Practicing Zen means walking into the marketplace ready to meet the world. The other day I went to Woodlands market on Christmas day to buy scotch tape for wrapping presents. At the checkout counter a familiar Hispanic woman asked me if I was going to be with my kids. I told her I was, and that I was just doing last minute wrapping. Little did I know she was about to give me Kwan Yin as my favorite gift of the day.
When I asked her about her kids, she said she told her oldest boy she wasn't getting him anything, that her total love was what she had to give him. We chatted for a minute about love as the essence of Christmas, and how kids have learned to expect too many material things. Then she told me that she did all the work in her family and had little money left for gifts. She worked seven days a week to support herself, her husband, and her two kids. She told me her husband had lesions in his back from his job, that he was an invalid who could barely walk, that his workers compensation had run out, and that because they are not citizens he is not eligible for disability payments. He is thirty-one. We looked in each others eyes and touched our hearts, and I told her my thoughts and heart would be with her and her family.
How can our hearts not soften when we hear the angst and pain of the world, when the world presents us with people who make the best of situations that might bury us all. I know all too well my own whining and complaining, my tendencies to run from pain, to seek out ease and comfort, and the idiocy of wishing for different karma. In the solitude of walking home under a warm December sun, my heart went out to my friend and her family, it went out to the world of suffering, and whatever I might have been holding as dust in my eye fell away as the great arms of Kwan Yin held this turning world in gentle embrace.
Rocks on the road,
So what!
Trip over them into love
Hello Kwan Yin
