“If we imagine our practice to be like a seedling, joy is the water that helps the seedling to grow. Without joy, the seedling will wither and die.” Jamyang Tenphel
My Grandma had a way of living with joy no matter what her circumstance. She would pause from peeling yet another basket of apples or lift her arthritic fingers from kneading the weekly batch of homemade bread. “Ain’t life grand,” she would chuckle, without reference to anything in particular. Her mind and heart remained relentlessly wide and open, despite a life that had been touched by poverty, blistering hard work, disabling illness and heartbreaking loss. It was a joy to hear her words and be reminded. Though my grandma never heard of meditation or the Four Noble Truths, in her wide-open heart, she and the Buddha would have been great pals.
Today, though, the grand-ness of life is escaping me. Whatever it was that Grandma and the Buddha were contemplating is elusive. I am overwhelmed and caught in an undertow. There is alarm at news of massive storms, of national policies that oppress the poor, and of profound violations of immigrants’ rights. I wish for wise and compassionate leaders but find a disarray of politicians at odds over how to address just about anything. My efforts to control the uncontrollable cloud and submerge my mind. I want to act; I want to fight; I want to flee; I want to shut down and take a long nap. It doesn’t help that, more locally, my refrigerator is leaking across the kitchen floor, and I am repeatedly flummoxed by the unexpected technical difficulties of the online class I am offering. Confusion reigns; my brain wanders across a variety of strategies, but I can’t find a way to start. There is no joy, no grandness. Just mental agitation, rumination and judgment. I am stuck in overwhelm. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.
I pause…so it’s like this now…this is stuckness. My mind is so crowded and busy that I can’t find my body. “Ain’t life grand,” she said. I relax a bit into curiosity. Yes, even this stuckness can be accepted and known in the grandness of things. Life is like this for me just now.
I see that my brain is cluttered and is trying to do far too much; in doing so I have moved out of what neuroscientists would call a state of coherence and into a normal but unproductive nervous system overload. Though the Buddha didn’t speak of modern neuroscience, he did teach about obscurations: mental clouds that keep me from seeing clearly. My greed in trying to do too much and my reactivity and determination to control those clouds further push my whole system out of a wholesome range. A certain amount of stress is goodness. It helps me to expand at the edge of the unknown, to grow into ever greater understandings, integration, and capacity. Without that challenge, I would devolve into dreary and lifeless rigidity. But now I am at the other extreme; my body is tense, and my brain is weary and overwhelmed. I struggle.
Where, in all of this, should I focus my attention?
In his own journey, Siddhartha – perhaps similarly – found himself in what appeared to be, literally, a dead end. In the zeal of his spiritual quest, he was mentally exhausted and physically near death from starvation. With meticulous insight, he saw that he was clinging to a view of spiritual practice that was too extreme. He was not allowing himself a sense of belonging in the natural world; he was trying to subdue his own nature rather than use his humanness as a vehicle for inquiry and insight.
He paused; he let go of clinging to his ideas about things. He opened to see a path that didn’t deny his ordinary humanness. He allowed himself to break the rules of his ascetic practice; he accepted the gift of a simple bowl of milk rice. He ate. He later remembered a time when, as a child, he had had a similar experience of broken-hearted love that included all of the joys and sorrows of this earthly life. As he allowed himself to receive nourishment, both physically and mentally, he was able to relax into the wholeness of life, rejecting nothing internally and nothing externally. He restored his body’s coherent balance and became able to rest even more deeply with the ups and downs of life, with its joys as well as its confusions and messiness.
Allowing himself the sensory goodness of that food and those memories didn’t lead him to suddenly abandon his robes and his spiritual quest. Quite the opposite. It was a key moment in his path to full enlightenment as he released the rigidity of his previous view and he saw his path: one midway between rigid sensual asceticism at one extreme and chaotic indulgence at the other. He saw that he could nourish his spiritual journey through a simple and kind appreciation of his full humanity, not in denial of it.
For me, I see that the place to investigate today is similar: to allow the actual experience of confusion and overwhelm to be present but to be known in the larger awareness of the grand wholeness of all of life. Like Siddhartha, nothing wholesome is likely to come for me from either being lost in and identified with my incoherent mind or in trying to shut down and ignore it all.
I ask myself if confusion and struggle might be known; can they be greeted and allowed? It’s like this now, in this body, in this mind. This is how it is. Yes. In kindness, I decide to let go of my agitated efforts at solutions: to step back and nourish the body/mind a bit more in the flow and company of nature. I walk to the woods; 
I see the sky, the purple flowers. The mockingbirds and Carolina wrens are calling to one another; somewhere a rooster is crowing. The breeze is cool on my skin; those white flowers are blooming; the leaves sway with the wind in a gentle dance. There is the simple easy joy of movement. There is still that mental confusion but now more space for it. It’s like this now. I notice my own sense of belonging in the natural world and remember the sweet support of my students. “It’s OK,” they remind me. “We’re here; we will wait.” Taking in the nourishment of their care, the support of relationship and the natural world brings more ease. This body/mind relaxes; it’s like this now.
As I return home, there are still decisions to be made; there are still actions to contemplate, a course to guide, a plumber to call, and technology problems to solve. But nourished by that pause, there is more natural coherence now, more capacity. I am once again more consciously connected to the flow of life: all of life, not just the sweet spots and not just an isolated “me” against it all. The mental agitations have faded. I have more physical energy and the mental space to inquire into the guidance of other aspects of the Dhamma: wise understanding, wise intention and wise effort. With investigation there is refuge. I see what is next for me and what Grandma and the Buddha meant: life is, indeed, quite grand and a grand, though often messy, adventure. I am born from, woven into, and returning always to that grand fabric of life. All is OK; I can do this. All is well.