Face to Face

Sign at Van Dusen Gardens, Vancouver, BC, Canada

My alarm pops off at 4:30am. I leap up out of bed, no sleeping in, no hitting it off on accident like yesterday, when I had to teach. I have to make a flight - and I've only missed one in my life because of sleeping in (the only other flight I've ever missed wasn't due to that).

I slide into my clothes, laid out the night before, brush the colic out of my hair, grab a banana to get me going and my host meets me at the door. We get downstairs before the cab arrives, and we explore the daily issue of Globe and Mail, looking at photo layout and discussing the difference between AP and staff-generated shots. The cab arrives, glowing in the fog, and puts my bags in while I get settled.

"To the airport?" he confirms.
"Yessir. Delta, to the States."
"Got it."
"Going home?"
"Sort of. I live in the States, but I am going to Portland for 24 hours, then back to Wisconsin, where I live."
"Ah."
A pause. He's chatty. Sometimes I like that. Sometimes I don't. I am neutral.
He probably doesn't know where Wisconsin is.
"Is that near Kansas?" a student asked me yesterday. I can't blame her - I am not 100% sure I know where Calgary is, and that is far larger than Madison.

"That's where the Sikh Temple shooting was, right?" Now it's my turn to pause. Crap. I caught the accent - Indian? In the dark fog it was hard to tell. I hazard a guess that *he* might be Sikh, though I don't say anything about my guess.

Taming the Tamer

Still from the tiny film Taming the Tamer (link below)

Here is a tiny silent paper-cut animation film I made a couple of years ago.
It is about taming the inner critic, though it often attempts to tame the good, while wild, parts of us.
I am in the process of setting up a more thorough YouTube channel, so I can share videos of my own, audio for students, and obviously suggest great talks and other resources on YouTube. I'll keep you posted! In the meantime, enjoy this little film.

Playful Humility

Today, the calendar year comes to an end.

This is no longer my New Year's. I have become too familiar with other traditions to see the end of this calendar as the end of my year. Naturally, fall feels most the end of the year for me, but according to the Tibetan Buddhist Calendar, my "calendar of faith" it comes in the beginning of March, which also feels pretty right. February is what we call "Mamo" season - a time when the tough stuff gets toughest, which is especially true to my experience having lived in Wisconsin my whole life. That's what is my real New Year's, now, in practice.

That having been said, for some reason New Year's Eve can be hard for me - I have always thought it was because of a pressure to perform - to enjoy parties, kind of like Halloween and St. Patty's Day, which don't trigger me but which I also mostly avoid. Maybe it's because it's the end of a tough time - the natural grieving period of the end-of-year holidays.

But this year I feel a slight change. A release in pressure, a chance to take it easy, and a desire to turn over to a new calendar. This quote was in my box today, from a weekly service sent out from a Shambhala teacher, and it hit the right chord (to join the mailing list or see the blog, click here).

PLAYFUL HUMILITY Humility in the Shambhala tradition involves playfulness, or a sense of humour. In many religious traditions, you feel humble because of a fear of punishment, pain, and sin. In the Shambhala world, you feel full of it. You feel healthy and good. In fact, you feel proud. Therefore, you feel humble. That’s one of the Shambhala contradictions, or we could say, dichotomies. Real humility is genuineness.
-Chogyam Trunpga Adopted from "Discipline in the Four Seasons," in GREAT EASTERN SUN: The Wisdom of Shambhala, page 63.

I hear that. I feel that. A humility that comes not because one is humiliated or trying to be "not humiliated (ie puffed up pride)" but a sense of wonder, of awe, and of course, of humor.

Here's to 2011, whatever you are, and my increasing sense of humble awareness, which, as it increases, I work to be even more humble about. There's nothing like the Dharma to be both awfully profound and ass-kickingly ironic at the same time.