I’ve got this calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh hanging next to my computer… Amen.

This morning I made a list of all the goodbye’s I’ve said in my life (that’s what you get when you make a Buddhist write) -both big and small. With my pen firmly anchored onto paper, I drifted along with my mental winds that blew me from the casual kiss after dropping my girlfriend off at her work to the final goodbye I said just over a year ago to my young niece in her hospital bed, where she lay unrecognizably chained to a dozen tubes and monitors that kept her alive. I breathed out deeply and stared over the water surface I had nestled myself in front of. With my oat milk latte to go  in my left hand and a cheese croissant I’d picked up on my way there to my right, I glazed into this September morning called my life. I’d had reminded myself of how little sense can be made out of saying goodbye. Two Nile geese flew over and prepared for landing. I went on with my list, a little more soft-core as my heart was still preciously morning fresh, and jotted down the hug I gave my friend on Tuesday when I left her on my couch as I hurried off to a yoga class and the talk-to-you-soon I told my mom on the phone, yesterday.

Suddenly I realized that my list contained no cyber-memories. No see you soons on Facebook, no goodbyes in emails, no be wells on Twitter. It struck me that I don’t say goodbye in virtual reality. There’s a lot of I want to see you soon!s and kind regards, ciaos and LOLs, but no proper goodbyes. Only reason I can think of is that the whole point of cyber space is that we never have to say goodbye since the whole thing is based on being connected. All the time. This virtual life is one long conversation, where we only take bathroom breaks. “That’s why I love it”, I thought, “I never  have to say goodbye online!”. Because I dread saying goodbye. Always have. It’s maybe even why I write, I realized when I read Natalie Goldberg’s commentary to this particular writing assignment, saying “the reason we want to write memoir is an ache, a longing, a passing of time that we feel all too strongly.”

When we’re online, we don’t feel that passing of time so nakedly as when we drop off a friend at the airport. We thankfully drug ourselves with the idea –and to some extent real possibility- of being connected all the time. Interestingly enough, the reason why we love it is also why we dread it. It’s exhausting to be connected all the time:

Yup, saying goodbye might be a bitch, but really what’s the alternative? Even being connected becomes a drag, eventually. Unless you hang in there and become a Buddha, that is.

I wondered whether my goodbye muscles would weaken when I spend a lot of time in cyberspace. I’m not sure. It made me think of apocalyptic prospects of humankind collectively moving into virtual reality in 500 or 5000 or 5 years. What would that be like? A fish bubbled up the surface of the lake but I caught sight of it too late. I rose, packed my stuff and made sure I’d say goodbye and thank you to this place –one of my favorite writing spots. I wandered back to my car kicking acorns ahead of me that my dog Eddie enthusiastically fetched, her nails scratching the pavement in uncoordinated joy.

(this article originally appeared on Elephant Journal)

I’m in a love-hate affair with words. Our first relationship crisis occurred when I was a teenager who suddenly realized that words could never express how I felt. I honestly feared that I could never completely share myself with anyone else as long as words had to do the trick. Teenaged style lonely and angry, I dramatically pasted onto my bedroom walls lyrics from Madonna’s song ‘bedtime story’: today is the last day/ that I’m using words/ they’ve gone out/ lost their meaning/ don’t function anymore.Strangely enough, this desire to let go of words all together pushed me into the most word-y job there is: writing. Inspired by writers who maybe couldn’t “get it all down”, but came remarkably close, I started using words as best as I could –and discovered a joy in that endeavor that to this day remains unequaled by anything else.

My connection to the dharma was crucial in transforming my relationship with words. The famous Zen saying that ‘words are like fingers pointing at the moon’ has been one of the most powerful instructions for both my writing and life. The finger in this metaphor that points at the moon implies that words give you a sense of direction, a notion where to look for the moon. But the finger that points is never the moon itself. It’s a simple metaphor, but like many simple things it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Using words to point at the moon is a practice, very much like a meditation or running or guitar practice, requiring both discipline and surrender. In my case it tends to bring both great sadness and great freedom –often at the same time.

In my experience, the sadness comes from realizing that you will never “get it”. How could you ever really understand the person who you’ve started calling your mother halfway through her life? How could you ever transfer your dog snoozing in the morning sun onto a white piece of paper? How could you describe the love you feel for your best friend? It’s impossible. And these are relatively easy things compared to loss, trauma, birth and the meaning of life. The fact is that we are soaked in complete mystery. We don’t know where we came from and when we go when we die. We hang in a universe that is completely unknown to us. And just as the unspeakable cannot be told, this incomprehensible nature of the mystery called your life cannot be understood –at least not by the conceptual mind. That’s huge. Not only writers deal with this. It is not only a philosophical problem. Everyone at one point or another is confronted with situations where you realize you will never get it. When you wish you could express all that you feel, all that you wanted to say, all that you are filled with, but can’t.

The experience of sadness however, is always connected to the experience of space. They go together. We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender, according to the poet John O’Donoghue. Our use of words embodies that predicament. We awake to our experience and try to share and express it as genuinely as possible, but ultimately we have to surrender into the experience itself. This surrendering creates a freefall kind of freedom. This freedom dawns when you realize that you actually don’t need fingers, or words, to know the moon. Although we try to understand the moon by placing it in the sky and launching rockets at it, that actually says nothing about the moon itself. We actually already know it in our most ordinary, inexplicable, non-verbal experience. By simply standing in the moonlight, by being in its presence, we know the moon. It is that incomprehensible, unspeakable knowing, which is too often pushed into the margins of mainstream culture. This kind of knowing without necessarily understanding takes great courage but in return offers tremendous freedom. It’s the space from which all things arise, constantly, fresh, unimaginable.

This kind of knowing takes courage. It takes courage to let go of words and all the insights, all the effort, all the tears shed and life lived that they carry. Just as sitting down on a cushion and being silent, it is a daring act to shift your weight onto the needle-point of now. It takes tremendous confidence to trust the space behind the words and our familiar world of concepts. But shifting our weight from the fingers to the moon –without losing a heartfelt connection to the fingers- is our practice. It is the doorway to both skillful, life-affirming communication and this wonderful, unexplainable, incomprehensible moment we call our life.

This article was published on Elephant Journal

(This is an excerpt from my submission to the 35<35 project: writings from Buddhist practitioners under the age of 35 on what it’s like to live the dharma every day.)

When I was about three years old, my parents took me and my sister out of the city’s July heat on a bike ride to a cherry orchard. When the four of us settled around the torn open brown bag exploding with big, juicy cherries, I insisted on eating them whole. And with that I mean whole. Despite several attempts from my parents to first convince, then threaten me into abandoning that strategy, I swallowed hands full of cherries –my way. I must have been very avant-garde, because based on my parents’ vivid description of the bike ride home, even at three I gave meaning to the expression of “having your shit popping.” Needless to say, I have been eating my cherries properly ever since.

The way I learn things hasn’t changed much since my cherry popping days. Although I grew up to be quite a nerd, devouring books and theories, a Grand Canyon separates me knowing something from actually getting it. My parents –bless them- bravely let me sink in the pool when I insisted I could swim without them holding onto me, witnessed the effects of me eating countless soap bars and once an entire strip of my mom’s birth control pills and a few years later reluctantly saw me disappear into ecstasy filled club nights. Discovering the futility of telling me what to do must have prompted them into some kind of faith in my tumultuous internal logic, because it worked. I survived my childhood.

…read the entire article on the 35<35 website

(and don’t forget to vote!)