Timely Rain by Chogyam Trungpa from Timely Rain: Selected Poetry of Chogyam Trungpa (Shambhala)
In the jungles of flaming ego,
May there be cool icebergs of bodhicitta.*
On the race track of bureaucracy,
May there be the walk of the elephant.
May the sumptuous castle of arrogance,
Be destroyed by vajra** confidence.
In the garden of gentle sanity,
May you be bombarded with coconuts
Of wakefulness.
Someone asked me recently how I find poems for this blog. Some mornings I pull down a volume or eleven from my bookshelves and page through until the right poem jumps up and down and shouts, "Pick me, pick me!" At other times a poem that I've read will float to the surface of my consciousness and I'll scoop it up and offer it. Sometimes I'll be in the mood to hear a particular author's voice. And days like today, when the weather seems to dictate a poem for a rainy day, I'll search the internet to see what I stumble upon.
This morning I decided to try something new. I went to the Amazon site and did a search for poetry and rain and then set about sifting and sorting through the results. I considered posting a poem by another Buddhist poet but he was from the Zen tradition and a bit too nihlistic for a gray day. Tibetan Buddhist poet and teacher Chogyam Trungpa, on the other hand, offered this blessing for balance that at first made me smile and then laugh out loud at the imagery.
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In the garden of gentle sanity/May you be bombarded with coconuts/Of wakefulness.
But don't drop your lollipop.
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Soon after I first started meditating on a regular basis, I went to an intensive Centering Prayer retreat. About 36 hours into it, I felt like I was being carpet bombed with coconuts. I was battered and bruised and in tears when I went to the retreat leader for spiritual direction. The first words out of my mouth were, "I don't want to do this. I just want to be normal like other people." Normal being people who didn't meditate or go on week long silent retreats or allow themselves to be broken open in order to grow and change.
The thing was, I'd been lounging in the garden for so long that it did seem sane, normal. Shaking the trees of transformation was scary. And the turmoil my soul was experiencing was anything but gentle. All those fears, insecurities, anger, compassion, love, joy were best left napping in the shade while I floated in the pool of status quo. Or so I thought.
I worked through some of my tears and some of my fears that afternoon but I still left the room with trepidation, willing to stick with it but not sure for how long. That was over a decade ago. Learning more about the psychological and physiological effects of what happens during meditation (which Thomas Keating and others call divine therapy) helped me realized that I what I was experiencing was normal, or at least normal for many who step onto this path.
I realize now that when I said I wanted to be normal, what I really meant was that I wanted to stay asleep. And some rainy mornings that still doesn't seem like such a bad idea, literally and figuratively. But then a coconut hits me and I remember the benefits of being awake. Because without a coconut falling, you can't have coconut cake.
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* bodhicitta - "enlightened mind;" an awakening of a felt and lasting compassion; felt need to
replace others suffering with bliss
** vajra - the Sanskrit word for both thunderbolt and diamond; a symbolic ritual object that
symbolizes both the properties of a diamond (indestructibility) and a thunderbolt (irresistible
force)
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