On this last day of the year I’m still mourning the
loss of a dear friend of mine, Javier Navascues, who passed away in the fall. I
miss our long conversations about everything under the sun, and his
instructions in the basics of Chi Kung. I’m wearing a saffron colored sweater
he gave me and reading a book he lent me: The
Hero’s Journey, a series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, whose life
and work weave myth, religion, psychology, literature and art. It’s
the story of a “left-handed” path. Campbell says: life is not a problem to be
solved but a mystery to be lived. Find your own true passion and follow it. The
path that is no path. The search for the meaning of life is really a search for
a deep experience of life. Javier had underlined that last phrase.
I’ve also been reading through some of Javier’s
letters to me from a trip he made to India and get a sense of a deep stirring
of spirit.
In one letter, he describes how he met Tenzin Palmo,
an English woman who went to study Buddhism in India in the 60s and upon
achieving enough knowledge to receive advanced teachings was refused access, as
a woman, perhaps as a foreigner, to higher practices. Her master suggested she
go meditate in a cave, like Milarepa. So she went up into the mountains and
found one. The nearby villagers thought she was crazy; it snows 8 months out of
the year up there. She ended up living in the cave for 11 years, and when she
came down the Buddhist monks who had rejected her now called her Venerable
One...
In one of Tenzin’s talks, she starts by relating the
time the Dali Lama came to teach in the nearby village. When the Dali Lama had
left she asked an old woman what he had said. The old woman replied that she
hadn’t understood much, but she thought what the Dali Lama wanted to say was:
“To have a good heart is nice”....
Javier had a good heart. At the memorial service held
for him his family shared a poem he’d written a year before his death:
I begin the long goodbye
Feeling – if not regretting – the sun’s hot
course,
Waiting for browning leaves to fall
I gather up the late harvest
And in joy relish every fig and grape
Every glass of wine,
The last roses fading on my doorstep.
