in as few as possible

It’s officially getting hot outside. I hate hot. I am familiar with the temperature because I went camping this weekend. With my new puppy Zen teacher, Maddy.

Camping was a staple of my childhood. It meant cousins and the Sound. My family camped in Salter Path, NC, which is on a barrier island that creates the most wonderful body of water that ever existed, the Bogue Sound. I loved every minute of camping as a child. I don’t remember the ickiness or the work involved. I was too busy being a taken care of or just playing with my beloved cousins. Camping has good memories for me.

The beach, however, is a different story. Even though camping is a fond memory because we stayed on the Sound side of the island, the beach in those trips is a memory of seared feet and sand- everywhere. We had to trudge across the road and through a stifling hot campground to get to the beach. It was never worth it. I don’t care what the priceless pictures of my three year-old self say, I didn’t like the sand, the saltwater, the body smacking waves and I hated every minute of the heat.

In my meditation I’ve been trying to work through the minor pains I get while sitting still for prolonged amounts of time. I try as best I can to not give to the mind numbing pain of a leg that falls asleep or the trickle of sweat that beads on my forehead because the AC has not yet been turned on. But, I always do give in and move the leg or wipe the brow. For now, I can’t elevate my mind to block the pain. I am still so grounded in my body, my literal presence, that trying to get to a mindful presence is nigh to impossible. I sometimes feel like an oyster that gets sand inside my shell yet I’m not right now able to turn that sand into a pearl. Right now in my practice, the pain is the pain- the sand is the sand.

Western society asks us to use our pitfalls to our advantages. Aren’t we supposed to make lemonade from all the lemons in our life? Are we discouraged from making mountains from molehills? Shouldn’t we be the oysters who take the irritating sand that grinds away at his body and turn it into something beautiful? Actually, no. We are so misguided in this venture. All these metamorphic ideas allow the negative energy to exist, to permeate, when really there is nothing there to grind away at us. We are only our thoughts, our memories. Pearls aren’t what they’re cracked up to bed anyway. They are just things, just memories of an association of something we deem beautiful. In the Buddhist sense, there isn’t even a pearl or sand or an oyster. But, there is a Me and I’m still working through how the Me I know survives in Buddhism.

Buddhism tells us to let go and detach. I feel like I’m getting there. I see things that could be sand in my oyster shell sliding off a lot more easily. I see that I’m reminding myself more often to just be and listen, especially to others. Yet, sometimes I wonder (and worry) that I’m the sand in my friend’s oysters. While I am better able to receive information from others that is either positive or negative with equal measure I assume that other’s can as well.

This weekend I gave a friend a piece of insight that they maybe weren’t ready to hear. I heard its rub against their shell in a comment that was later made. In Buddhism, nothing is permanent, nothing is personal. I started to say, “it’s just words,” several times this weekend as a means to dissipate the potency of thoughts, memories that I has cultivated. Because isn’t it? Aren’t an oyster or the sand or the pearl or even my childhood on the Bogue Sound really just words?