Monday, October 27, 2008

A Clay Jug Full of Canyons


Today was prop up your good friends day, which I am always more than happy to do. One of the people who needed propping was really at the end of her rope already when she had some old, icky business rear it's head.

"I thought I was done with this! I thought it was out of my life and I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore!" When she was done with her well-deserved freak out, I told her that now I was going to "go all Buddhist on her ass." And proceeded to do so. The reason I did was that what she said clearly resonated for me with what was on my mind with yesterday's post.

Kabir wrote about the clay jug which can contain mountains and canyons and the tools we need to test our mettle (or metal), because we contain everything. All our experiences, every lake we've gazed at, every leaf we've raked, every eclipse we've watched, they exist inside and outside us. We contain them entirely. No matter how many things we make part of our experience, part of us, there is infinite space left.

The upshot of this is that we cannot leave behind our experiences as we contain them, but that bad relationship, tragically embarrassing experience, or profoundly moving moment mean no more, or more less than that moon, that canyon, that raked leaf. They all just are.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The headlines of your blog posts appear on my home page. Only relatively recently did I realize that it said "Canyons."

All of this time I had been reading "A Clay Jug Full of Crayons." That's what I thought it was even when I read the blog and saw no mention of crayons, and yet it made some type of sense to me. Weeks after you posted it I finally realized that you had written "Canyon."

It works for me either way.

~
Judy

Anonymous said...

The headlines of your blog posts appear on my home page. Only relatively recently did I realize that it said "Canyons."

All of this time I had been reading "A Clay Jug Full of Crayons." That's what I thought it was even when I read the blog and saw no mention of crayons, and yet it made some type of sense to me. Weeks after posting it I finally realized that you had written "Canyon."

It works for me either way.

~
Judy