yogabhen ⎪ yoga and kirtan

Yesterday, on the streetcar, a man yelled out of the window -- to someone he knew? to a stranger? -- "He is such a bad Buddhist!"

A few people laughed, others ignored him. I stopped reading my book and looked up. What does it mean to be a 'good' Buddhist? To be a 'bad' Buddhist? For that matter, to be a 'good' or 'bad' anything?

A good friend of mine asserts that she is not a Feminist. This confuses me, because I look at her politics and her life, and I think: um, hello. Major feminist. But, No, she says. I don't want to be tied down to what a Feminist is supposed to be, or do. I don't want that label.

And I see that we are talking about different things. And that perhaps we are both missing the point.

Years ago, in school, I remember learning about grand narratives, of the difference between one Truth, and many truths. My attention is drawn back to the difference between the big T and the little t, between a Feminist and a feminist, and perhaps even to the difference between a Buddhist and a buddhist.

This difference is where we live; in the spaces between the grand idea(l) and the personal, daily experience where we probably don't tick all of the boxes, all of the time. The challenge is perhaps to allow this, and be okay with it. To not strive to be meeting our own and others' expectations, to be wearing these identities that are a size too small or big, to be squeezing ourselves into the labels. To instead relax into the space between the boxes, to listen and to be true to this - our own - space.

For me, this is the beauty and promise of yoga and meditation (Buddhist, buddhist or otherwise), which invite us to soften, to hear, to be intimate with this space.

Rumi, the Sufi mystic and poet, writes, "Let the beauty of what we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

In his words, I hear the song of wild geese, opening me up to the wordless possibilities of this space.

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting 
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

From Dream Work by Mary Oliver, published by Atlantic Monthly Press.

- KK