True Nature Two

Whatever is, is right. - Alexander Pope in the Zen Calendar (August 9, 2004).

Day 178. I just made 17 trips to and from my son's car as he spans the three weeks between his summer campus apartment and his fall campus apartment. Who says you can't go home again?

I've remained fixated on the concept of True Nature . In yesterday's post I mentioned that my mom has two favorite stories about me with which she effectively initiates every person I risk bringing to her home. I shared the tale of the Wayward Toddler. I'll call the second legendary yarn Daddy and the Dump.

I was four (that was a very big year for me) and my mother had me all prissed up to accompany her to a wedding at our church. As she tells it, I was turned out in full 1965 dress up regalia: pink taffeta dress adorned with a freshly starched pinafore and matching satin sash, rustling crinoline slip, pale pink ruffled anklets lining shiny, black patent leather Mary Janes. Fittingly, the ensemble was topped off with my springy blond curls fresh out of sponge rollers and tied back with a pink polka-dot ribbon. For some little girls, getting all dressed up for a storybook wedding in a rosebud sprinkled church would be a Dream Saturday. I'm pretty sure their True Nature differs from mine.

We stepped out onto the front porch, my mom admonishing, "Try not to wrinkle." I looked toward the driveway. Triumphantly grinning from the top of an enormous mountain of tree clippings piled in the bed of a pickup truck stood my dad. I was aghast as the implications of the scene sunk into my four-year-old mind. While I was being primped and curled and fussily poured into pink, my dad had been doing yard work. Mowing and chopping and cutting things. Dragging limbs around and hurling them into his truck. Getting dirty and sweaty, and - best of all - wearing yard gloves. MY idea of a Dream Saturday. With trembling lips and a foreboding sense of dread, I asked, "Daddy, where are you going?" His answer cut to the core: "To the dump, honey." I went rigid with horror. I was in a dress, headed to a wedding, and my father was bound for the dump.

There have been countless times in my life when my mother committed grievous parenting errors. This was not one of them. Tears of sorrow welled in my eyes as I stood stock still on the porch. Mom looked at Dad, who leveled her with a meaningful gaze and a shrug. Gently, my mother leaned down to her crestfallen daughter and asked neutrally, "Julie, do you want to go to the wedding with me or the dump with your dad?" To date, this may be the most rhetorical question ever posed to me.

I disappeared into the house like prairie dogs at a zoo exhibit on field trip day. Quicker than you could say "community mulch" I shed my clothes in a frothy pink mound on my bedroom floor. Jerking up the elastic waistband of my navy blue shorts, I stumbled pell-mell out onto the porch, where my mom slipped the Johnny Quest T-shirt I clutched over my unruly curls. She handed my dad the muddy Keds that were sitting by the front door as I hopped up into the cab of the truck. Dad got in, started the engine, and put her in reverse (I can still picture the "three-on-the-tree" shift lever of that old truck). Mom leaned in through the window and kissed the top of my head. "Have fun at the dump," she said. I imagine she sighed as she watched the truck back out of the driveway - tree limbs akimbo in the bed and a beaming four-year-old in the cab.

I have mentioned my personal track record in matters of marriage. Two marriages for a total of three years. Not exactly my forte. By some bizarre unconscious association, the word "funeral" inevitably (and totally unintentionally) comes out of my mouth when I mean to say "wedding." I guess it dates back about 45 years. True Nature is a formidable force. There is a great likelihood I would again choose a trip to the dump if faced with the same dilemma today, and I still fancy wearing yard gloves.

I think I was a budding Buddhist way back then. I didn't like excessive, demonstrative displays and avoided frills of any sort. I had those robust obsessive compulsive genes, so ritual and repetition came quite naturally. My active imagination kept me so absorbed from within that my ego was fairly malnourished. I even liked wearing the same thing every day, albeit not a maroon robe.

Contemplate your True Nature. Bring your life in alignment with it. That's the recipe for bliss.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc