Yours in the Dharma:  Essays from a Buddhist perspective by Sandy Garson

This blog, Yours in the Dharma by Sandy Garson, is an effort to navigate life between the fast track and the breakdown lane, on the Buddhist path. It tries to use a heritage of precious, ancient teachings to steer clear of today's pain and confusion to clear the path to what's truly happening.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Seeing Clearly


 So much Dharma talk is about clear seeing, aka pure vision. It's about how our vision of reality is abysmally clouded by cataracts (wishful thinking) and myopia (fear). Meditation is the trick for defogging our mind, the windshield of our vehicle through this world. Waking up is really opening our eyes to what's actually happening.

Frankly, I am not very accomplished in this skill but sometimes the teachers give big how-to hints. For instance, His Holiness the 16th Karmapa had an aviary at his monastery in Sikkim. He loved birds, loved walking among them, hearing them sing because, and here's the punch line, His Holiness believed birds were dakinis, the female protectors and wisdom givers. As it happens, the Karmapas 1 to 17 trace their omniscience to women, dakinis who magically empowered them through that black hat which cradles their brain. It is exceptionally awe inspiring to see a Karmapa put on that symbol of his clairvoyance. Supposedly spun from dakini hair. 

This idea of female empowerment is not far fetched. In every known language of the world, wisdom is feminine. Biologically and mentally, women seem to know what to do. Prajnaparamita, transcendent wisdom, is female.

I have always liked this idea that birds are dakini protectors. It's not far-fetched either: dakinis are always portrayed as flying goddesses.  So now that I try to see the birds that way, it's thrilling to be lucky enough or maybe meritorious enough to have so many coming to my small property when they could just as easily be down the road. The flitting hummingbird who blesses my flowers, the trusting phoebes who've built their third nest for new life in my eaves and clear the air of mosquitoes for me, the black cormorants who comically stand like crosses atop buoys to dry their wings because they lack lanolin, the Woody Woodpecker who--with sound more amped up than a rock band-- hammers bugs out of the dead pines alerting me which ones are, the magnificently gawky great blue herons who glide in and hover transfixed on their toothpick legs waiting for dinner to float by.

More to the point, I find I am no longer annoyed by the raucous, dirty seagulls. I am instead proud that one of the pack has chosen my place as home. It uses the top of my dock as its lookout and sometimes its sleep perch. It's turned the ledge into its lunchroom. The gull waddles through the low tide mud nosing with its beak for clams, yanks them out and then has to drop them on the rocks to crack them open, but not before carrying the shell to its lookout to make sure no other gull is ready to swoop down. I've stopped being annoyed by the gull shit on the dock, started feeling proud of  that enormous pile of broken clam shells covering the ledge. I have come to think of that gull on top of my prayer flags as sent to be my personal protector.

Of course there are crows, often shrieking mobs of them that could and did drive me crazy. But now I see them as black Mahakala, the protector who removes obstacles, his blackness the flip side of Chenrezig's stainless white purity. In other words, same same. Removing obstacles to end suffering. The more the merrier even if they eat my blueberries.

This year almost every day a flock of snowy white egrets flap through the air, swoop onto the water and pull out glittering fish, and soar off. Yesterday I swam off my dock with a lifeguard: a bald eagle nestled in dead branches of a very tall tree on the other side of this narrow inlet. You can almost tell when it's here: all other bird life disappears. Eagles are unfussy omnivores: a fish here, a rodent there, a bird for dessert. When I told a monastic friend I had an eagle watching me, she said: "That was Guru Rinpoche!"

You just have to believe you are seeing straight.








~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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