Piles and Parables

My life makes for a particularly confusing parable right now. This week has too many incoherent threads to be a helpful set of ideas about what I should be learning in this phase. It’s hard when you can’t figure out how to use your own life as a metaphor.

Take today, for example. This morning we woke up, walked the dog on the beach, and had a cup of coffee with Dave (the spectacular chippy) as we went through our plans for the future of our new house. This is a pretty good beginning to a day. While we were talking kitchens and windows and other big and little issues, his phone rang. It was the pile driver saying he’d be at our house today to drive new piles, deep in the sand, to hold up the house as we build upwards into the attic to get the room up there. There are great metaphors here. We have to dig down to be able to go up. We have to lay a firm foundation in places that will never see the light of day in order to build beautiful things way in the sky. You get the point. It’s also true that the house has been at a holding point lately waiting for those piles. More metaphors—need a firm foundation to build walls, once you have a foundation everything begins to move quickly, etc. Lovely grounding set of things there (and I’ve given Dave my camera to take pictures of the thing as it happens so there might be pictures here of that).

But as we were talking to Dave, we were also hyperactively straightening the house. We have a showing today. It’s T minus 2 days until the auction on Thursday. Things have just about never been more uncertain than they are in this house where we live now. On Thursday, we’ll learn things about what the next part of the future holds, but right now those things are unlearnt, are behind a black curtain. So even as the new house is looking more and more clear, the old house is looking less and less clear. What happens next is anyone’s guess. It could sell at auction for a decent price or for a lousy one. The new owners might want to move in early December or in late January. It might not sell at all if no one is willing to pay what we think it’s minimally worth. Then we’ve got the decision about how to proceed moving forward. We are ungrounded with questionable foundations. Thursday holds answers, but the answers will either lead to clarity or to more uncertainty.

And through it all, I’m getting ready to go to Thailand. I’m going to do some work with my friend Aeh there, and, among other things, it’s a growth experience I’m after with this trip. I’ll do a variety of pieces of reflecting—in public and private forums—about my life journey thus far. I’ll spend a couple of days just in transport (it’s 14 hours each way on an airplane, and there will be about two days worth of driving inside Thailand itself) which brings its own kind of reflection and thought experiences. And I’ll have 3 days meditating in a Forest Wat, in the lonely and lovely northeast of Thailand. All the time I’ll be with Aeh, who is making this whole trip possible (and finding a way to pay for it) through his work at a Thai university where I’ll be presenting and consulting about a new curriculum. Aeh and I met when I helped make possible his trip to the US about four years ago when he came to study with me and live with my family while he was still a doctoral student. Now he’s a PhD and is working on understanding the connections between development, wisdom, compassion, and contemplative practices. This is a beautiful set of ideas to be working on, and I’m honoured to be a part of that.

The parables inside this trip are both grounded and also unknown. I am grounded in this friendship, in the intellectual and emotional exploration that developmental study provides, in the transformational nature of coming together to learn about the way we ourselves change over time. I am grounded in the beautiful karma of my reaching out to help a stranger four years ago and now finding myself held and supported by a friend who has invited me to see a new world. There are lovely chances for this man who was my student for many months to now be my teacher and lead me into a new culture and a new meditation practice. And amidst that grounding, I am swimming in uncertainty. I don’t know what I’ll wear or what I’ll eat or how I’ll live inside a culture so profoundly different. I don’t know what it will be like for me to sit in silent meditation in a Thai forest for three days, to sleep in a hut, to see monkeys in the trees. What will I discover about the world, about myself?

But perhaps there are parables here that are useful if I braid all of these strands together. Perhaps this week is about the very nature of life and its beautiful certainties and uncertainties. This week is about making new beginnings of all sorts, and it’s about the way those new beginnings can be smooth or bumpy, known or totally unknown. I’m sharply aware of how my uncertainties press up against the lives of others: Dave bought himself a new house this week and will start working on that soon. At the auction, there will be many houses bought and sold, and many lives changing right in front of me. And on my trip I will visit an ancient country with ancient religious practices which is bumping up against the modern world and which is dealing with its own uncertainty (the bloodless coup there) and the uncertainty of its neighbours (like Burma). We are all of us always standing on ever firmer foundations, and all of us reaching toward some unknown future state. It’s just that this week, I have more reminders of that than usual.

(You’ll see there are no new pictures. Dave still has the camera—and the piles aren’t totally done. There are big posts outside the front of the house, though, and depressing new holes on the floor. The lesson here is that even when the future looks clear, it likely isn’t. So now I’ll just float in the murk of it all and keep you posted about what happens next.)