Visibility

This blog has recently been listed on Boston.com's Blog List under Politics and Media . While I have no understanding of how that has occurred, I am appreciative that someone took my words to heart enough to honor them with a visible place on Boston. com. I thank whomever that may be.

I have striven generally to make my personal practice invisible to the casual observing eye. This in itself is an element of practice. Unlike the practitioner of the ritualistically religious, I wear no vestments or monk's robes. Like the current character on Showtime, Nurse Jackie, I have worn a uniform, which has announced an element of my practice, helping the sick with the most skill and compassion I can muster. And, frankly, I have more in common with Nurse Jackie than with Pope Benedict.

Practice is best beheld and evaluated in the eye of its practitioner, I feel. To truly practice compassion and personal development through enlightened and liberated consciousness as a public activity takes excruciating discipline and consciousness at all times. Few are able to fulfill that demand. Gandhi, perhaps, the documented Christ, and the living Buddhas of various traditions. I do not aspire to the major league of practice. I'll be happy to stay with the farm team.

This practice of opening a crack in the door to my own practice has been a formative and demanding effort for me. To carefully consider my own truth, to challenge my own assumptions, to reveal my own process are all important to me and require meditation, self-criticism and a hard look at my own life/actions. I am seldom satisfied with anything I see in that process, but I have resolved to share those aspects of my practice as well, when I think they may be helpful to a reader.

So, when I suddenly became aware of the light of greater visibility of this blog, I greeted the news with mixed feelings. First, I am truly pleased at the possibility that a person may find these words, read them and gain nourishment for their own practice from them. Yet, I am also aware that this visibility may bring even greater challenges to me in my practice. Will I be equal to those challenges? Will I answer comments thoughtfully and fairly, even if they challenge the very foundations of my beliefs and my practice itself? Will I continue to devote the time this blog may demand with more readers?

Those questions will be there waiting. They will be part of this practice of writing this blog from now on. Another example of how every new thing in life adds to one's practice, enriches and challenges it. Practice is life. Life is change.