Beautiful Turmoil, Everyday Nirvana
Dear Friends,
This will be my last email newsletter until I return from my retreat at Plum Village, around Thanksgiving. I will carry you all with me and I promise to write about any insights I may have after I get back.
Today, I wanted to share something that happened to me while I was driving along Connecticut Avenue in DC in some really awful rush hour traffic. I started out my short drive (one that normally takes 15 minutes but ended up taking 35 minutes) listening to this talk by Nonviolent Communication (NVC) teacher Robert Gonzales. It’s a good talk about working with our longing and seeking.
A few minutes into the stop-and-go traffic, I decided that my drive would be easier if I listened to something more soothing to my nervous system, so I put on this Metta chant by Imee Ooi. I immediately felt better and could return to my body and my breathing.
The uptown lanes were much less busy than the downtown lanes I was stuck in, and a skateboarder was taking full advantage of the lack of cars to weave beautiful wide arcs back and forth across the empty lanes. A biker squeezed between lanes, flying past my open window speaking rapid Spanish into her airpods. A man with a cane waited patiently at a bus stop, folks walked down the hill carrying what looked like work bags, truck brakes squeaked, and I sat there in the glorious middle of it all, texting my family and taking notes for this story whenever my car came to a full stop.
I suddenly became intensely aware of the beautiful turmoil that is human life on earth. I saw that every one of us is a messy human being with feet of clay, annoying and hurting each other and ourselves day and night, and yet every one of us is also full of beautiful intentions and offerings. We aren’t often able to live up to those intentions, and yet we keep on trying. What the Buddha taught was that somehow we also all have the capacity to wake up to all of this glorious messiness. This moment brought me a few bittersweet tears.
In that precious moment (and in fact in every precious moment), we are all playing our part in the dance described by Buddhist teacher Alan Watts (who struggled with his own humanness):
At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell…the meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music, also, it is filled in each moment of its course.
This Alan Watts quote showed up in my life in 2001 when I was struggling with depression, feeling that my life had no meaning. Reading this and considering that my life may be something beautiful and precious even without a comprehensible reason for it was useful and healing. Seeing and feeling this dance in the middle of a traffic jam in 2023 was truly a gift.
As Thich Nhat Hanh has said so many times, we can only find nirvana (extinction of the flames of our afflictions) within samsara (the world as we normally experience it with all its suffering and loneliness). Nirvana is not somewhere else. We can find it right here and right now in the middle of all of the immense suffering that we each experience and sometimes cause. A friend of mine encapsulates this teaching with a mantra: Everyday Nirvana.
May you experience moments of Everyday Nirvana! I will be back in touch after my retreat. As always, feel free to reach out directly to me anytime. I won’t be checking email between October 12 and November 25, but will reply as soon as I can after that.
with love,
annie.