The fly and practicing like a sick person
This Monday morning I am suffering with a cold. My left eye has been tearing nonstop for days on end (allergies, I hope). Yesterday I sat zazen with 75 others and a house fly decided to hang out with me for a while, exploring the soft flesh of my lips, the bridge of my nose, dipping its little legs into the tears around my eye. I have a lot of experience with this, fortunately, from my time in Burma--between the hours of 1 and 3 PM the flies were terrible, but it was too hot to use the mosquito net, so I got to know them well.
It probably sounds terrible, to sit with that kind of sensation, that discomfort. But, I am training as a meditator to understand the nature of suffering, and by sitting with an experience like that, watching the urge to shoo the fly away, watching the mind want to go to some scary place of the "horror" of this creature exploring my face so intimately--there's a mind of equanimity there too, a part that recognizes it just as sensation, and honors the fact that I may not always have the choice to change the situation. I will be with those who are sick and dying. I will be sick, I will die. I may not have the strength or the ability to choose for myself. It puts things in perspective, and I can just wait out the dance of the fly, the buzz around my ear, the tickle on my eye. And now, I don't feel great, but I can be with the experience and not make more of it than it is.
I am so grateful for the causes and conditions that have allowed me this kind of learning. This is a rather bold statement but, seriously I think I value my initial training days and the past few days of retreat with my peers and other New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care community members more than the 18 years combined of formal schooling I've had. It's the right time for me to be doing this work. Before it was intensive retreat, now it's being fully engaged with others.
I feel so very blessed to have this opportunity and wish we could all be so lucky. Much of what I will be sharing in the coming months will likely come from the readings we're doing for class as I won't have much more bandwidth for reading beyond that. Hope you enjoy a peek into this experience and my beginning steps into what I suspect will be a totally new second career.
(photo)