My friend Brian, who is a Buddhist teacher, ran a day-long retreat Sunday. We spent the day, as he said, doing nothing--except, of course, that we observed everything.
Another nothing that was really something was decorating birdhouses any way we felt like it. I tore up a few meditations and pasted the paper on anyway it felt like going. The strips of paper made me think of bandages, which in a way made perfect sense. Letting the paper take its own course, I saw the words interact with each other differently and tell me something new.
Brian had begun the day by inviting us to consider that there is nothing to fix--in ourselves, in our world--because everything is perfect as it is. Thinking about this later--as I sat in front of my computer to prepare this post before bedtime--it seems to me we have to get our arms around this idea before we can open them to the rest of the world. It seems to me to focus on what is flawed can blind me to what is beautiful. That's no way to live.
Sandy Carlson Social