Old Age Day by Day April 21, 2013

I listened to a very timely dharma talk this morning, at least timely for me.  He was talking about feeling lost in a desert looking for home, or being a fish in the sea who is dying of thirst.  If you will stop, turn inside and look, all you are seeking is there.  But we don't look.  I think I've stopped and am feeling that lostness, yet know all I seek is right here.  I'm feeling stuck, but know my situation is a delusion, and I know where to look and what I will find.  I keep getting glimmers of it, or insights, and then I forget.  I'm stuck on the point that I can't quite yet believe I am a buddha.  I feel undeserving, though I know full well it's not a matter of deserving or not, it is reality, the truth.  Everyone has this essential nature.  I see it more easily in others.  I have trouble finding it inside me, though I've taken actions that I had no idea I had the capacity to enact.  It comes from somewhere, and I can often roll with it and feel proud after.  Why are we so hard on ourselves?  Yes, there is environment and the judgment in the culture, but what gets us from loving ourselves and feeling joyous about it, as you see with small children, to hurting ourselves and diving back in to the circle of suffering?  We seem to have to relearn what we're born with over and over again.  We can't think it, we must feel it.  The child doesn't think, she feels.  She loves the worm, the raindrop, her own toes.  Everyone is an extension of her.  She doesn't feel this existential separateness.  And then we forget our greatest wisdom. our greatest treasure and resource.  Life is strange and wonderous.