Chalk Cliffs and Molten Cheese

Scene 1: Ten days ago. I walk along a series of massive white sea cliffs at Beachy Head, on England’s southeastern coast. There are seven cliffs, called the Seven Sisters, and over each rolling green hill I see a new, spectacular view. Now the sun is bright against the tall, curving face of a cliff, the sea blue below; now the sky looks dark and violent, cliff and sea are churning shades of gray.

And in this beautiful place, where there is so much life, flowers mark one spot on a high cliff. Little signposts with names, dates of birth and death. One says the name of a man, and “At peace now.”

I stand before the flowers and say the words I’ve said hundreds of times – probably most often along the roads in India, where I lived last year. In Delhi, a man with no legs would shuttle himself across hot asphalt on his arms, winding amongst cars at a stoplight. Or I would see, from the window of a car speeding along an overpass, a car accident and a rich Delhi woman’s hand raised to slap the face of her driver.

The words are: “May you be well. May you be happy and healthy. May you be free from suffering.”

It’s possible that these words help only me. And I don’t know the stories of the people that have jumped from these cliffs.

But I hope, as I breathe in the cold air, alive with salt from the sea, that they could feel the ocean’s roar in their own veins, and that they could see how the ever-changing light on those cliffs doesn’t change the cliffs themselves, or their beauty.

The wild magic of those white cliffs against the sea juts right up against the evidence of the terrible sorrow that humans also experience. As I take it in, I make a wish: to remember the luck of waking up and breathing and walking this earth. To remember it every day, every moment.

How hard can that be to remember?

**

Scene 2: This is how hard.

It’s less than a week later and I’m back in Oregon, in an orange-tiled kitchen. I’m tired and jetlagged and distracted. I take the lid off a pan. The cheese on top of my refried beans is nice and melty. I put a spoonful of beans and cheese into my mouth and it is…. Hot. SO hot.

Time slows down and becomes focused on one thing: my mouth, and the cheese in it.

I try to spit it out. The cheese holds on for dear life, clinging with its molten-lava stickiness to the roof of my mouth. Even my tonsils get burned. When I look at my mouth in the mirror the next day I see white blisters coating not just the roof of my mouth but most of my tonsils as well. No wonder it hurts to swallow.

You can maybe imagine what happens next. It’s not that the pain is so bad (and it’s blown out of the water when I compare it to that of the other people I say that “may you be free from suffering” prayer for).

It’s just that my mouth is so… sore. And on top of that, I’m mad at myself for doing something so mindless. And somehow… I add a whole bunch of other stuff to the pile of suffering (relationship confusion; not knowing Exactly What I Want to Do Next in My Life…). And before I know it, my whole life feels sore.

And that’s how I spend the next couple of days: concentrating, hard, on how sore my mouth – and my life – feel.

Until I finally remember something useful. On the phone, just minutes before I took that bite of melted cheese, a friend was talking about Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance, and about Brach’s exploration of what it means to be her “own best friend.”

This isn’t a new concept. If I were to try to explain to my 19-year-old self why it is that I feel exponentially happier now, two decades later, than I did at that age, it would have a lot to do with being my own best friend. It’s one of those mysterious gifts that older people are always telling you about when you’re young and think that 19 is as good as it gets. I am (usually) so much more able, now, to be my own best friend: to wish myself well, and to enjoy who I am, rather than constantly trying to squish myself in to a shape that is not my own.

But somehow – with the soreness in my mouth, the soreness in my life – I had forgotten. Forgotten to be aware of my luck at being alive on the earth today, and forgotten to be my own best friend. Which really amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Taking joy in your own aliveness, just because you are…. Alive. Not perfect, just alive.

I last posted 2 weeks ago. Since then (apart from scalding myself with melted cheese) I’ve “scared myself” by adding a counter to this blog to see how many hits it gets (Halleluia! It’s not just Mom and Dad. Thanks for joining me!). I contemplated life and death on the white chalk cliffs of Beachy Head. I survived five Bikram yoga classes in five days, while I was in London. Bikram is an intense series of poses made far more intense by a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit (room heated to 105 degrees, at 60% humidity – “Yoga Journal” says that pro football players have died of heatstroke at a heat index of 109 degrees).

I’ve been saying for years, though, that I think the most courageous act most of us ever do is to love. And that’s certainly been the case for me in these past weeks: risking being vulnerable and confused and scared and unsure and torn, in a quest to learn to love more fully. I won’t go into detail, but I wasn’t alone on those white chalk cliffs. And my longing to be grateful for every step I walk on this earth is really about that: being aware of the luck of this force of life flowing through me. However it shows up today.

Fear, joy, anger, love, blisters on my tonsils: all just proof that I am here, that I am vital and alive as the surf below those cliffs, as the sun shining and fading and shining again against their white chalk faces.