Whispering Wyrd

I am and always have been someone who judges the truth of things, measures things, by lived experience. If a teaching doesn’t line up with my own lived experience, I dismiss it out of hand. For example, if someone says they love you but constantly belittles you, those words “I love you” lose their meaning. If someone stands by you through everything like hardships and disagreement, that love is real whether they say it or not.

That’s how I approach everything, including spiritual teachings. I don’t care much for slogans or platitudes, or cliches. I care about whether something is real in the everyday life that is lived. If something doesn’t match up with my own lived experience, I can’t accept it no matter hard I might try to.

I remember all too vividly the time I hit rock bottom. I was deep in addiction, I had been in jail, and I was facing years of conditional release. My life was collapsing all around me. Someone told me, “Just pray and give it to God. He will rescue you.”

So I did. I went out into the woods, fell to my knees, and cried harder than I ever remember crying. I was completely broken, and I begged for help. None came. None at all. In fact, things got way worse after that.

At my next probation appointment I was arrested again because a supervisor lied about me. I was later able to prove they lied thanks to two witnesses and I was released, but by then something inside me just… snapped. Rage, exhaustion, and despair. I had had enough. That was my breaking point.

I didn’t just think about suicide, I planned it, note and all. I took my pistol outside to a place I had chosen and sat down against a tree. I can still remember looking at that gun and thinking how easy it was going to be. Too easy. I was weirdly surprised at how easy now that it was about to happen.

Then something weird happened out of the blue. I suddenly started to think about a book I had bought from a used book store before. It was a book back in the house about Buddhism. I hadn’t even read it yet, so I can’t explain why it kept coming up in my mind, especially right then.

I just sat there with this strange numb feeling, utterly defeated with nothing left in me, that gun still in my hand. Then I stood up and looked at the gun again and then put it in my belt and I walked back to the house.

I picked up the book I kept thinking about and started reading. That moment in time changed my life. I devoured that book. Then I bought more books on Buddhism and devoured those too.

Not long after that, my family and I were at a mall when my oldest son and I went into a small shop filled with Buddhist statues. The man who ran the store greeted us with a kindness that was uncommon and deeply sincere and we started talking.

It turned out he belonged to the very Buddhist tradition I had been reading about. We talked so long that my wife and youngest son had to come find us. I knew then that I had found my path. I went back to that store many times to speak with him and learn.

To this day I am still a Buddhist. And I have never wanted to kill myself again. So when I say Buddhism saved my life, that is exactly what I mean, it’s not hyperbole or exaggeration. When I was lost in darkness and despair, a door opened for me. I have loved ones that will never understand this and have tried to convert me to their own beliefs. I hope they never understand that level of despair, because to truly understand it, they would have to live it. I don’t wish that on anyone.

These days I’m not only happy at last, I am also clean and sober for the first time in decades. Not everyone who gets their life back has to hit rock bottom like I did. Not everyone has to find a faith to get clean/sober. Everyone is different. I respect all paths to happiness and sobriety, spiritual and secular.

Amituofo
~Buck