November 2019
Dear Friends,
Here we are again—in these fall days that darken early, where we are called upon to navigate our way through yet another season of so many great unknowns. Here, at the cusp of unforeseen circumstance and unfathomable outcome, darkness can seem all pervasive. Not helping matters, our fertile imaginations wrap all kinds of stories around the dark—hobgoblins, ghouls, and other apocryphal messengers of doom.
Yet Shakyamuni Buddha prescribed that we are to be a light unto ourselves. What is that light?
I’ll share just one of so many, many examples. Early this morning in the predawn darkness I went out to the clinic to get some routine blood tests done. In the lobby, while waiting for my name to be called, a janitor came by to empty the garbage can near me. Our eyes met, and in that moment we met each other in that extraordinary way of wordless recognition. How to describe it? The subtle mutual joy—warm and luminous, vibrant and 10,000 times more bright that the fragile light of a firefly. Ahhhh!
It’s more about the readiness, I believe, that anything else. That is our meditation practice.
Just as the momentary world is filled with darkness, we can step into it fully by embodying the question, “What is this?”
Just as we meet the momentary world with the whole-hearted adventure of
being, the light has already appeared. We are it.
Yours in the ever-bright Dharma,
Jeong Ji
