On Looking for God in the Age of Extinction
What is the place of a spiritual practice in rebuilding the world while it’s falling apart?
I’ve had a hard time meditating lately — at least, in meditation like that. If you count sitting on the porch in silence riding waves of emotion at my country’s spiral into theocratic fascism and the looming likelihood of a civil war meditating, then I guess you could say I’ve been meditating a lot.
I read a story last summer about firefighting monks at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center clearing brush and spraying water as the Willow Fire burned on their doorstep. They called the water “dharma rain.” The literal meaning of nirvana is something like “a flame that’s been extinguished.” There’s some lesson in here about metaphors coming to life.
My spiritual path isn’t Buddhist per se, but I’ve taken many lessons from that tradition. I see the way Buddhism speaks of desire as the root cause of suffering as a truth about craving. In order to crave something, you must be lacking it. To come to a place of inexhaustible peace is to extinguish the craving for something else, to recognize that what you already are is enough. The ability to simply be, and be simply, deprives the burning fire of suffering the oxygen it needs to sustain itself. Even the desire to relinquish desire…
