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Where is the edge?
In-Room Exercise — Where Is the Edge?
Thich Nhat Hanh holds a blueberry and shows you the cloud inside it. The rain. The soil that fed the root. The sun that moved the glucose. The hands that picked it. The leaf that became the compost that became the soil that carried the water upward through the root again. The blueberry contains all of this, and each of them contains more. The boundary of the blueberry is the place where your attention stopped.
Many of us pretend to be a blueberry, when we are cosmos and chaos, oak and willow, mosquito and mammoth, volcano and tornado.
Accepting full responsibility — that is, the ability to respond — in our experience of being, we are freed of so many finite games to play with boundaries instead of within them. Success becomes true: when we play and more players join in, they are succeeding us in the game and we have succeeded. Teleologies molt off. Limiting beliefs collect at our feet like autumn leaves.
All this from a blueberry.
Soon we will see that the edge is the horizon — always out of reach, always beckoning us to stretch and range. For now, let's play six degrees of anything.
Choose something, anything in your immediate vicinity. Then imagine you are separate from it — this may happen habitually. Now find the ways you are similar.
Take a stone. Your bones and the stone share quite a bit. You may have once been magma together.
Take a bird. You both love music and playing with kids. Your skeletons are remarkably similar. You both enjoy eggs. You likely share an ancestor.
Find something real, in this present moment. Notice how any edge you try to hold as real escapes as you look at it closely.
Where is the edge?
Practice in the Wild — The Expanding Circle
Settle. Feel the weight of the body in the chair, on the floor, wherever it rests. Not reaching anywhere. Arrived.
Bring to mind someone you love without reservation — not because they deserve it, not because they earned it, but because when you look at them the love moves without needing a reason. Hold them in your awareness and breathe.
Now let the circle widen. Someone you know well but feel neutral toward — a neighbor, a colleague, the face of someone you pass on the same block every Tuesday morning. Let the same quality of attention rest on them. Not performance. Just presence.
Wider now: someone difficult. Someone whose existence in your life creates friction. You do not need to feel warm toward them. Hold them in the same field you've been holding the others, and breathe.
Wider: everyone in the building where you sit. The city. The country. The whole surface of the earth with its seven-odd billion nervous systems, all of them alive right now, all of them breathing, all of them carrying something they didn't ask to carry.
Further still: everything that breathes. The mycorrhizal networks beneath the forest floor. The whale in the deep channel whose song carries thousands of miles. The organisms in the soil too small for the eye to find but carrying the whole enterprise of decomposition and renewal with absolute fidelity.
Sit in the widest circle you can hold.
Then hold the question — do not answer it, simply hold it — where does the love stop?
When the answer comes, it will not be a word.
Practice in the Wild — The Edge of Welcome
Make a list: "Who and what I don't like." Lump people in with all the objects of your odium — since we're not speciesist here. These have to be things you really don't like. Nothing petty. Pet peeves don't qualify because you are obviously pretending not to like them.
Once you have your list — heights, being cold, leftovers, your boss, giving blood, cats, surprises — choose one item you are willing to give a real second chance.
First, let yourself fully feel your dislike. Record your sentiments — in voice, in words, or as a drawing. Any artifact will do, as long as it gives you the space to express wholly what comes up when you encounter this thing.
Then imagine the ideal version of your chosen thing. How would it look, smell, taste, sound, feel, act? Where and how could you encounter the closest real version to the ideal you can imagine? This is your mission. Find it, and make a date with yourself to face this loathing.
Prepare by imagining the encounter in advance, very slowly. As you imagine the first moment in the presence of what you have chosen to accept, feel how okay you are. Feel how strong you are. Then imagine leaving its presence with the same okayness, the same strength — unharmed, and a little thrilled from witnessing your own courage.
How short can that list get? Where is the edge?