Pending...and Complete

syv

parker

At midnight, the stars were glittering like sequins. There was a light on in the house next door. All the windows were open, but the air was still and summer-warm.

I thought about the snow falling on the East coast, transforming the world in the way snow does. Beautiful, but cold. Difficult for those who have to function. Another reality.

And somehow sleep reclaimed me, but I dreamed I was in trouble, getting deeper and deeper into bad. Like a 62-year-old female version of Walter White (but with no knowledge of chemistry) my crimes kept piling up like dirty snow, and I have no recall now of what they were but I was on the lam, a good guy no longer, and there was no turning back.

I know. There's nothing more boring than hearing the recitations of someone else's dreams, so I'll cease and desist right now.  

But I woke up wondering what it meant. The accumulation of misdeeds and omissions? The yearning for a clear new path?

I've talked to a few friends about my fervent desire to change myself in this new year just launched, to really become a different, better person.  

In response, my friend Dan sent me these insights from Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön: "Trying to fix ourselves is not helpful…Trying to change ourselves doesn't work in the long run because we're resisting our own energy."

The only approach that works, suggested Dan, is staying, moment by moment, with our own experience, meeting the suffering and ignorance of others in compassion but holding ourselves in compassion too. He offered some other prescriptive measures as well, but I guess the main idea is that I am to stop judging myself and blaming myself, and instead simply be myself.

"Now all of this will make a difference only if you remember to remember it every day," he said.  "It's like good posture.  The only way to have good posture is to remember to stand and sit up straight every day, again and again."

I'm going to try...which means I'm trying again. It occurs to me that if I stop yearning to change and trying to do better, I will have made the biggest change imaginable.

Speaking of change, there was a nice bit of its opposite yesterday, a thread of continuity: a visit with Parker, who was one of the 6th grade students in the very first class I taught in Gaviota.  He has gray hair now.  (I only said that for effect. He does have gray hair...but he's not very old.)

Anyway, Parker is someone who became my friend, not just my student. We helped each other through some things, and we used to talk pretty regularly, and then he went off into his own life. I'm very proud of him. But every once in a while he checks in with me, and that means a lot.

So yesterday Parker and I shared a scone, got caught up a bit, and went for a walk. It was a hot day and we didn't go very far, just up a hill to a bench, where we sat looking out onto the pastoral Santa Ynez Valley, the hazy mountains beyond.

There's something so dreamlike about the valley sometimes. Bits of tinsel twinkled in a vineyard, barn roofs gleamed white in the sunlight, a hawk soared in the distance.

Everything was blue and gold and yellow, paused in its state of enchantment, somehow pending but complete.