In the course of self-publishing Using Beauty, I went through a bruising process with someone who treated me less-than-honorably. I have some righteous indignation, some anger, some bitterness about the whole thing.
But I've been re-reading Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation, The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, and got to the section on Buddha last night. In light of what I've gone through lately, the concept of loving everything, of having compassion for all beings, is mind boggling. I mean... This guy? Dick Cheney? Child molesters?
How DO we balance the parts of ourselves that are aggressive, selfish and violent, with the parts of ourselves that want to be tolerant and compassionate?
How DO we protect ourselves from predators, without becoming predatory ourselves?
2 comments:
Great questions indeed...
I can look right out into the garden in two directions from my desk, and this time of year there's a lot going on out there. Birds, squirrels, chipmunks, each incredibly busy and serious looking as they zoom from task to task.
A little brown bird -- wren? sparrow? -- is enlarging one of the woodpecker holes in a tree trunk near me, and after every few stabs at the bark she SQUEEZES herself into the hole to see if it's the right size yet. She wants it to be big enough for her family, but not big enough for anyone who might like to eat her family.
The world isn't a very safe place for birds, yet they sing so beautifully and fly so freely. Come to think of it, I've never seen a bird with a worried look on its face. Do birds even know how to worry?
Is safety from predators a purely human construct, like justice? A nice idea, a worthy goal, but unattainable?
Joseph Campbell said the world has always been messed up, and always WOULD be messed up. That the trick wasn't to eliminate sorrow or danger, but to "participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world."
Build as snug a nest as you can, but don't be afraid to fly out of it, maybe?
K
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