I was already working on today’s blog, pondering the
question of whether life has taught you to be more curious or more afraid, when
I came across this Chinese Proverb in a thought for the week from a friend of
mine, Byron Stock, who works with emotional intelligence.
"That the birds of
worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change, but that they build
nests in your hair, this you can prevent."
I have been reading Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living. This morning’s
reading was about a man who had lived in the wild, the last of his tribe,
before coming into civilization. He shared that they had seen railroad trains
and thought they ate people because people would get on the train and the train
would move out of sight. When he was brought to the train in San Francisco, he
was able to get on. Later, when asked how he was able to do that, he responded,
“Well, my life has taught me to be more curious than afraid.”
I am working with all of that right now. How many tornado
watches have I gone through compared to how many tornados have I endured? How
much of what we worry about never comes to be? I am coming to recognize that I
can embrace the unknown with curiosity rather than with fear.
I remember a joke about a man who was training to be a
truck driver, hauling loads of logs down out of the mountains. The time came for
a quiz, to know if he was ready to go out on the road with his heavy load. The
first question was what he would do if he was coming down the hill and the
brakes failed. He answered correctly that he would downshift into the lower
gears to slow the truck’s engine. Then what would he do? He would put on the
emergency brake. What if that failed, too? He said with total calm, “If the
emergency brake failed, too, I would wake up my partner who was sleeping.”
Asked why he would do that, the response was an enthusiastic, “Because he won’t
want to miss the wreck we are going to have!”
Rain and sun comes to the earth. Death is as much a part
of life as birth. Endings and beginnings are each sacred. Loss and gain are
simply movements in the endless cycle. The meaning we give to our experience is
the meaning we choose. Everything, seen in its true light, is beautiful,
including this Black Vulture feeding on a dead raccoon.
 |
| Black Vulture feeding on a raccoon, along Stringfellow Road on Pine Island. |
Ah, now the Vulture is
a species that is able to make lemonade out of lemons. Let us all awaken our own sleeping
inner-vultures…. So we can be more curious than afraid!
