What we're talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye--not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking. The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we're going to be continually humbled. There's not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.

Instructions on mindfulness or emptiness or working with energy all point to the same thing: being right on the spot nails us. It nails us right to the point of time and space that we are in. When we stop there and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart. As one student so eloquently put it, "Buddha nature, cleverly disguised as fear, kicks our ass into being receptive." ~Pema Chodron When Things Fall Apart

Well now, how's that for a quote? This book was recommended to me by The Local Wise Woman of our town. I went for a long walk on the beach this morning with thoughts like this. Obviously, this speaks to my current struggle with the shameless whore of mortality. But it also makes me think about homeschooling moms. How much we constantly question ourselves and "our" results. Are the kids learning enough? Are we doing this right? Are we messing them up? Shouldn't they be learning more? How can we be doing all the More that we feel we clearly should be doing? How can we press more into them? How can we press more out of them? How much more could I be? How much more could they be? How much is, in fact, enough?

We are so afraid to do the children wrong.

You know what? I think elementary school is just total bullshit. I think it is an enormous waste of time. I am now officially refusing to worry any further about elementary school. And really, even Jr. High. That is still elementary, as far as I can tell. I wondered today, how do all those baby dolphins keep turning into such marvelously perfect grown dolphins, even as they never ever one single time ever go to anything like school? How do they meet, perfectly, the challenge of the ever changing present moment without ever having been schooled? That is, partly, what I think having the courage to continually die means and they all learn it perfectly. And the humans? They seem to so rarely get it. In fact, all that time in school seems to drawn them farther away from themselves, from all that is actually important.