Buddha & Boots

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worth of rescue.

–Clearing, a poem by Martha Postelwaite

I spent many years feeling like I was waiting to start living my life. Many years wading in my own mud, waiting for that moment when I would feel alive. Grateful to be alive. Really, totally, completely alive.

Then one day, I found myself in a little village in France, underneath a mulberry tree.

And something happened for the first time.

I watched my hand reach up and pick a mulberry off the tree.

A sweet, little, delicate, ripe mulberry right off the tree.

And there it was. 

Right there – in the hand I didn’t create, was a mulberry I didn’t grow, pulled off a tree I didn’t plant, fed by sun, water and air given freely, there was this sweet, little, delicate, ripe mulberry.

Just waiting for me to reach for it. 

Turns out inside this sweet, little, delicate mulberry there was a surprise.

Inside I found a clearing, and inside the clearing I found exactly what I was seeking.

I found celebration in sunflowers,

joy in a tea cozy,

laughter in the leaves,

delight in fields of gold,

reverence in the roses,

grace in a song,

peace in a poem,

serenity in stillness,

inspiration in ants,

solidity in a circle and

divinity in an eclipse.

It was all there, right inside a mulberry. Just patiently waiting for me.

Waiting for me to reach up and remember,

This Is It.

As Thich Nhat Hanh so very elegantly reminds us – there can be no lotus flower without the mud.

And also, perhaps, without a little help from the mulberries.

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