breathtaking

Not sure whether I want to make this a story of depth or laughter. It's always a good idea to poke fun of myself so perhaps in offering some depth, I can lighten up.

Some of you might have heard my stories about the bear who has been moving around my cottage over the last couple of months. He's big, he's black, he seems to be getting acclimated to human space. One evening he came up on the deck to check out an empty cooler I had placed out there. Another morning I looked out at 5:30 and he was munching some plants around the house before heading down the driveway. When I came out to my car later his paw prints were on the driver's side window.Mostly I keep my eyes and ears peeled for him when I'm outside and we're all good.

Thursday evening I was speaking with momma on the phone and she asked if I had seen the bear lately. I responded that I hadn't seen him for a week or so but that I didn't think he'd gone far. Early the next morning I headed out for a run (really a jog but 'running' sounds more athletic). Here's a good place to divert on an aside....

No-self. By my interpretation, the process of waking up to life rolls alongside my willingness to relinquish my sense of self: my stories about who I think I am; the great meaningfulness of my personal history; an attachment to walking through life as though I am entitled to happiness or fulfullment; my wish to fight to protect my ego; my desire to build myself up with illusory accroutrements such as possessions, accomplishments, or aptitudes. This strikes me as a dance of form and space. Ultimately, the universe is empty space. I believe the human body is actually made up mostly of space, 80-90% space in fact. As a human being, an ego, a self, however, I am rather compelled to notice form rather than space. My eyes seek out shapes, my ears listen mostly for sound. When I read a page in a book, I look to the words for meaning and completely ignore the emptiness which holds these words - even though the words are a tiny percentage of the page, we give them all our attention.

Running, to date, has generally been an act of will for me. I push through a self-constructed surface tension in order to tie up my shoes and begin pounding down the road or trail. As I run, particularly up the hills, much of the energy in my system rises to my should-ers (hyphen is intentional as the tops of my arms and back are the places where most of us hold the ideas of who I 'should' be and what I 'should' be doing). I have recently begun to ask myself how helpful is it to run with my shoulders driving most of the energy forward in such a willful manner. How many birds fly through the sky using their tail fearthers for propulsion? How many swans glide across the still water using their beak as a driving force? Humans, we're funny like that.

So, back to running on Friday this week. I was actually finding a flow on my run. My energy was centered mostly in my stomach core and into the hip flexors which guide my legs. I began playing with relinquishing my sense of "self as runner" and rather built my awareness on simply running; not "me/I" driving the energy but loosening up my "self" so that life energy, including space, could move me. The word 'surrender' is a tough term to draw out here because it connotes for me a quality of lying back rather than moving forward. For me, it's more like loosening or lightening my habitual belief that I am an isolated energy form and choosing instead to open to life as an infinite source of movement and creativity. This does, however, ask that I surrender my usual unyielding fixation on separateness and specialness. But it simultaneously makes space for a level of belongingness that is breathtaking.

Time for another tangent.

My friend, Bradford, and I travelled to the sea a couple of weeks ago. I love the sea, of course. I can't stop myself from hurling myself into it. When we arrived at the beach it was very cool, very foggy, and rather empty of human forms. After swimming for a while in the waves, surrendering my weight to the ocean I decided to go for a run in my bare feet down the empty beach. I was told that the beach was 5 or 6 miles long. It was shrouded in fog. After awhile I stopped and looked around me. Nothing. No sign of form. No humans. No buildings. Nothing but the sea extending out infinitely before me. Nothing but flat, empty beach in front of me and behind me. Unnerving. A force pushed in on me. I'm not sure whether it came from inside or outside of me or whether 'me' existed at all. Without my ears and eyes I had the sense of this force conveying that there was nothing I was, nothing I had done, nothing I could do, that did not belong. This energy had no human quality, no interest in standing in judgment, no ability to qualify or compare. It had an uncompromising ability to hold and only offered me the opportunity to yield, let go. This force could just as easily swallow me into the sea or suspend my body's gravity with water. No dualism. No good. No bad.

And I sobbed. It took my breath away that life is a force that wants nothing of me and offers unconditional belonging and unrelenting energy, even in death. The weight of that kind of belonging was simultaneously crushing and releasing. Humbling doesn't begin to capture my experience. 'Breathtaking' is the best I've come up with so far.

.... Back on the road this past Friday. I'm feeling some flow but I notice it's somewhat corrupted with a quality of smugness, a dead giveaway that my ego is close by. I'm thinking about my intrinsic belonging, about the energy that moves through me, around me. And around the next corner Bear comes lumbering out of the woods. Bent over on all fours, his back is as tall as my belly button. The depth of black on each individual piece of his fur coat reminds me of looking into the night sky. He is beautiful. But he is too close. I freeze. My breath went from somewhat laboured to non-existent. I went from my momentary delusional sense of no-self to: "oh Lord, I don't want to die!" and various other pleadings for safety and personal preservation.

Bear never did look my way. Maybe it was because I had reached such an enlightened level of no-self that I was invisible.... but I don't think so. Bear became my instant Master/guru showing me how quickly I could fall back into that old dream-state of thinking myself a separate entity in this thing we call life.

I went for a run again this morning not because I'm bold or ignorant, though I can be. Not even because I'm so deluded to think I won't run into Bear again. Life is. There is the collective dream of control but it's an illusion. There's precious little I can control in this life other than how I respond to it as it unfolds and whether I want to play or not.

Tomorrow, June 28th, is a notable day in this story of self that I call "Martha." On June 28, 1998, my brother, Alex, fell from a mountain's shoulder in a sloughing of snow. In a moment, the force of life I thought of as my brother went from form to space and left a new energy in my life that left me permanently altered. On June 28, 2007, my canine companion, Maelek, relinquished his beautiful and noble body rather unexpectedly while I was away, visiting my family in Canada. That night, as my dear friends sat with his failing body at an emergency vet clinic in Boulder, 2000 miles northeast I met him in a field beside the forest in my mind. My desire was to hold onto his life rather than release it. However, with a courage and clarity that came from somewhere more spacious, I slipped his collar off his neck and thanked him for teaching me about love and life. And then I watched him run off into the woods.

I have no electronic images of Alex but I'll attach a couple of Maelek.