New Year's Eve Tonglen
December 31, 2009
Happy New Year’s Eve! It has been a stunning year – so many incredible things happened. I feel blessed. I am sending out benisons of Tonglen today….to all I met and grew to love over the past year (and to those I only met via the bouncing electrons of ones and zeros, bits and bites)….Breathing in, we allow ourselves to feel the inevitable suffering that occurs in this life. Our heart’s natural response to this suffering, while breathing out, is compassion. We breathe in the pain and suffering of this world like a dark cloud, letting it pass through our hearts. Rather than bracing ourselves against this pain and suffering, we can let it strengthen our sense of belonging and interdependence within the larger web of being.
A Tonglen is the best blessing I can offer.
The perfect quote for New Year’s Eve is here, from Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works.” Some will no doubt look at this quote as negative. I can’t see it like that. It comes from a very negtive, pesimistic character though; one who comes to this realization at the end of the movie. At the end of the movie, he choses happiness and grace. He offers up this little speech and it shocked me. This is Woody’s way of saying Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may.
“…I happen to hate New Year’s celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That’s why I can’t say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works… Don’t kid yourself, it is by no means up to your human ingenuity, a bigger part of your existence is luck. Christ, you know the odds of your father’s one sperm from the billions finding the single egg that made you? Don’t think about it or you’ll have a panic attack!”
…And this same flower that smiles to-day. To-morrow will be dying.