Mama Says Om: Forgive

This week, the theme at Mama Says Om is forgive.

If your circle of compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield

Making coffee early in the morning, I spill water or a few grains of coffee on the countertop in the kitchen and refrain from castigating myself, taking refuge in a sharp inhalation of the breath rather than an obscure Anglo-Saxon expletive. Writing my journal pages, I glance at my handwriting, am thoroughly disgusted by my penmanship and stifle an oath. Rewinding the mundane tape at the end of the day, I look back on its chance encounters and realize sadly that I could have been a better person that day, that I could have said something more kindly, been more authentic or supportive, listened more closely to what someone else was saying. I could have been more forgiving.

On and on it goes, around and around it goes. Forgiveness is something one has to work at, and while I am (perhaps) making a little progress, it will doubtless be many more lifetimes before I get the hang of it, before forgiveness becomes as simple, natural and effortless as the act of breathing. Life, and especially the past several months have provided ample opportunities for practice, but there is one area in which I fall down constantly and consistently, over and over again and every single day, and that is in forgiving myself.

In the teaching tale or sutra of Indra's diamond net, the universe is described as a vast jeweled web, a glowing cosmic net in which everything is connected with everything else. By those lights, we are all in this together, and we are all intimately connected with each other. As Stephen Mitchell explained it so beautifully in The Enlightened Mind:

The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel.

The rocky hills in Lanark and the beaver pond, the roses in my garden and the spider's web after rain (and the spider too), that appalling sculpture in the park, the Kamakura Buddha, the cathedral at Chartres, the Taj Mahal and this wandering patchwork blog, this old me — we share common essential matter or "stuff", the same origin, suchness and identity, light within. What we do unto ourselves, we are also doing unto the rest of existence. If we don't love, accept and forgive ourselves just as we are for our own failures, foibles and shortcomings (for the simple act of being human and fallible), we are not forgiving others, and we will never be capable of forgiveness, a sobering thought. We are perfect in our imperfection, but we are always forgetting it.

How and where does one begin? I should begin by being patient with myself in small matters: those mornings of spilled coffee grains, the endless dropped spoons and stitches, the atrocious penmanship, the ease with which I will drop a chore (any chore) to gaze rapturously at a pattern in the garden, make a pot of tea or read a book. Given the measure of my shortcomings, this is no small undertaking. Tea, anyone?