the sweet in the bitter
One of the turning points in our spiritual practice happens quite unexpectedly, as they always do, when an uncanny feeling of wholeness creeps up on you in the most surprising contexts. All recurring feelings of remorse and failures seem somehow resolved. Nothing dramatic, really. This is a quiet joy where once there was quiet desperation. It is as if this inexplicable feeling of uncaused joy itself there is a transformation of our life into the very stuff that this joy is made of.
For me there is no clearer description of this than in the second stanza of the poem “Last night as I lay sleeping” by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875 – 1939). I tried last week to conjure this stanza up and didn’t get all the nuances. Here it is:
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error! -
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
The poet seems to discover layer after layer of delight in his heart. In the first stanza (see below) he talks about a spring breaking out of a secret aqueduct. It’s secret because it resists all effort to capture it, hence it is unmappable.
This essence, this joy, is ungraspable by the mind. And there is the whole issue: trying to grasp it leads to inevitable anxiety. This is a micro-lesson for our lives.
The practice challenges us to look at this vulnerable “unrepeatable life” (as Shin Buddhists say) as a life of grace.
This poem suggests to me that we dream so deeply that we are unaware of the transformation that is already happening, that has already been happening since the beginning. It’s the sleep of conformity, the apparent tedium of our lives. The tranquilization of the trivial.
But it also suggests a “marvelous error!” That inside our hearts there is a beehive alive with transformation just waiting for us to wake up and discover it. All the while the poet tells us
the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
The practice challenges us to live into our failures, not passed them. We agree to “suffer appropriately” as one teacher puts it, but not to spin off into neurotic guilt and shame.
One paradox of Buddhist practice is that we want to be happier and to become a better person. But this already the case. We simply glob on layer after extra layer of shame onto this ungraspable joy, and then we hate ourselves for hating our selves.
Perhaps the point is not to become better people, but to simply turn our hearts to our lives just as they are. Embrace everything.
We are all Buddhas, and some times we are suffering Buddhas. (”Sun face Buddha, moon face Buddha” in Zen). We are suffering Buddhas when we fail to recognize the sweetness already there, that the golden bees are making white combs and sweet honey from our old failures.
