Letting Go of the Broken Mirror

Small, broken mirror,

denies the possibility 

of wholeness.

How to rid oneself

of the faulty mirror,

that is the question?

In the frustration

of stuck-ness,

the possibility arises.

This poem, inspired by a dream I had during the retreat, and also Ayya Khema's talk on Metta:

Our surroundings, our environment, is like a mirror. We wouldn't know what the other person has unless we know it ourselves already. [...] As long as those traits in another person are very bothersome to us, we can be quite sure we've got them ourselves. We can be very grateful that we are given this learning opportunity to see ourselves as others see us. It's terribly difficult to see ourselves clearly, because the mirror image is only in other people. But it's very useful to see that, and then use that understanding about the other person, or the things we don't like about the other person, to check out ourselves. "Do I do that too? Do I talk like that? Do I act like that?" We should try to find these same things within. There's no blame involved. If we start blaming ourselves or others for all the things we do wrong, we'll never stop blaming. It's a totally useless activity, because for any negativity that we have an heap blame on top of it, it means we've then got two negativities. What we would like is to get rid of negativity. So intstead of blaming, we look at it, accept it, and change it. [...] Our work of the purification of our heart lies in our daily encounters with anyone, particularly human beings. 

Thanking the difficult people in our life for holding up the mirror that shows us our whole self.

All for the sake of pure love.