By Jaya Ashmore from Open Dharma
One of the Open Centre themes that most fascinates me is Leadership as service: or courage as humility and expression, embodiment of Dharma, the Sanskrit kalyaan… A curious kink with the new version of the website in June brought out a small example of this leading edge, leadership that serves the good of all. After we launched the new website a retreatant emailed to alert us that she could not access any of the new features. Since I have 884 unread emails in my inbox, I simply (and promptly, for once) thanked the person for the “heads up” and forwarded the email to Ernest, our web wizard. Ernest assured us both that there was no problem “from his side,” but within a week I forwarded emails from the same frustrated person to Ernest.
Ernest says he sighed to himself, “This is not my responsibility; but okay, let’s see what we can do.” This is the moment (not so glorious after all) where we turn our life over to a calling greater than the call of payment, position, or approval. (What if we could feel as “responsible” for spiritual callings—without the heaviness or “should”—as we do for our career “vocation” and other roles we have accepted from society?) When we let ourselves respond—be responsible—to something other than our “job description,” we allow joy a deep hold on our cells. This joy consecrates all it touches. This joy allows the necessary, the longed-for–the fully satisfying dedication of all we have and are–back to life itself. This is where time and the timeless meet. By the way, Ernest’s free response—in addition to helping a new friend see the fresh website—taught us a small trick that may be of use. Someone else had viewed the old version of www.opendharma.org on the same public computer that our retreatant/friend used in an internet shop in Dharamsala. The computer remembered the old link and, to save time, directed our friend to the stored version of the website. To access the new site, one has to delete the prompt that appears as one types in a web address. And start fresh.
We often use our power of remembering in the same way as the computer—to “save time” or to protect ourselves. We filter our lives through our heads. To uncover our ability to respond freshly, we use different kinds of remembering wisely. Four kinds of remembering.
1) Memory based on past experience can save time, but can obviously block us from seeing what has changed, and what we could not perceive previously. If we have a tendency to ignore certain things—someone else’s trickiness or our own—we can let past burns remind us to slow down and get off of automatic pilot.
2) Slowing down can help us learn to find a big enough perspective to take our own experience into account, so that we can really learn from our past. Then we are not just trying to remember, but also starting to gather and embody wisdom.
Wendell Berry writes about the importance of continuity in farming, and we can apply his wisdom to life. We can understand the “farm” as the responsibilities of our life—the opportunities for response in our life, a life so fully spiritual that there is no need to call it spiritual. Berry values “a remembered history of own mistakes and the remedies of those mistakes.” We will know from experience, “not just…what is… technologically possible” on the farm, but also what actually works, what we can do and what we can not do on the farm.* I love Berry’s call to join in on the love affair between the limited and the limitless: he says that with time we will understand the ways in which we and the farm, “empower and limit one another.” We can give up the habit of assuming that limitations limit us in any ultimate way. We can have enough confidence to look into, feel intimately, and work creatively with limitations like our insecurity, loneliness, anger, grief, and fear; our broken nose and heart; our noisy apartment and mind; our fat belly and thin patience; our lacks and our surpluses. We can sometimes accept the limitations of our lives with less resentment, envy, shame, and self-pity. We notice that the beauty of uniqueness lies in limitation, and we start to look less for the shelter of imitation or approval. We start to respond to our own unique way. As we gradually get our toes into the earth of our actual lives, with its seeming limitations, we uncover other kinds of remembering.
3) More and more often we hear life calling and we spontaneously respond. We re-member; we give ourselves back to our spiritual core. The specifics (the limitations) of this here and this now offer just the right opening for us to fall through, just the right encouragement for our spiritual eyes to open. And then we can actually experience that those seemingly solid obstacles—the chair, the anger—are not fixed, stuck, or dead. They need not be limited to our ideas based on past experience of them. In this dimension, they are fully alive. They are not limiting in the way we assumed. There is room for creative response.