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The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Jun. 9th, 2011 01:03 amFrom The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.
The storm by its nature wants to move on, and the tree's grace is that it has no hands. Our blessing and curse is to learn and relearn when to reach and hold, and when to put our hands in our pockets.
On my way to school today, I got off the bus as I always do – this is a school I have been to a lot, you could say I was a regular supply teacher there – and walked up to the intersection where I usually cross the road and waited on the lights to change. While I was waiting I was overcome by a sudden and intense wave of loneliness and sorrow. I don't know what triggered it – it wasn't because I suddenly started thinking about Mir because I think about her all the time – just whoosh, and there it was. It was so fierce and so intense that it actually made me cry for a minute or two. Instead of trying to push it away, I just let it all flow over me… experienced it for as long as it was so intense, and once it had passed moved on. It was a strangely freeing experience, to just… let the emotion come, and then move on. Usually such things, if they come, will linger – upset the whole rhythm of my day, but this was just a part of it, it came, we shared, it left… like the wind moving the branches of a tree.
Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure
and sorrow come and go like the wind.
To be happy, rest like a great tree
in the midst of them all.
-Buddha's Little Instruction Book
The storm by its nature wants to move on, and the tree's grace is that it has no hands. Our blessing and curse is to learn and relearn when to reach and hold, and when to put our hands in our pockets.
On my way to school today, I got off the bus as I always do – this is a school I have been to a lot, you could say I was a regular supply teacher there – and walked up to the intersection where I usually cross the road and waited on the lights to change. While I was waiting I was overcome by a sudden and intense wave of loneliness and sorrow. I don't know what triggered it – it wasn't because I suddenly started thinking about Mir because I think about her all the time – just whoosh, and there it was. It was so fierce and so intense that it actually made me cry for a minute or two. Instead of trying to push it away, I just let it all flow over me… experienced it for as long as it was so intense, and once it had passed moved on. It was a strangely freeing experience, to just… let the emotion come, and then move on. Usually such things, if they come, will linger – upset the whole rhythm of my day, but this was just a part of it, it came, we shared, it left… like the wind moving the branches of a tree.
