"Red Thread of Desire"

Adyashanti speaks of the "Red Thread of Desire" to help us understand the source of our longings.

We all long for many things; health, money, friends, candy, a lover's touch. The mind attaches itself to these longings telling us, "Once we get this, that, the other thing, then we shall truly be happy." We spend months, years, lifetimes grasping for things that once obtained do not stop the longings. When we get what we want, we inevitably want something else.

The problem is one of (mis)orientation. The source of the longings, the tugs at our hearts, comes not from the outside, where we seek first and foremost, but from the inside. These longings come from our Soul that is reaching for us like a happy grandmother calling us to her soft lap. "Come to me and here you can rest, find ease, the never ending river of love."

Turn inward, then, towards the source of the Red Thread that tugs at your heart strings to find yourself again, and again.

Paradoxes of Spring

Warm snow

Quiet river cracking

A search for solitude and

A lover's touch

Spring,

Father's strokes,

Daughter's birth,

Grandmother's mistep

All color except one

(a flash of Robin red)

bled from the landscape

My Ego Myself

Our ego is an identifier. We need to identify with a certain particularity in order to maintain biological and mental integrity. All this is to the good, so how is it that the words ego and egoistic carry such negative connotations? It is because the surface of our ego is covered with super glue. Memories, possessions, desires, experiences, attachments, achievements, opinions, and prejudices stick to the ego like barnacles to the hull of a ship. "This is the totality of me," the ego thinks, "I am my success, my wife, my car, my job, my woes, my wants, my, my, my." And the pure single identity succumbs to the disease of elephantiasis, in which our self becomes grossly enlarged, coarsened, and thickened. From Light on Life by BKS Iyengar


What thins the ego, the sages tell us, keeps it supple, flexible, properly sized, is the Soul. The senses entice the ego with promises of colorful candy, baskets full of fresh bread, forever love. "Look at this, smell that, feel me," our senses turned out towards the world are excited. It wouldn't be so bad but, as any Mad Man would tell you, the ego is easily manipulated, tempted, endless. The ego is easily convinced that it is you, you are it and all the things you possess.

The constant fear and anxiety that we can feel comes from the ego who so identifies with things that perish that death is always near.

Tether your ego to Soul, the sages tell us, for in the Soul there is no wanting, no impermanence, no death. My soul, your soul, which resides right underneath the breastbone, is linked to the universal Soul which I imagine is like a forever flowing river, without ending, without beginning. I draw energy, breath, life itself from this fast flowing pristine source from which I am never disconnected.

I am not without wants in this place. I still want food for my hunger, rest for my fatigue, outlets for my creativity, balm for my pain. But, in turning to my Soul for guidance, am better able meet my needs, wants, and desires, with wisdom, equanimity, and enough.

Thick or Thin

I've come to think that happiness isn't really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. happiness is determined by how much information and affection flow through us covertly every day and year." in Social Animal, by David Brooks, New Yorker, January 17, 2011.

I have had my suspicions about the achievement, money, acquisitions, theory of happiness for sometime now. Perhaps, since those long years working on the dissertation where one has to break down happiness into much smaller chunks if one is to survive such a long, sustained, and mostly uneventful, unrecognized, financially depleting endeavor. Imagining myself walking on the stage accepting that cape and diploma did fuel some work, as well as fantasies about a well-paying and stimulating tenure-track job, but putting off happiness for months then years as these fantasies required, wouldn't take me long past breakfast before I was utterly exhausted by the enormity of the task at hand.

Happiness, well-being, I found, in my morning walk, bike ride into the office, that really strong coffee they served in the student lounge. There were the children I played with at summer camps during breaks from school, Saturdays and Sundays (when I finally stopped working on the weekend), watching Love Boat after the late late news. There were the friends from so many different countries who filled my mind with new stories, fiction, and yoga which I started 20 years ago and haven't stopped since.

The walk across the stage never happened nor did that perfect tenure-track job materialize. The happiness that came from all that hard work was just that; happiness pried free in the moment exploring a new thought, feeling the spring breeze, sharing my worries with friends. I cried after the defense because it was over, because it was so anti-climactic, because I had learned of the sheer beauty of effort, in an of itself.

Compose Yourself

A composition of me, musically speaking, would include strings, brass, woodwinds, and timpani. Pluck me, blow with vibrato, touch the skin of my drum tenderly. I need an entire symphony for this composition of me which is only sometimes contained by notes. There are (will be) long silent pauses and times when only a single note is sustained by a lonely cellist. The audience (of course there would be an audience!) claps, riotously, my witnesses, inner angels and demons who stir, snore and do not turn off ringing cell phones.

Who, I wonder, conducts, writes the script, makes sure the musicians are well-fed? Is this symphony that is me burdened by fund raising, philanthropic events, high-minded charitable giving? At times, perhaps, this was the case.

But more often than not, and these days especially, there is no symphony space, no instruments or chairs for the musicians, no conductor. Where before they sat in black, my musicians now run wild on the cliffs that fall off sharply towards the sea. In this composting that is me, the music, for there is still music, is composed in wind, crashing waves, thunder storms, and laughing.

Grandmother Scrubs the Back Steps

My grandmother washed the back steps on her knees with a scrub brush, hard soap, and a plastic dishpan of dirty water. She would start at the bottom of those curving back steps and work her way up to the kitchen. As I played in the downstairs kitchen, I could hear the scrub of the brush on the old linoleum that looked the same to me before and after she had cleaned.

She wore a light cotton house dress when she cleaned, no girdle underneath, and house slippers with inch high heels. If she wore knee high nylon stockings, which was her habit, I would not see the blue veins in her calves and around her knees. Her knees ached, I could tell, because it took effort and groans to push up from bent knees that rested two steps below the step that was getting scrubbed.

I could dance around her up to the kitchen even when she was scrubbing the steps but everyone else had to, “Stay off the steps while I’m cleaning!” Her dedication to clean steps, steps that surely would be dirtied an hour after they were cleaned, amazed me. Such attention to those lowly back steps surely indicated how much we were loved.

After, grandmother would rest just like God did on the seventh day, with a coffee and a cigarette at the kitchen table. In her resting, I learned myself how to rest, to take a break from work, to pause before moving onto the next blessed task.

Can't ride your back unless it is bent

If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent. Martin Luther King, Jr, spoken April 3, 1968 the night before his assassination.

Is your spine straight or bent today? Do you walk upright, chest rising to the sky, head held high upon a strong neck, thoracic vertebrae snug in between the shoulder blades? Or is there a monkey on your bent back, making you scratch and itch, pulling you down towards the ground, enveloping you in fear, worry, and rigidity?

Think of those men and women in Albany, Georgia, 1962, standing up straight, walking forward into the water hoses, the dogs, the paddy wagons, claiming their rightful free place in this world even as they were surrounded by hatred. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached love and was murdered. How/where did he find compassion, fearlessness, unselfish determination? In a straight spine, perhaps, that no man could ride.