The stairs lead steeply up to a garden gate, which graciously reveals she is *not* locked. She speaks a plain, “Yes, come in,” but with the unlocked padlock still displayed, it’s a welcome that tells me, reminds me, how I so like to secure thresholds, keep them known to me and under my control.
Today’s image is a curious daytime manifestation of a nighttime dream: a lengthy, wrestling-and-unable-to-prevail type of dream, where I trained at a remote mountain-top Buddhist refuge — one of several novices under the passionate but strict guidance of a venerated teacher. It became clear the teacher was increasingly displeased with me for my inability to master anything, much less the Noble Eightfold Path. Finally in exasperation he demanded, “What is it you seek?” Totally exhausted, spent, depleted, I replied, “Freedom.”
The funny thing about freedom, is it’s all about letting go, removing, uncovering, unbinding, unthinking, and not-doing.
Leaving the padlock open.
The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) counsels his novices:
“You should know that there was never any man in this life who forsook himself so much that he could not still find more in himself to forsake. There are few people who see this to be true and stick by it. This is indeed a fair exchange and an honest deal: by as much a you go out in forsaking all things, by so much neither less nor more, does God go in, with all that is his, as you entirely forsake everthing that is yours. Undertake this, and let it cost you everything you can afford. There you will find true peace, and nowhere else.”
Counsel 4
What thresholds await today?
May we find true peace in the letting go!
tgholt.net 