Drops below the surface

Yesterday I read this in the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 36):

"Do not spend your time from one day to the next worrying about your outer appearance, what you wear and what you look like."

And then I read this comment from Anne Lamott, about her mother:

"She didn't have a clue that you could take care of the inside of things, like friends or your won heart, by tending to surfaces: putting on a little moisturizer, say, or making the bed. Surfaces were strictly for tricking nonfamily into thinking you and your family were enviable, more functional than you were."

Reading these two passages together, it occurred to me that the first need not be solely about clothes or possessions. It might be about any number of the other kinds of claims and pretenses, of surfaces, of denial and falsehood with which we clothe our lives: claiming the marriage is okay, pretending mom -- or our teenager -- is not an alcoholic, claiming global warming is a sham, pretending the economy is all going to be okay, claiming we didn't have sex with that intern, pretending this job or this husband isn't abusive, claiming we can afford this house or this car or this war, pretending that none of us will ever die.

Eckhart Tolle, in Stillness Speaks, tells us this:

"Most people's lives are run by desire and fear. Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less."

All this pretense -- and the isolation, suspicion, envy, selfishness and fear which it engenders -- keeps us treading in circles on the surface of things, stuck in grooves like the needle on a record.

And yet... somehow that surface activity, that continuous cycling through the spirals of desire and fear, creates a music in our lives -- a music we can't hear as long as we are caught up in the churning.

Lamott goes on, in Grace (Eventually), to say that her mother was "always frantic, like a hummingbird that can't quite find the flower and keeps jabbing around: she must have been starving to death a lot of the time."

Stress, that constant, exhausting cycle of rushing and doing, pretending and hiding, collecting and avoiding, leaves us caught in the surface tension of fear and desire, unable to tap into the richness that lies below it all. We need, instead, to be willing to stop and sink into that place of emptiness, of nakedness, where there is nothing to hide behind, nothing to protect us from the truth. If we take that risk, we are given the opportunity to discover the music, the poetry, the sweet stillness that lies beneath.

"Wait for the illuminated openness," says Rumi, "as though your chest were filling with light.

Don't look for it outside yourself.
There is a fountain inside you.
Don't walk around with an empty bucket,
you have a channel into the ocean."

Reality need not be the complex structures of pretense we build at the surface level of our lives to protect our fragile, naked hearts. The reality is that we are all part of one life; there is a rich and nourishing ocean of oneness that connects and feeds us all. Sink into it -- and learn to breathe.