that she would say that, especially when it had to do with things about herself that I saw as signs of bigotry. The colored laborer working in the lot beside our white-neighborhood house, in the early 1960s, who asked for a drink of water and was handed a peanut butter jar to drink out of. I chided her for that. When she said she couldn’t help it, she really meant that. She truly couldn’t help thinking the man had cooties, and that ever after, our drinking glass would not be able to be sufficiently cleaned. She thought she couldn’t help her feelings, and so truly — in some sense — she could not.
I might have prided myself on being free of my mother’s egregious bigotry. But the truth was, all my life, until I stumbled onto the idea that my inner world was distinct from the outer one, I believed as truly as my mother did that I couldn’t help feeling what I felt. You might say I couldn’t help being racially tolerant. Because of my conditioning — because of growing up in the mind-opening sixties, because of attending a racially integrated school — I couldn’t help recognizing that people were people. My mother had her conditioning. If I had grown up in the 1930s, in a world where the races were sharply divided by a set of unquestioned assumptions, probably I would have really believed the black man’s mouth was unclean in a way my own was not.
The deep value of observing the inner world is to see that it is, by its very nature, a conditioned place (the particulars of the conditioning being not so relevant). As a mother, I had conditioned myself to believe my little children should never squabble. Oh, I never had this thought consciously. But the fact that I reacted to their uproars with such frustration, such heat, had behind it the thought that there was something “wrong” with them getting into struggles with one another. Along with that thought came the unwillingness to accept the reality of the tearful commotions. I didn’t want them to squabble. I wanted them to always get along. It would make my life easier. Even if I could have just looked at that, at what I wanted — for them to never fight, never cry, never need my intervention — a breath of calming air could have entered the moment. But until this practice of honestly looking at what went on in my interior, it simply never occurred to me that the source of my frustration — of my pretty regular suffering as a mother — was not my children’s behavior. It was what went on in my head. Once I began to look, the inner world and the outer world started to appear to be separate things, carrying on quite independently. They were not, as I had believed my entire life prior, a single thing. Before, I had thought the only way for me to feel better inside would be to control what was happening on the outside: to somehow cause my children to get along all day. (Lotsa luck on that one.)
I couldn’t change my conditioning; I couldn’t make my thoughts go away. But if I could see them for what they were, if I could see that they were products of my history, of my own interior, I might not have to live at the mercy of them. If I could realize that my inner world was its own thing, not actually caused by what was happening, I might be able to just be present with my children — even if what the present held was squabbling. I might be able to accept what was actually happening, without experiencing it through the limiting blinders of how I wanted things to be. I might be able to imagine my children’s own frustration and confusion, to be a real help to them.
And who knows? If my mother could have seen she was the product of her history, her conditioning, might she have been able to be truly present with that thirsty man? Unburdened of ideas, might she have been able to simply imagine his dry mouth, get him a glass of water?
Where is the Beloved?
Bow your head: incline it the way a horse does toward a proffered hand, so gladly. Put your head down, let the weight of it settle into the hands of the beloved.
The beloved is everywhere: the earth, the lap of your mother, your lover. Your own lap. The beloved is the side of a big warm dog stretched long. It is a patch of warm grass. It is a river, the skin of a pond.
It is your own difficult daily life.
There doesn’t need to be a struggle. How strangely this falls on the ears of the struggling world, but there doesn’t. The discrepancy between how it seems and how it really is — this is the measure of the difficulty of understanding. The expression on somebody’s face when you tell them that suffering is dispensable — the incredulity, or confusion, or maybe anger — makes it clear what an uphill battle this is. It is sad, the saddest thing in the world.
Put your head down, and don’t fall asleep. Just lie with your eyes closed and see if you can feel what it would feel like to have nothing weighing on you, to know that you would never again have to strain at anything, or worry, or wonder if you’ll ever be happy. See if you can feel what relief there would be if you knew, absolutely knew, that the rest of your life would be effortless. That all was radically well, and would be, even though bad things would keep happening. That somehow, for the rest of forever, you would be soft and peaceful and laughing inside, no matter what hand you were dealt. Feel it, feel it. You owe this to yourself. If you never let yourself sink into the deliciousness of what seems so impossible, how will longing ever get a chance to start up?
This is not a fairy tale. This possible thing is as real as a tree, as real as politics, as the roots that hold the tree to the ground, as real as the newspaper and its stories. It is as real as the Red Sox, as the price of gas, as a fight with your in-laws, as real as a tuition bill, as real as a staph infection. It is as real as a tombstone, as a melting glacier, as the skin on the neck of a horse, real as hot steaming pavement. What do I need to do to get this across? It is as real as gravity, as the orbits of the planets, as lightning, as photosynthesis, as grime in a bathtub, as a car accident, real as the crown of a bloody baby’s head pressing against its mother’s tearing flesh.
The truth is, it is more real than these things, and yet it is hardly seen, hardly felt, let alone directly known.
It is emptiness. It is nothing, but it is everything, it is all, and these are just words. What good are they? Will they make a bridge across which feet can walk? Will they make a trapdoor through which a body can drop? A soft place for a head to sink to?
How maddening it is for one to want this, to know it is there, it is real, and yet it cannot be found. How I want to lay my coat over every mud puddle, lace my fingers into a stirrup to hoist a tired foot over the wall, how I want to operate on every pair of eyes to make them finally see, to see what is right in front of them, of us all, everywhere and always. How I want to put my hands on every single head and gently turn it, direct the attention toward this, this, and nothing but this. There is nothing else to look for, nothing else to care about, nothing else to believe in.
Bow your head, bare your neck to what you might think is a blade getting ready to come down on it, but no. It is rain, a soft sprinkle of rain. Or is it tears? Of course there will be tears. How could we not cry, in the recognition of this?
It is not so awfully hard. Truly. Once you know this, you will marvel that you ever could have supposed it was otherwise.
Life is short.
Time Enough
I used to want more time, but I don’t anymore. Not that I wouldn’t be glad of living a long life. It’s that I no longer experience time as being a scarce resource.
Really, I don’t experience time anymore, so it doesn’t occur to me to wish for more of what there doesn’t seem to be any of.
Time is greatly overrated. Nothing that happens in time is of real significance.
I used to want there to be more time in the day, more days to the week. This was not only because I couldn’t seem to get done everything that I wanted to do and needed to do. It was also because I liked the feeling of busy-ness.
What I wanted above all was for there to be more time in my life. I didn’t want to die, at least not if I could help it. At the very least, this meant putting off death as long as possible, and in the meantime, cramming as much as possible into the allotted time.
Why it stopped mattering about time had something to do with deep contentment moving in and taking over. This did not seem to require anything to keep it going. So what was more time going to get me? Nothing time had ever delivered