Grace and Grit

"Friends and family often wondered, is she being unrealistic—shouldn't she be worrying? fretting? unhappy? But the fact is, by living in the present, by refusing to live in the future, she began exactly to live consciously with death.

Think about it: death, if anything, is the condition of having no future. By living in the present, as if she had no future, she was not ignoring death, she was living it. And I was trying to do the same." Ken Wilber, Grace and Grit.

After I finished reading Grace and Grit I couldn't sleep, not sure what was going on, but when I told someone about the book I started weeping. Then I knew what was going on.

Treya Killam Wilber fought so hard and died anyway within five years. I had a good prognosis and knew I could easily live another twenty years after my December 2010 surgery. Or not. The Buddhists tell us to live our death. This doesn't mean worrying all the time. It means living NOW, whether you have twenty minutes or twenty years left. 

I try to do the same.

The Cries of the World

I wept when my friend Nancy gave me this statue after my surgery, with only an intuition of why Kuan Yin touched me so. Then I read this quote from Exotic India, which captures how I have been feeling these past few weeks:  

Kuan Yin: The Compassionate Rebel. Buddhism's most enduring (and universal) contribution to the world has been insufficiently translated as compassion. The original Sanskrit word is karuna, which holds within itself traces of the fragment ru, meaning to weep.

The term karuna is frequently described as a love for all beings. However, the all-encompassing nature of compassion is quite unlike conventional love—which is rooted in dualistic thinking and is egoistic, possessive, and exclusive. 

Karuna's root meaning is said to be the anguished cry of deep sorrow and understanding that can only come from an unblemished sense of oneness with others. The name of Kuan Yin signifies her compassionate nature, literally meaning 'One who hears the cries of the world.'