Certainty
Portola Valley, CA 18 April 2001
It is a bit later in the morning for me to be writing. The garden is buzzing with activity this time of day. I don’t know why it seems so important to capture all the comings and goings of the insects and the birds in the garden, but it does. I guess it is a sort of good-bye – my way of letting go. One way to let go is to take in. I am reminded of Thich Nhat Hahn’s talk in Berkeley about “interbeing”, about the interrelatedness of all that is made manifest in the physical world. Such a simple notion. I wonder at the difficulty of holding on to this during the day. In this moment, there is no garden without me, and there is no me without this garden. This interdependence is what is so disturbing to the identity I hold as “myself”, as distinct, as somehow non-contextual.
My sense is that, for whatever karmic reason, I/we hold fast to the illusion of separateness and distinction. A kind of cycle, I suspect. We all begin as an undifferentiated self, as an infant – how I so marvel at those tiny Buddhas that capture me in their tractor beam stares. And then the fierce journey toward individuation – the boy picking up a feather, or the girl who pricks her finger on a thorn. Finally, the urge toward reintegration, toward a new kind of immersion. It is an immersion that sees life, all life, as relationship. And these most profound ones – the binding ones – are the path onto this new level of immersion. Or is it emersion?
Loving someone deeply is an act of self-annihilation. This “I”, this distinctiveness that I have carved out for myself, is rooted in a wonderful garden of loving energy. It is as if this “I” is a stalk rising out of the garden’s soil. To the birds the stalk is all there is. It is the sum total of their experience of “me”. But to the burrowing insects below the soil, the stringy roots - the bits that intertwine with other roots - is all there is of this “me” as well.
Loving someone deeply honors these distinctions as loving illusions, as necessary distractions. It also means coming to realize that this inter-connectedness, this mutual sustenance, means giving up the illusion of separateness in the face of a more profound truth. Not an easy thing to do.
In this moment I have a glimmering understanding of those remarkable Buddhist monks who immolated themselves during the war in Vietnam. They so loved the world, the whole world, that they had the capacity to see the entire garden, the complete root system that makes up the entire web of life. The web that goes beyond the distinction between the seen and the unseen, between the known and the unknown. They were immersed in the necessity that they make this interbeing visible, so that we might see that what we were doing to the children we were doing to ourselves. And that must have been what Christ was all about - a kind of loving self-sacrifice, and an offering up of the illusion of distinction, to let us/me see behind the veil of my own creation.
But what does all this mean in the everyday world? What are the implications of this for how I should live my everyday life? My inner voice is telling me to continue digging. Spend more time with the birds and the burrowing bugs.
Now I know where my place is. Or at least I know where my place is now. Important difference. I know this in a way I have never known knowing before. Not a certainty in a factual sort of way. More the way a plant takes root and comes to know its place, and knows where it belongs even after being uprooted and replanted. It is a knowing, a certainty, that comes with settling in deeper soil, rather than just settling for a place to stay for a time. A settling in making it possible to be more comfortable in the darkness of the rich earth.
Certainty is about knowing about. Certain comes from the root kra, which means “to sieve, to discriminate, to distinguish”. Certainty thrives in the harsh light of distinctions. No, not always harsh, but unusually bright anyway. Knowing about is only one kind of knowing; it is sequential, patterned, and full of valuable nuggets.
Knowing “my place” is not so certain, not so well lighted. It occurs to me now in this moment how I still hold to the thought of darkness as somehow sinister. The roots of my being are bathed in darkness just as much as those plant roots in the garden. This darkness is full of wonder and mystery. And, I suspect, full of safety. Safe only so long as I speak my truth with the certainty that comes not only from standing rooted in the dark soil, but also from facing humbly into the light.