Passionate Equanimity

I recently finished reading "Grace and Grit" by Ken Wilber. While I do love his writing style and sheer philosophical brilliance, this was a different affair. This was a true story. A love story.

It's about the journey that he and his wife, Treya, took when they discovered she had breast cancer ten days after marrying and only four months after first meeting. It's the story of their lives together, for those five years before she died, and all of the pain and sadness, joy and beauty that filled the moments in between. It's a mix of commentary by Ken and journal entries and letters by Treya.

I wept as I read the last chapter - her last chapter - partly out of profound sadness yet partly out of sheer amazement and awe at the kind of person she was and how she faced her own death with such dignity and grace, such passionate equanimity.

That's the phrase that has been burned into my psyche.

Treya describes how most of her life had been spent focused on 'doing', on accomplishing things and being productive, and how much she denigrated the aspect of 'being' in her life. Through her journey she came to see that genuine acceptance of her situation, whatever she might face, was of crucial importance. With this came a new appreciation for simply 'being' and participating in life more fully through her presence.

At the same time, she wondered how to reconcile these two aspects of reality and after undergoing a major interior shift, she finally began to see their relationship more clearly. I have much I could say but I think her words say it best, offered in the last season of her life on earth.

"I was thinking about the Carmelite's emphasis on passion and the Buddhist's parallel emphasis on equanimity. This somehow seemed more important to me than the age-old argument about theism versus nontheism that these two groups usually engage in, and which seems beside the point to me. It suddenly occurred to me that our normal understanding of what passion means is loaded with the idea of clinging, of wanting something or someone, of fearing losing them, of possessiveness.

What if you had passion without all that stuff, passion without attachment, passion clean and pure? What would that be like, what would that mean? I thought of those moments in meditation when I've felt my heart open, a painfully wonderful sensation, a passionate feeling but without clinging to any content or person or thing. And the two words suddenly coupled in my mind and made a whole. Passionate equanimity, passionate equanimity - to be fully passionate about all aspects of life, about one's relationship with spirit, to care to the depths of one's being but with no trace of clinging or holding, that's what the phrase has come to mean to me. It feels full, rounded, complete, and challenging.

This feels very right to me, very deep to me, very central to what I have been working on for many years, going back to the name change. It's like the first part of my life was learning passion. The life after cancer, equanimity. And now bringing them together. This feels so important! And it seems slowly but surely to be permeating all aspects of my life. I still have a ways to go! But it feels like I can finally see the road clearly, on that "journey without goal."

And as for the task before me, it means to work passionately for life, without attachment to results. Passionate equanimity, passionate equanimity. So appropriate!"

I believe that this, more than anything else, is an expression of what it means to surrender to God.