This morning I’m sitting with my 6 month old son in my lap, watching the snow fall outside. Samuel is fast asleep and it’s opening up a quiet space for me to meditate. Last year, I worked for my city as a landscaping foreman and one of our winter duties was to push snow off of walkways and city ramps. A giant snowstorm arrived in the middle of the night and my crew and I worked for about 60 hours straight with little to no rest. Lots of folks love snow and it is beautiful to see it cover the ground and trees and I always appreciate the auditory muffling effect it has conducive to stillness. I have great memories of manually shoveling a path through the snow from the dormitory to the dhamma hall at a meditation campus I spent a couple winter weeks at. The experience was quite different in downtown Indianapolis last winter though.
My crew and I were exhausted and many city officials were very rude to us for not having control of the weather. It was impossible to keep up and rather foolish to try in retrospect. The winds howled straight down from the sky scrapers and ice particles hit my face and felt like a thousand tiny needles. The two men on my crew were older gentleman so I gave them the two enclosed vehicles to plow with and I took out the snow blower. The wind caught most of the ejected snow and blew it right back into my face. This went on for several hours that night with no progress because any path we would make was momentarily piled up again. I brought my camp stove and made us all breakfast in the parking garage that morning. It improved our morale and got us on our feet again.
My exhausted brain did a lot of thinking during that storm. It was an intense experience. My wife was pregnant then and the neighbor came and helped her shovel our driveway since I wasn’t home. I thought a lot about this incredible storm of human emotions we all weather through in life. During that blizzard I mostly dwelt on the negative ones and how they pile up inside us. So much anger, despair, grief and sorrow to navigate our way through. I know I’ve been working my whole life to push a path through it. It feels to me like it has to go somewhere or by some alchemy it has to change or perhaps my perspective needs to open up. I thought about the example I’d like to set for my son. I thought about how many of us didn’t have great examples and how it’s impossible to care deeply for others without extending that grace to ourselves. I thought about the drifting snows that keep so many of us feeling helpless against the storm.
Sometimes, ignorance, exhaustion, trauma and grief surmount into huge snow banks that last for seasons in me. Sometimes I don’t react wisely to my own emotions and push them off onto others. Sometimes people push theirs on to me to deal with…all the delicate and sometimes graceless interactions of being human and dealing with one’s emotions. It all has to go somewhere. It’s all connected in some way. It’s all here for a reason say the wise. For a lot of years I’ve tried to push through storms of anger and resentment only to have the wind turn it around and blow it back in my face or cover over my progress.
Over the years, I think I’m learning more how to wisely work through these undesirable emotions. I certainly don’t react to them in the same way but they haven’t gone away either.. Sometimes they melt a bit and then refreeze through the colder nights. I keep trying and that is a noble quality that I want to be proud of so I can instill those values in my son too. Life is so bewildering and difficult but I want to keep clearing my path because that act seems to be where self compassion lives. The snow banks haven’t burst into a thousand rays of peaceful light or vanished completely but some days my feet find surer footing on the path for being present with those feelings without judging them to much. I understand more fully why they are there, right in front of me. The seasons change and I’m learning to trust the warmth of the sun to melt them away in their own time. Sooner or later though that snow will melt and eventually evaporate back into the atmosphere. Some of it might turn back into snow and land on my path again. Maybe instead of bracing against it, I’ll smile to see it’s return and witness how beautiful it is to watch it fall in the quiet stillness of the moonlight once again.
fartlosophies 