Emptying - Mark Nepo

Experience is a river that never stops coming.
Often we need to empty ourselves of conclusions, judgments and
preconceptions in order to meet whatever comes our way...
The early monastic vow of poverty was based on the need to empty,
as a way to involve a deeper form of listening.
In its original intent we find that poverty of mind reflects a quietude
that can restore an inner emptiness.  Poverty in an inner sense means
a divestment of all the distractions that occupy the mind.  It means an
emptying of the interior belongings that keep us from the essential
experience of being that waits beneath all our human noise.

[We] must carry less - must put down the wounds that clog
 and weigh the heart.  We must risk being touched [by life].

[But] letting go is not just about putting things down.
On a deeper plane, letting go is about letting your heart crumble,
 about letting yourself be rearranged by the journey of being alive.
  To soften and crumble is not to die.  It simply allows us to change.
  It is a call to enter the unknown.

When we can admit who we are, and give voice to what lives inside us,
[all that we feel and experience], that very act opens us like an inlet
and lets the depths of being rush in.  For in admitting who we are lets
the mysteries of life enter us.
We are talking about the authenticity of being.

Mark Nepo

From - The Exquisite Risk: Daring To Live An Authentic Life

~

Photo - the bottom of a glass bowl...

"Love Waiting"

I’ve been wanting a dog for a few months now. The thought of getting a dog excites me for some reason. After our cat, affectionately nicknamed “Yodi Bodhi,” died last August after 18+ years I said I was not going to have another animal. It was too much responsibility, demanding a lot of time and energy in the last 8 years of his life, and tied us down in many ways. But – here we are 8 months later and I’m swooning for a dog. There can never be another cat like “Yoda”, so it must be a dog – but not just any dog.

And then I read a blogpost over at 108zenbooks that did me in. Briefly, it was about a dog named Hachiko who, after his owner died while at work, went to the train station every day for *9 years* to wait for his “owner”/life companion to come home! (Until he himself died on the steps!) Genju describes this as “love waiting!” OMG. My Heart started quaking open. Actually my Heart has been experiencing a lot of little quakes lately. I’ll call them pre-shocks, as if warning me of the big quake to come. And I can feel it, the big quake is coming. This intuiting of the big Heart Quake is causing an anxious quiver to run throughout my body. I want to run even before it has actually happened. And I can barely sit with it long enough to get in touch with it before wanting to get up and eat or watch TV or whatever else I can *consume* to numb this deep quaking of the Heart. Even writing about it is creating the RUN response!

I know that having a dog will quake my Heart and crack it open – full quake. I know it will. And yet I want it. Am I ready for that!?

So what is it that I *really* want? What is it that a dog represents for me? I think the phrase “love waiting” says it all… I want “love waiting” - that unconditional, tail wagging, love response that only dogs can give. I’ve tried with humans but it doesn’t seem to work out too well – humans tend to bite. :) And I’ve been known to send a few darts to the heart as well… But can I call a dog “love waiting?” How about “Buddha” – the *Essence* of “Love Waiting…” – or Being-Self, or Divine Mother, or Spirit, or Awareness, or…. You get the idea…

A dog doesn’t care about our baggage; doesn’t feel a need to argue or wrangle over words like “self” – "me" -“non-duality”, or the meaning of “Truth”, or “existence.” A dog *is* in many ways a reflection of “True Nature:” loving, accepting, open-hearted - just Be-ing Presence in the way that only dogs know how to do – “love waiting.” Sorry I just love that phrase.

I ask myself, so why is the thought of all this causing all this heart-quaking, this quiver in my being? What am I trying to avoid? What do I not want to see?

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s “Love Waiting” – but I’ll have to let you know after “The Quake…”

~*~