If we think about being thankful one day a year, that leaves another 364 days for us to wake up to our familiar accumulations of concerns, disappointments, hopes, dreams, doubts, confusions and all the rest of the many ways we try to make peace with our story, which we hope gives a fair and just account of our life.
This morning, reading a book that gives an account of an ancient sea chest of scrolls written by and about a man called Buddha, I finished reading a chapter with the title “We Embody Knowledge” and was feeling encouraged and hopeful about the way my life is going. Then I read the first few sentences in the next chapter, “A Grand Journey”, which is the final chapter in the book. There I read a sentence that sent me spiraling into memories that I work hard to store away in a thin brochure with the working title, “I did the best I knew how at the time”:
“As Dharma practitioners, we act to promote peace and eliminate harm: toward ourselves, toward others, and toward the natural world.” “Keys of Knowledge”, Tarthang Tulku.
I wonder if for some of us, our adult lives are an attempt to assign a tolerable place for things that happened in that dark binder, which we rarely pull out from the shelf of remembered junctures in time.
Let me very briefly share the gist of what I don’t want to look at in that binder: my son, Jon, took his life six years ago, after a sustained struggle in which I believe he tried to “do no harm, against himself, against others and toward the natural world”. But in the end, he couldn’t stay here in a world that was already for him—even before the present explosion of neglect and breakdown—a lonely outpost in time and space in which he couldn’t find a place that provided friends or a path that offered nourishment for his inner being.
So, did he commit an offence against the Buddha’s teaching to do no harm against ourselves?
My love for him doesn’t hesitate:
“No, that’s not true!”
There are surely no hard and fast rules about how we try to live with what we have been given. And what we have been given includes a wide spectrum, perhaps as wide as a rainbow stretching across the Milky Way and beyond, a play of light painting our hopes and fears, inscribing own life story in colors that shine within us in the radiance of Being. We live in a time in the life of our planet in which some, perhaps the most sensitive and most able to evolve into something new, can only try to make lemonade out of lemons for so long, before their inner being cries out, “Enough”. And for those of us who are still here, can’t we leave more space for those outliers of being?
A friend of mine, a few weeks ago, paused as if in surprise, and then said something about Gaia Awakens, the book she helped me write. She said she felt Jon in the room and that he was expressing gratitude that I had given him a place to live in its pages.
Isn’t it the truth? Love really does show the way.