“…you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle, and that’s your whole life.”

That’s Pema Chödrön. Last week her quotation from No Time To Lose became my current mantra: “…marshal your intelligence, courage, and humour in order to turn the tide.” And that one is still really working for me. When I put No Time To Lose back on my shelf, the book beside it called, The Wisdom of No Escape. I’ve quoted from this book on this blog from time to time. I had dogeared a few pages, underlined a few passages. But this time, oh! Suffice to say it’s now even more dogeared and filled with underlining and various other marks. Interesting how a book will hit differently at different times. I remembered a lot of the wisdom but this time through it just meant so much more, meant deeper.

More on the sacred circle: “Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’re always in the middle of the universe and the circle is always around you. Everyone who walks up to you has entered that sacred space, and it’s not an accident. Whatever comes into the space is there to teach you.”

You might remember the story of tigers that Pema talks about — it’s in this volume. That one gets shared a lot and it’s a good one. Tigers above, tigers below.

I’ve never been a big “self-help” book person and maybe that’s because I worked in a bookstore in my 20s selling what felt like thousands upon thousands of copies of the Celestine Prophecy and various habits of whomever. I kind of despised then, I admit, the patness, the seeking for easy answers, the simpleness of these books. (The manager was wont to say, “stack ‘em high and watch ‘em fly” and gave out prizes for the number of centimetres high of books we sold). Working in a public library for years has worn off my book snob edges, though. But yes, I’m still a bit (or a lot) suspicious of various false gurus.

Pema Chödrön is the real deal. Buddhism is not easy per se. It’s not hard either, but it doesn’t let you off the hook with too many catchy phrases or false promises. Pema quotes Trungpa Rinpoche: “Buddhism doesn’t tell you what is false and what is true, but it encourages you to find out for yourself.”

Pema says, “Learning to be not too tight and not too loose is an individual journey through which you discover how to find your own balance: how to relax when you find yourself being too rigid; how to become more elegant and precise when you find yourself being too casual.”

In the same vein, one of my life goals is to become more wholehearted. In 2017 I wrote a post titled “The Antidote.” In it I quote Pema, and also David Whyte who said, “The antidote to exhaustion is not rest: it’s wholeheartedness.”

In another post, I quoted from The Wisdom of No Escape with regards to “A Proper Cup of Tea.”

Unsurprisingly I quoted then the line that means a lot to me now. (It’s almost like we need to keep learning the same thing over and over :) ). She says, “Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably.”

The other big ongoing lesson for me is the one on impermanence. She says, “Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up.” She says also:

“Life is very brief. Even if we live to be a hundred, it’s very brief. Also, its length is unpredictable. Our lives are impermanent. I myself have, at the most, thirty more years to live, maybe thirty-five, but that would be tops. Maybe I have only twenty more years to live. Maybe I don’t even have one more day to live. It’s sobering to me to think that I don’t have all that long left. It makes me feel that I want to use it well. If you realize that you don’t have that many more years alive and if you live your life as if you actually had one day left, then the sense of importance heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude.”

And this is why it is said we must practice as if our hair is on fire.

So it seems appropriate after thinking about impermanence to end with the marvellous poem by Ellen Bass:

If You Knew

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

October 11, 2022