Dumbo Feather – February 2019

event. The “luminous emptiness,” the Tibetans call it, the radical condition of all conditions

is inherently profoundly happy and graceful and beautiful. And if the human race is going

to even go extinct, if maybe there’s thermonuclear war, the moment before the last person

dies or becomes so uncomfortable that they have no free attention is still a moment to be

savoured and enjoyed. There’s a great Zen story about a Zen master who is hanging by a vine.

He’s about to die but there’s a wild strawberry and he tastes it. And it is “so sweet.” And the

lesson is that this inherently beautiful nature of our lives right now, we do violence to it if we

look past it.

Yes there is tremendous momentum that is carrying us where we don’t want to go. And we

want to turn the ship...

That’s right. The medicine is in the unreasonable

happiness. The medicine is in the heartbreaking grief.

The broken-hearted tenderness at the distress of another.

And being able to be really present with all that.

Well here’s a proposition Berry. What if only a small percentage of

humanity is able to respond adequately to this call? Like zoom back for a

moment and let’s be a little dispassionate.

Let’s look at all of this from the perspective of, “Okay we’re going to have a thought

experiment and the whole human experiment is going to hit the rails and maybe we’ll all

go extinct.” But from this position after all that has happened, will it have mattered that

a sizeable group of people made the heroic attempt to bring love and awareness and the

potential for a new evolutionary stage of human development into being? To me it’s obvious

that it matters tremendously. For me that lets me relax and stop trying to calculate the odds

on this evolutionary horse race between consciousness and catastrophe. The fact that we

were raised in this amazingly comfortable contained reality where we thought there was

fulfillment to an individual life is being exploded. That wasn’t true in the first place. Life

has always been insecure. Nobody has ever, ever been completely safe. It’s always been an

experiment. It’s always been full of risk.

There’s a great book I read in my youth by Alan Watts titled The Wisdom of Insecurity. Letting

go of that need to grasp onto some sort of certainty is the beginning of a radically present life

in the emergent moment. And that’s what’s being asked of us. Even if things go as well as I

could possibly hope, there will be many future moments when I will experience discomfort

and pain and loss. And I will eventually die. So no matter whether it works out the way we

hope or the way we fear, most of the certainties are unchanged. And this is our brother-

sisterhood. This is where you and I meet. Because something in you feels called by that

opportunity just as I feel called by that opportunity. If we can begin to trust the lives we are

leading and have it summon from us what’s best in us, then the way that this shocks us and

hurts us doesn’t tend to break our hearts and destroy us. It tempers our soul and it deepens

But people don’t want to! They want to order on

Uber Eats, go on Instagram, watch Netflix and not

feel these feelings you’re talking about. And yet

the medicine is in the pain! The medicine is in the

suffering, it is in the feeling of the feelings.

I know about three people who

can do that. So that worries me.

[Laughs].

We have to encounter these very grim realities in

a context that doesn’t shut down to the inherent

divinity of each moment.

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TERRY PATTEN

DUMBO FEATHER