My One Wild and Precious Life

I just got back a few days ago from a week-long meditation retreat with Cheri Huber.  It was called “Not What But How,” which means we were looking at how the process of how we do things is more important than the content (the what).  I left the retreat with a renewed vigor for making the most of every day, not waiting around or holding back or feeling stuck.  I have said more than once this week that it seems that if we’re unhappy in a certain situation, we can choose acceptance or we can do something, but to sit around complaining and being unhappy is just a waste.  My favorite part of the recitation we do at the monastery is “If I am suffering it is because I am choosing something over ending suffering.”  The thing that is so big about this is that everything comes back to me—most of us don’t really want to deal with that.

So just a couple days ago, I was listening to a live recording of Cheri Huber and it was one of the people in the audience that framed it this way, which is pretty powerful to me.  He said that we spend our lives trying to survive, all the time we find ourselves in survival mode, but the fact is we don’t survive.  Right!  Somehow it has always seemed like a reasonable rationale—when I or someone else finds ourselves in survival mode, it makes sense somehow.  In yoga, we call this clinging to life abhinivesha.  But the only thing we know for sure about life is that we don’t make it out alive!  Now, I’ve said something like that before many times, but the way this guy said it really had an impact.  I’ve been thinking about the lines from Mary Oliver ever since the retreat and now I posted it in our bathroom:  “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?”

Here is a video that Cheri showed on the retreat this year and a couple years ago:

It is good to be re-inspired on this from time to time because when I’m just going about my day-to-day life and my husband isn’t doing what I want him to and I feel like I can’t catch up at work after my time away, I can feel the dissatisfaction and projection bubbling up.  I want things to be different.  But I don’t really want to spend my life wanting things to be different (do you see how that it is still wanting things to be different?).  So I keep saying to myself, “This is it.  This is my life.”  In every moment I have a choice.  And I choose to be amazed.  I choose to be grateful.  I choose fullness and wholeness.  I choose life.

Here’s a story about how great life is:

Pretty much from the retreat orientation forward, people kept mentioning the frogs that live in the outshowers at the monastery—little green frogs.  I was excited to see them.  Well, I only took a couple showers and on my last day as I was stepping under the water, I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen a single frog (aside from the big toad that startled me in the dark by the outhouse one night).  I went about enjoying my shower and when I was done, I opened the curtain and there on my towel right at eye level was a frog—no way I could possibly miss it.  Yay!  I even got to carry him on my finger from the towel to the bench.  Thanks, Life!