Enlightenment Is Just Rediscovering

Enlightenment can be hard for us to wrap our heads around, the way it’s been framed by eastern thought.

Especially for us westerners. 

We like our metaphysics neatly packaged like fancy chocolates so we can pluck them from the box and consume them in a few bites.

We don't play so well with paradox or obscurity.

When I Was Eleven

When I was eleven, I would disappear for hours after breakfast on May Sundays just like this one. 

I’d take a basketball and stop home in the afternoon for lunch. Maybe I would leave the basketball and grab a glove before disappearing again until dinner.

I loved anything where there was running, swinging, climbing, shooting, diving, sliding, throwing, tagging, tackling, lifting.

I wasn’t thinking about it. I wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Enlightenment Is Just Rediscovering

In a footnote to her translation of the Tao Te Ching, genius science fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin, writes of the author,

I love the Tao Te Ching. I love the simplicity of the language spun in ambiguities and the seeming dichotomies that synthesize just when you stop thinking about them. 

The universe is greater than we can fathom, filled with things we’ll never grasp, and our place in it is unknown.

Lao Tzu is elusive for good reasons.

Yet, when a voice lays truth bare it's as plain as the spring sun shining through my window as I write this newsletter. 

It brings light to reality.

It's funny that I recently read Rasheta's passage, quoted above, as I’ve been thinking about me now and me when I was eleven.

I still love athletics and movement. I never stopped. It’s as vital to me today as it was then.

This is obvious to me now but it took a long time to recall that part of me. I’d forgotten over years of not moving that much.

Insight wasn’t some cryptic process I approached sitting beneath a tree or pondering a koan. It was just rediscovering.

*This quote comes from Rasheta’s book titled No-Nonsense Buddhism for Beginners. It’s good.

Here are a couple other posts I wrote about eastern thought through a western lens.

Buddha Didn’t Use an App Under the Bodhi Tree 

Meditation Is Just Paying Attention

Out for a run this morning I came upon a doe and her fawn right in the Suffern Middle School parking lot.