,
What's the point of sitting together in silence?
You know,
The breath is often so elusive and the mind,
You know,
When I get quiet,
Sometimes what I see in my mind is like an insane asylum for like the perpetually berating,
You know,
The perpetually self berating.
It's like,
Geez,
Why would I want to go there?
Right?
But sometimes,
Sometimes it's like this poem by Raymond Carver.
And for those of you,
For those of you that don't know of him,
Of Raymond Carver,
He was a short story writer and a poet.
And he died at the age of 50 of cancer.
And this poem is called The Last Fragment.
And it was the last poem in this book of poetry that he had written.
It was the very last poem that he left us before he died.
And it's very simple.
He writes,
And did you get what you wanted from this life?
Even so,
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
To feel myself beloved on the earth,
To call myself beloved.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's like that.
So this path of practice that we do together has been described as two wings of a bird.
And one wing is the wing of wisdom.
And the other wing is the wing of compassion,
The wing of love.
And there's no flying without both wings.
Without wisdom,
We're,
You know,
If we only had wisdom,
We're flying in kind of circles.
And without,
Like,
If we were only flying with compassion and love,
Like that was our driving force,
Then we're also flying in circles,
Just in the opposite direction.
And I share a lot about the cultivation of wisdom.
It's the wing of the practice that I feel most comfortable sharing about.
But maybe we're circling around this too much.
Maybe we're getting a little too dizzy.
So I want to explore love with you,
Love and compassion.
And love can have a lot of different meanings for people.
It's loaded,
You know,
In our culture,
In our cultural conditioning.
It's loaded with romantic notions,
Sometimes lust or neediness.
In the Buddhist tradition,
Love is associated with a kind of freedom.
So love that depends on particular conditions or wanting or a grasping or needy type of love,
That's considered a form of bondage,
Not liberation,
Not freedom.
And for the purpose of this discussion,
Love in the most basic sense of the word is about connection.
That's it.
When we talk about love,
We're talking about simple connection.
That's how I'm defining it.
Just connection.
And so I heard this story when I was on retreat that illustrates this type of love.
It's a true story.
Some friends were getting together for an outdoor evening meal.
And they were in the backyard and there was a side gate on the side of the house that was open so friends could just come in through the side gate.
And they were eating and drinking,
There was music and talking.
This is something we all do,
Right?
And then this man comes into the yard and he holds a gun to the head of one of the guests and says,
Give me your money.
But this dinner,
This dinner guest,
He didn't have his wallet.
He was with his friends.
There was no need to carry any cash.
And so this man does it again to another guest.
He holds the gun up to another person's head and asks for money.
And this one person at the party,
She met this stranger quite differently than the other person.
She met this stranger quite differently than maybe how we would naturally respond when a gun is being held to our temple,
Right?
She approached him like another friend.
We have cheese and wine.
Can I get you a glass of wine?
And he takes the wine and says,
I think I made a mistake.
And so there's some confusion.
And after a few minutes,
They're just standing and they're all kind of silent drinking the wine.
And he says,
Can I get a hug?
And so this woman,
She hugs him.
And then he asks again,
Can I get a group hug?
Group hug.
And the guests encircle him in a group hug.
And he says,
I think I've come to the wrong house.
And he left.
True story.
Connection,
Loving kindness,
Compassion,
Simple connection.
That is the love I'm talking about.
And we live in a time where connection,
Connections are kind of,
Frankly,
They're kind of weird.
You know,
We connect on these little devices,
Taking pictures about like what we're going to eat and then sending them to our friends or posting them on our social media page to see how many followers that we have,
You know,
Is this connection.
Yet we want connection so badly,
But we're going about it in a way that often just evokes comparing or judging.
I took the train home from California where the retreat was held.
And I can't say enough about how awesome train travel is.
I really enjoyed it coming off of a retreat.
It was such a slow re-entry into daily life.
Just perfect.
So in the dining car,
They sit people together to make up a table of four.
So my table consisted of a couple and myself and another woman.
And I was having small talk with this other woman traveling alone.
And she had,
She was returning home to Cincinnati where she lived after seeing her son get married.
And as she was sharing,
She told me she was supposed to be on the train with her partner.
They had planned to go to the wedding together,
But he had died of cancer just a couple of months ago.
So she was traveling by herself.
And so I said,
Oh,
I,
I know something about grief.
And that's all I said.
And that just opened the floodgates to her grief.
And she shared of the cancer and the pain and the family dynamics.
And I listened.
And that simple connection,
When we got up from our meal,
I think we both felt lighter.
I know I did.
Lighter.
The feeling of love is light.
It's not heavy.
So love in a way is why we practice.
It may not feel that way when we sit down with our anxiety and our sadness,
The disappointments and the to do list.
But when we practice connecting with ourselves,
Connecting with,
You know,
Too much to do,
Or not enough time,
Or too many problems,
And relaxing back,
And just breathing in and breathing out,
Just connecting with our joy and our pain.
It's like the poem by Rilke,
Beloved break your heart no longer.
When we get up from that sit,
We have a little more ability,
A little more capability to genuinely connect with this life.
This beautiful,
Messy,
Fleeting,
Disappearing life.
Poetry is a phenomenal dharma teacher on love.
Many of the poets that inspire me know something about love.
They distill it so beautifully,
That connection.
I'll read something from Mary Oliver.
When I am among the true trees,
Especially the willows and the honey locusts,
Equally the beech,
The oaks and the pines,
They give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
In which I have goodness and discernment,
And never hurry through the world,
But walk slowly and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out,
Stay a while.
The light flows from their branches,
They call again.
It's simple,
They say,
And you too have come into the world to do this,
To go easy and to be filled with light and to shine,
To be filled with light and to shine.
So connecting with trees or nature is a wonderful way to explore love.
I had the opportunity to visit a grove of redwoods when I was in California that feels like me,
That felt like this great old ancestor,
You know,
My ancestors,
The redwoods.
And I sat with them and touched their mossy bark and like stroking my son's hair when I tuck him in at night.
And I can leave things with these trees,
These beings.
I release habits and ritual with these redwoods.
And when I leave the forest,
I feel lighter.
There's that word again,
Lighter.
So I'd like to stop now,
But we'll continue with this topic.
And I want to invite you as a practice for this week to practice with love in this very,
Very simple way of connecting,
Connecting more to family,
To friends,
To nature,
To your pets,
To the people in your life who make your life easier because of their service.
Connect and tune into that,
How that feels,
The lightness that's there when you connect and connect also to yourself,
Yourself as beloved,
To feel yourself beloved on this earth.
Thank you for your kind attention on these reflections.
