Two Buckets, Two Ways

1.

Jack and Jill went up the hill. They didn't know each other, mind you. In fact, they wouldn't have noticed each other at all if Jack hadn't stopped abruptly to look at the clouds, causing Jill to plow into him and drop the bucket she was carrying to market. Jill's bucket was dinged up pretty badly but when Jack offered to give her his own bucket which was new and shiny, Jill declined. She hurried away from him, anxious to get to market and fill her bucket. Jack smiled, nodded, and kept about his leisurely pace to market.

There was so much at market that day! Jill hoped she had enough time to get everything she wanted. She scurried from one vendor to another, filling her bucket with each new acquisition. Her bucket had suffered punctures in the fall and some things were spilling out. That made it hard to get it completely filled up and when she got home, after an exhausting day of searching and buying, she still felt as though she didn't have enough. She was determined to go to market the next day and get the things she'd missed.

And what of Jack? He made his way to market, arriving much later than Jill. Some of the vendors, in fact, had already closed, having sold all their goods. Jack was unperturbed, looked around a while, talked to a few people, found a few things he liked to put in his bucket and made his way home where he spent the evening smiling to himself and thinking about what a wonderful day it had been.

2.

In another part of town, astoundingly, another Jack and Jill were going up separate paths on another hill, this time to fetch some (you guessed it) water. This Jack also stopped to look at the clouds, at precisely the time their paths crossed, causing Jill to take a tumble and her bucket to fall. What are the odds?

Jack brought his bucket back, full of water, and was happy and content. Jill, on the other hand, had a damaged and leaky bucket now and by the time she arrived home more than half her water was gone.

Every day it was so. Jack made his way to the well and brought a full bucket of water back home. Jill lost more than half of her water on the way back from the hill and had to make many more trips as a result. Jack noticed Jill's dilemma and suggested she get herself a new bucket, but Jill, a creature of habit, was rather fond of her old bucket and paid him no mind. Through winter and into spring it was the same, Jack with his sturdy bucket and Jill with her leaky bucket making twice as many trips. 

It had been a dry spring that year and drought necessitated extra trips to the well for everyone. The hill was parched and dry and the municipality had issued a fire warning for the area. Usually vibrant with color this time of year, the hill for the most part was depressing to see. People took to using only one path up to the well, Jill's path, which inexplicably had a profusion of wild flowers blooming all along its perimeter.

The moral of the stories, you ask? Perhaps we are too eager to assign morals to stories. Perhaps things simply are the way they are.

The Last Place You Look

My dad had an impish, goofy sense of humor. He was fond of observing people, not to judge them in any way, just out of sheer fascination. He was famous in our family for going to Disneyland and spending a lot of his time there just sitting on a bench "to watch people". One of the many things that tickled him was hearing people talk about searching for a lost item and saying, at the end of their story, "and it was in the last place I looked". "As if they would keep looking after they found it", he would always say, and giggle his endearing little giggle.

If we had an instinct that would unfailingly tell us where the last place was, in terms of lost items, we would of course go there first and our days of having to search for anything would be over. I can remember my brother demonstrating this frequently enough in our family. When there was something missing he would become very silent and still and meditative for a few moments or half an hour, however long it would take, and then he would rise and, more often than not, go straight to it. He taught us that the first place to look is inside, not outside.

Lost items, happiness, peace, fulfillment, joy, passion, it's all the same. It is our long ingrained habit, as human beings, to look outward first. The world is so chock full of stuff, so mesmerizing! It must be out there, we say, and so we look and look, we acquire things, relationships, experiences and skills. Yet, for many there is still the feeling of not enough, not quite, not exactly what I was looking for. Sometimes we have to look until we are at the point of total exhaustion and desperation, until an overwhelming feeling of resignation or some uncontrollable crisis drives us inside. It is then we are amazed to discover, if we stay inside long enough and get to know the place, that everything we are looking for, and so much more than we ever dreamed was available, is there-- in the quiet, undemanding, elegant simplicity of inner space.

Oh boy, isn't it always in the last place you look?

Lessons in the Sand

Many years ago I attended a closing sand mandala ceremony. For two straight weeks, monks from a Tibetan Buddhist monastery had worked tirelessly to create an exquisitely intricate sand mandala in our local museum of Asian art. Millions of tiny grains of colored sand were painstakingly tapped from their small metal instruments, working from the center of the mandala outward. The entire mandala was about five feet in diameter and mesmerizing in its complexity and detail. I arrived about a half hour before the closing ceremony was to begin and was astonished to see the monks still laboring on the outer edges of the mandala, patiently, steadily, tap, tap, tap, each tiny detail completed with full attention and great love and care.

Mandalas are considered sacred in Buddhist tradition, representative of the interconnection of all things and the great web of life. The monks who worked on this one were doing so with clearly evident joy and enthusiasm; their smiles were as broad as their fingers were nimble. As time for the closing ceremony drew near, they quietly completed the finishing touches on the mandala without fanfare. By this time quite a crowd had gathered to admire this awe-inspiring and incredible work of art. The moment was brief, however, for the closing ceremony soon began. Ritual blessings were offered and then the mandala, this beautiful, exquisite mandala which had taken two full weeks of work to complete, was swept up into piles and small vials of the multi-colored sand were filled for the attendees. Quietly, reverently, we lined up to take our vials, the receipt of which is considered a great blessing in Buddhist tradition.

The lesson of of the mandala, of course, is the lesson of impermanence. The vast intricacies of our lives are all, like the sands of the mandala, eventually swept away. Nothing is forever; there is no permanence, no enduring thing. All of life is ephemeral, fleeting. To acknowledge this, to really know this truth and take it into your heart deepens you, enriches you, allows you to appreciate the grand web of life, complete with all its joys and its sorrows. This lesson, learned well, connects you in a very profound way with all people and deepens your compassion. When we cling too tightly to life, when we fear death, when we resist change, we struggle and we suffer. The Buddhists call this dukkha. The quality of non-attachment, which flows from the lesson of impermanence, is essential for an enlightened, joyful life, and allows for a vision of life in all its glory and wonder from a far higher vantage point.