Along With The Why...

“The journey that tries our souls brings the Y in the road along with the Why?...” -Katherine Kemick

Came in an email recently, a letter, which included the above query. And in seeking to answer the sender, I find in my heart an answer that has found it’s way into this essay…

We imagine that it all matters, “the journey”, “the Y”, and the “Why” of it all….we often find ourselves caught in the mind stream that believes that the path we take and its many twists and turns, will somehow mean something to the future we are planning for ourselves, hoping for ourselves, projecting ourselves into, and/or running towards, often as a way of running from the past.

Let me submit to you for your consideration, that it doesn’t really matter whether that Y takes you left or right…not really, not to your deepest self…

I remember long, long ago, my teacher, ever the Master at providing lessons from moments of experiential process, caused a phone to ring on cue in another portion of the building, from the training class in which we sat, which we of course did not know.

It was a disturbing and curiously disruptive sound. We had all been so immersed in the work and the world that work produces, gathered together for the purpose of trying to find our way out of the dark…that when the daily grind interrupted us, with its shrill tone and demand for action, I remember being piqued by it.

He stopped, cocked his head toward the sound…thus indicating that somehow it was important beyond the dredge of tasks that accompany any modern day human life, and listened, with that quiet and calm countenance I so love about him.

Many moments passed, and on the face of some, you could see the irritation building…and almost read the thoughts, “why isn’t someone answering that phone?” …”where is the staff that they are not taking care of this?”…. “isn’t someone going to do something about that intrusion?”…

And then in that quiet and commanding way of his, he said, “you will never find your way home until you know, truly know… that the phone, it’s ringing, and the room it is ringing in, are all inside you.”

Young and unwise, I tried my best to put that into some sort of “new age” context that somehow my molecules, and the phones, and the ringing, were all somehow protoplasmicly bound together. And of course, any scientist worth his salt, will tell you that we are indeed bound together, but that is not the point my Teacher was attempting to make.

We all get so routinely confused about the External and the Internal, about where the action is, and where to place our attention, and why it doesn’t matter where we are or what we are doing, or whom we are doing it with.

We might come up in the world in a “tribe” that bows to a wall, or bends to the east, or handles beads while we pray, or sits on a stone in a beautiful garden, or any other vast array of external peculiarities that locate us in a given time, or place, but which ultimately have nothing to do with whether or not we discover that the ringing phone is inside us and nowhere else.

On the day that I discovered, for the first time – and many years after I was first exposed to the idea, where the phone, and the ringing, and the room were truly located, I went to my teacher and tried to explain to him that I knew, that I finally I understood.

I have an odd personal idiosyncratic pattern of crying, and crying like my dog died, when I am infused with gratitude. For that reason, for many years, I couldn’t really talk to my Teacher without crying and sometimes embarrassingly so…

On this day, the day that I finally understood the difference between the futile search outside of myself for relief and salvation and the beginning of the inward move, toward an increasingly Silent Mind, I tried to tell my Teacher about my discovery, amidst tears, and sobbing, and the gulping of air, I finally sputtered…”I know, I really know, where the phone is ringing…”

I think back on that now and it makes me smile. I am sure he knew what I was referencing, but had anybody else been able to peek inside that moment they would have thought…”look at the grown woman crying until snot runs out her nose, because she found out where the phone is located…lawd, some people…”

It never matters where we are, what our hands are holding, what we are standing beside, or under, or with whom. Our great good fortune is that the Universal Intelligence that surrounds and infuses everything, needs nothing more special than a ringing phone, to awaken us to the interior of our being.

Take the job or don’t take the job, marry or don’t, run or stay, build an empire or scavenge for food from garbage cans, all things - everything and nothing - can cause you to finally get fed up, and stop the searching so that you may be able to uncover the Silence, that waits so patiently for your attention.

It is, paradoxically, both our birthright and our obligation to rise above the productions of mind. All the things we think about, believe on, manage with our need for control and dominance, direct by virtue of the force of our personalities, or acquire by commitment of our time and energy, are very pale substitutes for the Quiet Mind.

There is a form of nurturing in the Silence that carries with it a renewal that has no boundaries and no limitations. It is not a magic bullet, in that it automatically or somehow magically, changes things or events in the outer, nothing instantaneously happens in the outer….and yet everything of any importance at all, is entirely altered, and altered for the better in a most profound way.

To find yourself breathing in an entirely silent mind is to know yourself in a way, and with an intimacy, that cannot be duplicated by any form of outer experience. It provides you with - what I imagine can mature into - an unlimited supply of courage, a courage born of the knowledge that nothing that happens to you is, or can be, exempt from the soothing salve of Silence.

I know that Silence would not now be available to me, had I not found and committed myself to my teacher. That ringing phone would have forever remained beyond my reach, had I not sat in front of him for so many years. I first met him 28 years ago and the seed was planted then for the last eight years of my life, in which, I have sat in front of him at every opportunity that presented itself. In the book, The Monk and The Philosopher, written by Matthieu Ricard is the best explanation I have ever heard of the need for a teacher whose mind has met the Silence.

Describing his own teacher, Ricard says…” In his presence, however, I’d intuitively discovered one of the basic things about the teacher-disciple relationship, putting one’s mind in harmony with that of the teacher. Its called ‘mixing your mind with the teacher’s mind’, the teacher’s mind being wisdom and our mind being confusion. What happens is that by means of that ‘spiritual union’ you pass from confusion to wisdom. This purely contemplative process is one of the key points of Tibetan Buddhist practice.”

Until I read this book I had no idea of the ancient understanding which prescribes the “mixing of your mind” with that of the Teacher’s. For there is no doubt, that blending your mind with that of one who has opened to Silence, does indeed allow you to pass from confusion to wisdom.

The same is true of some artist’s and creators, all of their work becomes infused with the Silence out of which their particular artistic endeavors take shape, and can pass to the observer or the listener at the very least… the flavor, or echo, of Silence.

The first time I ever heard Bobby McFerrin, I was wandering around Scottsdale looking for something to do on a warm Friday night. Alone, I didn’t want to go to a bar or some more boisterous form of entertainment, and in this search I found a small theatre hosting an “improvisational and inspirational” singer.

I purchased a ticket, sat down near the front…and soon, onto the stage, came a handsome, lean, black man with a microphone and a green glass, bottle of water. He began a type of singing I had never heard before… part humming, part warbling, part words, while thumping his chest to provide base, sometimes making clicking noises to provide percussion, sometimes the sound traveled thru his nose to provide a new tone, all issuing from one man…and sounding like an orchestra was there in the room with him.

I have never forgotten him, never lost the wonder of watching his performance, never missed an opportunity to search him out and follow his extraordinary career and artistic expression. I believe in my heart, that he so captivated me because his work is born in Silence.

I saw him recently on YouTube, a small sampling of the wonder of his work, in a concert in Russia in the company of Yo-Yo Ma…and together they made music that would open the doors of heaven.

The best thing to know about the Silence is that it holds no favorites, knows no limitations, withholds itself from no one “sinner or saint” alike, is available for the asking, and entirely ends the fruitless and painful search for “meaning” and “purpose” and “greatness” and “approval.” Of course, it also ends any and all beliefs, most importantly the belief that we as individuals are somehow special or important… except as the Witness of the Silence, in that, we are the supreme pinnacles of creation. Once Silence has been touched, it slowly or sometimes quite suddenly, melts away the personal self. Silence then reveals itself to be the true self and that all personal characteristics, idiosyncratic behaviors, achievements, and all other forms of the personal are contained within the Silence, and therefore secondary to it.

Matthieu Ricard goes onto to describe the role of the teacher of Silence in this way…

“If a prisoner wants to free his companions in misfortune, he must first break out of his own chains. It’s the only way to do it. You have to gain in strength to act appropriately. An artist has to begin by discovering the roots of his art, acquiring a technical skill, developing his inspiration and thereby become capable of projecting it on to the world. The sage’s approach is similar, even if it doesn’t have the same goals. The spiritual path begins with a period of retreat from the world, like a wounded deer looking for a solitary, peaceful spot to heal her wounds. Here, the wounds are those inflicted by ignorance. To try to help others prematurely is like harvesting wheat when it is still grass, or like a deaf musician playing beautiful tunes that he can’t hear. To be able to help beings, there should no longer be any difference between what you teach and what you are. A beginner might feel an immense desire to help others, but generally doesn’t have sufficient spiritual maturity to be able to do so.”

It is my great good fortune to have found, and followed, a Teacher for whom there were “no longer any differences between what he taught, and who he was”…

It is my hope that all the world will find a one such as he…

Adayre R. Miller

2/26/11

photo courtesy of Jody9 and flickr photo sharing to see more of this artist work please follow this link… www.flickr.com/photos/jodymiller/2341945277/in/gallery-58398502@N05-72157626144720522/

For The Remainder of My Days...

Many years ago, I had a type of relationship unique to my experience in the whole of my lifetime, in fifty-five years of living, there has never been another like it…and I doubt that there will be another similar to it, for the remainder of my days.

What I was not capable of understanding then, was that the arc of my experience in this particular relationship, was the process by which…if I had been capable of said, understanding…I might have found freedom a great deal sooner than I have.

It began one night, in the deep middle of the night, when I had just returned home from a night of partying. I was in my middle twenties the decade in which you believe in unlimited possibilities, and the decade in which you are most vulnerable to fantasy and illusion.

I was living in central Phoenix, in a modest apartment turned condo complex, which featured a central courtyard onto which every apartment door opened. It was probably late spring or early summer, as the night was warm, even at three in the morning.

I opened my ground floor condo door, to hear my phone ringing, and like most people if your phone is ringing at 3 am you automatically assume someone in your family has taken ill, or been injured. I dropped my purse, rushed to the phone, and snatched up the receiver of my trim line princess phone…(this was after all the early eighties)…and on the other end was the first obscene phone caller, I have ever had.

His declaration that he wanted to “F@!* me” was delivered in a deep, throaty, menacing, and scratchy, whisper. In the first few seconds, having been expecting an announcement that one of my already elderly parents had experienced some form of health crisis, I couldn’t even understand what he had said. Tiny slivers of time, measured I am sure in fractions of seconds, marched by in what felt like, long stretches of eons…standing there in my dancing shoes, holding a phone to my ear, and struck dumb by an invasion of my privacy, and my well being, that could not have been anticipated.

“What did you say…”, I finally demanded. And he repeated himself, something he was to do for three very long years….

For three years, he called me at two in the afternoon, at four in the morning, during breakfast, before dinner, after I had just come home from a date, while I was doing the chores around the house, just after I had stepped out of the shower, while I was applying lipstick….his calls interrupted every type of moment I spent inside my home. In the early months, he called me as many as 15 to 20 times 24/7.

Now your first reaction to this information is going to be, “why didn’t you change your phone number…you goof ball?”

I couldn’t. I had the beginnings of what was going to turn into a business, at that time in my life, and changing my phone number without forwarding the number to the new one would represent, in my mind, a loss to large to sustain. Remember at that time, there was no Internet, or cell phones, just your primary number and your snail mail address.

He only ever said two phrases to me…just eight words, for three long years. He didn’t embellish or story tell. He didn’t elaborate or complicate. He repeated the same two phrases, comprised of the same eight words many times a day… over, and over, and over…

In the beginning, that first time in the warm desert night, after I got over the shock that kept me from understanding, I was flooded with terror when he repeated his phrase. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night, wondering where he was, how he found me, why he had found me, and if he were coming for me.

The next morning I called the police, they informed me that I could change my phone number, (not possible), keep an accurate log of dates and times, which might or might not, help them catch him…(remember early eighties – not the kind of technology we have now), and get a registered gun, not something I could bring myself to do.

I tried keeping the log…but you try finding the thing, when you last had it in the bedroom, at four am, when he called the night before…and now your standing at the kitchen sink, with your hands in soapy water when he calls on a Saturday at 1:30, and you are scared witless, it just wasn’t doable.

It took weeks and weeks for terror to downgrade to fear, and I suppose it only did because my system could not sustain the physiological trauma of that much adrenaline. In the weeks of terror, I would snatch up the phone before the first ring was expended, so as to stop it’s now malevolent sound, and drop it when I heard his breathy, scratchy, male, “I want…” which would, if given the time, evolve into the sexual threat he was constantly issuing.

Finally when terror did downgrade to fear, I tried many different ideas of defense - chief among them was blowing a police whistle into his ear - it made him laugh softly, before issuing his threat.

I spent many nights sleeping over at good friends homes in an attempt to not be found alone and vulnerable in my bed, by this deviant, and what I imagined would one day be his escalation to physical violence.

Finally, in time, I got enraged and our “relating” metamorphosed into one of my screaming similar profanities back into the phone, the instrument he was using to exact such a price on my life.

The rage didn’t last nearly as long as the fear did.

Then came a contest of wills. It would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so crazy.

I began picking up the phone, without saying hello…

He had already proven, that he would not speak if someone else answered the phone, and thus I picked up the ringing phone and merely waited, quietly, on my end. This tactic confused a good many people…who could be heard to finally offer a somewhat confused and/or frustrated…”Hello”?...”Hello”?... And in this manner, I could determine if it was him or not.

When prolonged emotionally taut filled, not to mention, heavily breathed silence, greeted me allowing me to know it was him, on more than one of these occasions I tried to wait him out. Once, three full hours went by, until I finally offered an hello and without hesitation his… “I want to F@!* you”… traveled back down the line, and into my ear.

I had been going about my chores, with the phone line connected and the receiver sitting on my desk’s top. Just imagine what kind of concentration and dedication it took, for him to be sitting there, for three hours waiting for me to return…amazing…

Then came pity.

I had come full circle, I now understood how damaged he was by the choices he had made, how lost, how empty, how damned…

I began, upon hearing his oft-used phrase, to advise him to get help, to reach out, to find a way out of the prison he had made for himself. At this juncture came the only change in his behavior, that he ever expressed, he stopped declaring sexual violence…and instead, in the same throaty whisper, offered his affection. His new phrase? “I love you”…and it was as constant and repetitive, as had been his threat.

On my end… pity, morphed into sadness, and finally into resolve.

By this time, the ringing of the phone… was once more… just ringing. I picked up that ringing instrument of communication, just as I had done before he entered my life, without hesitation, without dread, without trepidation, or anxiety. And when I said hello and he began his new phrase, I put the receiver into its cradle, with no more emotional content, on my part, than if it had been a census taker, or an advertiser, or a wrong number.

Done, finished, complete, over…

He called a few times a month or so, for another seven or eight months and then he disappeared from whence he had come, with no more between us than the molecules that wrongly appear to seem to separate us all.

It was a preview of things to come…

For here in the arc of this sad but fruitful relationship, is the entire history of my spiritual development, and that of every other seeker that has ever stepped upon the path.

I had not yet met my spiritual teacher, had not yet become sufficiently disillusioned with what the world pretends to offer, had no yet become so panic and anxiety ridden that suicide seemed like a viable solution, and still in those three years, with him, I was exposed to all that the spiritual path has to offer…but had no capacity with which to understand it.

I have now; come to the same internal “space” with every important relationship of my life.

If you imagine that I arrived at indifference with him, my phone-it-in-helper, then you have misdiagnosed the transaction between us.

I assume a good number of people believe that hatred is the opposite of love, but it isn’t….indifference is the opposite of love. (There is no “opposite” to True Love; I am talking about relative love here, or the love that most people mean when they use that word). Indifference provides the capacity to use others, as mere stepping stones to the outcomes we believe will serve us, to use them without hesitation, recognition, or recompense, to allow for a sort of mental, emotional, spiritual, or physical theft. A thing we have all been guilty of…myself included.

If I believed in Evil, as a stand-alone entity or devil, which I do not…Indifference…would be its name.

That is not what I came to feel for my phone-it-in-helper. What I felt for him, at the time, I could not even have named. It took my teacher’s guidance, my coming to the same place with every important relationship of my life, and many years of spiritual maturity to be capable of naming my internal response to my, once upon a time, faceless phone brethren.

I came to complete and utter Internal Silence, in my relationship with him, and my mother, and my sister, and now with an ever-increasing inclusion of the many relationships that populate my life.

Silence, the unwavering capacity to stand within myself accepting the events of my life, without hesitation, commentary, or judgment…to watch what must be seen, without grasping and clinging, or denying and rejecting.

The author Gangaji says,…”Life is silent awareness, and all the events of life appear and disappear in that silence. You are that silence.”

To know yourself as a seemingly individuated part of the totality of Silence, out of which all things come and to which all things return, is to know, at-one-and-the-same-time, your True Face and the face of every seeming “Other” that has ever lived, crawled upon the earth, moved up out of the sea, or sat like stone at the top of a mountain.

To meet a friend, a family member, or a phone-it-in-helper with Silence is to allow them complete freedom from you, and thereby, real and lasting and truthful, Agape Love.

I also learned, from my phone helper, that true Silence cannot be manipulated, cajoled, controlled, demanded of, taken emotional hostage, or in any other way used…and that is why he was finally capable of letting go of me.

William Butler Yeats defines relationship better than, truer than, more powerfully than, any other sage, writer, or wise one, I believe, ever has, when he said. “We can make of our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer, life because of our quiet.”

To be met with Inner Silence by another, is to receive the potential to have our lives set free.

It isn’t necessarily comfortable, meeting this “still water” in another, because our reflection may just be ugly to us, and therefore hard to witness. For years and years, when I sat in front of my Teacher I felt the need to bow my head, in part because of his radiance, but more often than not… because I was ashamed of what I saw of myself, reflected in his Silence and Stillness.

The emotional greed, neediness, manipulations, approval seeking, emotional bartering, smallness, desires, loneliness and terrible grasping, all of which and more, were true of me, were all there reflected for me to see… on the smoothness, acceptance, kindness, generosity, and non-attachment of his countenance. That is why true teachers are so rare, most folks who claim to be spiritual teachers, are just salespeople hawking the currently popular images and patterns of the childhood need for safety, from a scary world. That is not necessarily bad, but it will cost you precious time and a great deal more suffering…

As Gangaji puts it, “As a child I used to recite a Christian prayer, and I found comfort in that prayer where I imagined there was an angel beside me, and there was Jesus in heaven. Everything was in order and I would be taken care of. At a certain stage that comfort wasn’t enough. I needed to enter heaven itself.

That prayer was a way of taming a child’s mind. When childhood is finished, prayers from childhood are not enough. Finally the one who is praying must be discovered.”

Discovering the “one who is praying” is to discover the Silence in yourself. To discover the Silence in yourself, the conditioned mind’s identity must die, and that death is the fiercest battle you will ever undertake. You must and do, “pass through the Valley of the Shadow of Death”, to be capable of bringing an end to the conditioned mind’s hold upon your life.

When that hold is abolished…freedom, fearlessness, abiding calm, and complete security are established and become ever, and ever, increasingly available.

So I choose for myself, and pray for you… the capacity to journey without ceasing… all the way from terror, through fear, passing into anger, toward pity, including sadness, and finally to the resolve of Silence wherein “they” will be as free of you, as you are of “them”…and in that freedom, the Oneself is reborn anew, as fresh and real as the original birth of the Universe…

Adayre R. Miller

2/20/11

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"…. betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope." Steven Deitz

Betrayal has, (apparently), come to visit me in the form of behaviors from those I love whose outcome is, in my perception, disrespectful to me and possibly even harmful.

And it does indeed slaughter hope…

We live in a culture that believes in hope. Hope as a concept, hope as a savior, hope as a true path, hope as a loophole offering escape in the very trajectory of our lives and finally our deaths.

And yet, somewhere deep inside me where the viscera of my organs and blood meet, I have come to see the danger of hope… and the horror of it.

Webster defines hope in this manner: “To desire, with expectation of fulfillment, as, to hope for the best. To expect with desire; to look forward to; to anticipate; to think; to expect”.

Hoping is the activity of the self, projected into the future, leaning as far away from the present moment experience as can be possibly accomplished. I am reminded of one of my dogs, who as a puppy loved to lean so far outside the window anticipating and enjoying the wind, that I had to hold her collar to keep her from sailing out the window, to what would have certainly been a painful and messy death. Hope is like that, leaning away from the present moment, so far into the wind, that we are in danger of losing ourselves entirely.

You may not be capable of abiding with me, in this decidedly unpopular view of hope, and how it pulls us from ourselves and into the unreal and imagined future, and if so, I will no doubt have already lost you. But if you are interested, as I am, in becoming fearless perhaps you might journey with me, while we take a fresh look at hope and its dark twin betrayal.

It is not possible to be betrayed by a loved one, were it not for the hidden aspect of hoping that it will be different this time. The cycle of hope and betrayal is the snake that bites it’s own tail, in a never ending and circular pattern, which causes wives to stay with men who beat them, or children to hope for parents worthy of their love, or me, to find myself once more, standing in shoes worn bare by use.

I have only one strong memory of my very early childhood, a childhood whose central feature was the anticipation of the next wild loosing of my mother’s rage and the fear that rage inspired. This memory has a very real kinesthetic quality to it, a visual memory taut with the power of its pull and impact, on a child, trying to untie the knot of understanding and reveal the escape route so longed for, so hoped for, so yearned for…

I am reaching out and up, my hand is dimpled and plump, my mothers dress is full and circular in the style of the fifties, and I take hold of her dress pulling and tugging it to gain her attention…in a small voice, in a sad tone…I ask my mother…”What is wrong with me, Mommy?”

This question framed in the context and understanding of a very young child was meant to query why I was so unlovable, why no one noticed my fear and trembling, why no one came to save me, why no one loved me enough to hold me close and keep the pain from drowning me.

It will serve you to know that “hope”, for me, was born there in that moment… while I tugged on my mother’s cotton floral skirt. A hope that has betrayed me all the days of my life, as it set my feet upon the path of waiting to begin living until tomorrow… a waiting that has informed, and consumed, and deformed, the very fabric of my life.

In Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, speaking to the inequities of slavery and the impact of it’s social and spiritual effects upon the life of our nation, he said…” and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”, the hope my young self generated in that oft repeated questioning of my mother, has resulted in “every drop of blood drawn with the lash to be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

I set my life upon a course of hoping for a future that will never, and can never be born. And in setting my course in this manner I have drawn blood, both by the “lash” and in response and recompense, by the “sword”.

The hand affixed to both the lash and the sword is my own.

Try, if you can, to hear the resonance of truth that echoes from beyond the veil of understanding, to inform the notion that all the suffering that has ever found me, found me by my own hand. And this is true of you, as well…

As my sister seeks financial salvation through an action that could result in my financial ruin, every drop of suffering her actions have triggered, has been drawn by my own hand, both the lash and the sword are being welded by me, and me alone.

Here is where betrayal can and does slaughter hope, and rightly so…

To hope that another will rescue us, removing us from our spiritual debts, resolving the conflicts of our lives, and thereby presenting us with salvation, is the hope of immature children whose lives will never be fully their own.

I am committed to ending my days as a fully functioning and resolute adult, not the helpless and frightened child I began this life as. It is therefore a necessity that I rid myself of the type of hope that Webster defines as “desire, with expectation of fulfillment”, this kind of hope cannot live if it does not have the “future” upon which to rely. The future, just as surely as the past, does not exist…and thus hoping for that more desirable future is a means of running from ourselves, and escaping the present moment, which is the only Life there is.

When another’s actions begin to color themselves, in our minds, as “betrayal” we are called into a type of war. We imagine this war as being one outside of us, in a conflict with the perpetrator of betrayal, and thereby absolving ourselves of guilt in the slashing and burning that war always brings with it.

Lincoln, the great orator, defined the War Between the States in this manner… “but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came”.

When we are in the midst of defining another as the perpetrator of betrayal in our lives, then we find ourselves in the unenviable position of both “making” war so that some part of us may continue to go unrecognized, and “accepting” war rather than allowing us to continue in our blind warmongering and desiring of a hope that dazzles us with believing in a future, where we can live without conflict or demands.

The conditioned mind examines the behavior of others and deems that behavior to constitute betrayal and begins to make war upon them, when in truth the war and its savagery is an entirely internal affair. The only possible cure is that we, like Lincoln, must be willing to accept the war within ourselves, so as to preserve, enhance, discover, and uncover, the Self that may one day become capable of recognizing the shared Ground of Being from which we all source.

As Lincoln was compelled to do, we must become willing of accepting this war of our mind upon itself, if we are to prevail and in Lincoln’s words win for ourselves… “malice toward none, charity for all, firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the self’s (nations) wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves...

It has been reported by his secretary that Mahatma Gandhi’s last words were “Rama and Rahim”, this is a very unpopular view of the beloved leader, as Rama and Rahim are the Muslim name for God and thus allows for the world’s most inspiring Hindu leader to be framed in the light of Muslim understanding as well. In one of his talks, Gandhi even defines himself as a “super-atheist”, accepting the views of those who believe in no form of deity at all, to be honored and cherished equally with his. This is the evidence of a mind no longer at war with itself, a mind healed of the divisiveness of believing that anything at all happens in the outer, or external.

Nothing occurs outside of you…nothing at all, of any consequence what-so-ever.

I am happy to be able to share with you an example of this type of enlightened mind, closer to home. My teacher, during one of his by-monthly talks, took my breath away relating a story I would not have been capable of imagining as ever having happened, to one so pure of heart.

It seems a woman called and secured an appointment to see him, something he did - as always - free of charge, she came, sat, and began to describe a moment some months previous, when she had planned, intended, and attempted to execute, his assassination.

She had come to a large gathering, to hear him speak…sure that he was the devil, and committed to cleansing the body human of a one such as he. She carried into the meeting, concealed in her purse, a small caliber weapon. When the talk was completed, coming from the back of the auditorium she strove and struggled, to make her way through the crowd to a sure enough range that her bullet would find it’s mark, and strike him dead. She reported to him, that for reasons unknown to her, no matter which way she turned nor how mightily she tried, she could not reach him and after a good long while gave up in frustration, promising to herself to return at some later date and complete her decision.

Instead, she came finally to confess to him, and absolve herself of the insanity that had polluted her mind…a choice that must have taken enormous courage. And seeing only peace and well being, no matter where, or upon whom he looked, he offered her an important role in his ongoing organization and its efforts to provide others with the means by which to secure their freedom. A job she held for many fruitful years, until shortly before her death.

If you imagine that the power of these stories is in the results…that Gandhi’s assassins bullet found it’s mark and my Teacher was spared, then you have resorted to viewing life with the telescope turned the wrong way round once again. What happens in the outer, is of little or no consequence, it is the response of both these great men to which we must turn our attention. Completely at rest, and in perfect trust…they both accepted the actions, decisions, and behaviors of others as entirely correct and appropriate to the needs of the Oneself.

It is reported by Gandhi’s secretary, Pyarelal, who was walking with him when the first bullet struck, that…”At first shot, the foot that was in motion, when he was hit, came down. He still stood on his legs when the second shot rang out, and then collapsed. The last words he uttered were Rama Rama”, (most scholars now accept the notion that Gandhi was indeed trying to say Rama Rahim and was unable to clearly enunciate the second name due to the effects of blood and energy loss).

To a healed mind, freed from the twin darknesses of both hope and betrayal, all that can be seen is freedom, peace, and harmony of action.

We must become willing to know and trust, the teachings of all of the Ageless Wisdom Traditions, wherein as A Course in Miracles states…“Love brings up everything unlike itself, to be healed”.

To have a loved one, family or friend, “betray” you is to bend your will to the great workings of Universal Intelligence and allow the appearance in the outer, to help you realize in what way and in which form, you must become willing to heal the broken mind that resides within.

Adayre R. Miller

2/14/11

photo courtesy of Sismoon and flickr photo sharing, to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link www.flickr.com/photos/howling-at-the-moon/2435581284/in/photostream/

Full of Paradise….

As friends often are, mine have been aware of the many “troubles” that have beset my life these last three years…

The loss of my entire life savings, my sister’s pressure to sell my home, the health concerns, my professional losses and on and on…and as friends will often do, a friend of mine was attempting to commiserate with me and honor the “dark night of the soul”, that he assumes I have been passing through these long months.

His kindness toward me has been boundless, I had the best professional experience of my life with him and I know that he is offering only more of the same, when he offers me his appraisal of the troubles I have been traveling amidst.

The thing of it is, this has not been a “dark night of my soul”. I have had those and they are daunting indeed…but they are born of a mind in resistance to the circumstances in which it finds itself.

The death of resistance ends all struggles, and ending struggle ends suffering.

When I entered into this long spiritual retreat, I was well prepared and adequately disillusioned, (a quite necessary step along the way), and therefore well equipped for what was to about to unfold… but I had no capacity in the beginning, to viscerally understand what it means to end resistance, and further what it means to connect with the Silent Mind.

Along the way, a long time friend and I had a very painful exposure to one another, and in that exposure I revisited the very worst aspects of myself…and that too, allowed me to deepen my experience of the end of, or death of, resistance.

We, as human beings attempting to live in and through our “doings”, resist almost everything. We resist the car traveling too slow in the fast lane, we resist the loss of everything and everyone, we resist the changes that each new day brings, we would resist the sun rising fresh each day, if we thought for a moment it would get us closer to the day we dream of, when life finally settles down and behaves the way we want it to.

Resistance is so common to our experience we don’t even really understand that it is there, present in our every waking moment, and ruining any hope we might possible have for freedom, security, peace or well being.

Resistance is not the same thing, or even similar, to a clean functioning “No”. Resistance is that subtle, or perhaps not so subtle, emanation of the desire to be somewhere else, doing something else, or even fundamentally being someone else. It is the very source of the “celebrity” culture with which this particular time in history is flooded.

It is a way of denying yourself that is so primal, that it decays any potential to truly live and discover the truth about our nature, and our potential contribution to the ongoing unfolding of the Universe.

This long, long retreat that was gifted to me in the form of being laid off from my job, which then required me to live so frugally that driving my car became a luxury, was in its essence a study in releasing resistance. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do, (save fruitlessly searching for another job), and no one to turn to in the oh-so-common pursuit of running from the conditioned mind, that portrays itself as the identity we think ourselves to be.

Out of this emptiness came the willingness, even in time the desire, to altogether cease resisting my life and the process into which it is unfolding. Over time, I began to embrace all of the circumstances of my life and no longer made distinctions between what was “good” and what was “bad”, in giving up those comparisons…even more capacity to end resistance became available.

As resistance flaked away like rust off of old and weathered steel, fresh new and inviting energy flooded my system…soon I discovered the capacity to still my thoughts, and in the resulting quiet I have discovered the personal self as something decidedly more than just the functioning of the thinking mind.

It is stranger than strange, to discover that your thinking mind is deeply problematic, in that everything that has ever been created in the material world has come to us by use of the part of us that “thinks”. My teacher trying to convey the same odd truth would often call the productions of mind that cause us so much suffering – “thinking” and the aspect of mind that sources from the deeper creative parts of us – “Thought”.

A great many wise and powerful sages have defined the entire manifestation of the physical Universe, as one that is being “Thought” into existence, by the creative and loving Intelligence that surrounds and inhabits us.

This form of Thinking is the form that is obedient to, or subservient to, the deeper Silence out of which thought arises. All you need do to prove this to yourself…is to sit quietly and watch your thoughts arise. They source out of absolute silence and absolute stillness, in time and with joyful commitment, you can actually “watch” them arise.

Because my sensory perceptions are so visual, it seems to me as though they float up like ethereal balloons rising against the morning sun, floating up from some depth, which is unknowable and unperceivable. This depth, this unknowable ground of Being…is the truth about each of us. It is the Source…. home, help, ease, joy, comfort, abiding peace, unlimited affection, unalloyed pure and absolute Love and high regard, it is our immanent and abiding true nature.

When this has been touched, what in our external circumstances can stand against such experience? What could possibly be more valuable, more stable, more desirable?

This most vital and powerful of experiences is not available, in or through, the thinking mind… in point-of-fact this non-thinking mind surrounds or includes the production of thinking, while also being beyond it, or beneath it, or above it – all deeply inadequate ways of trying to describe the enveloping sweetness of the mind that is larger than thought. Believing, positive thinking, praying, hoping, wishing, and most especially wanting, are all productions of the thinking mind and as such have no capacity to touch this most vital of selves.

This eternally quiet, yet viscerally palpable self, is the ground out of which you, and I, and all that exists springs.

If a name were called for, my heart would whisper…like air moving over the wings of fragile moths… the name of Yahweh, the “personal” name for God. I am not Jewish, and somehow it feels slightly as though I am transgressing to speak a name that does not come down to me through legitimate means, such as birthright…that said, it is the one that my heart would use, were a name required.

But even as this name, this personal name of God, speaks itself in my heart…I know that this is not the god of the ages, not the god of gray haired old men who live as superstitious figures from out of the historical time of men. But rather, a binding force that holds the stars orbiting in their light filled paths, a delivering force that will lift us above the smallness of our own minds, a living force that causes breath to come and to cease, a loving force that beckons us beyond the limitations of the conditioned mind, that at once causes and creates, all of our suffering.

Believing in this God, this personal god, is a pale lifeless substitute for experiencing it in the stillness and silence of our very own mind. Belief is the structure and construct of the very mind chatter that keeps direct experience of the Ground of Being unavailable, it is the prison into which our minds guide us…when freedom is available for the taking.

“Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.”

- Rumi

“I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. “

-Thomas Merton

We are “full of paradise” without our knowing it, and the circumstances of our lives do not figure into that fullness in any way what-so-ever…it is only the conditioned mind that can enter into “a dark night of the soul”. The Silent Mind is forever at rest, forever in repose, and forever available….

Adayre R. Miller

2/8/11

photo courtesy of CD Barnes and flickr photo sharing

The Heart of Silence….

I have heard it said that who we were is who we are meant to become, this idea was presented to me in a book I read years ago. The author and the name of the book are long past remembering, but his thesis was so entertaining that I remember it to this day.

He took some fifteen or so, very famous people in different arenas and went searching for the point of origin of their particular genius. He recounted stories of the most admired Matador, Spain has ever produced, and how he was such an easily frightened and spooked child that he spent a good deal of this youth hiding behind the skirts of his mother…which then of course, eventually became the flowing cape of his bullfighting trade.

He chronicled the painter Jackson Pollack, and his ground breaking explosive expression, of dripped and spun and spattered paint. As a young boy the story of his excessive interest in peeing in the winter snow, told over an over by his childhood friends, making the same splatter patterns that would one day catapult him into iconoclastic status among twentieth century painters, was apparently all there in the yellow snow of his childhood.

These are the only two stories from the book that I can remember, but I do remember looking back into my own childhood and wondering if there were some clue as to who I was destined to become, in the wreckage that was my background.

My mother, despite the rages that would overtake her and cause her to briefly lose her mind and her judgment, was by her nature, taciturn in the extreme…nearly mute, she required me to do all of her “public” speaking. As soon as I could speak, if we needed ketchup in a restaurant I would be required to ask for it, if someone came to the door I would be required to be part of the discussion. She worked for 35 years in the same job as a presser in a dry cleaner, (the chemicals used were surely the culprit of the lung disease that eventually killed her), I believe, primarily, because she never had to speak to anyone new.

As most folks who prefer not to speak, she was an extraordinary listener. So much so, that entire days could be spent with my spinning one tale after another, recounting days at school, first dates, homecoming dances, or new job escapades. She practically bred me to be a storyteller.

In time, I met the first of my many mentors, I was seventeen when he walked into the dry cleaners where I worked “the front” dealing with the customers, while my mother shrouded in steam made perfect creases in customers’ pants…and he appeared to be glowing to me.

A precocious child, made voluble by my mothers long time patient listening, and my very real desire to keep her entertained and thus calm, I had excelled only at classes that had some form of public speaking attached to them. All through primary and middle school there was English where we read from well loved books; in high school there was drama, speech, and debate, which were by far the most exciting, and the only time I was really engaged. And then onefine day, this glowing-to-my-eyes man, walked into the dry cleaners and made it possible for me to know that you could make a living telling “stories” to audiences.

When I asked him what he did, and he explained he sold and taught Dale Carnegie public speaking courses, I demanded that he let me take one. At the time, in the early seventies, the course cost $350.00 a very large sum of money for a seventeen-year-old girl. He said no…but I would not take no for an answer…

“You can’t, it’s too expensive”, was his first volley. “I have the money and I can write you a check right now”, was my reply. “We have a rule that only people twenty-one years of age and older can take the course”, was his next lob. “Change “Well”, he said, recognizing three commissions in one no doubt…”if you get your parents to spend $700.00 dollars taking the class with you, I will get the regional manager to suspend the age limit just this once”. the rule… and if you can’t, I will get both of my parents to take the class with me, thus providing all the protection against underage risk exposure that you might be worried about” was my demand.

I did, and he did.

You can imagine that getting my mother to take a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, was a contest of wills worthy of the gods of Olympus…but I prevailed and we attended, and she was forever and very dramatically positively changed by the experience.

As for me, the die was cast…I could imagine no other life for myself, save continuing the experience of engaging large numbers of others, in the way I had spent my childhood engaging my mother.

There were a good many missteps along the way…

I once got a friend to give me a chance at speaking to a large crowd of business people about the topic of “customer service”, something I had no business doing. It went so badly, to this day, the memory of it causes a blush of embarrassment.

But in time, I found my topic, as well as my venue. I was in the first wave of “new age” speakers that came out of the early eighties, and I settled into a church in California that was the largest of it’s type in that faith, and soon I was giving the one of the fastest growing of the many services we provided.

We sat up chairs in the lobby, had a TV installed in the rec room, borrowed parking spaces from surrounding buildings, and allowed folks to sit on the stairs going up to the second floor of the auditorium, the church board began looking for properties three sizes larger for us to purchase and move into.

To say that I excelled at it would be an understatement. But the most amazing problem began arising, in all of this wild growth, just as the long held and much desired fulfillment of my already decades old “dream” of making my way in the world by telling “stories” to audiences, began to ripen and become real… I became increasingly lost in a very surprising form of shame.

I would finish a lecture, sit down in the front row next to the Senior Minister, and shame would flood my interior. It was so sharp and real and painful that I could almost not bear it…and worse, I didn’t have the foggiest notion where it came from, or why I was experiencing it.

The parishioners had no idea that my experience was so different from theirs, in the receiving line that was a tradition of our church, they would file by one by one, crying, or smiling, or deeply moved by what I had “shared”, and would tell me in many different ways how important what I had said was, how valuable what I had provided them, how glad they had been that they had come that day.

And I would leave the auditorium on the long drive home, bathed in confusion and shame.

To this day I do not really, clearly, understand it. Sure… I have teased apart some of the aspects of it, enough to share with you the pearl I have finally discovered, but beyond that I do not know, and perhaps do not need to know.

Of course, the first layer is one of finally understanding that I was pandering. If you grew up as I did, insecure enough to want everyone you meet to “like” you…if you teach yourself how to make others like you by using praise and affirmation, to cause them to turn toward you like the sun causes sunflowers to follow it through the sky, then you are well on your way to becoming a panderer. (Just a note here, “to pander” has two very different meanings – one; a person who furnishes clients with a prostitute or supplies persons for illicit sexual intercourse, a procurer or pimp. I hope it goes without saying that I don’t mean that one, or two; a person who caters to, or profits from, the weaknesses of others. This is the meaning I am making with the use of the word.)

Now, how is it that a person, like myself, who is utterly sincere in their desire to “help” others and equally devoted to her own personal and professional dream…could rightly be considered to be pandering, or “profiting” off the weaknesses of others?

Well…that is precisely the point of this essay…if you are still with me, we will get there.

My teacher, spoke to us often over the course of the twenty-five years I was among his many students, of the dangers of following those whose primary benefit was to make us “feel good about ourselves”. That may very well rest harshly on your ears, so try – if you can, to listen to the deeper meaning. Every one of us, throughout the known and unknown history of the world, was born into a conditioned mind. A mind developed and defined by the cultural, familial, and tribal boundaries of our particular time in history, which is used to create what is considered the current and common social “norms”. This mind, although decidedly NOT the real you, becomes so familiar and fundamental to our sense of self, that it quite literally puts us to sleep with its hypnotic and mesmerizing abilities.

The vast majority of us live inside this mind, swinging like a pendulum between ease and comfort on one side, to disease or discomfort on the other, for the remainder of our lives. A lucky few of us, (and perhaps more and more), reach a level of disturbance and suffering that sets us out upon the heroes journey…the search for the unknown and, in truth, unknowable.

In this realm we follow what feels good, is somewhat novel compared to what we grew up with, and here we find release from the pressure and some measure of resolution to our various conflicts. This is the “many paths” of the current structure of the new age movement. There is nothing wrong with this process, nothing to complain about, or condemn, in any fashion what-so-ever…and my Teacher would also have supported any and all, who chose to rest in this particular bend in the road.

But if you have traveled long enough in this brand of teachings and processing, you will most likely come, as did I, to a very strong and compelling form of disillusionment. No matter how many times you affirm, process, pray, pick a card, form a goal, follow a heart’s desire, or find a new idea…the current level of swinging between ill and well remains. This new level, could well be – as it was for me, far above the level at which suicide seems like a doable solution, but well below the “peace that passes understanding” that the Bible promises.

Here is the source of the shame I felt, during the wild success I was experiencing those long years ago…I was unconsciously pandering…and I was just as lost in the productions of mind as I had ever been, and more, my soul knew it and communicated it to me in no uncertain terms.

It is not possible to use the productions of your mind; no matter how elegant, eloquent, beautiful or sincere they may be…to find your way beyond the mind. It simply isn’t possible.

Not only can the mind hamper discovering what is beyond itself, but it can and will, actively cloud the issue as it is struggling for its own survival in the process of your attempting to unburden yourself from it, as the conditioned mind is the very source of all suffering.

This is why my Teacher warned us of those that lead by “making us feel good about ourselves”, there is nothing wrong with those folk in any form, it is merely and only, that a leader cannot take you where they themselves have not journeyed.

Let me turn your attention to the manner in which Gangaji reports this understanding…

“But when it comes to the recognition of truth, the mind is not equipped to lead. It is exquisitely equipped to discover or to follow, but not to lead. The mind is not the enemy; there is nothing wrong with it. The tragedy is that we believe the conclusions of the mind to be reality. This is a huge tragedy, responsible for both mundane suffering and the most profound suffering, individually and collectively.

You are conditioned to try to keep mental understanding in an exalted place, but that is not true understanding. That is in the realm of understanding how to tie your shoes, practice good manners, learn a new language, or decipher advanced mathematical formulas.

The power of understanding, which is a beautiful power of the mind, is useless in the discovery of your true self.” (Emphasis mine.)

I would go further and say not only useless, but actively problematic in the pursuit of the non-thinking, or Silent mind.

Unknowable Silence is the source of Beingness and as such is the source of the self. It is the real you, the everlasting you, the safe and secure you, the discovery of which has been driving your thirst from the day you began “searching”. It cannot be found precisely because you search, and because you are searching with the very mechanism that must be laid aside, if you are to be found at all.

A rightful Teacher is one who has laid this false self away, and has embraced the no thought mind to the degree that they can embody it’s presence, and thereby make it possible for you to turn within and quiet the mind of the “thinker” in yourself.

My Teacher’s presence was so strong that I felt the need to bow my head when near him. His capacity to see beneath my many personas and attempts to please him and thereby curry his favor, was so strong that I eventually could no longer handle the embarrassment I felt when he would turn his laser like clarity upon me, causing me to feel the falseness in myself and making me want to hide in shame from that piercing, and still somehow, life affirming examination.

Recently I heard Gangaji expressing a similar phenomenon with her Teacher. She reported using all the many personality skills she had developed to entice him to look kindly upon her and to approve of her. She reported that he had no interest at all in the many roles she took on in those attempts, and that she often felt he was disgusted with her behavior. And then finally, when she had no more ways to gain his approval and instead began to submit to his greater understanding, she reported feeling shy and awkward like “an eight or nine year old”, and it was then her understanding began to develop and mature.

I too, remember feeling so awkward in the presence of my Teacher that I could hardly bear it, and as I looked around me I saw that same awkwardness in almost every one in the room.

A human being who has become capable of moving beyond the mind and into the changeless, ever present, no thought self…is something to behold. A marvel to wonder at, a harbinger of the future of the entire species of humanity, a Buddha…”the Awakened One”, but this “One” is not a mere dressed up version of the self that thinks.

This Awakened One is the one who no longer sees or experiences the sense of separate self that was the fall of mankind, and the expeller of humanity from the Garden of Eden. To Awaken is to know yourself as vibrantly alive, in a mind that is capable of stilling the ensnaring trap of thought and thereby coming to know that we are not the productions of our minds. But something so much more, and so much more necessary…a fully engaged Being, a Presence, a centered and centering Knower come fully free of “believing” in the productions of the mind, a carrier of Silent Wisdom.

So now, many years past the time in which I had an “audience” to speak to, I finally have something worthy of being said…

Deep within you lies the heart of Silence, in that silence lives and continues evermore, a Being whose nature is transcendent Goodness…the Good that has no opposite. That Being cannot be found or sought, but only uncovered. To uncover the Being we all share, you must be willing to lose all that you now believe makes you, you. It cannot be done without fear, or traveling through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but take heart…both the fear and the “death” are figments of the imagination of the very active mind, and thus are entirely unreal.

And here in these fourteen words of A Course in Miracles, is the truth to comfort you, while you peal back the layers of unreality and the production of mind that shroud your true nature from view.

Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God.

The “unreal” productions of mind do not exist, what is real in you cannot be threatened. Silence allows you to know this beyond anything the mind can “believe” itself into accepting, Silence is an uncovered or discovered state of Being having nothing at all to do with the productions of your mind. It rests below your mind, always available…eternally patient…

Adayre R. Miller

2/4/11

Photo courtesy of Shyia and flickr photo sharing to see additional images please follow this link.

www.flickr.com/photos/26182292@N08/5086140562/

The Race That Must Be Run...

When Job queried God about the many troubles that had come to rest upon his life, knitting his brow and dulling his heart…God spoke thus…

Do you give the horse his strength or clothe his neck with a flowing mane?

Do you make him leap like a locust, striking terror with his proud snorting?

He paws fiercely, rejoicing in his strength, and charges into the fray.

He laughs at fear… afraid of nothing.

He does not shy away from the sword, the quiver rattles against his side along with the flashing spear and lance.

In frenzied excitement he eats up the ground, he cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds.

“Do you give the horse his strength, or clothe him”? God is asking Job about his hubris, about his love of control and his illusory belief that he is the captain of his destiny and that his hand should, or even could, be upon the tiller.

The horses proud snorting, his fierce pawing, and the joy he takes in his strength these too are made by God, gifted by God, allowed by God…

Given this divine inheritance the mighty horse fears nothing, does not shy away from the sword, eats up the ground and cannot stand still when the trumpet is sounding.

Here in this ageless metaphor we find our right relationship with the Divine in us, with the Beingness that animates our limbs and restores our breath.

We have not made our life possible, nor our birth, and despite our believing so, not our daily lives either. Our every moment is a gift from the mysterious and the Divine. It is our role to rejoice in the strength that is ours to meet our life with, to become fearless, to eat up the distance and collapse the space, between the conditioned mind and the open heart.

If we spend our days in outward pursuits, yearning for the false and the temporary, if we come to believe that we are worthy of having all of our desires, and desires yet unborn, to be provided us, if we grasp and cling, wish and hope…then we have squandered the great gifts that the Divine has so lavished upon us.

If we remove from the allegory the notion that God - (as the other) - was punishing Job by causing the losses that populated his life; the loss of his fortune, family, standing in the community, his home…then we can see more clearly that it was the divine in Job himself, that was testing him. Testing to see if he had the will, the strength, the constancy and the commitment to the stay the course, to teach himself fearlessness …to teach himself, that when the trumpet sounds… the race must be run.

The goal of your life and mine is not to discover our egoic passions, or to pursue outer rewards and accolades. Choices such as these add complexity to the human drama, but little or no depth. Changes of this sort are superficial at best, an author whose name I can no longer recall said, “We once killed each other with rocks and sticks, now we can kill millions with a touch of a button…no one could rightly claim that as substantive change.”

Real change, substantive change, is developing the will and courage to live life in the only place it really occurs… inside your own heart, mind, and perceptions. William Blake said, “We look through a glass darkly”, in his poetic and revelatory manner he was trying to turn our attention from the clouded view of the external, to the crystalline pure stream of inner attention.

In my early forties I began taking dressage lessons from an exemplary teacher, her capacity to understand the animals and to teach me that same understanding, was quite extraordinary.

We started with a tiny, (by horse standards), speckled gray mare. I could ride her with ease and comfort, and easily progressed in my skill level to cantering and even running. I developed quite effortlessly a “good seat”, which is to say I began to ride her with no space between my bottom and the saddle; matching my rhythms to hers we found union and cohesion.

But she was “barn sour” and each time I tried to put her in the cross latches to groom her, (a non-negotiable responsibility of every rider), she would rear and kick, snorting and pawing at the ground and soon my teacher no longer wanted to bear the burden of liability, for an animal who might well become dangerous.

So one day I appeared for my lesson to find myself with an introduction to a new horse…the largest I had every laid my eyes upon. She was supposed to have been a thoroughbred, but who is kidding whom here, she was a Goliath in a red horse suit.

Getting on her back and looking down to the ground was like standing on a three-story window ledge with nothing to hold onto. She wasn’t just tall… she was gargantuan, and then some. And she scared me into next Thursday…

I lost my “seat” entirely. Sitting on her back even at the walk, I bobbed up and down like a buoy in fast moving water, at the trot my teeth slapped and rattled together, and my knuckles turned white from grasping the pommel. With the, I now realized, Lilliputian grey mare…I had come so far that my hands were loose on the reins, my thighs relaxed against her breath, my seat “stuck” to her saddle…I didn’t know how good it had been, until Goliath’s wife came my way. (Even her owner was afraid of her height and would not even trot her.)

Soon the lessons that had become the bright spot of my week, became so foreboding that only my having given my word that I would show up, got me in my car each week.

On the long drive into the countryside, past the golden and waving grass, with the bright blue California sky above me and the old and weathered railing to keep me company running along side, I spent my drive not in harmony with my surroundings, marveling at the beauty that was mine to drink freely from…no, I spent my time imaging the many ways in which my Goliath in a red thoroughbred suit could kill me.

I have an unusually strong and visually capable imagination and I could literally see my broken and bleeding body, lying in the dusty and yeasty smelling ground, of the riding arena. Maimed and broken beyond repair…

So after about four of these nail biting and gut wrenching rides to the stable, my teacher welcomed me on this one particular day, with a somewhat uncharacteristic query about what I wanted to practice that day. Like most good teachers she was used to holding the reins, and it was rare indeed, for her to solicit my opinion.

And without so much as a moment worth of forethought I said, “Quitting would be my first choice.” She looked up at me with mild surprise on her face, and her sudden teeth clench made her jaw muscle protrude as she said with clear assertion…”Well, that’s not going to happen, and why would you even entertain the idea?” And so I made my small confession…

I told her of my colorful and imaginative scenes of death and dismemberment, of broken backs and collapsed skulls, of limbs askew and chests caved in, and I told her I didn’t think I could continue riding the three story building that was pretending to be a horse.

“Oh”…she said…”is that all that’s wrong”? All, I thought…isn’t that enough? Good grief, I can barely breathe when I am astride Miss-So- Large-I-Could-Squash-A-V-Dub-By-Just-Sitting-On-It, (in truth this horse could take on a Dodge Ram Fifty with ease).

“Ok, we are going to trot next” my teacher said, “give me the reins, try to relax your thighs so you can stick the seat, slow your breathing…and close your eyes.” You-have-got-to-be-kidding-right?

“I cannot, no, I will not do that”, was my only response. I didn’t so much mind giving over the reins, although that would not have been my first choice, but give over the control stick and close my eyes as well…not a snowball’s chance in hell, as they say.

But my teacher was steadfast in her resolve, you can, you will, and this is non-negotiable.

My teacher holding tight to the reins and her resolve, described how she was going to run along side us while we trotted forward, with my eyes closed and my immanent death at hand, or so I presumed. Thankfully it didn’t take but a few seconds of feeling the horses movement, so entirely like my little gray mare’s - smoother even than hers because of the longer gate and the better footfall - before I understood in my depths, that my eyes and visual perception had been lying to me, that I was as safe on my three story building as I had been on my horse the size of a large St. Bernard dog.

You see, it is never what you believe…ever. It is what you are willing to trust that counts.

This horse became a beloved friend, as time went by I would often rest my forehead in the curve of her flank and tell her my, (at the time), many woes. She would listen with patience and kindness, and sometimes look back at me with deep and mysterious tenderness in her eyes, while munching on the hay I always provided when it was time to curry her and care for her hooves.

Twice more, before we parted, she taught me deep trust and willingness. One winter’s night separated from my teacher by the entire length of the arena, the storm that was still passing over head caused a lightening strike somewhere between us and the electricity generators, and plunged the arena into the pitch blackness that you can only experience in the deep countryside and with a roof overhead, to shut out the moon light.

Suddenly blind and deeply afraid, I did not know what to do. It was not possible for me to dismount my building-cum-horse without mounting steps and I would not have been capable of finding them in the deep blackness.

Just then, from so far away it sounded disembodied, came the voice of my teacher…”do not worry, she can see, even if you cannot”…

And sure enough my large friend carried me right to the arena exit with her tail swishing lazily in the background, glad that the lesson was over and she could look forward to brushing and oats.

The last time this large animal taught and informed my soul, was the only time I ever saw fear or concern on my teacher’s face. She, my teacher, had been pestering me to get a pair of boots for a very long time but I preferred to wear tennis shoes, for the comfort and ease they provided. My teacher never really explained the reasoning behind boots as necessary footgear, she would just cluck and complain every time I showed up in a pair of tennis shoes. But one fine day, I came to understand that boots were not a fashion accessory, but a potentially life saving tool.

I was climbing the mounting block, the only possible way to get astride my giantess and with my foot in the stirrup and preparing to swing my other leg up and over…my foot, sans the necessary heel of a boot, slipped straight through the stirrup hole and slid under my horse’s belly, tossing me over backwards onto the stairs with a decided thump. Almost any horse, no matter how tame, careful, or kind they might be, would have bolted from the spot taking me, and my now very vulnerable head, for a badly bumpy and very possibly deadly ride. My teacher knowing that horses can sense your fear when it is so small even you do not know it is there, began moving toward me as slowly as she could endure it with her face mottled with concern.

And the horse…

Well she merely turned her giant of a red head, and looked down at me with my foot pressed against her soft and exposed belly, as though to say…you look quite ridiculous like that you know, do get up now if you can…

I loved that animal.

And so much more importantly, I am grateful to her…for helping to continue teaching me to trust in the process of my life, and more, to know that trust is a non-negotiable lesson.

You and I do not get to decide if we are willing to trust life or not.

We do not get to test the water with our toes, determining whether or not it is safe to jump. One fine day, your badly dressed foot just slips through the hole and could cause your horse to believe you are a snake, or your cancer comes back, or your company closes it’s doors in the middle of an economic meltdown, or your sister begins to see you as a life raft, rather than a financially struggling survivor…and you must trust or sink.

In hardier days when life was a near constant struggle, the wisest among us knew that we must forge ahead, must trust and move, must accept and open…

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all have confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained”. - Marie Curie

So that finally, and with open awareness and a glad heart, we can come to the sure and certain knowledge that…”Self trust is the essence of heroism”. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am moved and inspired by the heroic among us that exercise their courage in the external, for all to see and take part in…but it is the singular soul, that sets out upon the “path less traveled”, to which I bow my head in wonder, reverence, and respect. The adventurer who becomes the hero of his own internal landscape, where no one sees but himself, where no one applauds but himself, and no rewards save the invisible ones are attained.

May you find in yourself the hero, who in complete trust, lays down his external weapons and takes up the race that must be run.

Adayre R. Miller

1/31/11

photo courtesy of h.ludens and flickr photo sharing to view additional images please follow this linkwww.flickr.com/photos/40157801@N02/3722555856/in/photostream/