…So about those monks.
A friend of mine, with whom I went to the deal with those Tibetan monks last month, recently asked how that experience was showing up in my life. It was an interesting question, as I’d been feeling a new-ish sense of compassion everywhere in me, and yet I hadn’t thought about it specifically.
So one morning as I was journaling, I asked for clarity on how that ceremony had taken shape in my life and I was given, for all my troubles, a hornet. A bald-faced hornet, that is. And not just any bald-faced hornet, but a dying one.
Now, I don’t like hornets, and I hate bald-faced hornets. My hatred for them stems from an experience last summer, when we were camped at a beautiful site along a crystal-clear stream that happened to be Bald-Faced Hornet Central. There must’ve been a thousand of those little bastards, finding their way into everything; we couldn’t get away from them. (There can be up to 700 in a nest, and they sting repeatedly when their nest is threatened.) We had to move our campsite twice, after I got stung under the eye by one. It was the most painful sting ever; my eye hurt for 2 1/2 weeks. …So yeah, I’m still kinda traumatized by the experience.
When I saw this nasty thing, dying on the step beside me, I immediately went into that whole mindloop of fear and spite. And then I remembered my little bat from last spring — the one I tried to help as it was dying in the Utah desert. I hadn’t liked bats before that experience, either.
So I looked at this dying hornet, and thought of those monks, and of my bat, and I sucked up my fear and loathing enough to try offering compassion and light to this dying little thing I’d come to despise.
And within seconds, the tears started flowed like they were never going to stop.
There was a lot going on for me just then, but one of the things that came to me clearly was the beginnings of a visceral understanding that we are, in fact, all one. I’ve heard this, and believed this, and tried to act as if it were real, but it hadn’t ever really come home for me. In that moment, offering love to that black hornet as it transitioned out of this life, it began to be real, that there is no separation on the level of the soul, between that bald-faced hornet and myself. And it was only my fear keeping my hatred alive.
There was no thunderclap as this hornet transitioned into the Bardo, just a quiet peacefulness. Its energy was there for me to connect to with love one moment, and then it wasn’t. When I opened my eyes and wiped the tears away such that I could focus, I saw it curled into a ball and motionless.
I had asked for an example of how compassion lives in me, and this tiny being came to die beside me, offering me a chance to see for myself what my limits are.
It reminds me of a sweet Grateful Dead song:
Once in a while
you get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right
~Scarlet Begonias