Remember When…

If you’ve ever been to my class, you know that I always end it with a chant from the Zen Buddhist tradition.  It is a chant that was taught to me long before I became a teacher and it reminds me of where I am and where I began. 

Life and death are of supreme importance

Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost

Let us awaken, awaken

Do not squander your life.

This prayer or offering has so much depth and can be interpreted in many different ways, but truly it has one teaching.  A teaching I cannot teach.  It’s a teaching we must recognize in ourselves when life calls us to wake up.  In the Zen Buddhist tradition it is believed that enlightenment isn’t a place we get to when we’ve done all the right things.  It is a brief moment in our day when life happens the way it does, and we go, “oh… I see…”. It’s a felt sense that is hard to describe.  You have to experience it to understand it.  Although everyone’s understanding of it might vary, I’ll do my best to describe mine.

When I was a little girl, I used to watch my parents dance around the kitchen on Sunday mornings.  My mom making a big breakfast, my dad playing the guitar or singing to country songs on the radio.  There were many, many songs that etched their way into my childhood, but in particular, the song Remember When by Alan Jackson grips onto my heart so tightly that it’s hard to listen to today without tearing up.  My memory of these infrequent mornings live in my body like a movie playing out, with the sun shinning through the windows with rays of light stretching across the room.  When my brother died, we played this same song at his funeral and the meaning of it grew with the changes of my family.  There’s a line in there, “…When 30 seemed so old,” and in my youth, 30 did seem old.  Then life happened, I grew up, fell in love, fell out of love.  I moved provinces, had babies, opened yoga studios and found my great calling in life.  My oldest graduated high school and my youngest ran through the house and the sound of his feet on the floor told me I was exactly where I was meant to be.  When I pause to reflect on my life, I feel brief moments where in my opinion, I am awake.  I can see both that this life is full and expansive, yet fleeting and impermanent.  To me, this is this chant.  

If you haven’t heard of the poet Andrea Gibson, I’m so excited to introduce you to them.  They are a Colorado Poet Laureate and internationally known spoken word poet whose work explores gender identity, mental health, love, grief, and social justice with emotional honesty and fierce compassion.  They died this past year after losing their battle with cancer.  In the months leading up to their death, they wrote a poem, or a list, or whatever you want to call it.  It’s titled, “A List of Things I Love.”  When I read it, all I could think about was this chant, my life and my now.  Life and death are of supreme importance.  Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.  Let us awaken.  Awaken.  Do not squander your life. 

Most often times, folks hear this chant they think to themselves they need to rush to do all the things they feel pressured to do.  This chant is not that.  It is about doing the opposite of that. Removing and stripping everything from your life that is unnecessary so that you have enough energy to appreciate how precious and short our time here on earth is.  We create enough space between moments, activities and tasks in our day so that we can pause, reflect, feel, and love.  And just like the memory from my kitchen, a light shines across the moment, and we wake up again.

Last fall I taught a special workshop where we explored this chant, Andrea Gibsons list and we wrote our own poem as part of our own ‘waking up’.  I didn’t realize teaching this class would bring up so much emotion in all of us.  But it did and it became a memory I’ll cherish forever.  This is the poem that came from that class.