In one of the many Joan Baez songs that I love:
“Now I know a woman with a collection of sticks, she could fight back the hundreds of voices she heard. She could poke at the greed, she could fend off her need, and in anger she found she could pound every word. But one voice got through and caught her up by surprise, it said ‘don’t hold us back, we’re the story you tell,’ and no sooner than spoken, the spell had been broken, and the voices before her were trumpets and timpani, violins, basses, woodwinds and cellos…”
Sometimes I relate to this woman.
I went to a small, informal yoga/meditation retreat outside of Darjeeling in 2007. At the time I was getting over some anger at an intangible love, and in my head and practice I learned a lot about what I wanted and my capacity to love. What was ironic about this retreat was that the leader of it would occasionally go ballistic… over traffic, over how much food I ate (which I had bought and paid for, so no harm to him), or over other trainees. This contrast of “spiritual guru” and “man with anger management problems” seemed so accurate to our human condition.
How much of our lives do we spend trying to manage selfish desires, anger, and expectation? How do we get over these things gracefully? How do we incorporate them into the story we tell and turn them into trumpets and timpanis?
