A Story About The Adventures Of A Dog Walker…

 

Recently I was sent a video of a young girl walking her dog, and was inspired to watch it due to the tag line…”the cutest thing I have ever seen”.

So I opened it and began to watch.

A very large dog and a very small girl were walking down a paved, but clearly, country road.  The little girl was just at the age where she could walk reliably and without teetering on her small feet.  She was blond and adorable, the dog, also blond, stood a good head or two taller than the girl, and must have outweighed her by three or four times.

Connecting them was a bright red leash, which the girl held in her tiny fist with great commitment and concern.  As they walked slowly toward the mom or dad who was filming them, the girl noticed a tire size depression in the road that was filled with three or so inches of water.  As soon as it caught her attention she felt compelled to investigate the sparkling and reflective pool.  As she moved toward it she was pulling on the leash of the great dog, in an attempt to get him to join her in her alteration of direction, toward this curious and fascinating opportunity.

The dog would not be budged.

The most she could manage was to move his head slightly in the direction of the intriguing water, but she could do no more than that, to entice him to change his forward momentum.

So she walked the short distance the leash required, to stand beside him, and then with the care a neurosurgeon might show, removing tissue from a brain, she laid the red leash on the ground... just so.  Her concentration was absolute.  Once the leash was placed on the ground, she inspected it carefully, to make sure it had been placed correctly, before moving away …

The dog stood immobile exactly where she had left him, as she went over to the depression and stepped immediately into the water.  Her head down and her gaze fixed on its splashing contents, deep concentration and observant joy were written across her features.  The first splash was, I imagine, quite satisfying… but as we all know, “you can’t eat just one”…and thus she walked in and through the pool, twice more.  This too was deeply satisfying, but it needed just a small enhancement.   So this time she ran several feet past the pool, at this point, her giant companion of a dog, turned his head to see where she was going and to assure himself she was not moving too far away.  Then she took a running jog at the pool, as she splashed through it making the water leap over the top of her small high top tennis shoes, this – her third trip through the water – was apparently just the right amount of joy…

She came out the other side, and walked slowly to where she had so carefully laid the red leash upon the ground, bending down to pick it up with the same deep attention to detail, with which she had relinquished it.

The short film ends with her strolling along side the massively large dog just as before, holding her end of the red connection and moving toward home.

It was indeed one of the “cutest things I had ever seen”, but it was also a deep reminder of the Bible’s injunction that… “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whom so ever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’” (Matthew 18:3-4)

The humbling that Jesus is speaking of, is a renunciation of believing in the mind that “knows”.  We lose ourselves so completely in the thinking mind that we grow into adulthood, with little or no capacity to recognize a moment of joy where and when we find it.  Joy born of curiosity, wonder, and exploration…by the way… kudos to the mom or dad, who had the good sense to let our young dog walker follow her intuition, and get her shoes well and truly soaked, allowing her to remain in the innocence of childhood, and without being taught that getting your shoes wet is “wrong”.

I had a moment like this, just the other day.

It stands in stark contrast to the thousands of other moments that I have had all the years of my adulthood.  I can recall having two others like it before, although I must have had many more than that, back in the days, when I too, would not have been capable of walking by a small pool of water, without getting my feet well and truly soaked.

It started with no more preamble than paying my bills.  I had my computer on and logged onto my bank’s website, I was checking my account balances and intending to write in my register, that days expenditures.

I am neither right nor left handed, I use both hands to do all the tasks my life requires, but I most often write with my left…(while I eat, paint, sew, and bead with my right), and I am a bit of a pen and pencil snob.  I must have just the right sort of pen, if ink is my need, it must flow smoothly from the nib having no resistance as it flows onto the paper.  If it is pencil, it must be mechanical and be filled with a .09 size of lead, all other sizes of lead routinely break as I grip and push my pencil across the page.  (I do not hold my writing instruments as most left-hander’s, curled over and around it, so that I am pulling the pen across the page as a right handed person would do.  Rather I hold the instrument, just as a right-hander would, and push it across the page, thus it must be smooth functioning or it creates frustration for me).

On this day, I was using my favorite orange mechanical pencil.

I had my calculator out and my check register open to the appropriate page, intending to log my recent purchases and tally up the correct results, I pushed the pencils lead feed and the lead extended just the right amount.

As I placed the lead onto the sheet, taking care to stay inside the boundaries indicated by the soft blue lines of my check register, suddenly, and without warning, my attention became so focused that my experience of the action, became exponentially enhanced.

The feel of the lead as it made its way across the paper, the sound of its soft scratching as it laid down a track of gray lines and circular shapes, the uneven point of the mechanical pencil’s lead…all captured my attention with such a fierce totality that it would not have surprised me in the least, to look up from my task, and find the whole world had dissolved…leaving only my orange pencil and me, in its wake.

Twice before, in my adulthood, I have had a moment like this.

The first time was the moment my mother took her very last breath.  I was kneeling beside her, witnessing her leave taking, as I had assured her I would be…and the world stopped turning entirely.  I felt as though I could see out of the back of my head.  I was aware of every nuanced sound in the room, and of every sound that had ceased as her breathing stopped.  I could feel the life in my body in a way, and to a degree, that I would not have imagined possible prior to that day.  I felt more truly alive than I had ever been before, and I became entirely free of the fear of death.

The next time was many years later, I was standing in the grass at the front of my subdivision, having just walked my dogs to it for their evening walk.  I had my head down looking, without seeing, and pointed at my feet.  I was telling myself some story or other, about the upset of the day.   Of course, I cannot remember even a little bit, what my mind was speaking to me about – I only know that it was some sort of unhappiness – when my attention became laser focused on the view of my feet.  The grass whose green was still visible as the light was fading from the sky, the way it stood up all around the imprint of my sandal, like haphazard green toothpicks sticking up this way and that, the slight haze of humidity that was still clinging to it from the watering that could not have been long ago, as I could still feel it on my toes and heels, all this and much more, tumbled into my brain…as I realized that my mind was entirely silent inside me.  The “inner voice” of me was absent, just as it had been when my mother drew her last breath, but this time, I was acutely aware of its absence.  That awareness rooted me to that spot, as though my feet had been encased in concrete, and I was about to drown in a sea of small green twig shapes.

And now… the sound 0f lead inscribing small gray lines and circles being drawn into a tiny window of off-white, bordered by soft blue lines…

This is who we are meant to be. 

Not captains of industry, nor winners of prizes; not hikers of mountains, nor planters of flags…but rather simple receivers, of the elegance and wonder, of the current moment we find ourselves in.

I do not mean to say, and I hope you do not hear, that giving up the roles we play in life is somehow necessary.  If you run a business, then run it.  If you are intent on winning an academy award, or a Rhodes scholarship, then by all means do the work.

I am only here to say… that if you are interested in discovering the kingdom of heaven, here on earth, then your attention must flow into the current moment, with as much concentration and commitment as the young girl whose great dog waited patiently for her, while she discovered the wonder and joy of wet feet.

“Be ye like little children”, so said the great one.

And I can tell you that these three moments that I have been graced with, are far greater than anything my mind has ever told me.  Far more valuable than anything I could have ever imagined.  Far more important to my life, and to Life itself, than anything I have ever dreamed about, hoped for, or prayed to get.

I have painted above the door to my home this credo: “Fear nothing, but the failure to experience your true nature…”

Your true nature is Simple Awareness… writ large enough… that last breaths, green grass, wet feet, and charcoal gray pencil lines, can bring you home to yourself, and end the long and utterly fruitless search, for more or better or different.

If I could bless you with anything, it would be that your attention finds itself so engaged in life, that a tiny moment fills up the Universe and bestows upon you the grace to understand that your pursuits, longings, desires, and dreams are the scraps of life, while the banquet and the feasting of your life goes unnoticed and unclaimed…and worst of all, well within your reach...

Adayre R. Miller

2/22/12

photo courtesy of Miss Chien and flickr photo  sharing to see more of this artist work, please follow this link: www.flickr.com/photos/57734740@N00/3145141308/ Miss Chien

The Fruit of Understanding...

 

Yesterday being required to go to the grocery store to stock up my pantry, walking on a foot that protested every step, I leaned on the shopping cart and hobbled glacially slowly down first, this aisle and the next, looking for the items that will get me through the next few days of foot elevated healing.

The store was busy, and the aisles packed, and my slow progress created even more pressure on the over stuffed isles.  A young man, in his early twenties, was stacking yams and sweet potatoes in the root vegetable isle, and I asked him which did he think, was a better purchase – yams or sweet potatoes.

As he turned his attention to me I could see clearly his disgruntled and slightly disturbed attitude.  He did not want to be where he was, nor doing what he was doing.  Just after he answered my question, an older woman walked past us with her purse hanging from her shoulder.  The purse swept a clear plastic box of cherry tomatoes, from the top of a stack of them, and onto the floor.  I could see from my vantage point that she had no idea she had even touched them, and she continued down the isle with nary a backward glance.

The young man, however, put on quite a floorshow.

He looked after her with such disdain, aggravation, disturbance, and resentment; you would have thought she had been caught murdering puppies.  Even as he was reaching this way and that, to pick up the small red escapees, his glaring gaze followed her down the full length of the store.

I attempted some inane remark to ease his upset; he ignored it and continued to glare in her direction.

I could almost hear his conditioned mind’s conversation.  “What an idiot!!  Why doesn’t she watch what she’s doing!!  Now I have to clean up the mess she has made!!”  (I suspect I have cleaned up his inner language quite a bit…)

This tiny moment spoke to me in a large way.

We imagine, by courtesy of the many dream merchant’s our country supplies us with that our lives are supposed to fulfill some great purpose.  That we are to go out amongst the world’s population to slay dragons, win the maidens, and acquire great gobs of attention, approval, money, and fame.

But what if the dream merchants are wrong?  What if our only purpose in this lifetime, or any other for that matter, is to win a simple victory over a mind that sees everything as a problem, and by doing so causes us to hate, or so much worse, fear… our moment-by-moment existence.

If you view the cherry tomato escape from this perspective then the only thing that occurred, is that the young man went from stacking tuberous root vegetables to picking up tomatoes, and both activities could have been achieved with no emotional component at all…with no resentment, and therefore no suffering.

The twenties is the decade of the “should” and “should not’s”, the time when we are most sure about how our world should work, the time when we are most physically, mentally, and emotionally, capable of fighting the losing battle that is the world of dream chasing.

As we age, and life begins to teach us that we can never control the outer world to suit our desires, we learn the hard truth that life is filled to the brim with suffering for those that continue to fight a losing battle for what they imagine they want, instead of looking to the real and the true and beginning to unravel the darkness within.

In religion, it is said, that there is always an exoteric and an esoteric version of every faith.  The exoteric is the outer traditions, trappings, rituals and rights, which the believers follow – hoping to ward off the fears of daily living.  But always a few, in every tradition, begin to hear the call of the esoteric… hidden within the depths of all the outer genuflections and church dogmas.

In the “new age” movement there is an exoteric and an esoteric path as well.

Adayashanti calls it being “in time” or “out of time”.  He describes the in time group as one that is easy to find, quite visible, probably advertising, and making a large splash of some sort…while the “out of time” groups are often obscure, hard to find, never promote themselves, and will teach you to fish so that you may feed yourself.

The dictionary meaning of exoteric is “understood by all”; anyone who speaks the same language can understand the messages of the dream merchants.  My Beloved Teacher was an “out of time” teacher, an esoteric and deeply wise human being, and it took me 24 years to begin to understand the obscure, oddly impenetrable, arcane, and wise teachings that were the work of my Teacher.

This is not a fault of his capacity to teach in a clear and simple manner, but rather the workings of the conditioned mind’s many ways in which it strives for survival and to veil the truth from us.

Lost in the productions of the conditioned mind we become incapable of accessing our direct, deeply intimate, and beautifully fluid experience.  We can no longer feel the beauty of the rising sun, but rather we can only talk to ourselves about it, and thus reduce the world around us to a series of “like it or don’t like it” internal conversations.

The most valuable thing that happens when we are freed from the mind that creates all that conversation is the recognition that “like it or don’t like it” is an illusion.  We can therefore be in pain or pleasure without having to run from it or run toward it, and herein lies the real meaning of stillness. 

Spiritual stillness is not a function of sitting in meditation, watching our breath, or opening to our chakras.  Stillness is a mind at repose, a mind capable of ending the constant refrain of “I want or I don’t want”, a mind made peaceful through the grace of surrender and acceptance.

The young grocery store stocker did not want to be spending his time putting yams in a pyramid, he believed strongly that the woman who was completely unaware that she dropped a box of tomatoes, should had stopped, apologized, and perhaps even picked them up herself.  He had an enormous conflict with reality and was instead lost in the world of illusions, where he “knows” what should and should not happen, and “knows” how people should and should not behave.  And the only person paying the price for his “knowledge” is himself.  One day his body will tire of the constant conflict with the simple truth of the moment and his heart will stop, or his body will begin to over produce cells in the form of cancer, or some other window will open for him to flee from himself and the world of suffering he is in the process of creating.

Or perhaps grace will enter his life in the form of a simple teacher with an even simpler message, to give up “believing” and “knowing” in favor of direct and pure experience.  If he is so graced, then a world that cannot be imagined will suddenly appear directly in front of him as though a miracle, and he will begin to breathe the free air of the middle way…

Adayre R. Miller

2/15/12 fidgetromeo

photo courtesy of flickr photo sharing and Fidgetromeo to see more of this artist’s work please follow this link:

www.flickr.com/photos/69715645@N03/8000051816/

Only I Will Know…

 

This morning I was doing chores around the house, and came in from the garage carrying a large load of freshly dried laundry, positioned in front of me and heaped nearly chin high, in a blue laundry basket.  And thus could not see the path in front of me...

I have a very old dog in the house, whose brown eyes are now clouded by cataracts, whose ears no longer hear me when I call, and whose penchant for laying directly in the most traveled traffic patterns in the house, would have been best remembered, by the owner of all that fresh laundry.

But seeing as how I did not remember her odd and quirky pattern of laying in the only pathway past the chairs in the living room, my foot found itself suddenly wedged under her, and my weight flying over her, as I crashed onto one knee and hurt my foot to the point that I thought it might be broken.

As I lay on my floor moaning in agony and unable to move, unsure of just which hurt the most…my knee or my foot…I was once more acutely aware of just how fragile is my existence, and just how much I am alone.

It took many moments to get up off the floor, and more still, to get ice, a towel, and a compression bandage to ward off the swelling that was surely to come.  I hobbled from room to room attempting to secure the necessary items, and to get my foot raised above my heart so that the injury would not travel the darkest path, and allow unnecessary swelling to cause yet more pain.

The pain was acute, severe, and demanding.

It coursed up my calf, married the still throbbing pain in my knee, and wound itself around the nerves in my brain stem.  My entire life’s awareness localized itself around this – my-right-sided-lower-limb – as my nervous system communicated the depth of the insult to my brain, which carried it on and into my consciousness.

I currently make my living doing a fairly low paying straight commission job, which cannot be accomplished by gimping from here to there, as it is quite physically demanding, and it was immediately apparent that I would not be capable of working the upcoming schedule that would start tomorrow, the Monday of my work week.

Thus as I wrapped my foot, positioned the ice pack, and lay down to elevate the limb… I realized that this fall would cost me a good deal more than mere pain…it would cost me hard dollars as well.

But here is why this inglorious fall, tripping over my old and deaf dog, merits an essay.  It did not cost me any amount of suffering what-so-ever.  Not even one tiny smidgen…

And here, right here, is the measure of my life.

I have not achieved, at least in any sustainable way, anything that I once thought was vitally important.  Not even one of the things that was depicted on my “vision board”, scheduled on my bucket list, or written down on my goal sheets, has come to pass for very long.

That is, I-suppose-in-part, because I have spent my life doing what my Teacher once called “Grazing”.

He would often provide lessons that underscored the difference between achieving in the outer world, and growing in the inner.  As an example, he would affirm that if you had an outer goal to visit, let’s say Los Angles, then you would follow a 1-2-3 linear pathway to arrive there.  Maps would be needed, the car’s tires checked, gas procured, the paper delivery stopped, and any number of other small details would have to be accomplished in a quite literal and linear process.

On the other hand, if your “goal” were to bring about inner peace, the end of resentment, constant contact with the deeper realms, and the end of suffering…then…”grazing” would have to be your mainstay.

Grazing was the name he gave to a non-linear, non-sequential, utterly uncontrollable, and entirely grace driven process, by which life takes you where you need to be, in order to deliver you to the deeper aspects of yourself, and the freedom that lies at the core of who you are.

He depicted it by use of a simple story of how a horse in a sunny field of grass will begin its day reaching for the nearest plump tuft of green, and having munched it down to the earth, will move on to the next closest one, having no more guidance than that next clump within its reach.  In this manner, the horse may travel great distances, over much terrain, arriving at a place that is entirely unknowable. 

But… arriving there… fed, nourished, content, and complete.

I had a deep and instant recognition of this simple story.

It hummed within me, precisely because it was the first “authority” figure that had ever approved of the strange method and mode of travel, that I have spent my entire life being guided by.

I have never had an outer plan.  I travel by the light of a compass only I carry, but oddly cannot even see.  I am jostled along by the stream, rarely ever inquiring where it is going, but rather following its curves, twists and turns, with ever increasing depths of trust and contentment.

And now, I have come to the place where real, immediate, and direct pain, produces no suffering at all.

I did not curse the dog for being stupid enough to lie down directly in the pathway.  I did not bemoan the injury, or tell myself a story about how it should not have happened, even though it is severe enough that it may require more than mere time to heal.  I did not shake my fist at the fact that there was no one available to help me up from the floor, or to bandage the hurt foot for me.  I did not look to tomorrow, and wonder how I will recover financially from the loss of income.  I did not weep the acid filled tears of remorse, though I did cry a valley of cleansing tears, which slowly helped the pain to find its way out of my body.

There will be no rewards for this achievement, of the separation of pain from suffering.

No one will beat a path to my door, or provide a golden statuette.  There will be no songs sung, or marches marched.  No flags lowered out of respect, or finish line tape snapped, as I make my way over the line drawn on the asphalt. 

Only I will partake of the sweetness of this victory.  Only I will know how deep the river runs…

More than five decades of grazing have brought me to this astoundingly simple, startlingly brave, devastatingly clear, moment-out-of-time.  When I can fully embrace the shockingly fragile nature of my daily life… and allow its moments to fill me… in equal measure with pain, grace, and gratitude.

Adayre R. Miller

2/11/12