The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [32]
Lambert had been a handsome competitive athlete in his youth, a swimmer who was great at science and math. He had strong Hawaiian bones and huge, shiny black eyes and a big, sincere smile. But the disease ruined his body. It made his bones swell up. His skull got lopsided. His elbows bulged. His fingers were stuck in a half fist. He couldn’t be left alone even briefly or it was likely that his lungs would fill up with fluid and he’d drown in his own mucus.
I admit that taking care of him was sort of painful at first. For one, I missed out on some of the best surf sessions of the winter. Plus, I was always tired because Lambert needed fluid sucked out of his lungs with a special machine every few hours, so I never slept more than a few hours at a time. When I did sleep, I was on the floor next to his bed so I could wake up to do the lung clearing.
But the more time I spent with Lambert, the more I liked being with him and didn’t mind missing the surf, didn’t mind the intimately mundane parts of the job: stretching Lambert’s legs, bathing him, emptying the bed pan, cooking for him. Lambert was always upbeat and I could never maintain an emotional slump around him. Not even I could keep sulking when a paralyzed man with a fatal disease was telling jokes. It was free therapy.
Lambert’s family almost never came to visit him. But he didn’t complain—ever. His main social interaction was with his caregivers. But his caregivers all seemed to linger when they came to visit. They didn’t want to leave. I guess they knew they were going to have to go care for a bunch of bitter patients who were angry about everything, and understandably so: most of them were dying.
Lambert was dying, too. But he didn’t take it out on those around him. He never got mad at me when I messed something up—which as you might imagine happened all the time.
And that is why he’s still my guru. His life is a perfect teaching. It doesn’t need any clever words. The way he just abided in his life exactly as it was. This was a perfect demonstration of the core truth of the Buddha’s teaching: true contentment does not come from external circumstances.
From a whole year of frantic searching for perfect waves, fanatically living my surf-religion dream, Lambert’s teaching was the one lesson that really stayed with me.
So: Thank you Lambert.
PS Lambert, I’m sorry I haven’t written. Also I know you don’t need it, but I can’t help reciting Amitabha Buddha’s name for you once in a while. So if you see a big golden buddha, don’t freak out. I’m betting he and Jesus know each other.
It’s All Happening to All of Us, All of the Time
Sylvia Boorstein
The mind of the Buddha is called bodhichitta, literally “awakened heart–mind.” Bodhichitta has two aspects: wisdom—profound understanding of the nature of reality, and compassion—love for all beings and the desire to free them from suffering. Bodhichitta is actually our true nature, and through various practices we can develop this innate wisdom and compassion. The beloved Insight Meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein found one way for people to share and expand their natural love and care for others.
I’ve been leading a two-hour, Wednesday-morning class at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for more than fifteen years. Of the seventy or so people there on any given week, there are the folks who have been coming regularly since the beginning, new people coming to see what it’s like, and visitors to San Francisco who come because they are in town. I’ve begun to think of it as our local church. We always begin by greeting newcomers. I then give some meditation instructions and we sit quietly for thirty or forty minutes. In the last minutes of the sitting I remind people that they’re welcome to mention the names of people they are particularly thinking of, people facing a special challenge, so that we could, as a group, think of them with shared concern