Walking the Wall

I have a friend Liz (she who killed my iPod) who walks wonderfully to the tune of her own drum, so to speak, who when I first read the poem, Shine, I thought of her immediately when I read:

We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?”
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

Because she definitely had a part in teaching my daughter self-confidence and how not to ask “who am I to be” but instead to ask “who am I not to be.”

She was over last night to play Mexican Train dominoes and we were playing on our stone top coffee table which had kept my husband awake the last time we played when we shuffled the dominoes on the stone in a loud and “reach through the walls” way. This time I thought we’d just dump them all in a giant plastic bowl and mix them up that way with the intent of making it quieter. Hm. That did not work.

Immediately Liz got both hands into the bowl and starts mixing them up into a very loud, ear shattering clatter near my husband asking “Is this quieter, Mike” over and over and over and over to see if she could break his calm. She was getting so much enjoyment out of the whole process that he finally just shook his head with a bemused grin and said, “I just really don’t even know how to define you.”

It really struck me because it went along with something I’d just read in The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield. I’ve thought about it all day because I think there is something to be said for not fitting into a neatly defined box, although perhaps a “free spirit” would be closest to the best definition. As someone who has always felt constrained by labels, I find it refreshing. It is something that most of us need to work at, leaving behind set labels, roles, masks, and boxes and moving with the flow of life. The 5th chapter of The Wise Heart  a lot about the “illusion of self” and how much a tightly constrained idea of “who you are” can give rise to so much struggle in life–it limits us. Kornfield writes that an Indian guru taught him, “Love says, ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says, ‘I am nothing.’ Between these two my life flows” (68). A Buddhist master said something similar, “‘When you understand, you will see tht you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything.’ When identification with the small sense of self drops away, what remains is the spacious heart that is connected with all things” (77).