Meeting Reality Where It Is

NOT FROM WHERE WE ARE

It was probably a year ago when we first started talking about leaving California, where we’d spent most of our lives. Karen retired from teaching at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year and we embarked on this grand adventure of relocating to the Pacific Northwest.

It seems like the last 12 weeks, in particular, have been a mix of frustration, surrender, compassion, clinging, aversion, and every other feeling and/or volitional act common to humans amidst struggle.

I remarked earlier today in a private instruction with Lodro Rinzler -one of my Buddhist teachers- that although I experienced these myriad emotions, I was simultaneously aware that it didn't have to be this way - that I could meet them where they are... and from where I am.

Now, as we've been in the Pacific Northwest for two weeks, the uncertainties and general feelings of things being out-of-our-control seems less important; they're still there, but I recognize that they don't have the same power over me.

My most most rec…