Keeping the Dream

I’m reading Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh, and was struck by a passage in Chapter Four. I love this analogy. It is what inspired my book, “Little Yellow Pear Tomatoes”.

Thich Nhat Hanh is addressing non-elements, using paper as an example. The clouds, sun, forest, logger, wheat that fed the logger, the logger’s father are all non-paper elements. If you remove them, the paper is empty.

Empty of what? he asks.

Empty of a separate self. It has been made by all the non-self elements, non-paper elements, and if all these non-paper elements are taken out, it is truly empty, empty of an independent self. Empty, in this sense, means that the paper is full of everything, the entire cosmos. The presence of this tiny sheet of paper proves the presence of the whole cosmos.

Emptiness that means emptiness of an individual through the fullness of everything. This made me just sit back and think about our western conception of what nirvana or attaining that state of emptiness means. Culturally, this is not a very attractive form of “heaven”. I mean who wants to be nothing? To the western way of thinking, this equates with annihilation – ceasing to exist.

But in the Buddhist way of thinking, emptiness is actually “more”. I think it’s the equivalent of the dying of the seed to become the wheat. Only, we’ve come to believe or hope it means the salvation and glorification of the seed into a better seed in a happier pot.

How many gifts from other cultures do we…does any culture miss that cannot accept them through the filters of our own confined understanding? And to what depth of understanding can something “foreign” have on our understanding of the teachings of our own teachers?

And that’s what I feel like I’ve done with my music and writing. But how do you balance the needs of those around you with the needs of your personal drive…only I’m feeling more and more like I’m barely trudging along on foot!

You know, sometimes it’s so hard to see what’s going on with your own self. I’ve been told quite a few times by quite a few people that I have wonderful insight and give advice that they have found helpful.

But sometimes, helping others isn’t helping others as much as avoiding helping yourself to accept the challenges of your own life. Because when you’re so busy tending to another person’s life, you get to not tend to yours. And as much as some of us like to complain about that, that really is the payoff.

I wonder how much of that is involved here. I know, at the very least, it does carry some weight. So what am I going to do about it?…

A friend in the business and from my past just popped into my reality a couple days ago. He wanted a lyric to a song I wrote back in 1990 as he’s wants to produce the song for a young upcoming talent he’s discovered. And it’s funny, because I was just thinking about that song…

And I could feel music inside of me and a desire to write and record again, and I wondered how I wandered so far from what I love doing. I haven’t written a song since August, and that was the first song I had written in a year.

Should I sing again…and to whom? Tonight I sang to my granddaughter, two months old. She smiled at me…stopped her fussing and smiled. And it made my heart melt and filled me with a delicious warm feeling.

I love my creativity…I just wish I felt more secure about balancing it with the rest of my life. It’s almost an all or nothing prospect for me. When that creative passion flows, it leaves little room for anything else. I could go for days without eating or sleeping…okay, maybe not that long, at least, at this stage of my life, but it would be all consuming.

At least that’s my fear…at least that’s what I’ve been told. But I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Because some people are so threatened by something they don’t understand, that the very thing that attracted them to an artist will be the very thing they become insanely jealous of. Even a little bit of time is met with resentment.

One thing I know….I wouldn’t be writing this post if I wasn’t contemplating opening those doors again.