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Third Response : Balancing Monsters of Love
November 11, 2016
Leonard Cohen died. A true person of Zen, wild and wry and honest about the things it's hardest to be honest about. He was the Bodhisattva of That Voice, and he's the one who said that in times like these, we ought to be balancing monsters of love. Thank you so very much, Jikan of the roaring silence, please travel well.
The ground is going to be unsteady for awhile now. There will be comings and goings, things that slam shut and some that break open. Ghosts and tremors and tears that surprise. Strange dreams and unexpected resolve. Know this and take good care of yrselves. It will not serve to claw for certainty, because certainty is not of this time. But uncertainty can be balanced with love, which holds steady on unsteady ground, remains loyal to the vulnerable, and remembers the through-line beneath any upheaval. And uncertainty is balanced by courage, which moves step by step in the dark, slipping between the sentries of the heart.
At the winter solstice we always did a meditation in which you let the winds of the vastness strip you clean, taking skin and flesh and muscle and sinew, until only yr skeleton remains. Then, after awhile of resting in that state, a radiant jewel appears in yr ribcage, out of which grows a new, softly glowing body around the bones of the old. Perhaps this is a meditation you'd like to take up between now and the solstice. Perhaps it feels like a pretty good fit for the time. Just be sure to inhabit each part of the journey - being stripped, being empty and resting there, being home to a new jewel giving birth to a new life. And always, always, offer up the new life's glow to all our companions making their own way across unsteady ground.
Here it is.
