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Nearly all the water was gone from the creek.  The large stones and pebbles in the creek bed, the skeletal remains of the sinewy current, were still moist.  They paved a hidden way through the trees, hemmed by walls of dark earth.

I stepped carefully, rounding each curve, always thinking it would be impossible to go further.  I found a small pool of water, only inches deep, cradling a commune of tiny black carp.  Their known universe had shrunk to the size of a tide pool.  One or two were golden orange.  One in particular was the size of my hand and a gleaming tangerine.  She hovered under a rock and, once in awhile, glided out into the open to watch her dainty comrades darting from stone to stone like they were dodging bullets.  Fish in a barrel.

Just beyond the event horizon of their shallow village, I spotted a dead fish.  She’d been trapped in a nook when the water level was dropping.  “If the water level falls any lower,” my friend said, “these fish will die, too.”

The next day, Tangerine was dead.  She must have needed more oxygen.

We’d been talking about generosity when we found the puddle.  I related an old fantasy of a world in which love abounds, and no one is left out.  Everyone frolicking in fields of flowers, dancing, singing, kissing, and skinny dipping in the river.

In such a world, I argued, generosity would flow easily, because the abundance would make the spirit of taking unnecessary.  Without a spirit of taking, giving would not feel like having something stolen.  The sense of poverty is what drives grasping and scares away generosity.

My friend pointed out that many people had tried to create the world I described, but it never worked.

They get scared, I thought.

As we sat on a rock waiting for another glimpse of Tangerine’s sequin glow, I offered an analogy.  You’ve been working a dead-end job for years, and one day you feel the call of passion.  You want to go out into the world and make a real difference.  You want to see the world change, so you quit your job and leap into the unknown with nothing but your passion and faith.

Soon, you’re faced with your own mortality, the vulnerability and transience of your small self, and you have a choice.  Continue forward, devoted to the greater love compelling your leap of faith, or retreat to the safety and security of a steady paycheck.

For those who retreat, the decision seems smart, and the movement into passion seems foolish and precarious in retrospect.  For those who continue, the world is changed.

For those who retreat, the world is scary, a place where poverty always looms around the corner.  The edges of the known universe shrink daily.  Abundance evaporates.

Those who continue find the inner wellspring.

We want to see the inner wellspring, to see the abundance, before we leap, but it’s only in the leaping that we develop the eyesight with which to see it there.  It’s only in the leaping that the heart opens wide enough to feel its own true wealth.

We sat in meditation.  I opened out into the space around me.  I listened to the rocks and the trees.  My mind became still.  After a long while, I thought, “I feel the Buddha nature of the trees and stones, but what about my friend sitting beside me?  Why am I leaving him out?  Where is his Buddha nature?”  I felt out into the space containing his form, and just at that moment, an acorn smacked my friend in the head.

I took my two boys to the beach, and we were on our way back to the car to retrieve some sunscreen. My six year old began to run ahead of my three year old. My three year old wanted to be first, so he started crying. He was crying and running to catch up, and running and crying. All the while, my six year old was laughing hysterically and running faster to stay ahead.

Hearing him laugh at his sobbing younger brother, I was very angry. When I caught up with him, I said firmly, “Remember to be kind!” Knowing how he valued the notion of love, I said, “I know you know all about love, so remember to be loving.”

He said, “I know all about love, but I don’t know how to love. I don’t know how to act loving.”

I was touched by his sincerity, and I empathized completely. Is this not the problem we all face when we set out to be more loving?

I said, “Well… don’t laugh when someone else is crying.” It was all I could come up with right then, and perhaps it was enough, but I think the most important thing my son did was to simply want to act with love.

I suppose choosing love does not necessarily mean you know what to actually do. It means that you wish you knew.

Two hands lift silt from the bottom of the shallow river and rise to the surface.  The sun shines into the water as the silt is carried away by the current.  The hands, glowing golden against the black river bottom like a treasure, gather another layer of silt and hold it just under the surface.  Slowly, the silt disappears again.  Impermanence.

An idea for a drawing congealed in my imagination, a sequence of sketches illustrating the above scene.  The silt dissolves into the current, and in the last frame, the hands themselves dissolve into the current.  Impermanence.

I pulled out some paper and sketched two open hands.  My six year old son was watching.  When he saw the outstretched hands, he immediately insisted that I draw a giant heart in both of them.  I drew a big, red heart.  My son took the drawing and wrote in the right margin: “I am holding love.”

I left it at that.

The next day, a friend who knew nothing of my imagined river scene loaned me Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the sculptor and naturalist Andy Goldsworthy.  Andy travels to different geographical regions and builds exotic creations using only the materials he finds in nature.  Rocks, leaves, even ice.

Soon, his creations dissolve back into the environment from which they came.  Stones collapse.  Twigs are scattered by the wind.  Ice melts.  Leaves and flower petals are carried away by ocean tides and river currents.

Yet, despite the transience of his creations, Andy reveals a deep continuity.  After building a large cone of stacked stones on the seashore, he said:

“The sea came in and the cone just disappeared and then was gone, but it was still there.  A work that I had only just finished making, so my contact with the stone was still very, very strong, so I was with it down there but I still couldn’t see it.

What I have touched on this… this… this time, is I haven’t simply made this piece to be destroyed by the sea.  The work has been given to the sea as a gift, and the sea has taken the work and made more of it than I could have ever hoped for.

And I think that if I can see in that ways of understanding those things that happen to us in life, that changes our lives, that causes upheaval and shock… [rubs chin thoughtfully]”

Impermanence does not mean giving up on our efforts to create something lasting.  Even if we build our house on the sand, if we build it with love as a gift to the universe, the universe will come in, like the sea, and make more of it than we could have ever hoped for.

We’re moved by extremes to call forth great love and openness, but the small and ordinary things require our hearts in just the same way.  As we’re moved to show compassion to someone starving on the streets, we can be moved to compassion for someone hungry for a conversation.  As we might open to forgive a thief in prison, we can open to forgive a friend if they say something impolite or neglect to be considerate.  For the small things, forgiveness can feel like a dismissive wave of the hand.  “Okay, I’ll overlook this,” we grumble.  The heart is not stirred, because we hold on to the small entitlements, sometimes more than we cling to the large entitlements.  When forgiving the thief, the heart is stirred.  We feel the redemption of the thief, the unconditional love of the cosmos for the thief.  We can feel this for someone over a small thing and move forward open and pulsating with love.

This is fierce love brought into ordinary life.  Movie love, like a character compelled to make a heartfelt sacrifice for the sake of another.  She sets aside her own concerns without hesitation or a second thought, because she sees another in great need.  This determination and selflessness comes easily when the need is profound and acute.  Now how to bring this same determination, this same deep heart of service, into the small things.  Keeping the dishes clean and put away, being present when you’re tired, listening, buying coffee.  Rush in with gusto, your heart ablaze, to (as the Zen proverb goes) “chop wood and carry water.”  No need is too small to love big.

Your mere presence in this world is your offering of love.  You can love with being instead of with doing.  The problem of how to love is only a problem when you want to know “what do I do?”  How do I give to the world?  But your very self is your gift.

Osho wrote that love is “neither easy nor difficult, just natural.”  “Love is a natural state of consciousness,” he says.  “It is not an effort… It is like breathing!  It is like your heartbeat, it is like blood circulating in your body.  Love is your very being.”

Just as you are, the world witnesses and savors you.  And in being who you are, completely, wholly, consciously, you bless existence with you.

Once you’ve been burned, it’s hard to come close to the fire.  There is light and warmth but also the danger of being badly injured or consumed.  The metaphor is very appropriate, because it captures something crucial: why something we want so dearly and enjoy so much causes fear.  Pain creates a deep groove in the mind, tracks the mind will follow again and again if we allow it.  Then, as we come closer to the possiblity of having that same experience, the body trembles, anticipating another round of pain.

Of the many strategies for coping with such fear, there is only one that cuts to the core for me.  I can tell myself that everything will work out, and I believe that, and I can try to manage each situation with greater wisdom, and that is something I value, and I can take a deep breath, and all these things ease my mind for a time, but none of them dissolve my fears the way love does.

Fear requires a closed heart, and love opens it, and when love opens the heart, fear is impossible.  Fear balloons as one’s self-focus becomes more intense, and fear also encourages a stronger self-focus, so there is a feedback loop.  You concentrate on your individual survival, your own bodily integrity, and anxiety rises and spreads like a mold.  Then, anxiety shifts attention further towards one’s own survival, and this changes how everything looks.  We start to classify things into two categories: safe and dangerous.  As our mind becomes occupied by concerns about our self and potential dangers, it’s easy to forget to love.

So I take a moment and remind myself that I’m not the only soul with fears and dreams.  I’m not the only soul who needs love and compassion and tenderness.  Shifting the focus ever so slightly from self to other, like a crack in the curtains, a ray of light pushes through, so warm and beautiful, and it opens my heart.  Individual survival ceases to matter; danger ceases to matter.  It ceases to matter, not because I no longer care for my own well being, but because the danger turns out to be an illusion, and I find well being, paradoxically, in the unconditional wish to give it.

I run into the fire.  Although it seems foolish at first, somehow the love coming out of my heart forms a mist around my body, and I don’t get burned.  Instead, the fire moves straight into my heart and becomes even more love, until I think I’m going to burst, and the beauty of it makes me weepy with gratitude.

Our fundamental need is not to find some perfect person to satisfy our heart… but for our heart to open… and to stay open, unwaveringly.  Whoever can enable that in another, what a blessing they are.  What a beautiful blessing.

So why run into the fire?  Do it out of love, the way you would rush into a burning building to save a child.  You don’t think about getting singed.  All you think about is the beautiful child inside, and nothing else matters.  In that love, courage comes unbidden.

You are War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and yet most people assume you are only three pages long.  They say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but equally useful is the warning, “Don’t assume that the Preface captures the essence and nuances of who someone is.”

Once, people would sit down with a good book, relish each word, turning the pages slowly, and digest the story along with a nice cup of tea.  These days, we get the Cliff Notes version, sift through the basic facts, and move on with our busy day.  We think we know each other; we think we’ve enjoyed the story to its fullest, after only a few pages.

The author, David Foster Wallace, was known for his extensive use of footnotes and endnotes.  His book, Infinite Jest, contained a hundred pages of footnotes, and those who read the book soon learned that the footnotes were an integral part of the story.  Wallace said that the notes reflected his perception of reality (see the interview clip on Charlie Rose).  How many people, getting to know Wallace, skipped the footnote section of his personality?  They would have missed an integral part of who he was.

In contrast, Pablo Coehlo, who wrote The Alchemist, is known for his bare bones style, his tendency to tell a story straight up without embellishment, and yet his stories are rich with meaning and inspiration.  How many people, getting to know Coehlo, dismissed the meaning of who he was on account of the simple delivery?

Then there is you.  You’re not a sound bite.  You’re not a headline or a two sentence summary.  You deserve to be savored from cover to cover.

Once, I was invited to a dinner, and I mistakenly thought it was a date.  Sitting near the kitchen, I was conversing with the cook when the cook asked me a question.  He thought I was the host’s significant other.  My “date,” who overheard the question, shouted across the room, correcting the cook’s misconception, something about not having a significant other.  In that moment, my heart sank, and I felt terribly out of place.  “I shouldn’t be here,” I thought.  I wanted to leave, to shirk away and curl up in some corner by myself, maybe cry a little.

However, at that time, my mantra was “keep your heart open no matter what.”  “I have a choice,” I thought.  “I can walk away, cradling my bruised ego and feeling sorry for myself, or I can stay and offer my company to someone who cares about me and did in fact invite me over.”

I decided, with much conscious effort, to keep my heart open.  I stood up and walked over to the bookshelf.  I grabbed the first book that caught my eye, closed my eyes, opened to a random page, and planted my finger on a random spot.  When I opened my eyes, I saw that my finger was pointing at the phrase “open heart.”  Yes!  Validation.  The book was Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti.  It happened to be my copy on loan.  I continued reading:

“Open mind, open heart.  Realize that there isn’t somebody in there to protect.  There is no need for an emotional barrier or the feelings of separation and isolation that come from that barrier.  The only reason you ever thought that you needed protection was because of a very innocent misunderstanding.  This happened because when you were given a concept of yourself in very early childhood, you also received a kit with which to build walls that would protect this concept.  You learned to add to the kit as circumstances arose.  If a good dose of anger seemed useful, you would add that to the kit, or perhaps you added resentment, shame, blame, or victimization.  Whether you cling to a self-image as a good person or an inadequate person, the kit of identity is used to protect that image.

This is very innocent.  It happens without your knowing that it’s happening.  It continues until you realize that inherent in this holding of ‘me’ as a self-image in the mind and body is the belief that you need protection.  You can’t have one without the other.  They come in the same box.

When you drop your protection, the truth comes in and takes away the self-image.  That’s why the self-image came with a wall, because without the wall, the remembrance of your true nature is going to jump in fast and take away the self-image, whether good or bad… When the emotional wall opens up, you become open-hearted.”

Adyashanti went on to describe the love that arises spontaneously when we stop seeing everything in relation to this self-image and instead drop the walls and open up to the world as it is.

I returned the book to the shelf and joined the wonderful dinner and focused my mind on enjoying what was, as it was, and appreciating the gift of friendship.  I felt happy and connected, and my unrequited affections melted once more into a more mature and genuine tenderness.  I think the choice to keep my heart open helped me become a more loving person.  Often, closing the heart inadvertently leads to self-absorbtion and makes it difficult to see the needs of others.  Opening, in contrast, despite all the fear, is a gift of love.