Glimmer of Light

Method Living

“Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must let go of your preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and you don’t learn. Your poetry arises when you and the object become one, when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden light glimmering there…”

Basho

          Sometimes, I feel like I’m sitting on the sidelines watching other people’s lives. Do you know what I mean? I think about method actors, who become the part and don’t go out of character so long as they are playing that role. It seems that is how we should be about our own lives—stay in character. But it doesn’t work that way so much, does it?

          When we cleave to ourselves, we grow insular and inflexible. We lose touch with how what we say and do affects others. We view everything through one lens and have difficulty with empathy. It’s almost paradoxical that we must enter life so deeply that we lose our preoccupation with ourselves in order to fully participate.

          I used to date someone who constantly told me, “A tiger cannot change its stripes,” meaning he could not change. But we are not tigers. We do not operate simply on instinct. We have these large cerebral hemispheres that allow us to learn and grow and change. We can also change the lens through which we view the world. We can get a wide-angle or a telephoto—we can experience the world up close and broadly and learn about it. We can look through a microscope and get a whole new understanding of life’s composition and structure. There is so much more to life than our little sphere of concern for ourselves.

          When we broaden our gaze, we can see beyond our own self-interest. We can see that there is a whole world out there that has nothing to do with us. We are one of many, a small reference point in a moment of time on a speck of dust in the middle of an infinite universe. Not such a big deal after all. And yet…within that one small reference point, there exists a glimmer of light that can illuminate the cosmos. We must find that light and let it shine.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane