Living In A Divided World {part 2}

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“Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.” ~Ajahn Sumedo

As we talk about facing the divisiveness that plagues our every moment, the never-ending list of crises that need solving, we are exploring a path within meditation known as “The Middle Way”.

The Middle Way lies between aversion and attachment; it lies within the meeting point of opposites. 

This teaching feels like something like a koan to me. A koan in an unanswerable question, riddle or poem that invites us to a state of awakening. We can’t explain it but somehow, when we hear it, we understand the truth that lies within it. 

There is a part of us that feels called to stand up for what we believe is right, to stand up for the health of the world {in all of the ways, and addressing all of the pandemics, and in this same moment, we are invited to sit in the middle of the tension, paradox and discord, and quietly relax right in the middle of it all. 

It is ok if you respond to this teaching with more questions than answers, with a whole list of comments that start with, “but…”  I have questions too. 

And, I am reminded of Rilke as he writes, 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

These teachings don’t say “don’t feel”, and they don’t say “don’t act”. These teachings allow for all of it to be here. In the middle. 

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