Small Graces: Everyday Easter Moments

(Jack yawning outside the kitchen window)

My favorite William Carlos Williams poem, “Pastoral,” begins:

When I was younger

it was plain to me

I must make something of myself.

Older now

I walk the back streets

admiring the houses of the very poor:

roof out of line with sides

the yards cluttered

with old chicken wire, ashes,

furniture gone wrong…

He concludes,

                No one

will believe this

of vast import to the nation.

Maybe everyone begins to feel this way as they age.  Maybe not.  But when I was younger I wanted to accomplish things.  Halfway through my undergraduate studies, I had an intellectual crisis because I realized chasing the American Dream was not for me.  Not because I doubted its plausibility, but rather because the quest felt hollow.  I became angry, depressed.  Later, after meeting Marci, I decided maybe that dream wasn’t so bad.  The chase puts food on the table and it’s nice to be able to pay the bills.  Older now, I still believe that dream to be good.  On one condition--becoming doesn’t overshadow being.  That’s what all the great spiritual leaders of time have attempted to teach us, from Buddha to Christ--that there is more to this temporal life than most are aware of, and if one can truly learn to enter each moment fully, the temporal world will take care of itself.

Jesus, for instance, tells the fishermen, Peter and Andrew to “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of Men and they straightway left their nets, and followed him” (Matthew 4: 19-20) without worrying about how much time and money they’d invested into their boats and nets, now all for nil; or what the neighbors and family would think; or even whether or not their retirement plans would suffice them in old age.  They were tuned enough into the moment to know what they should do, and were confident surving would take care of itself.   Jesus stresses this faith in life and the moment again when he says, “Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead” (Mathew 8:22).

The Buddha came to the same conclusion before Christ was born:  the physical world is both reality and an illusion simultaneously and we can glimpse the eternal reality in the ordinary if we will but slow down enough to see between the lines, the molecules, atoms, and the subatomic particles.

(The dishes I washed after Easter Dinner) 

In other words, if we will put our spiritual selves first, life will take care of itself.

This does not mean to tune in and drop out.  One way or the other crops have to be harvested if we wish to eat.  Work is a part of life.  But it shouldn’t consume lives.

One way to keep the spirit alive is to simultaneously live the sacred and profane by ritualizing the little moments.  Shabkar says in The Flight of the Garuda, “No matter what arises, when you perceive your original nature, the joy arises automatically--and what joy!”

(The Easter eggs Everest, Rio and I colored next to the bottle of vinegar)

Although, I have to work at it, I want to get to a place where I’m continually aware of my original nature--that I’m a son of God who has been placed on this earth for a very specific purpose--no matter what I’m doing, whether it be dishes, taking out the trash or, if necessary, shoveling bullcrap for a living.