I Am Paring Down
This morning I sat in my comfy brown leather recliner and had at it. I pulled up a wooden wastebasket and began my work. I said “I am” and left it at that. The silence felt as silky smooth as a Dove Bar. But that was not why I sat down to work. I was going to run through a pile of self-descriptive adjectives and then toss them in the trash.
For example, I said to myself, “I am bigger than my body.” and so I tossed the words “my body” into the trash. Next I said, “I am bigger than my emotions,” and tossed the words “my emotions” into the trash. I was left with simply “I am.” You get the picture.
It was easy to come up with descriptive adjectives because this was a conscious exercise in self-awareness. It is not so easy to do when you are sleepwalking through your life or when you are in a crisis. When my husband was dying from multiple myeloma, the adjectives around “I am” became as thick as an animal’s winter coat. “I am terrified of losing him. I am afraid I won’t be strong enough. I am angry at the cancer. I am trying hard to do the right thing. I am desperate for a good night’s sleep.”
All of those words and phrases hovering around “I am” reduced me to a pile of mush even though I was on the spiritual path. I was defenseless around a pile of adjectives. I began a correspondence with a man named Peter who was quite ill from a series of strokes. He could barely get around and yet he told me he was “bigger than the sky.”
After his strokes, he found that the old pile of adjectives around him did him no good. “I am a good-looking man, a man’s man,” he told me once. And yet he found himself unable to walk down the hall to the bathroom for two years running. The new adjectives people were using were not particularly helpful. Strings of words like “poor prognosis, stroke victim, unable to work” were now applied to him.
He went to spiritual teachers and found them to be useless. “They could not help me,” he said. “They simply did not know how.” So he did the only thing he was able to do. He sat in the sunshine with a little cat named Alex on his chest. The cat’s purrs, in lieu of a nursing staff, conveyed to him the healing power of nature. He watched the robins run across the grass because they were what he saw. He was grateful in the most basic way. And he began to realize that what he had found was the living experience of himself. No adjectives need apply. And so I sat in my leather recliner in perfectly good health, and remembered that I was not who I thought or felt I was. I simply was.
By the end of the morning I had a wastebasket full of words that seemed to describe me. I was bigger than any of them. I knew what Peter knew, that I was bigger than the sky. I was bigger than anything that could be named or described. Peter is no longer among us and yet he lives within all who loved him. How does he do this? I was never sure how Peter did anything but feel the joy of the moment. “When I in pain, I yell. And when I fall down, I say “ho ho.” But he never latched onto anything. He learned to hold on to “I am” and it became stronger than any stroke could ever be.
He had had a brilliant career and then he had almost no memory of who he was or who his friends were. He couldn’t make change. But he sure made a difference. You see, the “I am” that we all are is indestructible. It is too bad we don’t learn this unless we are reduced to helplessness. In Peter’s case, he saw through the illusion of having a separate self. He realized that no matter where he found himself, he was bigger. And that brought him joy that few of us will ever know.
When I take a walk around my neighborhood, I often see the robins running across the grass. My heart opens to the understanding that Peter gave me. “I am” bigger than anything. I am bigger than the sky.”
Vicki Woodyard
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