The Grace of Pursuing Skillful Means

An important dharma path for me has long been the grace of pursuing ever more “skillful means”:  How to skillfully be what this life, this manifestation of these myriad dharmas, gives rise to.  It is one of the bittersweet benefits of 55ness to accept that, in this life, we can actualize this intention ( the work called for in the atta dipa) merely to a degree.  At moments, I can see just that which can be achieved as great accomplishment.  Other times the glass seems half full, at best.

For example, yesterday it struck me, articulately for the first time, that for me, in this life, most of the formative contributions to my offspring had already happened.  Other youths I meet appear to have been raised more skillfully, to have what seem more fortuitous myriad dharmas shaping their lives.  Yet, I tell myself, I have moved my cluster of kharma legacies down the pike.  My kids are wondrous, and fountains of dharma, shaping what will arise from their ancient twisted kharma, more or less skillfully.  I know they aspire  (at least at some moments) to evolve, to be the source of ever more beneficient kharma.  I know I’ve, more or less skillfully at various moments, armed them with the faith that the nest step can always be towards redemption, towards the tathagata’s call in the Atta Dipa.

Sogyal Rinpoche, in a passage read years ago, one I can’t find again yet, discussed how what some call reincarnation can be seen as the gentle evolution of lineages towards enlightenment (lightening up the tangle of ancient twistedness??).  Not a given unique “soul” moving from skin bag to skin bag, but a cluster of dharmas, moving through evolutionary time & its matrix of place/moments, living in these fleeting humanesses, related to lineages of biology and also socio-biology, tendencies and proclivities, mindfulness and mindlessness, moving towards . . . . . . . what?  Getting nowhere, but tending towards . . . . . grace, liberation, freedom from . . . . what seems to ail us (I guess).  Then . . . what whatness?  An emptiness with room for clarity and grace?  A bodhisattva’s effort?  Whatness??

Or so it seems.

Did you ever see this poem?:

MYRIAD BECOMINGS

Bice C Wilson, Late Winter 2007

Becoming,

ephemeral collusion

Interweaving myriad dharma vectors

tendencies become transient actualities

At every scale of time a stillness

Is,

which,

seen differently

Is

simultaneously shape shifting –

never IS the same.

No thing HAS to be, one moment to the next,

We are given, in this fleeting form

gateways to mindfulness,

senses animating our dance

And somewhere,

among the warp and woof of the

many becomings

we are just now

Sings this spark that knows and chooses,

conducting whatever wholeness we can find

step by step, dancing along the path.

Dancing in fields open, empty of must be,

constrained by conventions,

dancing degrees of volition

the sublime suchness

Open to our intention

Emptily