Making Friends In Isolation

Now is a great time to make friends. Why not? You’re in isolation due to the coronavirus, so it’s actually the best time to do so.

Make friends with anger, fear, doubt, worry, confusion. Make friends with those old timers that have been around before you were born, and will continue to be here long after your body is making fertilizer for flowers, like uncertainty, yearning, change, and paradox. 

So make friends in isolation. Hell, make friends with isolation itself. With the quiet, with the unknown, with yourself.

Open to what is. No heads in the sand.

To be awake is to be awake to it all, the messy and the miraculous, the disastrous and the delightful. This awakeness is an embrace of being alive, even when things are not what the mind thinks they should be. 

To fight it or tune it out simply inflames whatever arises. To be the ocean that holds it is the path for those who want to wake up sooner rather than later. 

I only began to get the hang of this timeless wisdom of welcoming all and everything, years into my spiritual path when it began to simply be how I met life. It surprised me. But it made sense. I had been practicing the open arms of awake living through a meditation practice that pierced to the core of Reality; that which is underneath and beyond the passing thoughts and emotions and opinions about life. 

Dzogchen is considered the “direct path” in Buddhism. An arrow straight to the enlightened heart of the spacious ocean that we are, each and every one of us. A sea of awareness from which all details are perceived.

Whatever is swimming in your ocean right now is not permanent. Fear always fades. Whatever visits you in your darkest night is not the ultimate truth. Your anger and grief are not who you are. It is all coming and going, coming and going…and you are what notices it.

You are vast enough to be with whatever arises. 

See if you can notice it with some warmth, like when a noisy toddler passes you on the street, waving their arms and shouting hello, determined to be noticed and acknowledged. Once you do — “hello, restlessness, I see you”, “hello, sorrow, hello” — it will be on its way. Or maybe not. Maybe you’ll make a friend who visits from time to time. 

And if you’re lucky, as the beautiful Rumi poem suggests, this visitor will empty you of what you’ve been holding too tightly, so that the fresh breeze of what’s new can now come through. 

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

— Jellaludin Rumi,

translation by Coleman Barks