The Chains of Suffering…

“I am not what happens, but the space in which it happens.” -Author Unknown

The move from locating the identity of ourselves in the events and circumstances of our lives, to understanding, accepting, and even celebrating the realization that we are truly the space in which the experiences of our lives unfold; is as simple as the breath, as near as a heartbeat, as valuable as the dawn, and as frightening as death.

“Die before you die” said Jesus…he might just as easily have said “relocate yourself”. Ok, that’s a bit tongue in cheek…but truly all the useless suffering you and I have ever endured, is one born of being mistakenly located.

By looking at children, I make the assumption, that they believe themselves to be located in the body, chubby fists grasping chubbier thighs, small round and dimpled knuckles being sucked by soft plump mouths, they surely must take great pleasure and solace, in so physical an existence as they experience themselves to be. Sadly, a great number of people never move beyond the notion that they are only, their alternately pleasure providing or pain filled bodies.

Most of us, however, journey inward to the emotional self and begin the often life-long sojourn of identifying ourselves as some version of happy/sad, hopeful/hopeless, angry/calm, sorrowful/joyful and so on.

Here an even more dedicated group of people park themselves and never journey deeper, to regions which in all likelihood are frightening, in that to be free of them it is required we give up our favorite emotional state of mind, to become capable of investigating the truth that “seeking” is a deeply effective form of hiding from the truth. No one, in so far as I can tell, has escaped the desire to seek when the source of their identity springs from the emotional levels of being. Seeking is not a strictly spiritual process, material seeking, security seeking, romantic seeking, pleasure seeking, all these searches and many more define the entire lives, of the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived.

Then there are those among us, who move into the realms of mental being, they develop and disguise their search in the power and prowess of a well-developed and muscular mind. Effective thinkers and capable users of the mind, they may become captains of industry or science, leaders in politics or even religion…and yet, they too, are incapable of teasing apart the puzzle of existence and purpose, finding that location which is nearer than the breath where the true heart of us lies, available and awaiting our return home.

I have come to see that searching for the solution to the problems and circumstances of the physical, emotional, and mental bodies can and does, occupy millions for lifetimes. And further, that all of that seeking is, on the deepest and most profound levels entirely fruitless. I do not mean to say, and please do not hear, that we cannot “fix” our bodies imbalances, or our emotional tendencies toward suffering, or our circumstantial life situations. But rather, living and working on these levels does no more than plugging our most recent leak with a determined, and perhaps even well educated and talented finger. Like the little Dutch boy we are forever trying to stop up the damn that threatens us at every turn, an entirely inadequate response to a threatening flood that is deeply mistakenly perceived as dangerous. The very waters we are trying so to hold back, are the life giving boon of a loving and intelligent creator, who would have us fully embrace the drowning we so fear…so that we might yet awaken to the Truth of Being, which if given the chance, would lift us far above the daily problems and fears our lives are infused with.

The journey from form to formlessness is one that can be achieved in the blink of an eye, in a second split in halves, in a moment small enough for an electron to be born, live, and die. That realization is the only thing that will count on the day of your physical death, on that day you and I and all of creation, will know itself as more than form…but waiting until that day comes, to discover this highest of truths is the only tragedy that has ever, or will ever, occur.

The move from identifying ourselves as the story of “me”, or the historical events of our lives, or the anticipatory future we are so emotionally invested in, to the space of the formless, timeless, silent Ground of Impersonal Being is a shift from the false to the Real, one that is paradoxically effortless and yet requires all the courage that any human could possibly ever muster.

Discovering, or uncovering your true identity as the Watcher, or the Witness, or the Container of your life’s events, circumstances, and evolution, is very much like waking up from a horror filled dream. You can clearly remember the terror of being trapped and lost and wandering, but now there is a spaciousness that cannot be breached by the mind that “believes”. A calm centeredness that both surrounds, supports, stabilizes, and sustains you…here from this place you can look back, or perhaps more accurately outward, upon your life and its many twists and turns, and smile at the fears that once left you breathless and agonized. Here in your True North no evil can befall you, no harm can penetrate, no loneliness can carve its name upon your heart. Here in the peace that passes understanding lies the open and available depth of Being, a loving and care filled center of the known and unknown Universe. A nameless, faceless, fountain of renewal, rebirth, and everlasting acceptance…The Source…

“Selflessness is the highest state attainable”, thus spoke my Teacher.

To a life still located and emotionally invested in the knowable self, no idea could be more threatening or more worthy of active denial. Protection of the self is the alter upon which the mind worships, holding the self’s place in the world, achieving recognition for the self, supporting the self, finding and forging comfort for the self, caring for and lovingly helping the “selves” of others, these are notions more dear than life and limb and freedom, yet they are entirely without merit or reality.

Spiritual “True North” is the direct and complete dissolution of every version of this form of “self”. The death that comes before death, the Bible entreats us to be willing to endure.

It is not easy, I will give you that. But it is simpler than can even be imagined. And the rewards cannot even be spoken about…

It is not possible to discover this selfless self, without being entirely ready and willing to give up our hopes that what we want will be found in the next moment, the next thought, the next adventure, the next achievement, the next lover, the next religious fervor, the next ecstatic state of mind, or the next healing.

Every footfall that you place upon the “path” takes you farther away from the heart that beats beneath your physical one. Farther from the release that is so desired, farther from the “truth that will set you free”.

So how do we do this thing?

This letting go of the self, this waking up to the Selfless One?

We must begin precisely where we find ourselves, aware of what and how and who we are.

Let me give you the most mundane and simple example I can express. Yesterday I went to my favorite grocery store, past the colorful boxes and carefully lined shelves, to the back of the store where the white coated butcher labored to bring red and marbled meat to the counter.

He is a handsome young man, swarthy in complexion with a carefully manicured black mustache, just the sort that I once favored in days gone by. His demeanor and behavior has never indicated any measure of joy in his work or professional circumstances, he is polite but only nominally so, he is helpful but entirely without interest in being so, and thus I have always thought of him as unhappy to varying degrees.

But yesterday he must have been having a particularly unpleasant day, when I appeared before him, asking him to package a product that was already packaged and on display in an ice tub right behind me.

With a mildly exasperated tone he informed me that what I wanted was already packaged and had been done so, freshly, just this morning and was within arms reach right behind me. I of course knew that, but wanted a smaller quantity than was held in the case he indicated. As I stumbled around attempting to reframe the request I had made of him, he sighed beneath his breath and got out a container to comply with my request. Written across the entire width of his face and mannerisms, was his annoyance at my quirky demand on his time and energies. His resistance was a palpable presence standing between us like Scrooge’s departed partner Marley, dressed up in his chains and cement blocks, with his decaying jaw held in place by a handkerchief tied under his chin.

His mind had to have been saying to him some form of “why can’t she just take the one that is already prepared, why can’t she just leave me alone…etc, and so on and so forth.”

And just like Marley in Dickens famed fable, he will wear the chains he was in that moment forging, as we all will.

The chains of indignation and resignation, of resistance and argument, of displeasure and striving, of want and desire, of ill use of time and exclusively external focus…in that precise moment… a priceless opportunity slipped by the butcher, and once again he swam in the murky waters of a mind that believes it knows how life should be, and ought to be. And worse, he was almost certainly comparing his actual life to the illusions his mind populates his inner landscape with, where he is somewhere other than dealing with customers who want what they shouldn’t want, and by doing so disturb the fantasies and ruminations of a mind unknown to itself.

On the other hand, he could have chosen to abide with himself…to see his resistance rather than my demand. If he had made that choice instead of the one he made, his life and future would be measurably lighter and freer.

That is how it works. Just like that. As simple as that. Nothing else… no spiritual bells, no whistles, no burning bushes, no angels from on high, or visions of golden beings. Just a butcher in a white coat, facing not a customer…but himself, and his wish to be other than himself, other than his place in the world at that precise moment, other than the where, the how, and the who of his present tense experience.

Here is how we deny ourselves; we look out when we could be looking in. We see the other, when we could be seeing the self that needs releasing. We believe the lie the mind fuels our seeking with, that if this or that circumstance were just different, then… oh…then we could be happy, and peaceful, and free.

I tell you this story, not to take the butcher to task…but to allow his missed opportunity to fund your understanding. Freedom is the most mundane of tasks, the most common and frequently missed opportunity the world round. There is nowhere you need go to find the portal, nothing you must possess, no one you must meet, nothing you must learn, for all of that exists in the mind of the believer, in the mind that “knows”. That mind must die if you truly want liberation, and I have found that the vast majority of folk who confess to wanting the truth, really just want a little bit more comfort and ease, a little bit more prosperity or well being, a little bit more of a little bit more.

An effective spiritual no-path path, is a path of loss and release…. and as far as I can tell now, the losses and releases are without end - but do not despair, once you get the hang of it you can’t wait to give up the next thing, and the next. It doesn’t take long before the marrow of your bone understands that liberation is a naked thing, and naked is a glorious thing.

Two days ago, life gave me the opportunity to give up the hope of the love and acceptance - in the way I define it - of a mother/sister, and to serve us both in the doing of it. Already I can feel the lift, the resurrection, and the restoration. Twenty plus years have prepared the ground upon which I now find myself standing, seven years with a Teacher whose will was developed beyond reckoning, and two and half years of no external life have forged in me the will to practice every day and in every way the release of the forms of my life, in favor of meeting the formless before my days are through…to say that I have been blessed is an understatement of incalculable size.

I, like all of us, came into this life with the self forged chains that Dickens illustrated so well in his beloved classic, and yet, I have been given by grace, the will and the tools by which I have begun to pull apart each singular link, releasing me to the unknowable and to the salvation of its embrace.

I alone can find my way home, true also of the butcher and the baker and the taxman…and true of you, as well.

May you enter the portal of release through the very next moment that brings you irritation, or indignation, or resistance, or disagreement…see your “self” and not the other and you too, will be setting your chains aside and preparing for flight into the unknowable, and the wonder of Being.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day”.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

“Little by little, through patience and repeated effort, the mind will become stilled in the Self”.

- Bhagavad-Gita

A mind stilled in the Self is the end of prison, the breaking of a new dawn, the removing of the chains of suffering…

Adayre R. Miller

1/28/11

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To Sing When the Dawn is Yet Dark...

My sister called again this morning to ask me to sell my house, so that she might get the investment she chose to make eight years ago out of the property, now that she has gone through all the money that was left when she sold her business and before she borrowed heavily to open a restaurant that subsequently failed.

She is in dire financial straits and looking to me to fund her escape, of course my leaving my house and the 50,000 dollars I have in it would create both financial destitution and homelessness for me. A notion that she cannot understand or perhaps does not agree with, and as in so many of our conversations in the past, she cannot hear my perspective without getting enraged and today was no exception.

She hung up on me and when I called back in an attempt to reach her and help her to see the proposed solution I was offering was a reasonable one… she refused to speak with me. (I have offered that she apply some portion of the 39,000 dollars in interest that I have paid her over the life of the original 85,000 loan, toward the principal in the hope that a bank would be willing to refinance the house even without my having a job. Godaddy will no longer return my emails or my calls, and thus I must assume they have withdrawn the pledge that illness was an excusable reason for leaving training).

The internal pull to see her choices and actions as betrayal is so strong it is hard to see beyond it, and yet I will lose both my last remaining family member and myself if I am not capable of rising above the pain that my response to her phone call has engendered.

Even as I sit writing this, the desire to paint myself as her victim pulls on my psyche and waits to nourish my hurt feelings.

This like every other circumstance that has ever befallen me or any other human being is a test, a test of the commitment and will to know the truth, or live in the lie and the subsequent loss of sanity.

I, like you, cannot effect in any form the situations and circumstances that I will face. I could not have known eight years ago when I accepted her offer to act as my lender, that we would come to this place. I knew there was danger given the volatility of our childhood relationship, but I believed then that all that was necessary to protect us from what we now face was my willingness to pay my bill, which I have done without a single late or missed payment.

Who could have predicted the endless stream of poor financial choices she would make, the three great grandchildren she has chosen to raise, or the job market tossing me to the curb like so much used up refuse.

Back then, I believed in a better tomorrow…trusted that somewhere over the horizon my dream would come true and I would finally be living a life filled with admiration, approval, financial stability and professional recognition.

I could not have known then, that my willingness to know the interior depths of my own mind would take me down paths that have been populated by losses of such magnitude, that there is nothing left to rely upon save my own mind and heart.

Those of you who believe that believing is the way to prosperity and well being will not like what I am saying, will most likely be scared by it in some form…and I understand, and even empathize with that.

It is difficult indeed to deal with the truth that crucifixion precedes resurrection, it was so for the Christ and for the Buddha and for all the other Masters who have found their way past the mind that searches for some place better, for freedom in the outer and the transitory.

I have developed enough strength to stop the illusions that once populated my mind, to recognize them when they begin forming and to stop the impulse to run from myself and my internal fear based conversations.

This is the only goal I pursue now, the only outcome that still holds my attention, the only achievement worthy of the long journey through the very dark nights of my past.

My sister’s fear and pain has now cast me in the role of villain, and it is mine to accept and to make peace with…and further… to learn from.

Here is the real work of spirituality, the nuts and bolts, the load bearing truth of the path and the demands it places upon us. It is so easy to listen to the alluring songs of the sellers of spiritual promises…a heaven somewhere over there or one here, depending on who is doing the selling…and now in the fullness of time and maturity, I have finally come to see why my Teacher never in all the times I sat with him made promises of any kind, save that I must be responsible for my own salvation or find no salvation in any form. “Surprisingly, a true teacher and a true teaching will throw you, with the greatest compassion and ruthlessness, directly into the center of the wound itself.” – Gangaji

It is the great compassion and ruthlessness of my Teacher who routinely, and with great Love, through me back into the very center of my wound that living with all of these apparently negative circumstances has been both possible and life affirming.

Gangaji goes on to say,…”Healing wounds is appropriate. There is treatment for all wounds, and wounds that can be tended are to be tended. The problem only arises when truth itself is sought through healing. While the emotional, physical, or mental wounding is addressed, that which by its nature is whole, pure, free, and at peace goes overlooked. Truth is already there, regardless of the state of your body, your emotions, your mind, or your circumstances.”

The path, lit by my venerable Teacher, to which I have been committed these 27 years has not been one that leads to a problem free life, or even just to the relative good of healing…no, the path I have been guided toward and have dedicated my life to, sees beyond the relative good of mere healing, to the absolute good of coming to know that “by which its nature is whole, pure, free, and at peace”.

The Ground of Being is the destination, not the many restless and constantly changing external forms by which our sight and thus our minds become mesmerized, I want more than relative ease…I want freedom and release.

Pleasure is no longer attractive to me, only Peace will do now. The peace that recognizes no form, no content, no shifting insubstantial external realities, but rather is born and nurtured and given birth to from deep inside the Impersonal Self…the Ground of Being itself.

I will pay whatever price is required, loss of professional and personal identity, loss of friendships, loss of family, financial destitution, homelessness, disapproval, or whatever else may come up…if it will liberate my mind from finding my identity in the external ever changing non-reality of circumstances and outer events.

Again from Gangaji…” I invite you for just this moment to stop searching for relief from suffering. The invitation is neither to become oblivious to suffering, nor to give up in despair. It is an invitation to stop searching for something to rescue you from yourself.

The desire for enlightenment is not the problem. The problem is the expectation that enlightenment will give certain results, or look or feel a certain way. From that arise confusion and wondering why, if all one desires is enlightenment, there is still no abiding experience of peace.

I encourage you to really investigate your own mind and see if there is any image of truth, freedom, enlightenment, or God. If there is an image, try this experiment: Let it go. Now see if there is any expectation associated with God, such as, if you are true to God, God will give you perfect health, perfect wealth, eternal happiness, etc. Look into your mind and see if there are expectations that the realization of God or truth will give you some release from life, or some control over life. Now, for the purpose of inquiry, let those expectations go. Surrender them. Give them up. If you are hoping for a particular state of clarity, oceanic bliss, or certainty about your purpose in the world, just let that go so that you are simply here. Let everything go. When you have nothing, you have only yourself. And when you truly only have yourself, you are awake to who you truly are.

If you desire to be free, and this desire is not given any form, expectation, or thought but just allowed to be, then this true desire revels the entire known and unknown universe. Every particle is revealed as one, and that one is you. The very instant you think your desire for God, freedom, or truth should produce a particular result or look or feel a certain way, you cloud the purity of that true desire.

The challenge in any spiritual seeker’s heart, no matter how beautiful and essential the seeking may be, is to stop seeking any thing to fulfill that final desire. The challenge is to let your whole life fulfill that desire. You can offer the whole of the rest of your life to that desire without knowing what the result will be, without knowing whether there will be ruination, homelessness, riches, or fame. You can give what you have, which is your life in this moment, to truth, freedom, God.”

I am come very near to the edge…I have now, only myself…

I trust that Gangaji, The Christ, The Buddha and my beloved Teacher are all deep truth tellers and now that I have only myself, that I will begin the liberation that they have promised and that they have embodied.

If I have ever meant anything to you, through this writing or in any other form, pray for me will you? Not that I will be delivered from my travails, but rather, that I will have the courage, strength, and will to face them and to demand of them, that they provide me the strength of will necessary to overcome my fear and desire based self.

“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” - Rabindranath Tagore

Adayre R. Miller

1/26/11

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An Invitation…

Waiting for someone to make good on a promise is not something that I have traditionally been good at…

I have a long history of folk in my life who make promises but either choose to, or are incapable of, completing the circle and making the connection that promises require. My father was particularly poor at keeping his word, and my response to that was painful and helped to shape who I am in the world.

So from this history, I am waiting for a company to make good on their promise, that I may rejoin and restart an employment process interrupted by illness and lack of fundamental skills. So far the wait is nine business days and six emails, on my part, long. (I have tried unsuccessfully to reach someone by phone).

And once again… all that is possible to do, is face myself and my own interior conversation. I have come so far in that process, that I no longer believe that any outside or external event has very much consequence at all.

It becomes more and more clear, with every passing year, that the whole of one’s life is spent in the space between the external trigger and the internal conversation that trigger produces.

It is so simple as to be almost laughable.

All the years of searching, seeking, wanting, hoping, hurting, and running were all ways and means by which I tried, in vain, to escape the self that lies in wait just beneath the surface.

In these two weeks, the snippet of conversation from my sister…that she is afraid I might “take us both down”, or the embarrassment I felt while failing so publicly in class, or the return to the job search, or the relief, now dissipated, that I have finally restarted my income stream…have all come to sit with me…but not on me, as they once would have done.

They sit, like toads on a lily pad; green, garrulous, shiny, and unblinking…watching me…waiting… tirelessly.

Among the many character defects I have come to know and communicate with over the years, the biggest, may well be my quite childish belief that once I have discovered the fault in my thinking…that there’s an end to it. For some reason, I am always and evermore, thinking that if I have conquered my desire for rescue from the self once, that it will no longer darken my door again.

And so… I tick-tock like a metronome between the Truth and the Lie.

The Truth: nothing is ever wrong in the present moment. I know this to be real, as more and more of my life is spent in the release and relief of the present moment experience…the greatest gift these long months have given me, these months with no external life to speak of…have taught me by experience, that the present moment is entirely free from pain, worry, fault, hope, help, suffering, and want.

The Lie: that the future matters, or is relevant, or necessary, or valuable, or different in any way from the moment now unfolding. (I have long ago, left behind living in the past…my mind does not often wander back over what was, or if it does, I am capable of finding myself fairly quickly, thus the future and the potential rescue that my imagination fires the future with, is now the field of endeavor to which my attention must turn).

I know that a good many who might read this find great comfort in anticipating a potentially “good” future. Most American religious systems are founded on the notion, that the good lies somewhere out in front of us all. Heaven being the deepest and most radical of the future based beliefs of an eventual good, and of a much desired well-being.

A belief in future good is so compelling, that young men with all of life in front of them, will strap bombs to their chests and die in flames and outrage to defend their beliefs and to find the open doorway to a “future” of fulfillment and promise.

This anticipatory view of a greater good somewhere out in front of us, like the proverbial carrot on a pole, is a notion so hard to see and so damaging to live by, that it can and does, take lives the world round and for all of recorded history.

Clearing the mind of anticipation is, I find, a much more difficult task than clearing it of old resentments and historical stories of “me”. I am sure the reason for that is, anticipation unlike resentment, has a good taste and pleasing aroma to it. We savor like a good meal, the notion that we are headed for somewhere better than here, a new and exciting horizon beckons with promises of new life, and love, and fulfillment, and personal victory…or whatever combination of delights your particular history and culture populate your dream state with. Those young men who needlessly die are told stories of 77 virgins and their open, waiting, and pliable arms.

It is possible, for those of us in the West – with our history of scientific research and our belief in reason – to smile indulgently, at the notion that 77 virgins are awaiting these young and earnest men. But our notions of a better future are no less dramatic, and no less grounded in falseness than is the young Muslim who is now preparing himself for the glorious death he has been taught to anticipate.

The belief that tomorrow will hold better things than does today, is so universal it could be thought of as ubiquitous. It is, as they say, the water in which we fish are swimming…and ending its hold on our psyche is something that requires an intense commitment and willingness on the part of the individual to conquer.

So why, might you ask, does it matter?

If it provides us with delight to anticipate a more pleasing future, if it soothes our troubled brow and doesn’t go so far as to have us turning ourselves into weapons of mass destruction…why not look forward to the bloom of a new horizon? Why not see the world, our lives, and the whole of the human drama through the lens of our rosy imaginations?

In answer… I point you to Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 1 BC – 65 AD) Roman Stoic philosopher, “Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, we lose today.”

To look back or to look forward, in either it’s negative forms or it’s positive, which is to say either regret and nostalgia or dread and expectation we lose the whole of our opportunity to live, to learn, to behold, to bear witness and thus fail both ourselves, posterity, humanity, and the evolution that is so direly needed.

We imagine in our minds so befuddled with confusion, that serving others is a matter of working in the external, to feed, to clothe, to inoculate, or to protect. We believe that extinguishing the suffering of others is an act of wiping a fevered brow, of filling a bowl with rice, of putting a dollar in an outstretched hand. Yes…I don’t deny, that all of these things and so much more, can and do soothe and supply…but none of these things can cure.

Curing is an internal, solitary, necessary, essential, and personal journey. No one who has ever lived, or will ever live, can help another into the inner sanctum of his or her own mind. A great and vibrantly centered Teacher may inspire, may display the necessary Mastery, may light the way…but can do no more than that…each of us must travel alone and naked to the center of Being wherein a cure may be found.

It is paradoxical in the extreme that the only thing that has ever, or can ever harm us is our own mind. Yes we can be struck by lighting, or maimed by a bomb, or robbed at gun point…but the sane among us will walk away from events such as these unfettered and in tact, the almost sane among us may feel an emergency response in the moment but they will not be traumatized for a moment longer than the event lasted, and the sick among us will live for a lifetime shackled by the echo of something that no longer exists.

So how best to serve humanity and ourselves?

Give the dollar, fill the bowl with rice, and wipe the brow…if you are so inclined, but do not for a moment believe that is the greatest, or even the best form of service, that can be provided a family in such great a need as is the family of man.

Demonstration of the courage to face the figments of imagination that so populate the mind, and so confuse the individual, is the greatest gift that can ever be given.

Masterful determination is required to leave behind the traditional pathways the culture has so inoculated our minds with… “The goal of every life is to grow bigger than the circumstances into which you were born.” -Maya Angelou

I suspect that Ms. Angelou may have been talking about what is traditionally considered “greatness” in this quote, a building of an external life admired and applauded, but it held great resonance for me when I applied it to the pursuit of understanding that so captures my attention.

The “circumstances” into which you were born are the mythologies of your culture that you accept as givens, things like the culturally accepted definitions of good and bad, of success and failure, of illness and health…it is your job and mine, to grow “bigger” than these deeply flawed and potentially dangerously divisive ideas. We can see that so clearly when we shake our heads and wonder at the sheer nonsense of planes being flown into towers, or cars being bombed, or congresswomen being shot, but when we apply that to the ideas of success and failure and the intrinsic good that success is supposed to hold, we can no longer sustain the awareness that it is every bit as illusory as what drives the terrorists among us.

To loosen our grip on the cultural view that so binds our minds, requires potent and quite personal faith, a faith that allows no withholds and no back-pedaling.

“Faith is knowing that there is an ocean because you have seen a brook.” - Emanuel Teney

In a mind no longer dominated by the furious and rushing sound of the thinking self, a brook appears…a trickle at first, no doubt, but if followed in faith an ocean cannot be far.

I know by faith…”I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” - Douglas Adams

I began my life so far outside of myself that I was a danger to myself, I publish here with you as my witness, that I will walk without knowing where I am going, and by faith, so that I might restore my own sanity and by doing so serve all that shall come behind me.

I invite you to do the same…

Adayre R. Miller

1/25/11

Photo by Kristin Farwell, Karmalized.com - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kfarwell/3087928486/ and flickr photo sharing…to view additional images please follow the link listed

Equilibrium…

I have come to think of it as the Holy Grail.

The dictionary says its synonyms are symmetry, balance, and stability. The ability to stay in the center when all around you is out of balance, chaotic, and transitory…it is the work of a lifetime…and the only thing really worth the effort.

I know that the few of you who read my work are often caught off guard, if not even “gob smacked” as the British say, by the assertions I make and the inferences I provide.

I am continually entreating you to reconsider the meaning of things the culture takes for granted, like fun and pleasure and goals and success and failure and happiness, and I know that I challenge some of you with my views and the levels my understanding seeks.

Life is all too short, the commercials and sales schemes are always telling us…get your gusto now, before the shelves are empty and the tank runs dry…I get it, the world sells pleasure and sells it with a vengeance. This notion is even promulgated by a good many of our Spiritual leaders, you can see it every day of the week in some huge TV church with a good looking pastor and an even prettier wife…lovingly selling abundance and well being, ease and comfort, and all you have to do is BELIEVE…

(If you imagine that I am saying abundance and well being, and ease and comfort, are somehow wrong, you are missing the point and losing sight of the potential of seeing beyond the mundane in favor of the transcendent.)

My childhood was so chaotic and frightening, that I was a world-class sort of believer. I believed with a fervency and commitment that would have met with approval during the Spanish Inquisition…I “believed” and then some…

But in all the swirl of emotional believing, one man’s voice called out in the wilderness, one quiet, calm, kind, gentle, strong and confrontive man who appeared beside me, as if sent by an angel, and slowly over many years repeated and repeated the cautionary need to unbelieve, to undo the conditioning of my mind, to come away from the slavery of living in a mind who “knew” what was real and what was not. A mind already lost, a mind adrift from itself.

And one day, after considerable fear, anxiety, and even dread…I became capable of unbelieving.

And suddenly opinions stopped, and certainty became a thing of the past, and liberation became more than just a word.

It wasn’t permanent…not for me, I drop back into believing as easily as night follows day, and once more I find myself shackled and assuming that I “know” what is right or wrong, good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, kind or unkind.

Just this morning my sister called, before I was even out of bed and eventually got around to telling me what she wanted. She, by her own choice, invested in my house many years ago. At 6 percent interest she has realized some 34,000 dollars of profit on her original investment, an investment with such solid gold consistency that her bank has used it two different times to provide her loans for professional risks, that ended up costing her a lifetime of profits from hard earned business ventures she once owned and created.

Now after many years of poor financial choices she is living in almost as much poverty as am I, and now she wishes that I would sell my house so that she could get her money out of it. A wish I understand and even empathize with…

Because of her age and the fragility of her mental state, no matter how many gentle times I tried to tell her that if I sold now, she would get her money but I would be completely financially devastated, and thus totally impoverished…she could not hear the perspective I hold about the folly of selling and moving to some better city, with better employment opportunities…”come to Denver, it is better than Phoenix, you will be able to find a job there” she kept repeating.

It is a function of the egoic mind, that believes that running from your current circumstances to some other circumstance, will somehow magically transport you to a place where solutions will be found. That somehow Denver holds a solution that Phoenix doesn’t, it is the same kind of thinking that caused me to invest $2,000.00 in jewelry supplies a year or so ago, only to discover I had no place to sell them and no desire to create them.

When we choose to live in the world of believing, the world where we imagine that we know where the good is and how to get there, a place where we pursue pleasure and external approval, an illusory place where life matches the workings of our imaginations and the desires of our childhood conditioning…we are as lost as we can possibly be.

This is why the Buddha’s first noble truth is that life is suffering. We suffer because we use our extraordinarily skillful mind in the development of fantasy, illusions, and projections rather than the capacity to fit ourselves seamlessly into the present moment just as it arrives without protest, or demands.

My sister has come to the place where she imagines salvation rests in my selling my home. In fairness she imagines that the salvation she is looking for will benefit us both, and of course it would not. It is hard for me to hear her need, and not move heaven and earth to get her what she wants, despite the fact that I understand without question, that a temporary fix will not mend a broken mind.

I have a singular obligation toward her, and that is to stay within the bounds of my integrity and continue to supply the monthly payment I have so faithfully supplied these last eight years, I have every intention of doing so…should my circumstances permit. Today I have that money; tomorrow must take care of itself…

At the conclusion of my conversation with my elder sister, a woman who was once - for all intents and purposes - my mother, my equilibrium was lost and my heart hurt, and my mind wanted solutions and fixes and answers and resolution…none of which is possible or even valuable.

I cannot move into her interior being and mitigate even for a moment the anxiety and pressure she feels, my selling my home will not and cannot change the mounting pressure she will most likely feel for most of the remainder of her life. She lived an entirely external life, pursuing outcomes and results and goals, and she did so with great commitment and great success, if you are measuring life by numbers of dollars. So now, in the twilight of her years, she has a weak internal reference system and a decidedly growing need.

I am moved to sorrow about that, but I can do nothing to change it.

It is so common, as to be sadly normal, for us to think that we can ameliorate another’s life. We think because we have skills, understanding, resources, will, or commitment that we can somehow transfer those and improve, amend, or even restore another human being to the dignity, sanity, and well being that we all so richly deserve.

It just is not so…

No matter how much we might wish, or want, or pray, or hope to support another in finding freedom, it isn’t possible. We imagine, just as my sister does, that freedom has some external shape or form. That getting her money out of the smart investment she made those many years ago, will fix the problem and provide the solution…an Oh so common belief…

But her problem lies not in the stretched to tight budget that she labors under, but in the romanticism with which she has lived her whole life.

And now, she has laid her decision making and ill conceived choices at my doorstep, and wishes that I move against my best interest to support ending her anxiety and alter her internal experience by providing a solution to her money woes.

Would that it were so easy as that…

We want those we love to somehow escape the truth that life, lived in and through the fantasy of imagination, is suffering. We want them to somehow escape, having to learn the hard way, that the origin of suffering is that we are attached to the desire that our lives should be other than they are, we want them to somehow escape having to learn how to cope with attachment and how to end their internal, and very personal, suffering. We want to provide them with an escape hatch, a ladder out of a burning building, and a rescue from their own depths.

“Never do for another, what they can and should do for themselves,” taught my beloved Teacher. And seemingly conversely, “selfless service to others” is the highest state imaginable.

Two ideas that seemed always at odds with one another, in my understanding, until very recently. What every human being “can and should do” for themselves is to explore, challenge, restore, and heal their own minds weaknesses and desire for rescue. Selfless service can only be effectively provided to those who have the will to stand in the face of their own fears, you and I, cannot make another’s mind stable, we cannot empty another’s mind of imaginary boogey men, we cannot walk the dark tunnels of another’s lost understanding, and we cannot live through another’s dark night of the soul.

From the moment I chose to live, in 1983, I have been gifted with great, wise, and loving, guidance…but I sought them, I reached out, I made myself available, and I did the necessary standing in my own fears until the light began to dawn.

Rosa, a gifted therapist…George, the wisest person I have ever known or even heard about…Byron Katie, who gave me a tool of incalculable value…Tom, who walks beside me with constancy, patience, commitment, and kindness…a tiny army of incalculable power. But even as gifted and committed as they all are, they could not, would not, and have not, sheltered me from the storm of my own making.

It is one of life’s great paradoxes, that we must be willing to serve others while at one and the same time never venturing beyond the restraints of “each must go alone.”

I will leave you with the wisdom and soundness of a mind so much more supple than mine…

Lao Tzu says of “real people”; (emphasis mine)

“They are full yet appear to be empty.

They govern the inside, not the outside.

Clear and pure, utterly plain, they do

not contrive artificialities but return to simplicity.

(They comprehend) the fundamental, embracing the spirit.

Seeing the evolution of events, they keep to the source.

Their attention is focused internally, and they understand calamity

and fortune in the context of unity.

They keep to the simplicity of wholeness

and stand in the center of the quintessential.

The mark of a moderate man

is freedom from his own ideas.

Tolerant like the sky,

all-pervading like sunlight.”

And finally…

“I empty my mind of its likes and dislikes together with all the other rubbish accumulated during a lifetime of folly, (unbelieving) and then, I may expect to be guided by the universal Tao in me, that is to say by my personal Te.”

I, choose this day, to serve my sister and myself… by doing nothing in the outer and once more bending my will, my commitment, my determination, my resolve, my strength of character, and my spirit to the Inner and thus to serve the Real and the Necessary.

And may God in his infinite kindness and care, speed us both along our way…

Adayre R. Miller

1/14/11

“rock balancing” photos courtesy of Heiko Brinkmann

www.flickr.com/photos/85034017@N00/5340319192/

www.flickr.com/photos/85034017@N00/1492041644/

(if you have never seen “rock balancing”, I can tell you that it seems miraculous in its shear implausibility…the first time I saw it, I swear I didn’t believe it…until a seagull looking for a perch landed upon what appeared to solid rock, only to have the entire thing fall apart at his first touch, the memory has never left me. And there sitting relaxed and intensely quiet off to one side was the craftsman who built this astonishing structure, with a hat at his side where a growing amount of greenbacks were piling up…to which my contribution was added, to express the shear joy of discovering so unique a construction.)

Starting the New Job…

I thought I might report in on my most recent flood of Life Events, and the Experience that my heart and mind have turned those events into.

Day One of Brand New Job training, and have essentially never used Internet Explorer which turns out to be as important as knowing how to swim in rough waters: Within two hours I was so severely underwater and out of my element, that the escalation of pressure was reaching red zone already and I was rapidly drowning. Close of day one, I left with “the Voice”…what I used to think of as me, threatening me with all kinds of dire and dangerous outcomes. On the drive home, I listened…was kind, as one must be, when dealing with figments of one’s imagination…and kept control, despite the difficulty I knew was in front of me.

Day Two of Brand New Job training: Physical illness escalating, (I got really sick just before the job began – but they told us that no absences were allowed in training if you wanted to keep the job and I, most assuredly, wanted to keep the job). Now on third day, of no more than two hours worth of sleep, I tried in vain to keep up with the shear volume of information they were dumping.

Day Three of Brand New Job training: So while they were burying me in mountains of industry specific knowledge, I still couldn't figure out how to smoothly and efficiently navigate to the sites the trainer wanted us to go to, couldn't keep the six different password and user names straight, and apply them at the lightening speeds that everyone else could. The trainer, understandably, chose not to help me in terms of becoming capable of knowing how to navigate thru Internet Explorer, a wildly different animal than Mac's Safari browser, which I have been using for the last 15 years. It wasn’t personal…she expected that we would be PC and Internet Explorer capable…so, while data dumping an array of confusing information that was so industry specific that it was like suddenly waking up in Afghanistan and being told your life depended on trying to find your way home, thru hordes of hostiles, with a paper clip and a water pistol…I was in free fall and headed for the rocks. In the weeds and in deep trouble, with no MacGyver moves to apply to the situation and thereby save myself, with some clever chewing gum wrapper tool.

I reached out to the fellow sitting next to me, when I asked if he would help me, the first time he did so...the next time more reluctantly, by the third time he was actively misdirecting me. So I spoke to a woman who really seemed to know what she was doing and asked her if she would mentor me on the PC and Internet Explorer - she agreed - I moved my seat to one next to her and by question three she didn't want to help me either, she didn't throw rocks at me while I was drowning like the other guy...but she was clearly done supporting someone who basically didn't know how to do what might be considered the most basic forms of working with the machine and the browser. (If they had been dumped into Mac World, with me, rather than me dumped into PC world maybe they would have been the one searching thru a mountain of sailors knots trying to find the beginning of the rope pile, to save your life, while also under water and holding your breath….but wait, no, Macs are designed and constructed so that your Grandpa, who has never even seen a computer, could get on it and find his way to the website that sells his favorite brand of tobacco chaw, and two days later be chewing it).

Even this problem would have been surmountable if I had had even the smallest amount of time, to allow my brain to work its way around the problems...but no, the tempo of the class was beyond describing. Go here, do this, open that, find the other thing, go back to the first one, triple back to the fourth one, stand on your head, while walking backwards…and oh, by the way, I am going to play really loud and really obnoxious music, for the entire length of time that you are trying to find all this stuff. (I get that playing the music was smart conditioning, the capacity to concentrate with the volume turned up to a 9.8 on a scale of ten, is a condition of working on “the floor”…I could see that by watching the reps, just outside the door. So I understood, and even applauded, the depth of training and conditioning that was being supplied…that said, it didn’t help me save myself).

So that was what was happening on the outside. On the inside, my brain was overheating, (while also percolating with the streptococcus virus – it turns out). And imploding, with trying to understand what “you should be navigating with your tabs” meant, when the teacher walked by and dropped that in my lap with no explanation about where tabs were, what they were, or how to find them, or use them once found. Each time she redirected us and I was still trying to find the right password/user name combination, while every one else was at the appropriate site and already following her now third command about that site… while I was still trying to get across the threshold… my blood pressure would escalate, while my eyes were futilely searching for the right combination of keys that might unlock the door and let me in. All the while, embarrassment was flooding the shores of my interior, escalating every difficult physiological response I was having…let’s face it, no none likes being the dumbest person in the room…a situation I have not encountered since the pre-algebra class that I barely passed in ninth grade, and the very last time I put myself in that kind of no-win situation.

So under this kind of pressure, both external and internal, I scored an 82% on the “mid-term”. After the test, while the others were engaged in an activity, the trainer asked me to step outside and she told me clearly that she didn’t believe I would pass the final at the end, which is a condition of retaining employment. I uttered a mild protest by saying that I had gotten an “82 percent” on the test, and 85 was passing…”could it be that maybe I could catch up?”

Her response…”you scored an 81 point 17 percent”….oh, dear… I stand corrected.

She then gave me an out, because I started the class really ill, she told me that I would be able to get a Doctors note and restart the class at a later date. Which I am in the process of doing, even though - I now clearly understand - that working there, for me, would mean putting a square peg in a round hole, in a world class kind of way.

Please let me apologize for the length of that description…when what I really want to tell you about is what I learned and what is truly important…

The thing all of us face, without exception, is coming to understand what is outside and therefore external, and what is inside and therefore internal…and under our control.

Now you might think I have just stated the blatantly obvious, and you are mildly offended that I realize that you surely already know the difference between External and Internal. (Here’s the thing, if humanity really knew what is External and beyond our control and Internal and ours to deal with, there would be no war, no harm, no evil, and the loss of paradise would be a bad dream everyone had already woken up from.)

So, I really do think it is worthy of our consideration…

For instance, there are some 6 billion people on this planet…and thus there are 6 billion ways in which to entertain the notion of Spirituality….in the External. You might pray, genuflect, cross yourself, chop the heads off of chickens, shake your fist at a non-existent god, bring fruit to the ancestors, worship cows, or find the face of Christ in a tortilla…and in all of those myriad of processes, if we do not eventually stop believing in the outer and start understanding, that the pathway has no meaning excepting as to how it affects and effects the Inner self, then we will remain fundamentally lost…and in whatever form of personal hell we find ourselves in.

Your deep interior self, is the same Impersonal self that we all share… so paradoxically, there are 6 billion ways to get to One destination and only one.

A belief, idea, notion, hunch, conclusion, summary, synopsis, gist of, concept, scheme, impression, opinion, suggestion, proposal, brainstorm…or thought are all the content of your mind, and as such are illusions. They are born, arising from whence no one knows, and dying back to whence no one knows. The only life span they enjoy is the Attention we provided them with, and they possess no other reality save that one.

Does that mean that they are not capable of becoming a space rocket, or a hammock, or a pill, or a water cooler…no it doesn’t. When a new idea is born in the mind of man it comes as inspiration and has the potential to serve the greater good. When a thought is an opinion, like murder should not happen – even though it plainly does. Or, I should not have to suffer thru poverty – even though I plainly do. Or, he shouldn’t have done that – and he plainly did…then these thoughts have no relationship to reality and thus are a form of madness, which causes great and very unnecessary suffering.

So, okay, most everyone can agree that we harm ourselves by holding negative opinions…that we cause ourselves suffering when we think we are broken, or useless, or ugly, or worthless, but can you not see that holding a “good” or positive opinion is just as bad for us?

When I got my new job, I found myself slipping back into desire and planning and the future, something I know to be dangerous and I worked to get hold of myself and stop the illusions that began populating my mind and thus my heart. A kind and generous soul, offered me the guidance that I “deserved” to feel good about my “positive” change and the potential to ease my financial distress… that I should allow myself the pleasure of thinking these “good” thoughts.

I know the advice was offered in deep and true kindness, but I cannot allow myself to follow such advice…and here is why.

If I attempt to “positive think” my way into success or happiness or well being, I have merely relit the fire of the content of my mind and allowed the self to reassert it’s control and to take back the hard won freedom, I have spent a lifetime acquiring.

To believe my positive thoughts…is to believe my thoughts in general once more. I can only have this “pleasure” of believing my positive thoughts if I am willing to allow the negative thoughts the same hold on my reality. For every moment I spend believing my positive thoughts, the fundamental equilibrium of the Universe will be brought to bear upon my mind and I will be required to believe my negative thoughts for the same amount of time, intensity, and density…a price I am no longer willing to pay, pleasure is way to transitory and unstable to even begin to allow thinking to once more rule my life.

So I must guard my consciousness as rigorously with the “positive happy thoughts”, as I do with the negative painful ones…and what do I get in return for this constant and committed vigilance?

Uncaused Joy.

Transcending the self puts you in a higher vibration…in touch with an environment that produces Mastery and Elevation, Nobility and Gratitude, Tolerance and Commitment. A place unlike anything the content of your mind could even begin to provide. A place of peace, solitude, the gifts of solitude, stillness, silence, and grace.

So even as I failed spectacularly, and in public, my “self” did not reassert its control and I did not leave my body and project myself into a non-existent, and financially threatened future. Under considerable pressure, I leaned into my discomfort, danced with my confusion, held the hand of my embarrassment, courted my disability, and glided ever more deeply into the Impersonal Self and the Uncaused Joy it holds in escrow, waiting for me to reach out and grasp it.

It is nectar, and goodness, and wonder, and liberation, and bounty, and amazement, and emancipation, and release…to stop believing yourself and win back an open and unshackled mind, an empty stillness into which the Universe can place its order, and harmony, and simplicity, and kindness, and accord, and agreement…and most of all its Witness.

It took me a good long while to be willing to give up the negative content of my mind, but saving my physical life was hanging in the balance…it took me longer still, to know that I must give up the “positive” content of my mind. But now that I have, it has put wings under me… flight, and soaring, and lift. Who knew??!!

Adayre R. Miller

1/13/11

Photo courtesy of dca and flicker photo sharing www.flickr.com/photos/diham/3554329060/

I Will Love You, Always and Evermore…

My eldest dog has not been in good health, for a good long while now… she has endured a great deal of pain and suffering in her life. Pain I could do nothing about, save throwing pain pills and seemingly ineffective anti-inflammatories at it. She, and I, eventually learned to cope with her many difficulties and found a new rhythm and patience with her disabilities and discomforts…but not without cost, which both of us had to pay.

She is by far the most intelligent animal I have ever met, or even heard about.

I cannot recall, and therefore relate, the many times in our days together that she did things that I could only marvel at. I remember one specific incidence that I can no longer recall the circumstances of, but have a very clear memory of the surprise I felt, when she used problem solving thinking to process through whatever issue she was handling.

I do remember, very much, the great tenderness with which she treated my mother.

My mother was not a kind, nor a sentimental woman. She was raised on a farm and animals were either commodities or work tools. After years of begging for a dog, to assuage the deep loneliness that clung to me like a shadow, she finally relented and allowed me to have a small white poodle. One day when that poodle peed on the carpet, as young animals are wont to do, when still learning about where and when to eliminate, my mother picked it up and threw it with great force against a plate glass sliding door. Having been on the receiving end of my mother’s violence for years and years, I was still shocked and surprised that she could vent so, on a being so totally free of guilt, and was equally surprised it didn’t kill or severely break my small dog.

So you may be able to imagine my surprise when Mocha, my beloved spaniel mix, stole my mother’s hardened heart.

She was only six months old when they met…my mother ill with a deeply debilitating lung disorder, and my physically young, but emotionally deeply mature, animal. Mocha was never what one thinks of when thinking the term “puppy”. She was never hyper, excitable, or dependent, she wasn’t even charming in that goofy way that puppies normally are. Instead she had this fascinating dignity and character to her demeanor, much like we imagine higher order of beings might display. Nonplussed, she could and did, take on all comers. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, frightened her. In our years together we have been attacked by no less than four different pit bulls and chows and pit bull mixes, it is almost has if they can see, or more likely smell, her natural superiority. For that is most assuredly what it is…a regal bearing, a calm view of all things, a fierce and compelling fearlessness.

When confronted with my sick and distant mother, she merely walked with dignity to her sick bed, sat on her haunches just within reach, and waited for what seemed like days for my mother to notice her. I can’t recall her ever presenting herself in that exact same manner before or since, be very clear, she is not the body wagging, belly exposing, soft touch her housemates are…she will come to you, but only with the awareness of her own dignity moving in front of her like waves of grain rippling and bowing to an unseen hand.

So she sat, and waited, watched and offered herself, to my sick and stoic mother…and one day…I happened around the corner to find my mother touching her very soft and wonderfully copper brown head. Mocha received her touch with so much elegance and beauty; it would cause you to catch your breath, if you have any love for animals at all.

I stopped dead in my tracks willing myself to become invisible, hoping that my breath, presence, interest, surprise, and joy would not disturb this poignant moment, filled with such tenderness and selflessness.

It reminded me a great deal of one of the strongest memories I have of my childhood. My mother, in her confusion, extreme fundamentalist religious background, and her motherless childhood was a very easily aroused and angry woman. Her rage, could and did, send shock waves through me. She would beat me until I could no longer restrain my fear and confusion, and would often wind up begging her to stop.

But one day while driving on some day long excursion, with the sun pouring in through the windows touching everything in the car with its warmth and light, she allowed me to lay my head upon her lap and she began to absentmindedly twirl her fingers through my hair…the only time I can remember her touch as soft, easy, simple, and kind. And just like the day I saw her touching Mocha in much the same way, it caused me to catch my breath, lay perfectly still and hope that she wouldn’t stop.

As I stood motionless watching her touching my beautiful dog I hoped again, this time for her sake, that she wouldn’t stop her easy stroking.

A few days later, Mocha still young and in training peed on the carpet and my mother caught me cleaning it up. I was past the fear of her that had loomed up out of my childhood, but not past the guilt I felt at letting a dog have an accident in the house which would so upset her notions of cleanliness and appropriateness…and yet, to my great surprise, when I began apologizing and back pedaling, my Mother allowed as to how it didn’t matter, no crime had been committed. I can’t begin to express my surprise…and I have no doubt it was the dignity and tenderness with which my dog made herself available to my mother, that softened her easy anger and her view that animals have no value other than as food or tools.

Mocha’s fearlessness is something to behold as well. My other dogs dash, and dance, and bark, at the smallest changes in their environment…a grocery bag dancing in the wind, a darkly painted motorcycle sparkling in the moonlight, a shape that bears a vague human outline too far away to be identified, all and more, will make them yip, and dance, and argue loudly. Not so, Miss Mocha…

Nothing moves her to fear responses, save the smell of a vet’s office.

One day I was blowing my leaves tending to my garden, and she was directly in the path I needed to take to accomplish my task. The blower with its loud and obnoxious sounds, and its wind tunnel effects I thought, and wrongly so, that a tiny blast from its mouth would get her moving and out of my way. …Nope… She just stood her ground, with her ears blowing back from the force of the wind like she was ridin’ a Hog and commanding some center stretch of desert asphalt. God that girl is self-possessed…

When she was young and her back first went bad, she would come to me and whimper ever so lightly and press on my chest with her feet. I sincerely felt that she lacked only the vowels and the soft palette that would have been necessary to say clear as day “Look my back hurts, do something about it!”

I would do what I could, giving her pain medications and drugs to slow the swelling and warm poultices to soften the muscle constriction, even slow deep warm baths that I thought might loosen her back and ease her discomfort. But in truth, nothing really seemed to work, and she would continue to silently shake and quiver, no matter what I did, or what the many vets I took her to prescribed or indicated might help her.

One of the saddest days I can recall of our many years together came on the day she stopped pressing her small feet upon my chest to urge me to do something…anything, for her. She had come to the intelligent, sane, and sad understanding that I could not help her and thus she stopped asking me. Even here her great dignity served her, she no longer came pressing and pushing and causing me anguish over the fact that I could not help her, but rather bore in silence what could not be helped. (This was the first time I thought about euthanizing her, but my vet in California gave me a boxing about the ears when I tearfully brought it up, “Good grief”, he said…”she just has a bad back”.

There were times when finances made helping her any further undoable, and the guilt of that bears a weight upon me. I don’t mind the doing without that poverty has placed upon me…I do mind, what it has caused her to go without…

Her nobility is such a palpable presence that my other animals are deeply cowed by it.

On more than one occasion I have found my small white dog pacing the floor, or my lovely copper colored dog baying his lungs out because she chose to lay herself across a threshold of a doorway and inadvertently trapped one or the other, on the wrong side of freedom and escape. Neither of my other animals will dare to try and slip past her, even though to my knowledge she has never so much as showed her teeth to them. She is so clearly in charge that they will not trespass on her territory even to find freedom or escape, it has always made me smile when I come upon such a scene…Mocha lying there resplendent in her golden brown and white markings, relaxed and in repose, while the other two are pacing and baying, with their foreheads knit in consternation because they see no way out of the fix they find themselves in. A soft word from me, and Mocha moves aside making escape and freedom once more possible.

In the dark days when my inner conflicts ruled my world and threatened my well being, it was not her way to coddle me…licking, or nudging me out of my tears or woe.

No she would come, sit within reach, and look up at me with the most beautiful eyes you have ever seen. A dark pupil, a honeycomb gold ring and an auburn outer burst…she would look the long way up to my tear stained face, with her smooth and easy countenance and admonish me with her calm…”you are making much ado about nothing - life is as life does - and it is your job to fit yourself without complaint, into its curves and contours and circular comings and goings.” My head has known that for a good long time now, and Mocha’s simple acceptance and grand decorum helped me to know it in my heart, and more…to begin to exhibit it in my behavior and attitudes.

So now we come to the reason for all this reminiscing about my beautiful and poised dog.

It is time to exercise my obligation to send her back to whence she came.

I do not fear or tremble at the loss of her presence in my life, I do, of course, grieve…I want only the best for her, and she is due the best and the bravest from me. She is due respect and care and kindness and tenderness and remembrance…and I write this, so that you, who read, may help me to carry my obligation to serve her and her memory.

Perhaps she will find her way to the spirit that is my mother and once more offer her willingness to teach that all are important, that all are valuable, that those who cannot speak are here to teach those of us who can; compassion, right treatment, and the respect due all of Life, in all it’s many forms.

I have spent a good deal of the day in tears, as I work toward what it is my obligation to provide her…and I will allow Josh Billings a contemporary of Mark Twains to explain so well why that is…”A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.”

Thank you so much for spending these moments with me…as I move toward the humane and the kind.

And thank you Mocha, for exemplifying Beauty, Dignity, and Nobility even in the face of Life’s many travails. I will love you, always and evermore…

Adayre R. Miller

1/4/11