My intention in writing these letters is to speak to you, my friends and readers, from a transparent and authentic place about what I am learning as we live here together on this planet--all of us, participating in this infinite web of life. And life on this planet is not easy. It’s not neat and tidy, and the lessons we are given are often overwhelming, heartbreaking and chaotic. That’s just the way it is. 

I’ll be 60 next year, and I’ve passed through some of the toughest  learning  in my whole life this year. I’m realizing that it actually takes a long time to really grow up, a long time to become capable of sharing genuine wisdom and compassion with others.  In the process life shakes us up, burns us, tenderizes us, until we are open enough, free enough, strong enough, to stand on our own two feet and see what  really moves us.

So if I speak to you honestly about what is unfolding for me, and for the people I work with, and the people I know and love, I have to say that I think we are all being pushed by some kind of evolutionary force right now. I really don’t know what this force is, but I feel it pushing us, calling us to move beyond all our safe and familiar places. It seems to be taking us, like a wild river, into a way of being that feels radically new, strange, disorienting, and very awkward at times. That’s all right, and it’s much easier to bear if we don’t take it too personally, if we realize it’s happening to a whole lot of us.  Whether we like it or not, whether we think we asked for it or not, it’s still happening.

A few months ago my daughter went to Kelowna, a city 5 hours by bus from our town. She went for a short visit, and was returning on the night bus, arriving the next morning. I went to pick her up at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning, and there was no sign of the bus. I waited for a while, not really concerned at all, because I knew that nothing much can happen to anyone on a Greyhound bus. While I was waiting, I called my partner Jonathan, to see if she had phoned him.

He told me about a story he had just seen on the news. It happened  the night before, the same night that my daughter was coming home, on a Greyhound bus travelling in Alberta,  the province right beside us.  A man who was on the bus walked to the back, pulled out a machete, and beheaded a young fellow who was asleep on the back seat.

I was shocked and horrified by this piece of news, and very glad to see the bus from Kelowna roll in a few minutes later, with my daughter on it safe and sound. But I couldn’t seem to shake whatever that story had stirred up in me. I realized that my thoughts about what could happen or not happen  anywhere in this world are just that-ideas that have nothing to do with reality.

A few days later I was speaking on the phone with Peter Fenner, who teaches the Radiant Mind course. I told him what had happened. “Sometimes it just seems like too much,” I said to him. “This whole conditioned realm that we live in-- it’s really weird.  Most of the time I feel so lucky to have been born as a human being-there is so much incredible beauty and so many magnificent beings here, on this earth.  But the other side of it is also true: so much madness and suffering. If I really let myself open to all of it, without getting into any denial, it feels like it’s too much. I ask myself what I am doing, living in such a strange, crazy kind of place.”

“Well,” Peter said, “It can certainly seem like that. But this is our home. This vast conditioned realm is our home, as well as the unconditioned, the place where we are unborn, unlimited. We can’t really get away from any of it. As human beings, as any being that is born and lives for a while, this is where we find ourselves. It’s our home. It’s a deep home, a vast home, a realm full of anything and everything you can possibly imagine. And there’s nothing we can do except work with it as it is.”

When I heard those words I felt something melt away in me. The urge to transcend this place, to deny it, escape it, dress it up, do anything at all with it, just seemed to fall away, to open into a deep sense of “Welcome home.” My conditioned mind wants to pick one part of this home and make it real, significant and solid, but that’s not the way it is. Nothing in this whole realm of our experience is fixed. As soon as I say it is any particular way, it changes, flows, and becomes something else.

So this world, this universe of ours, cannot be approached with anything but a profoundly fluid intelligence. This is an intelligence, a way of observing, that remains open to all the different aspects of life here, life as it presents itself in each moment, in the open, unbounded field of awareness.

At one point last week I was experiencing some deep grief. I was having trouble sleeping, so I got up and went to the computer. I had been lying in bed for a long time, remembering a large picture we had of the Medicine Buddha, in all his deep blue glory, while my mother was dying, and how much it had helped me at that time.

So I went to YouTube and found The Medicine Buddha Mantra, sung by a man, probably a Buddhist monk. His voice was so beautiful, and he sang that mantra over and over, while pictures of mountains, waterfalls, sunrises, and birds passing over water streamed by in the background. I sat there for hours, looking at those pictures and learning the mantra. 

I was so grateful for what I had found on the Internet. And the Internet seems to be a perfect display of everything that exists in this home of ours. Look at what you can find in cyber space. There is nothing so depraved, so twisted, that you cannot find It there, and there is so much beauty, grace, inspiration, and kindness. There are videos on youtube that tell stories about people so brave I weep when I watch them. The human spirit displays itself without holding back, on the Internet.  There are miracles and madness, there are saints and terrorists, there is deep wisdom and there is lunacy and utter confusion.

This is where we find ourselves, and if it seems like we are all alone and without help, this is not true. This is never true. Help is always here. It may not be the help we are hoping for, or addicted to. It may be the voice we have avoided listening to for a very long time, the clear strong voice that says, “Look at what you are doing. Don’t turn your head away. This is your life. Look at what is not working.  You can keep on doing what you have always done, yes, we can keep on doing what we have always done. But then we have to count the cost of that, be really ready to count that cost. To weep for it, to feel the deep grief that comes when we see the price we have paid for holding onto what is no longer working.”

I would never have been able to pass through the tunnel of change that my life has been lately, if it was not for the conversations I have had with other human beings, conversations where I was finally ready to listen.  In all of the work I do, listening is at the heart of it all. I know how hard it is to truly listen, with our whole being. Most of the time we are not listening, I was not really listening in the area of my greatest suffering. I could not see what I was doing, I was blind to it. I was just letting a little bit in and filtering out the rest.

And then something happened-life knocked me around enough so much that I realized I needed help. I was not doing so well without it-we do not really do so well on our own.  We cannot see our blind spots by ourselves. Pride holds our head high for a long time, and then something inside us starts to soften, and we may fall to our knees, if we are lucky.

Whenever the moment comes, we can never make it happen. How can you force someone to listen, to see what they have never been able to see before?

How can you force yourself? The moment when something opens inside us, and we are finally able to hear something, to really let it in, is what we are all waiting for. I am so grateful for all of the people I have shared such moments with.  And right now, especially, to Duncan Grady and Peter Fenner.

May we find the courage and love we need to continue giving and receiving such gifts from each other.

Link to the Medicine Buddha Mantra http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUJucA-mrgE

with love
Shayla