Finding Your Way

One of the most helpful (and challenging) ideas I’ve encountered in Buddhism is that wherever you are is the Way.

If you are stuck in traffic and hit every single red light, that is the Way.

If you are in the middle of a fraught work or health situation, that is the Way.

If you are on trail or off trail . . .

. . . it doesn’t matter. Wherever you are is the way.

But this often doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Surely, we need to turn into a wild-haired hermit who eats slugs with a drop of lightning-bug juice on top of them to find the Way, because isn’t that what the holy ones have always done?

Trusting wherever you are is the Way can actually be a relief. It means no huge, dramatic life choices have to happen.

It means no special equipment needed. You don’t have to go out and buy anything or do anything. You just have to be where you are.

This also means you can never be lost. You might feel lost, but you can never be lost. David Wagoner puts it this way in his poem, “Lost:”

Wherever you are is called Here

and he urges us to treat it with respect.

The Benedictines who founded the school where I teach might say we should treat our Here and Now as if we are welcoming the stranger. When we do, who knows what kinds of wonders (and lessons) are in store?

But it can be hard to see our Here and Now as something with wild and strange powers. We might feel trapped in the ordinary, overwhelmed with the uncertainty.

How often is our Here and Now something to grit our teeth and get through, to move past, because the Good is always up ahead, right?

Living like that is exhausting, taxing like being a serf under the rule of an unfair king. “Here, let me take this sweet moment away from you. And the next. And the next.”

Or we can live free and be our own rulers in this Kingdom of the Present Moment, wisely and gently (or even firmly) returning to the Here and Now again and again.

Wherever you are is your Live Light Way. Just so, bright spirit. Let it be just so.