Everyday Buddhism 44 - Chaos and Order: Personal Reflections, Poetry, and Chaos Theory

Published: June 23, 2020, 9:16 p.m.

Join me for an episode that is part autobiographical, part solidarity with Pride and Black Lives matter, part poetry, part science, and part Buddhism. Sounds a bit chaotic, doesn't it? Yet I hope you find some relevant order.

Sharing a recent experience with my own revisiting of internal trauma sparked by the external trauma of pandemic politics and social unrest, I tried to find order in the chaos through poetry and, of course, Buddhism.

Every life has some chaos because as the poet Gregory Orr writes, "there is a great deal of disorder in experience." Or stated through a Buddhist lens, "the unenlightened life is suffering." Yet, in the suffering and chaos there may be a new heartbeat; the birth of a new order, if we lean in and keep going with strong back and soft front.