The poet Carl Sandburg said: “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” Time is precious, more precious than any currency. In an economic system that trades time for currency, in a nation so overworked, and for the majority of our people, underpaid, this is wise advice to heed.
If a salary is a way of calculating the worth of a person’s time plus skill and talent, it is wise to think on how much a life is worth. The answer of course is that any life is beyond measure, beyond any comparison, beyond any number, beyond any coin. What if we lived as if this was true? What would our life look like? What would our world look like?
I was very grateful this past week to honor earth day this year by celebrating with a few people at a dinner party over Zoom. This past Wednesday was the 50th anniversary. At the dinner, we talked briefly about earth day and the environmental protections that came from staunch activism and visionary policy.I thought with great gratitude of the great wide tree trunks that lined my city streets in Portland, Oregon, protected under environmental acts from development. I grew up with these great majestic trees: White Oak, Ponderosa Pine, Crape Myrtle. I would sit in the shade of some of these trees, and honestly never thought much about them. They were a fact of life like air, water, and food. As I grow older, I now see these basic building blocks of life are not to be taken for granted, but appreciated as precious: air, water, food. These resources like time don’t seem to have a comparable coin that can hold the same value.
Many people are discussing right now where all of these physical distancing measures will lead as a globalized society. On a personal level, many are wondering about the future of our school system, our social life, our job outlooks going forward. Many businesses are applying for loans in preparation for what can reasonably be assessed as a shortfall in the coming fiscal year. Many are imagining a near future in the next weeks or months with small groups of people, continuing to physical distance, all the while wearing face masks. With all of these sudden changes, it is reasonable to wonder what our future may hold. But the answer to this question is actually very simple and practical. Our future will be decided by what we do today. The future will be decided on what we value today. The future will be decided on what we work toward as a global community today. The future will also be decided by what we neglect today, and what we take for granted.
It is a tempting mistake to think that the future will just happen to us. It is tempting to think of the future as far off, ephemeral, and mysterious. It is tempting to think of our small life with all its innate limitations, and wonder along with our friends on social media, what will arrive for us in the coming weeks and the coming years. This is a tempting mistake, but it is a mistake.
One of my favorite pieces of wisdom comes for Dainen Katagiri Roshi who came to the United States in the 1960’s. At that time, Zen Buddhism was planted both on the West Coast and East Coast, and on a plane from New York City to San Francisco he saw a powerful truth, a truth that we are still learning today. He said there is a different America in the middle, between the coasts- the middle of a huge, diverse, vast country. He and his family decided to move to Minnesota in the Winter, something his wife, Tomoe, would remember viscerally and shiver. They both had never experienced such cold, such snow, a people who knew next to nothing about Japan outside of World War II. I think of the great difficulties he endured to share his understanding of life in this soil, but he had the right spirit for it. His Buddhist name Katagiri, can be translated in English as “Great Patience.” He said something during his tenure in Minnesota that I continue to reflect on to this day. He said: “If you want to take care of tomorrow, take better care of today. We always live now. All we have to do is entrust ourselves to the life we now live.”
“If you want to take care of tomorrow, take better care of today.” I have often myself and in meeting with others encountered the persistent delusion that our real life will begin someday, once this over, or once this is order, or after we’ve finished this. I have seen now enough people on their death beds, some of them who only at the end realized there never was a period when this would be over, or this would be in order, or this would be finished, whatever this is. I have witnessed in myself and through different people, waiting for a day to truly arrive, a day in their mind, a day that never came. It was always now. It was always here. The future was in today.
Many of us know now if not personally, at least second hand, someone who has died recently from the virus. Their life is still here today. It is here with us, in what they shared, and who they were. Time is tricky like that. It doesn’t seem to follow a linear pattern like our minds sometimes trick us into believing. Time is only real now.
What will we do with our time? Some are asking themselves this question as they sit quietly in their homes. Time is a whirlwind of activities for parents, parents who are still employed, working from home, and also educating and caring for their children, and oh yes, trying to remember to take care of themselves. For some, time is at a standstill like a clock that has been struck by lightning. We see the best and worst all wrapped up in a single moment of time. We witness protective orders, protests, some with vile speech, we hear birds chirping, we see time for some becoming blurred, one day nearly indistinguishable from the next. We hear certain key periods of time being emphasized: one week, two weeks, 6 months, the next year, 18 months, the rest of our foreseeable lives. It is no wonder so many of us are overwhelmed with all the time there seems to be in need of keeping track of.
But the truth, like Katagiri once said, is much simpler. It’s always today. What time is it? Now. The only time that matters. I am aware that in recovery there is also an emphasis on one day at a time as the key to a sober and prosperous life. I think this truth applies to all of us. We can gorge ourselves on projections, drink the wine of conflicted opinion, come out at the end vaguely disturbed and confused. What a pity it would be to live the rest of the time we have in a state of vague disturbance and confusion, until we reach the end, and see that the key was always here now in today.
The key to our future and the future of our planet is right here today. What a pity if we miss that. Does this mean that the future will be all sunshine and roses if we take good care of today? No, of course not. But we will know where we are, and that is most of the battle. We will know where we are placed in the unfolding of our life and the life of our beautiful world. We will know where we are, and inhabit where we are with a sense of purpose and confidence, a great patience, come what may. This is possible. But it’s possibility that can only be embodied today.
All of life is unfolding, offering us shadow and a place to rest, whether we notice or not. Like air, like water, like food, like a ponderosa pine, we rest in the arms of greatness and majesty that can be too easily missed and too easily squandered. What a pity to never know where we are, and never allow ourselves the opportunity to see all that supports us in our life today, which is also the life of our future.
This is the last week of our monthly theme of “Liberation.” We might often think of liberation as something that frees us from something. We may want to be liberated from a given circumstance, like a pandemic for instance. Or we want to be liberated from stress or a sense of dread or responsibility. We may want to be liberated from aspects of our life that we feel limit us, both internal and external. This is a perfectly understandable thing to desire. It is a precious human desire to want to feel free, free to live, and know we are truly alive.
I would like to offer an alternative liberation for you to ponder. The kind of liberation I am becoming increasingly interested in is not a liberation from, but a liberation to. Not a freedom from, but a freedom that gives us a way to engage further into the life we are living. A freedom to live our life, not a freedom from our life. A freedom to engage this time with compassion and vision. A freedom to see this day as a rare and precious opportunity, supported by innumerable rare and precious living beings like you, like wild oak, like the songbird. A freedom to face what we have to face with great patience. A freedom to use our intellect to envision paths forward. A freedom to create. A freedom to live the life we are given, and know with gladness we are alive.
You may not yet realize why you are here, and why you are listening to this sermon. You are here to be liberated. I am not liberating you. No one can do that for you. You are here to liberate yourself. Even deeper and perhaps more profound, you are here to know you already are liberated. How can this be, you might say? I feel like I’ve always felt, and I’m not sure I like it. That’s maybe because you are looking for a liberation from instead of a liberation to. You may be seeking to free yourself from certain conditions or circumstances, instead of realizing you truly have everything at your disposal to find freedom to take the next right step, and then the next right step, and then the next right step. Liberation I think is a daily practice, a practice that is accessible to all of us, regardless of circumstance. Even when it is right that we challenge and change our circumstances, we can do so from a place of power, a place of freedom to engage what is now, to engage our faculties fully in taking an inspired step forward.
This is a tough time. Make no mistake about that. But it is also a potentially liberating time if we develop our vision, and not wait for tomorrow. Right now there are prison inmates all across Ohio who are contracting the virus due to being in closed quarters, and there has been a call to liberate them from disease and possible death. Right now many of us are talking about liberating our environment: to recognize air, food, water, trees are not a given, and they are not a resource for our thoughtless greed and discontent. These aspects: air, food, water, trees, animals, time itself: there is no other coin that can compare in value with any of these. To see this and feel this, to share this in a community like this and beyond: this is liberation. This liberation is not a freedom from difficulty or struggle – it is the liberation to struggle with great patience till the end of our days. Time may confound us, but time is truly there for us. Time is there for us to recognize and live it well, lest we let someone live it for us. When we act as if the future will be decided for us, we are wasting our time. We are losing sight of the only time that truly matters, and that is the time we have today.
Today let us liberate ourselves from the delusion of time as something that is beyond us. Today let us liberate ourselves into the life we are given, and let us do good. Today let us comfort those who mourn, afflict those who are comfortable with delusions of dollars and cents and scarcity to see what is right in front of us: an abundance of shade to rest in, an abundance of sustenance, an abundance of time to enjoy friendship and peace, an abundance of life waiting for us completely and fully today.
