Refuge

The threat of pandemic disease and death offers plenty to worry about.  But that is not to say that suffering is inevitable.  Which is, after all, why it is said that there is “refuge.”   What does it mean to take refuge in the Buddha, in the awakened mind?  Where is that mind?  It is of course your own mind!  All the disciplines of practice are about that.  All are trainings to notice that.  Like chanting.  Like sitting quiet and still.  Like walking.  Like breathing.  It’s not about escape, because fleeing from difficulty only serves to confirm its power. 

Hence the truth of suffering.  The path goes through suffering because suffering itself holds the seeds of its resolution.  If there was not already knowledge of something different, of its opposite, there would be no suffering.  In coronavirus itself are the seeds of something very different, like gratitude, like appreciation for how interconnected our lives are, how dependent we have become on  people who work long hours for low pay in paper mills to produce our paper towels and toilet paper.  We are given an invitation to quiet down, to be still, to pay attention, to to look beyond the drama of ideas and opinions, to see all sides of what is 'just happening, ' and then to act:  the ‘Tathagatha,’ ‘thus come, thus gone,’  just what’s happening.