Happy Winter Solstice to all of you who visit my page in this amazing Facebook community! For those of us in the northern hemisphere, this is the darkest day of the year, and the moment when the light begins to return—like the darkness before the dawn. What a beautiful metaphor for life and how it moves. And of course, for those of you in the southern hemisphere, it is (or more accurate, was yesterday) the summer solstice, the lightest day of the year and the moment when the darkness begins to return. The cycle of days and nights, seasons and tides, repeats day after day, year after year, and yet each winter, each spring, each day and each moment is completely new. I’ve always loved the word satsang. To me, it is a word that evokes the Heart. As I see it, satsang is devotion to Presence, devotion to this moment, just as it is. It’s not just something we do on special occasions in the presence of some guru or for an hour every day in meditation, but rather, it is a way of being. We are the Guru, the Buddha, the whole universe waking up—there is no other. When there is presence Here / Now, we see beauty in what might ordinarily be considered ugly or disappointing. We begin to welcome the dark times as opportunities to open ever-deeper, to dissolve ever-more completely, to discover the light in the last place we ever expected to find it—nirvana right in the very heart of samsara. Practice might be described as not leaving satsang, even in the darkest times. We could also say that practice is recognizing—in this very moment—that we never do leave satsang. The Holy Reality is always right here, waiting to be noticed. There is nothing else going on, not ever, not really. Even the mistakes, the false turns, the moments of delusion and confusion, the distraction and upset, the pain and suffering, the most horrific acts of cruelty and violence—all of it is the Holy Reality. And as an old Zen koan about the dark side of life puts it, “It is only for your benefit.” This is the koan of our lives, what Zen teacher Susan Murphy aptly describes as “the problem of reconciling the one continuous mistake we sometimes call life with buddha nature, which is complete grace from the beginning. It is a great joy to be in touch with all of you from so many different places on this marvelous blue ball spinning through space—all of us one whole listening presence, one seamless happening, one undivided awareness beholding and realizing itself from infinite points of view…beholding the blue ball and the blackness of outer space, beholding the winter and the summer…being it all, being just this moment...all of us Here / Now together in this placeless place from which the next breath originates. Wishing you all Happy Holidays and all blessings in the New Year and in the ever-new NOW. Happy Solstice!
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 17:22:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015