SHIFT HAPPENS

Sometimes it’s a small thing. Tonight I discovered that I need to wear my WalMart reading glasses while cooking, otherwise I might chop off a finger. Sometimes it’s really a big thing, like 9.0 on the Richter scale. Any way you slice it – a finger or the world knocked off its axis – shift happens.

I’m a big fan of shift. In fact, I have an addiction to change. If things get too status quo I have to mix it up. In my younger decades, this meant changing husbands like underwear and morphing from a mousy married 24 year old mom to a law student, litigator, high school teacher, writer, cowgirl, EMT and now Buddhist chaplain student. This proclivity for shaking it up used to drive my friends and family insane.

“ But I’m just like Madonna!” I’d exhort my buddies at the 4th Street Café, “Every five years I reinvent myself!”

“Yeah,” cranky Steve would reply, “But Madonna keeps getting better.”

Touche, Dude. Keeping it humble.

Speaking of big shifts, I just returned from a two week intensive at Upaya Monastery in Santa Fe where 18 of us showed up bright eyed and altruistic for two years of Buddhist chaplaincy training before ordination in March of 2013. One of the best things about going to Upaya is the fact that I get away from Bob’s snoring. That’s not very evolved, unless you’ve ever had to sleep next to a fog horn. I checked in to my little adobe dorm room, a double, with my roomie’s bed about a foot from mine. You guessed it. She snored like a sailor. Here’s another big fat truth: You can run, but you can’t hide.

So that inner earthquake of spiritual evolution is endless and pretty funny. In the words of Ram Dass, big deal Buddhist teacher for decades: “If you think you’re enlightened, spend a week with your family.” Go ahead, try it. Family presses buttons like a girl scout on a doorbell. Folks who consider themselves “spiritual” sort of get an ass-kicking at Thanksgiving when drunken Uncle George is yipping about “homos” and your Mom is apologizing about your job, hair, your behavior, or “that fat roll.” Nothing worse than self-righteous spiritual folks, eh, and family brings you right to zero on the humility scale. Think you’re enlightened? Feel the shift happen.

People at the hospital where I work are already making fun of me – while truly loving my changes – calling me “Rev” and asking for healings, which I will in fact do, for a dollar. My brother Dom who still calls me Fathead, is now resigned to calling me Reverend Fathead. Like Rodney Dangerfield, I can’t get no respect but I don’t care, because in my earthsuit, there’s one thing for sure: shift happens.

Some days, even here in Paradise/Steamboat, it seems like there’s suffering all over the place. This beautiful ski town has the highest per capita rate of suicide in all of Colorado. So, there’s that, as well as the normal range of yucky behavior brought about by the demon rum, people on the brink of financial ruin, and some guy at the hardware store complaining, loudly, about “them Mexicans.” And then just when you get to feeling despair, The Brotherhood shows up in town. Now The Brotherhood is a national group of black skiers and ever few years about 1,000 of them descend on lily white Steamboat, and for a week they remind us how to be happy, how to have fun, and how to really work an outfit. Shift happens, and God bless The Brotherhood.

Shift is happening in my body as we speak, as things descend towards the ground. My neck turned to chicken skin, things sag, and dang what the hell is going on with my potbelly anyway? The Chinese Buddha figure has a big fat belly and a huge smile. In fact, the little Buddha guy I have on my window ledge also has both arms wide up in the air, like Touchdown Buddha. Happy as can be in his big, fat belly, loving the moment. If you’re over 50, the present moment is all you have because….what was I saying? Shift happens, eh?

Change is great, and even the cracking and falling apart of the world, or the economy, or our government is not such a bad thing. When politics causes everything to grind to a halt, maybe people will soften up and start helping each other more. And while an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown seem like an improbable trifecta of disaster there’s this letter of a survivor from Sendai, Japan where the writer talks of food and clean water showing up on what’s left of her doorstep. Seeing things crumble and get swept away right in front of her here’s what Anne Thomas concludes:

Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don't. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that much larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent. http://www.odemagazine.com/blogs/readers_blog/24755/a_letter_from_sendai

Any way you look at it, shift’s going to happen over and over. Might as well open your big Buddha arms, breathe out that big Buddha belly, and welcome all the good shifts to come.