"At least once a year, I imagine that I am about to die. Looking back as truthfully as I can at my entire life, I give full attention to the things I wish hadn’t occurred. Recognizing these mistakes honestly but without self-recrimination, I try to rejoice in the innate wisdom that allows me to see so bravely, and I feel compassion for how I so frequently messed up. Then I can go forward. The future is wide open, and what I do with it is up to me."
From "No Time To Lose" by Pema Chödrön
My birthday just passed, December 1st. I love that day, that date. If I could have picked my own birthday, I really believe that December 1st would have been my number one choice.
I'm in the midst of a practice that I mentioned in an earlier post but I'll reiterate it for the purpose of, well, getting to my purpose for writing this at all.
Two months ago I began a practice called "Living Fearlessly: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last" with the Zen priests Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison from the NY Zen Center for Contemplative Care. Some of the practice includes required reading and suggested reading, meditation, exercises done at our meetings that often include looking in to the eyes of a total stranger and communicating on levels that are unsettling at the very least. But the connections are deep and they are real and they are profoundly moving. I have moved in the direction of what I fear my entire life. It has always served me well and it has always been obvious to me that if I didn't take that path I would get stuck in some sort of emotionally debilitating quicksand.
Death has been a part of my psychic vocabulary since I was a very little girl. Dreams, fantasies, even the time at around age 5 when I watched a Tarzan movie with my Dad and realized that it was made ten years before I was born. I remember sitting in the tiny rocking chair made for my 5 year old behind and being acutely aware that Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah were swinging, at that moment in time, on a vine in a world that existed without me in it.
So I decided, right around my birthday last week, that aside from my Zen practice, I would write every day for a year about just about everything. I want and need the discipline of a public commitment plus I'm sure it's the only way I'll get to the bottom of all the thoughts that pour out of my head daily and collect, unceremoniously, atop the compost heap of my best intentions. This is my journey for the next year.
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