Loving What Is Rightfully Ours
Photo by Sabine Ojeil
There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours…
—David Whyte
In this talk Zuisei asks what if the one who is rightfully yours is you? Through a study of poet David Whyte’s poem “Truelove” and the Lotus Sutra’s parable of the Prodigal Child, Zuisei explores what it takes to grow into this you. There is a need to be loved, to be held, and to hold ourselves, to acknowledge when we are lost, and, time and time again, to bring ourselves into being, intentionally and with love.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard. See below for transcript.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially, if you have
waited years and, especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you in this way.
This is David Whyte in his stunning poem “The Truelove.” Truelove is one word here. He is part British, part Irish, now part American, a poet, a Zen practitioner, and I would say, a prophet. This poem is from his book The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love. You could read it as a poem about romantic love, but I really wanted to offer it as a poem about love for life: love for self, particularly the self that we're capable of being—the one who is rightfully yours and mine.
I have made the art of conversation a practice. I think I got a little bit spoiled when I was living at the monastery, because conversations tended to be heartfelt. They tended to get to the core of things, though not always. Not always but in general people who came to the monastery wanted to know, wanted to understand, wanted to wake up to their lives. You would sit down in the dining hall and have what otherwise would be a casual conversation, often with a complete stranger. They just got off the bus. They just drove in for the first time and are trying to figure out what it even means to be in a monastery, and over soup and salad, often, you would get to truly meet another. You would hear, sometimes, very intimate things about their lives, about them. You could tell now and then that even they were surprised, How could this have happened so quickly?
I think I did get a bit spoiled because when I left the monastery it was harder to find people who when you asked, "How are you?" would actually tell you. And when they asked you, they actually wanted to know. It was harder to find people who really are not interested in talking about the weather. Many years ago, I thought, that's the sign of becoming an adult. Once you start talking about the weather that means you've grown up, and now you don't have anything interesting to say. So, here, I've made it part of my business to look for, to find, and to cultivate those relationships with people who are willing to go there with me. I have found a few.
A new friend, who I consider a good friend in this sense, was asking me the other night, “What is it all for?” What's the purpose of life? What is its meaning, all of this work, all of this striving? She works a lot and likes her work, loves her work, but what is it all for? I didn't say this, because I didn't have the right words at the time, but I said something similar. After reading this poem, I wish I had said, To meet the one who is rightfully yours. Who do you think that is? To bring that being into the world, to gift the world with that being, with that fierce love, I think that's what we're here to do.
For some reason, I was reminded of that story of the prodigal child in the Lotus Sutra. They set out on their own, as they must. The way the story is told, particularly in the Christian tradition, is that the son, because it's a guy, leaves the father and squanders their fortune. But I was thinking about it a little bit differently. I was thinking about it as the child leaving the parent, as they must, when they're ready—when it's time for them to step out into the world and become their own person, and the trouble that they run into, as they're figuring themselves out. In the Lotus Sutra, the child doesn't want to ask for help, so they're wandering the land and they become impoverished. The way the story is told there is this sense of getting lost, of being separated from that parental figure, and that somehow that leaves us bereft. I was thinking that this is just a necessary step in our development. We have all done this. Those of you who are parents will, if you haven't already, see it with your own children.
At the same time, we want to grow up. We want to have that independence. I remember being a child and thinking I can't wait until I can stay up all night. Now that I'm an adult, I go to bed at 9 or 10 o'clock. You can’t wait to have that freedom. Then you get it and you think, oh, can we go back because I really want somebody to take care of me again? I certainly have had those times and not that long ago. I’ve thought I just want my mommy. I just want daddy to tell me that I'm loved, to tell me that it's going to be okay.
I don't know if I've made this up, but it's such a clear image in my mind. The earliest memory that I have is being in the bath and my father holding me. I have a crystal clear image of his finger drawing figure eights on the green tile, the green shower tile of the wall. The feeling in my body when I evoke that image is one of being held and being loved, unconditionally. My father was my world for a long time. I recognize now, as an adult, those moments in which I want that again, that reassurance, that closeness. Maybe, for some of us, it was not a father or not a parent. Maybe it was an aunt, grandmother, or close family friend, somebody who had our back. Becoming an adult, we can only do that ourselves. In our culture, this very strong message that you should do it on your own, that you should figure it out by yourself—as if that were possible—cuts out and negates that need that I think all of us have in one form or another—to be held. Like Pema Chodren saying to her friend, "Stay. Stay."
In the story, the child leaves home, which could also be understood as those times in which we leave ourselves. The years, the decades perhaps, where we're trying to figure out who we are. We are trying to figure out what all of this means. Maybe we're really good at doing the thing. We work really hard. We have a good job. We find a good enough partner for us. But the story says the child comes upon hard times. I was thinking what if that doesn't mean they're poor in terms of wealth, but it means that they can't find themselves. I can't tell you how many women I know, who, in the midst of all the work of marriage and raising kids, get to a point where they're like, Who am I? In the middle of doing all the things that they're supposed to do, checking every box, and doing it extremely well, they get to a point where they wonder, But who am I?
Another good friend went through exactly that. She excelled at being a mother. She excelled at providing for her children and for her partner while she had a partner. Eventually they separated. She realized one day that she had no idea who she was or what she wanted. She was 44, and she got so freaked out that she went up to her office, looked up inpatient psychiatric wards and called her insurance.
She said, "I need to check myself into one of these."
And the woman says, "Well, are you hearing any voices?"
"Not any more than the usual ones."
"Are you thinking of harming yourself?"
"No."
"Are you thinking of harming another?"
"No."
"Well, ma'am, so what's the problem?"
And my friend said, "I'm 44 years old and I don't know who I am." She said she thinks the woman chuckled.
She's not sure, but she remembers the woman chuckling and saying, "Ma'am, I don't think an inpatient place is the right place for you. I can give you a list of therapists."
She said she remembered the frustration, the catch 22 that she found herself in because she felt as if she was going crazy. But if you know, you're going crazy, that proves that you're not crazy, right? She said that what she felt, her desperation, was real. She would look at her hand and think, Okay, I'm a mother, sister, wife, worker, all of these things. At the center of that, who is this person? And she could not give an answer.
So you know what she did? She sat down and had this vision of sweeping the forest floor. She said to herself, If I can be in the presence of a monk, sweeping the forest floor, and if the monk asks me something esoteric, like how many stars are in a leaf, then, I can figure myself out, I think. She did a Google search. She doesn't remember what her search was, but what came up was a Thai monastery that makes our monastery look like the Ritz. It was that rustic. They didn't even have walls, the meditation hall was a thatched roof. She went for 10 days and her entire life changed, because she came back after a week of silence, after a week of being with herself sweeping. She got to, in fact, sweep the forest floor. She realized everything that I've done, I don't need. And if I died tomorrow, I will forever feel like I betrayed myself because I was not put on this earth just to work. So, she sold everything she had, the cars and the designer clothes. She kept two suitcases and began traveling around the world. She could do that. She had the means to do that, so there is that. She decided that she was not willing to give up herself in order to do what was expected of her. Her kids were now grown, and so she had that freedom.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
That's Whyte again. What are we worthy of, truly? What do you think you're worthy of, truly? Because we come to a tradition that promises liberation. Do we actually think that that's something that we can achieve, that we can have? Do we think that we can actually be happy in this life? Do we think we can have love, that we can have protection? Are we worthy of not spending so much time wondering whether we're worthy or not? I'm not sure, gentlemen, if this is something that you go through. I think for us women it's common. Maybe not exactly in those words. Wondering what is wrong with me that I can't...that I still feel...that I don't want....what is wrong with me?What if nothing is wrong with you? I've had people say to me, I'm afraid that others will find me out and realize that I'm not who I say I am, who I appear to be. I always want to say, "Well then who are you? Who would you be if you did not have to pretend?"
I think this is the part in the sutra where the prodigal child is shoveling shit in the stables. The father has found their child and approached them in a way that he could be seen by the child. So the father gets all disheveled, takes off all his fine clothes, and offers their child a job in the stables cleaning manure. The child thinks that's a job for me. That's something that I can do. What is wrong with me?
So we settle. We settle for a good enough life, relationships that aren't quite loving but are, meh, superficial connections. Let me acknowledge that in a sense, this is bourgeois suffering. There are many, many people in the world who don't have a choice about what their job is, what food they're going to eat, but suffering is still suffering. Systemic suffering, which we all create, comes from that same place, from dis-connection, from that very strong message that we received, "To each their own. No one is going to take care of you, so you need to do that yourself." The etymology of the word alone is contracted from an old English phrase, eall ān, which means entirely alone, solitary and single. But the Middle English is more accurate, because that comes from all oon, literally all one, like Dr. Bronner's soap.
Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them…
Daido Roshi had a koan in his collection Koans of the Way of Reality called “Jesus Walks on Water.” He put this collection together early on when he was first teaching. I just found I have his notes for all of these koans, which is pretty wonderful. He took these koans from The Way of Reality and from all different sources, and, some of them were Christian. I think he was in the process, as I have been myself, of trying to figure out, how do I do this? How do I teach? How do I talk to people? How do I reach them? In this koan, his original commentary is very Christian, actually. He really gets into the story from the Bible, breaks it down, and then compares it to Buddhism; later, he really focused on the Buddhist teaching. Daido Roshi’s [Jesus Walks on Water] was the best selling talk that we had in our catalog. I often thought people must have thought it was going to be something else when they ordered it. When MP3s first came out, there was one slightly older woman, she ordered the talk, and she was so excited. We sent her the link, and she called and asked, "Well, where's the talk?" And I said, “I sent it to you.” She said, "I thought it was a booklet!" And so we had to explain to her what an MP3 was. It didn't work, and she wasn't able to listen to it. She was very disappointed.
In the talk Daido likened the koan to—there's that moment where Jesus goes off to pray on his own. Then he goes into the boat, and then, out on the [Sea of Galilee], he calls his disciples to him. And so of course, his disciples won't come to him. So, Jesus steps out onto the water to go to them. He says to Paul, "Come." Paul does, until he realizes he too is standing on water. Paul doubts. He freaks out, and then he falls.
There are at least a couple of stories in Buddhism that speak of monks also walking on water. In one of them, the Buddha is walking with a monk, and they get to the edge of a river, a very fast flowing river. The monk hesitates for a moment, looks at the Buddha, and then the monk steps on the water and walks on it as if it were land.
The Buddha calls out to him, "How long did you practice to do that?" The monk says, "Well, 30 years."
And the Buddha says, "I can just get on the boat and cross for a penny. Your little miracle is not what you think it is."
The real miracle, a different koan says, is chopping wood, carrying water. The real miracle is talking to your irrational teenager without losing it yourself. To create life/work balance, how many people can say they have that—to not have handed over your self-worth through your social media feed to your co-workers, to your friends? The real miracle, I think, is to love yourself, even though you think it's embarrassing to even try. Even though you might suspect you don't deserve it given the things you've done. Sometimes it's necessary “to reteach a thing its loveliness.” That's from another poem, “St. Francis and the Sow” by Gallway Kinnell.
Sometimes we're fortunate enough to have someone teach us. I feel that I had that. We came home one day from school, my brother and I. My mother asked, "So what are you learning in catechism?" And I don't know what we told her, but she immediately said, "I'm teaching you from now on." So every Wednesday afternoon, we would sit in our little apartment, and we would read from an illustrated Bible, all of these stories. This [Jesus Walking on Water] was one of her favorite ones. Also the multiplying of the loaves and fishes. She liked the miracles. I remember the wistfulness in her voice when she would tell this story, that moment where Jesus steps onto the water. I would hear that as her saying, Imagine, imagine what is possible if this is possible. A few years later when I was 13, she said to me, "Vanessa, you can do whatever you think is right. Even if I disagree with you"—teaching me to walk on water.
…and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love…
Again, who do you think that is? And what is that moment when we have to say, “Yes,” purposefully, meaningfully,intentfully? That one we love, how old are they? How big are they? What age in your development? What is their other side when they're standing back to back to us? Who is that?
That's why it takes 20 years for that child to shovel all that manure out of that stable. In the beginning it is too much, it is too soon, it is not for me. That's not me. How many times have you sat, perhaps in a zendo, or listened to a talk, and thought, They're talking about liberation, that's not for me. These teachings about being loving and kind and compassionate and patient—eh not yet, I'm not ready for that. So, after 20 years, the child says, "Well, maybe now. Maybe now, I can begin." And the father, sensing this, comes forward and says, "Okay, now you're going to take care of the books, you're going to take care of all of my business, my house." He says something very interesting, "From now on you and I will no longer behave as two persons." Isn't that an interesting thing to say? From now on you and I will no longer behave as two persons, which of course they never were. Now the child is perhaps ready to see that. If you think of what we've been told every day, if you work hard, if you pay your dues, then one day you can retire. One day you can do the thing that you really want to do. Like my friend realizing, I'm not waiting that long. I don't know if I have one day. So I'm going to do it now.
It's kind of like when people say to me, “I haven't seen the koan,” and I always say, "Well, how do you know?" How do you know you don't know? Really don't know, and then you'll be fine. Don't know and then see what you see. Because if you know or you don't know there's just two possibilities. That's it. It's either this or it isn't. Get rid of that—infinite possibilities.
I was listening to an interview with John O'Donohue from On Being with Krista Tippett,” maybe some of you have listened to it. If you have an Irish accent, or at least a British accent, you can pretty much say anything and people will be right there with you. He had such a beautiful way of speaking that he could have just read a grocery list. At one point, Krista Tippett asks, "Why do you say that we're all artists?" And he said, "Because we're always constructing our world." We know this. We know this, but do we know it? Do we know that, as O’Donohue also said, time is the mother of presence, is the parent of presence? Think about this for a moment. We normally think that we are present to time in each moment. Or we’re not present to it. We're either present in this moment or we're not present in this moment. What if we reverse that and say that it is time itself that makes our presence even possible?
It makes me think of Master Dogen's “Being Time.” It's the moment that brings us into being, which means, in every moment, you have another opportunity to be born again. Quite literally. I just made the connection, but I think that is why a bodhisattva never gives up. Somebody could be in the throes of the darkest darkness, and it only takes a moment for that to shift—and another moment, and another moment, and another moment, granted. But it's just a moment. I used to say this to people all the time in the middle of sesshin, “You may be exhausted, you may be completely discouraged, you may be whatever it is that you are, but it just takes a moment for that to shift.” And it's true.
so that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning…
I've heard some of you say this to me, in slightly different words, I don't want to drown anymore. I don't want to make do, to get by. I don't want to settle. I think of how many of us never ask the questions that we really want to ask, but feel that we don't have time for or feel just too scared to actually really get close. To decide that we don't want to drown anymore is to decide that we're not willing to rush from one task to the next, not willing to not make enough time for beauty, for goodness.
That is the moment in which the father hands out everything he has to the child. You know the sutras, they always describe these palaces, they're full, bursting with jewels, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, banners, and perfumes. To me, the sutra is saying, basically, everything that is mine, everything that is beautiful, everything that will nourish you, I give to you. Now the child is ready to take it—everything that is joyful. I've said before how I've assigned to people and to myself the practice of turning toward joy because it's actually not that easy. We know pain, sorrow, heartbreak, and we kind of are comfortable in a painful sort of way within this. It takes courage, as Whyte himself says:
so that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could
When we finally step out of the boat, everything confirms our courage because if you wanted to drown you could. We all know how to do that. We all know how to doubt like Paul. You look down and you're like, oh my god, I'm standing on water and whoosh, you fall in. What if you are that water? What if there's no way to tell where you're standing because it fills everything? So, to not abandon yourself in all the many small and large ways that we do day to day. To not abandon yourself, to stay present to yourself in the face of heartbreak is an act of love. From now on you and I will no longer behave as two persons, the you and you and you and you in here.
So much of practice is bringing all of those selves into presence, into time, and seeing that they're all one and deciding that you will live with all of them, that you will love all of them. Remember, you don't have to like them. You don't have to agree with them. You just have to love them. You will want to live and want to love. You will walk across any territory in any darkness, however fluid, however dangerous to take the one hand, you know, belongs in yours. That danger, that unruliness, that wildness, it's part of it. So don't let the stillness and silence either deceive you or constrain you. I have. Don’t let that happen to you because all of it needs to be brought in. So in those times when it seems boring, when we think, is this all? Yes, this is all but look closely. Look closely at that all because where I'm standing is limbed with wonder. The miracle is not to walk on water, but to meet each day as your first, your only. This is actually how the mind works. This is actually how things are. We just have to pay attention and get close. We have to step out of that boat and trust that everything will hold us.
That other Rilke quote, You must realise that something is happening to you— At those moments, especially at those moments of great doubt and confusion. Realize that something is happening here.
...that life has not forgotten you that it holds you in its hand and it will not let you fall.
And if you did fall, where would you fall to anyway? Where everywhere that you step, everywhere that you step is ground.
Explore further
01 : Truelove by David Whyte
02 : Lotus Sutra: Willing Acceptance, Chapter IV (The Prodigal Child) translated from the Chinese of Kumārajiva by Tsugunari Kubo, Akira Yuyama
03 : On Being with Krista Tipett: John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty