the ghost of lichen

27 March 2008 - 16:43

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I wrote this two weeks ago but feared posting it. I was afraid readers who know certain details of my life would view this as an explanation or a justification, or as a response to one person or one set of events. It is none of those things.

Almost three years ago I came here with a flurry of cryptic questions about how to approach my life (see entries beginning here).

This entry is my current working answer to those questions, so I am posting it here where it belongs.

***
For my entire life I have had a wish to be a force that is forever extending itself, that no matter what it may encounter, *never recoils.* From five years ago: I am the lichen on concentration camp walls that, dreaming of lilies and daffodils, over centuries carves the stone into an angel. I have made my life a perennial effort to be the thing that never recoils. When my first serious relationship ended and my heart was broken, I tried to make myself okay enough to be friends with my ex. When my next boyfriend wanted an open relationship, I tried to convince myself that that style of interacting was something so noble and evolved I would be an idiot not to prefer it. When people close to me abused alcohol and hard drugs to the detriment of themselves and everyone around them, I did everything I could to hold those situations together and not back away from the people I loved the most.

In every one of these situations, I failed to be the thing that forever extends itself. Why? Because in each of those situations, given who and where I was in my life, there was no way for me to extend myself to the people around me without recoiling from myself.

I now understand that the only sin greater than recoiling from another is to recoil from oneself. What is the point of extending yourself forever when you become so thin and stretched out you no longer exist? How can anyone receive your ghost?

This year is different for me from every other year because I am truly beginning to achieve something I have been striving for my entire life: to see the "external" world as an extension of myself. To understand that nothing and no one is apart from me yet the only way it's possible to change anything is to change myself. Before I would tell myself these words but live as if I could make a place home just by rearranging the furniture.

Codependence, addiction, lying, and procrastination are all the same thing. The illusion that you have to give up a part of yourself for, or because of, someone or something else: your needs, your goals, your truth, your drive. A fiction that tells you you are being forced to put yourself aside.

My goal is to find that vibrant green place inside myself that is always growing, extending, and going on and to never again deny that part of me. I now understand that this is the only way to love anyone I have ever known.

***
Followers of the Way [of Chan], if you want to get the kind of understanding that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you're facing inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely anywhere you wish to go.
--Linji Yixuan, early founder of the Rinzai school of Zen

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