The Welcoming Arms of Nature Beyond the Burning House

Waking up this morning, I smile:

Twenty-four brand-new hours are before me.

I vow to live each moment fully

and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh

 



I woke up this morning to beautiful spring light shining in through my window and I could hear the sound of robins singing.  My heart just grew 100 times bigger in that small little moment.  I felt so blessed and so connected. I was so glad to be alive.

Nature Can Fill Our Reserves

These types of offerings from nature are always around us.  We are constantly reminded of how precious life is.  We are given these precious little nourishments of natural beauty to give us strength to see us through when things are not so pleasant. We need to seek these moments of "awe" to fill up our store house with. 

If we want peace, joy, well being we need to fall in love with nature again.  This is what Br. Phap Ho teaches in his dharma talk from Deer Park.  When we fall in love with Mother Earth again we fall in love with self again, with humanity again and with all beings again. Love is at the core of our relating to all.

To do this, he explains, we need to be able to love all aspects...not just those parts , those persons, those things that are easy to love.  We must also love the parts of us that we do not want anyone to see.  We must also love the parts of nature that scare us because we do not understand them ( like rattlesnakes or Covid 19 maybe).  We need to love others even if they seem to be hell bent on hurting us,  others or the world.  We must see beyond that which scares us, that which angers or frustrates us...to the Love that is at their core as well.

Anger: A Burning House

But we do get angry don't we?  When someone says or does something unkind, or when we see someone putting their ego ahead of the well being of others or the planet...we get pissed off...don't we? We begin to resist and struggle against what they are doing.  We "fight" them.  The more we fight the angrier we get and the more determined we become to make them pay. At what cost? Does our anger change the other person or the situation or does it just hurt us...taking us away from this peaceful love at the core of us leading us from one ego pursuit to the next  in the name of righteousness?

I love this analogy shared in this talk.  We can compare having anger in our bodies and minds to being in a burning house.  Does it do you any good, as the flames begin to appear,  to look outside the house for the person or something responsible for it, to drop the fire extinguisher to  run after the culprit so you can make him pay for what you perceive  he or she or it has done? No...you will just come back to a pile of ashes. 

What we need to do is put the flames out when they are small enough for us to extinguish them.  Then when the flame is out and we have recovered somewhat from the ordeal...gained a stable footing, some space , we can attempt to determine what caused the fire.  We can , from a place of peace and calm, confront the causative factor  and help to transform it.  We need to remember that at the core, no matter how buried that core may be, is Love...not destruction. We need to see beyond anger to that truth.

Tap into that Love rather than fuel anger and allow it to burn us alive.

Tapping Into Nature; Tapping Into Love

We tap into that love when we are surrounded by nature.  When we hear it, when we smell it, when we touch it....These moments of slowing down and appreciating her in all her glorious beauty and bounty can be the stuff that fills our extinguishers. That motivates us to face, accept and deal with our anger, our own imperfections and the imperfections of others.  That helps us to commit to supporting her better, supporting ourselves and all of humanity better, all beings better.

First...we must be willing to slow down enough to notice nature, to "stop and smell the flowers" as the old cliché goes, to touch her, to hear her, to feel her in the breeze against our skin.  And to know, as the Buddhist mantra goes,  we are the earth walking on the earth.

Now that is a lot to think about!

All is well.

Plum Village ( February 2020) Falling In Love with Mother Earth/ Dharma Talk with Br. Phap Ho at Deer Park Monastery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p17MRdGNdQw

Thich Nhat Hanh (2011) peace is every breath. New York; Harper One