Do Not Be Lured by the Soft Light

I’ve heard a definition of renunciation which can sound so moralistic and pious that I want to avoid it at all costs, as instead “admitting these things will never bring happiness.” The solution to them will inevitably become the problem. Drop the rock you’re carrying that keeps you so burdened.

I think a lot about the relief of renunciation in here. I have imposed renunciation of a sort. My life is a little strip-search. No orifice my own.

There’s a deeper form though, in what I think are the instinctual karmas. Renouncing one’s rights. “You can’t talk to me that way.” “You can’t treat me that way.” “I have the right to . . . medical care, fair treatment.” Well, perhaps on paper! But in practice, no. No, you don’t. When I let that go, there is a most breathtaking dawning: this life is a gift. And with that, stacks of dominoes of gifts, I can see it! Ramona and Adrianna walking behind us doing mantra, my heart brimming. A gift! Emunah trusting me to aim her in the direction of herself when she can’t figure out what to do with the labels of her charges. And that, for the first time in thirteen months, they gave us real chicken breast! A filling of gifts concealed behind the curtain of many disrespected rights.

Some women grip to the death for these rights, write endless cop-outs to bureaucratic auto-responders because they think that will protect their dignity.

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, on the Fourth Day, the suggestion is something like:

You will see a glaring red light

and a soft yellow light. Go

toward the glaring light. Do

not be lured by the soft light.

I live that in every moment in here as I aim to walk the bright line. There’s a line that runs parallel: an easier, softer way. The soft light is not bright or hot enough to burn out the sense of self: self-preservation, self-interest. This is where “virtue” cloaks the teeth of agenda. You’re a lot more popular, a lot more put together, but the endless performance of acting for imagined cameras is exhausting. When Adrianna wants to bond talking smack about Miriam, who I am not happy with right now, and I have to say, right when she’s holding the pipe of collusion to my mouth when we could bond and get that hit of “invisible vengeance,” and I have to say “Sorry, I can’t gossip about people,” and point to my ngakpa shawl as if to say “because my mom is watching,” and she walks away to go gossip about me. And I just sit there in the burn. That is the reward. Bye-bye, self. You little misery maker!

Something magical replaces it. The sense that I’m sitting here in this light as the various scenes of life are projected and pass.

There’s a funny Instagram of a woman with her spirit guide. She simulates it grabbing her hair asking “what they do on it,” saying “we wait,” and then it takes off out of the blue and drops her at lightning speed.

It’s like that. When I asked my Lama how in the heck I was going to face what was ahead of me as I was leaving Mongolia after getting the 2:00 a.m. call that I’d been indicted, he said:

Ninja-like confidence

compassion,

clarity.

Don’t move. Until you do. And when you do, fast as a bullet. Windows open. Something helpful can be spoken. But in the cacophony of a lot of high-alert self-protected sound barriers. Everything stealth and barbed-wire, like someone shooting up in an alley with a gun.

From Ride or Fly, a soon-to-be-released book Nicole Daedone is writing from inside a federal women’s prison. Subscribe to follow the excerpts as they come.