I was thinking about Heaven and Earth
…on my climb up the six flights to my apartment.
I was thinking about how it is written in holy books and legacies that we tread and toil on “Earth” so that we can get to the paradise of “Heaven” and reap goodness from all we’ve sown. But it is also written that Earth is a place for the living, and Heaven you get when you’re good ‘n’ dead.
It’d been a blissful day on this walk up the stairs. Productive. Sunny and beautiful. Filled with promise of new projects and completion of current, and I got to meet a wonderful new friend.
This on the heels of the day before
…one of utter self loathing. One where it was all I could do to quiet the voices that were tearing me apart limb by limb. And as a matter of fact, I stopped trying to quiet them. I finally surrendered, knowing that when they are as mean and base as they were that day, there is no winning. Only surviving. So I sunk in and loathed myself more fiercely. And kept working. Kept surrendering. Kept hating.
“I hope,” I thought, “this doesn’t last.”
I was thinking about how there are these days, these ugly, wrong, upside-down days. And there are blissful ones. And if I can feel my way through these ugly bastards, I’ll reach the blissful ones…till the self loathing comes again, to hopefully, eventually be replaced by neutrality, and then bliss.
Sounds like a cycle, no?
Long about floor five on my climb I thought, “Today feels like Heaven next to yesterday’s Earthly toil. Yesterday I was busy earning today.”
I reached the top floor with a tiny and kind epiphany. Earth, and our lifetime on it, is not a place to stack up toil for a great big gain in the sky. It’s a place to practice, toil, loathe, breathe, and notice the Heaven between the living.
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IMO, this should be distilled into a poem.
Exactly! I tell myself the same thing — the tough days make the easy ones so much more delightful. I just wish I would remember the sentiment more readily during the dark times.
Yeah, that’s tricky sometimes, huh?
Last week I had one of those toil-days. Someone then called, “‘Heard’ you needed a friend, what’s up?”
“Wa wa blah wa blah…” I bitched and moaned.
“THAT SUCKS!” she replied.
“Yeah, that does totally suck” I said.
We then wrote a song together over the phone. Almost needless to say, most of the lyrics were, “That sucks!”
And when we were done, so was I. By embracing it, Heaven had returned.
Very wonderfully put. Nice to know I’m not the only one who has those days…
We wax. We wane.
Wax on. Wax off.
I was reading Pema Chodron’s Taking The Leap today. And it was so reassuring to read in print, that this is the way of things when you are human. We are constantly changing and shifting and moving from the roiling depths to the heavenly heights. It is when we allow ourselves to get hooked and keep feeding the story that we get stuck.
I wonder if we could experience emotions with less grip, meaning feel them intensely but let them pass through us. Would that make us stoic? Or free? Thinking of tree rings, how they show the history of a particular year, but on the outside, the tree keeps standing, quiet, wind blowing through it. Hard not to get poetic and abstract about it.