Embracing Uncertainty.

As I face yet another day of what seems to be an endless path of doctor appointments and surgical visits - I feel such a great sense of uncertainty in my own heart. And as I wait, again, for my name to be called ~ I am reminded of a most beautiful Zen parable, one that reminds us of the importance of caring for our own inner being.

Change can be unsettling, at best...and life altering, and its worst. But if we remember to care for our own inner garden - we may find that the blooms of harmony may begin to stand in its place.

This is a most amazing story, and one that seems always to find a way to "fit" so many of life's events. It's beautiful and uplifting and wonderfully charming, and I know you will gain the same comfort that I did.

namaste my most beautiful friends, and remember to drink in all of the moments of your day.

"Embracing the Mystery of Uncertainty
--by Alan Briskin (Dec 28, 2010)
Listen To Reading!


A Zen parable captures the mysterious connection between attending to our own consciousness and the external events that enfold us. A respected teacher was asked by members of a village if he could come and bring rain to their dry fields. They had tried many different approaches, including soliciting the help of a number of rainmakers, but still no rain came. When the teacher agreed to come, he asked only that he be given a small house and a garden he could tend. Day in, day out, he tended his small garden, neither performing incantations nor asking anything further of the villagers. After a while, rain began to fall on the parched earth.
When asked how he could achieve such a miracle, he answered humbly that when he came to the village, he sensed disharmony within himself. Each day by tending his garden, he returned a little more to himself. As to the rain falling, he could not say.

The garden is a wonderful metaphor because it suggests that if there is a safe place for something to grow, then harmony may be restored elsewhere. To care for the soul suggests a return to the self, but a self that interacts with the world around us. Every day we enter situations that are inherently uncertain but still marked by underlying patterns. These patterns maybe emotional fields, dry because there is little nourishment or turbulent because of unresolved feelings of anger, disappointment or frenzy. When we come in contact with each other, some aspect of the underlying field affects us. Like the teacher in the story, we can come to recognize the disharmony in ourselves and begin to make a place where the particulars can be tended. Yet to embrace the idea that our own consciousness is influenced by and influences what is around us, we must honor the overlap of self and other. We must look for unity of what happens and how it happens as inseparable from each other, without forcing a causal link to explain the occurrence.