Just to ....

Donna Birdwell

The prompt:

“Just to be is a blessing

Just to live is holy.”

—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Donna Birdwell

Just being is a blessing.
Just living is holy.
The child wakes
between you.

—A Participant

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Donna Birdwell

My cousin in Houston passed away just over a month ago. We were never close. She married just out of high school and had two daughters who are now in their fifties. In Ireland you’d call them spinsters. One sister is disabled and has never worked. The other sister works five days a week sitting with a neighbor’s Down’s Syndrome sister from 6:30 am until 2 in the afternoon. They’re barely scraping by. I wonder how they would understand these words. Do they feel that “just to be” is a blessing? Or is it a burden? Sitting in their sparsely furnished apartment adorned with pages torn from magazines, “holy” was not a word that came to mind.

Two nights later, I sat in a friend’s tenth-floor condo in Dallas, just off Turtle Creek. There were real paintings on the walls, a vase of two dozen red roses in the center of the table and good wine in cut crystal glasses.

Is my friend more blessed than my two spinster second cousins? Whose life is more holy?

Just be. Just live. If you can find a few moments of holiness in that, maybe that’s the blessing.

—Donna Birdwell

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Donna Birdwell

The second precept that we take in Soto Zen is “do not take what is not given.” At the San Francisco Zen Center they added a line to each of the precepts to give them a positive spin. “2. A disciple of Buddha does not take what is not given but rather cultivates and encourages generosity.”

Perhaps it should be, “we should take what is given.” Someone suggested that I should add an only to that: "we should take only what is given."

In any case, I thought it would be an interesting generosity practice to focus on taking rather than giving. Rabbi Heschel's statement suggests that being on earth is a blessing. Appreciating that seems transformational. I feel, “Thank you, universe, for letting me be. Thank you for the innumerable gifts that you shower on me every moment.” (This may introduce a dilemma: as a generous and loving person, do we thank the coyote/universe who enjoys our neighbor’s yelping dog for supper?)

I imagined myself starting to focus on these blessings. How lucky I am to be surrounded in my life by so many jewels! How lucky to live in an environment so conducive to my interests!

The second line of the Heschel quote, is “just to live is holy.” In Buddhism we talk about the rarity of being born human. It is the rarity of the possibility that one tortoise would rise to the surface of the ocean and its head would go through one floating oxen yoke. That's how lucky it is to be born in human realm.

In the Torah, God says that you shall be holy for I'm holy. Here, too, it is a recognition of what it is that which makes us special. It doesn't matter what you call that which created us. It also says that we should revere our mother and father. We revere holy things, and  that makes us holy, for we came from holy parents. And our mother and father, metaphorically, are everything that comes together to give us this life.

What a great tattoo this would be, with each line of Heschel’s quote on a different arm! Then the words could be easily shared when we reach with both hands to accept what is given to us.

And we can smile and say thanks.

—Kim Mosley