The qualities of celebration and groundlessness make for a delightful world. So you live that life. I think the conventional idea is that we lead our life because we have to struggle and we have to achieve something, which keeps us occupied. But maybe that's just one way, and there's an entirely different approach altogether.
*Chogyam Trungpa. Cynicism and Magic: Intelligence and Intuition on the Buddhist Path. Ed. Opening the Dharma Treasury Editors Group.
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Groundlessness means everything is moving, in constant transformation - including you. You may think you have stable ground under your feet, that you can just cling to what has been and is. That will not work. The fear of moving ground may keep us from realizing the joy of moving with the ground. Life becomes flavorful when we stop hanging on and let go, moving with the moving.
This is like water. When a boy, we had creeks nearby. They flowed all the time and were cold. We could drink from one near my family home. Others we could swim in and fish from. We had bottled-up waterholes and ponds, and the water was not moving, was dirty. This is like us. Our lives get stale and dank when we resist change. When we flow with the flow, a freshness arises, we feel a self-renewing vitality. Life becomes creativity, for creativity is only possible with groundlessness.
A Christian scripture speaks to this in religious terms. Galatians 5.16 reads for us to walk in (or by) the spirit (Greek, pneuma; wind, breath, spirit, Spirit). This points us to go with the wind, or breath. Breath moves. When a person breathes their last - so expires - there is no more inspiring. Breath has no more meaning. Wind blows. If the wind is said to be still, that makes no sense. Wind is blowing, or wind is not. We walk. These are action words.
Hence, to fight the Breath is to lose inspiration. This, while to walk means inbreathing and outbreathing. We take in; we give out: self-nurture, service.
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We can shut groundlessness out of our mind, though we see, for example, we are aging moment to moment. Seasons come, seasons go. Change is the one constant. We can think we are stopping change, putting our life in neutral, so playing it safe, but that is change too. Resisting the groundlessness creates unfavorable conditions. The ground is moving, you are moving, everything is moving.
The good news is groundlessness opens a spaciousness to step out of claustrophobic situations and make positive shifts. Since all is impermanent, we can align with this, not accepting we are fated to settle for a life less than one of delight. Though life can be painful, it can be a celebration, too, if we choose.
So, yes, there is another way to live than struggle and survival, a much better way. Yet, if you mention that as possible for you, do not expect a lot of support. In the egoic, self-centered way, people will not like your challenging their belief in struggle and misery. Also, many people are so accustomed to their inner suffering that they are unaware of how immense and all-consuming it is. Spirituality is a means of disidentification with struggle to embrace enjoyment, for life is life... it is alive. Yet, this awakening rarely, if ever, begins without becoming wearied with needless, chronic suffering.
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We experience groundlessness, but groundlessness arises from a Ground. A spiritual path opens awareness of the unchanging amid change, with the understanding we cannot escape the constancy of change. But we can explore how to work with groundlessness, not fearing it but seeing it as a friend, thereby making positive changes for ourselves. We can trust in something not subservient to the relative dimension of flux.
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At age thirty-three, Larry Walters decided to see his neighborhood from a new viewpoint. One morning he bought forty-five used weather balloons from an army surplus store. That afternoon Walters strapped himself into a lawn chair, to which some of his friends tied the helium-filled balloons. He took a six-pack of beer, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a BB gun, planning to shoot the balloons one at a time to land.
Walters, who assumed the balloons would lift him about one-hundred feet in the air, was caught off guard when the chair soared eleven-thousand feet plus into the middle of the air traffic pattern at Los Angeles International Airport. Too scared to shoot the balloons, he remained airborne for more than two hours, forcing the airport to shut down its runways for much of the afternoon and causing long flight delays.
After he was safely grounded and cited by the police, reporters asked Walters three questions. "Were you scared?" He replied, "Yes." "Would you do it again?" He said, "No." "Why did you do it?" "Because you can't just sit there."
*"Leadership," Summer 1993.
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We do not have to go anywhere else esteemed better than where we are or do anything sensational for life to be an adventure. Not just sitting there implies, to me, doing something to spice up life. Another way of saying this is to wake up. Groundlessness provides the opportunity to make positive changes, so seasoning life.
I like the idea of food with no seasoning, but I do not like the taste. So, I spice up my meals. I veer from salt and use herbs. I do not look to anyone else, saying, "Please add some taste to my food." Or complain, "Oh me, my! This food is not tasty." No, I do something to add flavor.
Some thirty years ago, I began learning to do nothing to add flavor to my life. By nothing, I mean... sitting quietly, reverently, and restful. I discovered I could welcome a more subtle experience of presence to flavor my life. Doing this faithfully and daily enriches my life experience. This silent sitting is not always pleasant or easy, and sometimes it is; regardless, it has proven worth it.
There are many spiritual practices to enhance your life - service, chanting, singing, hatha yoga, dance, communal worship, vigil, retreat, daily silence, spiritual reading, mindful walking in nature, journaling, intercessory prayer, giving of gratitude... Each tradition offers some array of practices, communal and personal. And I found some "spices" outside my native faith tradition, as you might. I have discovered the joy of learning from the spirituality of other faith paths in enhancing my prior understanding and spiritual practice.
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A challenge for us is not to settle into a routine and go to sleep spiritually. Often, being over-familiar with our way of spirituality, we can go through the motions until all happening is the motions. Our heart is no longer in it, so to speak.
We exercise will and awareness to awaken and stay awake. Otherwise, we might just go back to bed. We are moving about doing things but among the walking dead.
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In the Way, sometimes a whole new direction is needed. We see we have grown beyond the past and need to invite newness and, with that, freshness. We grow to accept that self-responsibility, not waiting for others, even our tradition or spiritual leaders, to give us permission. Faith leaders often think they are to protect us from such changes when they hinder us from following our hearts.
If you want to spice up your life spiritually, do not settle with what you have thought and done. Do not allow others to cage you in. Be creative... think, do... outside all boxes. All the boxes are illusions. The adventure is not in clinging to the known, the past, or for the approval of others. Venture out from the common shore. You may see that as a risk. The greater risk is not to welcome that venture. Move like the wind, flow like the breath... walk on and do not look back.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photographs.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
