1. This morning after a period of zazen, Misha Merrill, Jane and Patty's extraordinary teacher, and the treasured guiding teacher of our Twining Vines Sangha, gave a dharma talk. Then we cleaned the temple for an hour, the kitchen cupboards emptied and all its contents washed and dried, the bathrooms scrubbed right down to the grout, every surface dusted, every zafu and zabuton beat whisked down to purest black. Then, after coffee and sweets, a few of us rehearsed tomorrow's Shuso Hossen ceremony, reviewing the complex choreography, the unfamiliar playing of instruments--han, inkin, the brass bowls of the doan. Among us plenty of uncertainty, even anxiety--will we get it right? Amazing, the distraction of the ego. I had my own version for most of the morning. Oh, but the waste, the endless waste of it all; how lost to the moment, to the connection we might share when instead we are caught up in the fear that we'll blow it. Of course we're human and that's what we do. Except when we don't. Except when we are so completely present for each strike of the brass bowl, each bow, each call of the Shuso's "Hai!" that there is no ego, there is no thought of failure or success, no I striking the bowl, no bowl, only striking; no I, no bow, only bowing.
2. It's over. The practice period ended last night. Tonight's entry is the mirror image of the one I wrote the night before practice period began. I offer no summary, no sweeping insight cast like a bright light over these 30 days. No last thoughts, no questions, no answers. But these days, the zazen, the incense and candles burned, the services and sutras chanted, the meals prepared and served and eaten, the dana bowls emptied and filled and emptied again are alive in this body, and ripple out from each of us, touching, as Misha said this morning, every shining figure of Indra's net, all sentient beings, all inanimate objects, sky, weather, light, space and time.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
No more basket
1. At some point this summer, I began to use the garden basket, brief early summer home to lettuce, broccoli, herbs, to carry my sewing things to and from the zendo. But the sewing is done, at least the rakusu sewing. The scissors are back in the home sewing kit. The reading glasses return to my night stand. The basket at its post by the front door awaits the ripening tomatoes and string beans. And I am strangely bereft.
2. At five yesterday afternoon, seven of us trooped from Francis and Sondra's West 11th Street loft across West Side Highway to one of the newly finished piers that juts out from the West Village stretch of that roadway into the Hudson: Sondra in glamorous sunglasses and pink Converse All-Stars, aide Marva-the-Marvelous driver of Sondra's wheelchair, Francis and look-alike son Jonathan, Sondra's brother Joel visiting from California, me and our friend Darryl, also visiting from California. Over that while of walking and looking out at the river and visiting with a jolly 8 month old baby, all kicks and giggles, we kept reconfiguring ourselves into pairs, then individuals drifting off to walk alone or in trios, always someone with a hand on Sondra's wheelchair. The kicking, giggling baby was one of a pair of twins. A nanny pushed the other twin and a third child in the twins' stroller. A man in a bikini sat on a poured concrete wall talking on a cell phone, rising to stretch, showing off his tan to no one in particular. Then it was time to head back to the loft. The family and Marva were looking at a take-out menu from a local Chinese dive as Darryl and I said our goodbyes, and went on to meet Joy at the apartment, then on to Ben & Jack's where Elyse joined us. Drinks, dinner, good stories, a wonderful Croatian waiter named Miro, laughter. We put Elyse in a cab, a dog at Joy's apartment and a long drive ahead for him and me, good nights.
Day and night, we were all liquid, melted by the heat and the love among us.
3. Joko Beck talks about building an ABC, a bigger container--for conflict, for judgment, widening the reach of the heart of compassion, an endlessly useful tool. Susan Postal told the story about her resistance, decades ago, to Buddhist practice because of all the rituals and trappings, the bells and whistles of ceremony. The man who became her teacher explained that it was as if he had an egg which he wanted to give to her. But without a shell, he could not put it in her hand.
There are days when it feels like there is only ritual, and days when the ritual feels full of intention, vibrant with the Dharma. And there are days when the ritual falls away and the big empty sky sings.
2. At five yesterday afternoon, seven of us trooped from Francis and Sondra's West 11th Street loft across West Side Highway to one of the newly finished piers that juts out from the West Village stretch of that roadway into the Hudson: Sondra in glamorous sunglasses and pink Converse All-Stars, aide Marva-the-Marvelous driver of Sondra's wheelchair, Francis and look-alike son Jonathan, Sondra's brother Joel visiting from California, me and our friend Darryl, also visiting from California. Over that while of walking and looking out at the river and visiting with a jolly 8 month old baby, all kicks and giggles, we kept reconfiguring ourselves into pairs, then individuals drifting off to walk alone or in trios, always someone with a hand on Sondra's wheelchair. The kicking, giggling baby was one of a pair of twins. A nanny pushed the other twin and a third child in the twins' stroller. A man in a bikini sat on a poured concrete wall talking on a cell phone, rising to stretch, showing off his tan to no one in particular. Then it was time to head back to the loft. The family and Marva were looking at a take-out menu from a local Chinese dive as Darryl and I said our goodbyes, and went on to meet Joy at the apartment, then on to Ben & Jack's where Elyse joined us. Drinks, dinner, good stories, a wonderful Croatian waiter named Miro, laughter. We put Elyse in a cab, a dog at Joy's apartment and a long drive ahead for him and me, good nights.
Day and night, we were all liquid, melted by the heat and the love among us.
3. Joko Beck talks about building an ABC, a bigger container--for conflict, for judgment, widening the reach of the heart of compassion, an endlessly useful tool. Susan Postal told the story about her resistance, decades ago, to Buddhist practice because of all the rituals and trappings, the bells and whistles of ceremony. The man who became her teacher explained that it was as if he had an egg which he wanted to give to her. But without a shell, he could not put it in her hand.
There are days when it feels like there is only ritual, and days when the ritual feels full of intention, vibrant with the Dharma. And there are days when the ritual falls away and the big empty sky sings.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Impermanence
1. I woke too early. The sky, just growing light, was solidly overcast and cool. I lay in bed for a good while, listening Morning Edition, petting Aanakin, frankly dreading the day because I sometimes do.
There's been no rain for ages. I last watered the gardens Thursday evening. Out went Anakin and me, hose tap on, a good soaking for the chard, tomatoes, green beans, herbs, celery, onions and peppers. A little ball, a little dog leaping to make the catch. Breakfast, 'pecial K (with a nod to toddler Evan) and blueberries, orzo and chicken for the dog currently bland dieting.
To follow: Email. Job. Zendo. The final stitches on this rakusu. Zazen. Somewhere in there, the dread will probably turn to something else, the way the early morning sky is clearing now.
2. youtube.com saves the day. After the Beatles, after Ray Charles singing "What I'd Say" after Van Heylan (sp?) singing "Jump," I listened and watched the Isley Brother, "Shout." After the splits, after the backup brothers whose upper bodies move with no reflection of each other but whose lower bodies are in perfect synch, after recognizing in their footwork the way my brother and I dance, I had a really nice day.
3. Jane placed a half dozen dots on the mineki, the tab that hangs from the rakusu straps at the back of the neck. Then she directed me as I made the stitches--a dozen?--to "draw" the pine branch, the mark of our Soto Zen lineage. Then it was done, and I put this blue rakusu in the case I sewed for it, and I stood in front of Jane and presented it to her, exchanging bows, and noting, I believe, in the way we looked into each other's eyes, our shared love for the Dharma and our gratitude for these years of shared practice. Now she has eleven days to write and draw on the white backing, and give me my Japanese jukai name, and return it to me when I take the precepts on the 14th.
Then we had dokusan (face-to-face meeting to discuss my practice) and I told her something I realized only minutes before: Jane has stronger equanimity than I do. "That's good," she said, not because she wouldn't wish great equanimity for me, but because it's good for me to have her maturity for company, for inspiration.
4. Tonight Patty gave her third talk on compassion, focusing on her many years of hospice work. The open heart of compassion. She must have said that four or five times in the last six or eight minutes of her talk. The open heart of compassion. The heart unencumbered by ego. Imagine.
There's been no rain for ages. I last watered the gardens Thursday evening. Out went Anakin and me, hose tap on, a good soaking for the chard, tomatoes, green beans, herbs, celery, onions and peppers. A little ball, a little dog leaping to make the catch. Breakfast, 'pecial K (with a nod to toddler Evan) and blueberries, orzo and chicken for the dog currently bland dieting.
To follow: Email. Job. Zendo. The final stitches on this rakusu. Zazen. Somewhere in there, the dread will probably turn to something else, the way the early morning sky is clearing now.
2. youtube.com saves the day. After the Beatles, after Ray Charles singing "What I'd Say" after Van Heylan (sp?) singing "Jump," I listened and watched the Isley Brother, "Shout." After the splits, after the backup brothers whose upper bodies move with no reflection of each other but whose lower bodies are in perfect synch, after recognizing in their footwork the way my brother and I dance, I had a really nice day.
3. Jane placed a half dozen dots on the mineki, the tab that hangs from the rakusu straps at the back of the neck. Then she directed me as I made the stitches--a dozen?--to "draw" the pine branch, the mark of our Soto Zen lineage. Then it was done, and I put this blue rakusu in the case I sewed for it, and I stood in front of Jane and presented it to her, exchanging bows, and noting, I believe, in the way we looked into each other's eyes, our shared love for the Dharma and our gratitude for these years of shared practice. Now she has eleven days to write and draw on the white backing, and give me my Japanese jukai name, and return it to me when I take the precepts on the 14th.
Then we had dokusan (face-to-face meeting to discuss my practice) and I told her something I realized only minutes before: Jane has stronger equanimity than I do. "That's good," she said, not because she wouldn't wish great equanimity for me, but because it's good for me to have her maturity for company, for inspiration.
4. Tonight Patty gave her third talk on compassion, focusing on her many years of hospice work. The open heart of compassion. She must have said that four or five times in the last six or eight minutes of her talk. The open heart of compassion. The heart unencumbered by ego. Imagine.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
untitled
Yesterday I went to Brooklyn Zen Center to hear Grace Schireson (Mel Weitzman's student--he gave her Transmission some years ago, and she serves I think three CA sanghas) give a dharma talk, drawing largely from her book Zen Women. The Zen center, between 3rd and 4th Avenues in Brooklyn's Gowanus section--between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens--is beautiful--open, light, spacious. I was moved to see this place made for the care and nurturing of the Dharma. Grace's talk was intelligent, thoughtful, the Q & A which followed was more of each, much more--I loved hearing her on her feet, drawing spontaneously from the decades of experience and study and zazen, zazen, zazen. I would like to be just like Grace when I grow up, if I ever do. At 63 I have my doubts. Still, it's nice to have her for a model.
During her talk, I asked about her use of the word "transcend." I set up the question by trying to explain my own historical relationship to the word, and when I paused she said, "Would you like mt to tell you what I meant by that word?" Of course I said yes, but I felt pretty dumb. Really, all I had to do in the first place was says, "Can you tell me what you mean by the word 'transcend'?" There I was with my ego hanging out. I've been batting all that around since yesterday morning, especially the hanging out with my ego part.
Some years ago, I came across something I remembered this evening from one of Pema Chodron's books. She'd been giving the basic teachings of meditation, including the instruction to note one's thinking and bring the attention back to the breath without making oneself wrong for thinking. After her talk, a guy came up to speak to her. He introduced himself. I think he said he was a truck driver. He'd been practicing meditation for a while, and when he noted that his attention had wandered off to his thoughts, he told her he'd he'd say to himself, "Thinking, Good Buddy." Nice, right?
At about the same time I remember reading in one of Natalie Goldberg's books that she and a friend were having a lousy day, so they decided to sit. After their zazen, they seemed disappointed not to feel better. That was sort of a surprise. It never occured to me to sit in order to feel better. Clinging and aversion. The teaching is, it's no biggie. You don't like it? Don't worry it'll change. You like it? Don't worry, it'll change. There's no holding on because there's nothing permanent onto which we can hold. Grace had a funny expression--an acronym for a phrase something like "Wishing it were otherwise." WIWO. Tonight I am thinking that charity begins at home. Chodron also talks about how programs in self-improvement are a kind of assault. Start where you are. And then stay there. A different take on the expression, There's no there there. Oh yes there is. There it goes.
During her talk, I asked about her use of the word "transcend." I set up the question by trying to explain my own historical relationship to the word, and when I paused she said, "Would you like mt to tell you what I meant by that word?" Of course I said yes, but I felt pretty dumb. Really, all I had to do in the first place was says, "Can you tell me what you mean by the word 'transcend'?" There I was with my ego hanging out. I've been batting all that around since yesterday morning, especially the hanging out with my ego part.
Some years ago, I came across something I remembered this evening from one of Pema Chodron's books. She'd been giving the basic teachings of meditation, including the instruction to note one's thinking and bring the attention back to the breath without making oneself wrong for thinking. After her talk, a guy came up to speak to her. He introduced himself. I think he said he was a truck driver. He'd been practicing meditation for a while, and when he noted that his attention had wandered off to his thoughts, he told her he'd he'd say to himself, "Thinking, Good Buddy." Nice, right?
At about the same time I remember reading in one of Natalie Goldberg's books that she and a friend were having a lousy day, so they decided to sit. After their zazen, they seemed disappointed not to feel better. That was sort of a surprise. It never occured to me to sit in order to feel better. Clinging and aversion. The teaching is, it's no biggie. You don't like it? Don't worry it'll change. You like it? Don't worry, it'll change. There's no holding on because there's nothing permanent onto which we can hold. Grace had a funny expression--an acronym for a phrase something like "Wishing it were otherwise." WIWO. Tonight I am thinking that charity begins at home. Chodron also talks about how programs in self-improvement are a kind of assault. Start where you are. And then stay there. A different take on the expression, There's no there there. Oh yes there is. There it goes.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Daily Practice
[A brief continuation of yesterday's entry. 5. My mother died on June 16, 2009. Last fall, Joy and Evan and I invited our friends Melissa and Shayna DeLowe (they were married last month and Shayna took Melissa's last name) to help us bury Mom's ashes. Melissa was Evan's Hebrew tutor over the months leading up to his Bar Mitzvah in Israel. Shayna is a cantor at Temple Rodef Shalom in NYC. The five of us spoke some Saturday about what we wanted it to be like, down where the ashes of my mother's best friend and Tyler, mom's cat are buried. We made plans about what we'd say, what we'd do, what we'd sing. When the time came, I forgot it all. "What do you want me to do?" Shayna asked. "Just sing," I said. She sang for what may have been five minutes or twenty. She opened her mouth and the sound poured out of her as though she couldn't possibly hold it back, clear, pure, at once heart-felt and light. After she stopped the singing was still there.]
In the years when I taught fiction writing, I encouraged my students to write daily, explaining that though there was no reason to expect they'd write something brilliant every day, it was a good practice, an announcement to the unconscious: I will be available to you every morning between 7 and 9AM to receive whatever you want to offer me. I'd forgotten about that teaching until just now, as I realized that the consequence of this blog writing, my thoughts turn to practice, to looking to see through the lens of practice.
Another thing I encouraged my students to try was writing on the subway. I know it's sort of obvious, but the subway is underground. The unconscious is its own underground. Riding the F train to Coney Island and back was how I worked through a lot of snarls in stories I was writing. In the Fukanzazengi, Eihei Dogen wrote, "take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward." In. Under. Jane and I were talking recently about prepositions, how these words which describe out relationships to all phenomena are among the most challenging for students of English as a second language. Where is inside? Where is under? No place. Everywhere.
In the years when I taught fiction writing, I encouraged my students to write daily, explaining that though there was no reason to expect they'd write something brilliant every day, it was a good practice, an announcement to the unconscious: I will be available to you every morning between 7 and 9AM to receive whatever you want to offer me. I'd forgotten about that teaching until just now, as I realized that the consequence of this blog writing, my thoughts turn to practice, to looking to see through the lens of practice.
Another thing I encouraged my students to try was writing on the subway. I know it's sort of obvious, but the subway is underground. The unconscious is its own underground. Riding the F train to Coney Island and back was how I worked through a lot of snarls in stories I was writing. In the Fukanzazengi, Eihei Dogen wrote, "take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward." In. Under. Jane and I were talking recently about prepositions, how these words which describe out relationships to all phenomena are among the most challenging for students of English as a second language. Where is inside? Where is under? No place. Everywhere.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
The Practice of Art
1. I watched a 1992 documentary about Joan Mitchell last night and this morning. She was one of the New York abstract expressionists who came up in the years following World War II. She painted large canvases brimming with color, dancey and bold, emphatic, surrounded mostly by men whose work got a lot more attention than hers did, but she kept painting. She lived in France for a good deal of her life after the NYC years. In the film, there's a section of an interview with Mitchell conducted by a French art critic. Again and again, with what seems to me to be an obsequious, disingenuous smile, he pushes her to answer questions about the meaning of her work. Again and again she doesn't answer him, except to say the art is the art, the painting is the painting, it is what it is. How moving that this woman, sixty-seven at the time the film was released and dead before the year was out, was so clear and unshakable about her experience of painting, which sounded like samadhi to me--no painter, no painting, no separation.
2. I'm watching "Word is Out," a 1977 documentary about the lives of a couple dozen gay men and lesbians, among them poet Elsa Gidlow. In a scene at a kitchen table with three or four other women, she explains how she views the filmmakers--as wanting to pigeon hole her, because it fulfills the demands of their film. She uses the analogy of writing a novel; the novelist uses her characters to fulfill the demands of her story. Not where I come from. I have to get out of the way and let my characters tell the story, since I certainly don't know what it is. And if I can't hear a character speak truthfully, then no story follows. Again and again, I have to get out of the way in this exercise in non-attachment.
3. Some years ago, when Francis was without a studio, I offered to sit for him so he could draw. Out of about a dozen meetings came a couple of dozen drawings. About the best of them, Francis said he'd exercised over them no control whatsoever--and this is a skilled draftsman, an artist whose sculptural work requires great precision. These best drawings came, he said, out of not knowing, having no idea--no idea about how he was going to respond to the figure in front of him, and no thought or feeling about having no idea.
4. I once asked my yoga teacher Dave if there was a difference between the OHM we chant three times at the beginning of class and the ones we chant at the end. Yes, there is, he said. The chanting at the end of class is unobstructed. Some part of the obstacles of containment, holding, tension have been released so the sound can come out full voiced, ore rotundo. Between the breath and posture, pranayama and asana, the ego that produces those obstacles releases its grip on the body. (Ana, I'd love for you to weigh in here.)
************************************************************************************
Day 20 is almost over. This night my days are diminished by one.
I have only the stitches of the pine branch to put into the mineki of my rakusu and then the sewing will be finished. I put it on this afternoon so Jane and Patty could measure the straps. It feels substantial. I want to wear it. Here is the verse we recite before we dress ourselves in these robes of the Buddha in miniature:
Great robe of liberation
Field far beyond form and emptiness
Wearing the Tathagatha's teaching
Saving all beings
Oh, practice. Oh, art. Oh, life which grows shorter with each passing day.
2. I'm watching "Word is Out," a 1977 documentary about the lives of a couple dozen gay men and lesbians, among them poet Elsa Gidlow. In a scene at a kitchen table with three or four other women, she explains how she views the filmmakers--as wanting to pigeon hole her, because it fulfills the demands of their film. She uses the analogy of writing a novel; the novelist uses her characters to fulfill the demands of her story. Not where I come from. I have to get out of the way and let my characters tell the story, since I certainly don't know what it is. And if I can't hear a character speak truthfully, then no story follows. Again and again, I have to get out of the way in this exercise in non-attachment.
3. Some years ago, when Francis was without a studio, I offered to sit for him so he could draw. Out of about a dozen meetings came a couple of dozen drawings. About the best of them, Francis said he'd exercised over them no control whatsoever--and this is a skilled draftsman, an artist whose sculptural work requires great precision. These best drawings came, he said, out of not knowing, having no idea--no idea about how he was going to respond to the figure in front of him, and no thought or feeling about having no idea.
4. I once asked my yoga teacher Dave if there was a difference between the OHM we chant three times at the beginning of class and the ones we chant at the end. Yes, there is, he said. The chanting at the end of class is unobstructed. Some part of the obstacles of containment, holding, tension have been released so the sound can come out full voiced, ore rotundo. Between the breath and posture, pranayama and asana, the ego that produces those obstacles releases its grip on the body. (Ana, I'd love for you to weigh in here.)
************************************************************************************
Day 20 is almost over. This night my days are diminished by one.
I have only the stitches of the pine branch to put into the mineki of my rakusu and then the sewing will be finished. I put it on this afternoon so Jane and Patty could measure the straps. It feels substantial. I want to wear it. Here is the verse we recite before we dress ourselves in these robes of the Buddha in miniature:
Great robe of liberation
Field far beyond form and emptiness
Wearing the Tathagatha's teaching
Saving all beings
Oh, practice. Oh, art. Oh, life which grows shorter with each passing day.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Practice Period [PP]
1. Sitting at home. Intention: to sit daily. Actualization: not daily, but with greater frequency than previous to the PP. Less likely to think, "Hmm, this would be a good time to sit," and then blow it off; more likely to actually do it. More attentive to the desire to sit. Aware that sometimes even the thought of sitting brings me to a place of equilibrium. Except when it doesn't.
2. Sitting at the Zendo. Intention: to spend some part of every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at the Zendo. Actualization: have spent some part of every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at the znedo. This Sunday I'm not going to make it. A little touch of wab-sabi, like the two times I recently wrote a single blog entry for two days or the calculated error in a Persian or Navajo rug. Actually sitting at the zendo is simply sitting at the Zendo. But I've spent many hours at the dining room table working alongside sangha members sewing, and in the downstairs kitchen preparing and sharing meals, from which I get this sense of all of us making something together, maybe making more of the us, at least for now, a momentum building as we move together toward Shuso Hossen (8/8) and Jukai (8/14). Once, Susan Ji-on asked me about my outbreath, where it ended. I said that though the exhalation ended (in an inhalation), the extension of the outbreath went out and out and out--it didn't end. This growing intimacy among sangha members is an extension of all of our outbreaths, and it goes far beyond us, connecting us to all beings.
3. The Blog. A daily enterprise--you can see how I've fared on that account. The idea for it came out of dokusan with Jane. I don't really remember how our conversation went. I do remember that as soon as I thought of it I knew it was right. I like it. I don't think I could it up indefinitely, not on a daily basis. But I like how, having charged myself with having to think about everyday events in the context of practice, I am more mindful throughout the day. Pleasurable too is starting with something, intuitively I'd say, with no sense of how it's going to come around to the life of a Zen practitoner, and writing into the surprise of the Dharma. It seems right that, looking back, I don't necessarily appreciate best the entries I liked best when I wrote them. It's not unlike living with my friend Elise's three landscapes, hung on the largest wall in this house, how my relationship to them changes over time, month to month, year to year. A wonderful expression of perception as impermanence. Over the days and now weeks, I've gotten a little less inhibited about talking about myself (which is both the good and the bad news). More trusting of myself, and consequently of my readers.
Hey, that's you!
2. Sitting at the Zendo. Intention: to spend some part of every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at the Zendo. Actualization: have spent some part of every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at the znedo. This Sunday I'm not going to make it. A little touch of wab-sabi, like the two times I recently wrote a single blog entry for two days or the calculated error in a Persian or Navajo rug. Actually sitting at the zendo is simply sitting at the Zendo. But I've spent many hours at the dining room table working alongside sangha members sewing, and in the downstairs kitchen preparing and sharing meals, from which I get this sense of all of us making something together, maybe making more of the us, at least for now, a momentum building as we move together toward Shuso Hossen (8/8) and Jukai (8/14). Once, Susan Ji-on asked me about my outbreath, where it ended. I said that though the exhalation ended (in an inhalation), the extension of the outbreath went out and out and out--it didn't end. This growing intimacy among sangha members is an extension of all of our outbreaths, and it goes far beyond us, connecting us to all beings.
3. The Blog. A daily enterprise--you can see how I've fared on that account. The idea for it came out of dokusan with Jane. I don't really remember how our conversation went. I do remember that as soon as I thought of it I knew it was right. I like it. I don't think I could it up indefinitely, not on a daily basis. But I like how, having charged myself with having to think about everyday events in the context of practice, I am more mindful throughout the day. Pleasurable too is starting with something, intuitively I'd say, with no sense of how it's going to come around to the life of a Zen practitoner, and writing into the surprise of the Dharma. It seems right that, looking back, I don't necessarily appreciate best the entries I liked best when I wrote them. It's not unlike living with my friend Elise's three landscapes, hung on the largest wall in this house, how my relationship to them changes over time, month to month, year to year. A wonderful expression of perception as impermanence. Over the days and now weeks, I've gotten a little less inhibited about talking about myself (which is both the good and the bad news). More trusting of myself, and consequently of my readers.
Hey, that's you!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
When Bobby Fox, my grandmother, was well into her 70s, my mother moved her to Norwalk where Mom and Dad were living. Bobby had a small apartment in a retirement community, what we now call an independent living center. Had she chosen to, she could have had three meals a day in the dining room, enjoying the company of the other residents. But she had a tremor which made her hand shake when she drank from a glass or cup, when she fed herself with a fork or a spoon, and she didn't want anyone to see that tremor, so she ate alone.
When my brother married Jennifer four years ago, Mom came up from Florida to the wedding and afterward spent a week with me in Putnam Valley. Visits north had gotten rare; travel was hard for her. That week, there were so many places I wanted to take her, places where there would have been a wheelchair for her use. But she didn't want to be seen in a wheelchair, so we didn't go.
My mother was a model. Her good looks were her stock in trade, though as she grew older, she came to appreciate some of her other assets. Still, as recently as a couple of months before she died, she commented about how, because she'd always been careful to apply moisturizer to her neck as well as her face, she did not have a crepey neck. At 85, she was still holding on to her beauty, even as it fell from her grip. We let go incrementally, and console ourselves with what we've not yet lost.
I turned 63 this past spring. I think a good deal about my aging body. I'm in good health, and am only as limited as my failure to maintain a rigorous exercise schedule makes me. But I see the announcements menopause has written on my skin, my belly, and I know there's more to come. Already I look to see how I identify with various aspects of my physical appearance and capabilities, and they are numerous. Once again the question arises: who am I?
Impermanence. It all goes. There is nothing fixed. Not a mind state, not an emotional state, not a flower, not a piece of fruit, not a tree, a rock, a mountain, the great quadriceps I had when I cycled the streets of New York City, not the jaw line I had when I weighed thirty pounds less, nor the brown hair or the spotless complexion. Zazen is an invitation to be present with impermanence, noticing the breath in perpetual change, the body's comforts and discomforts, the temperature of the air on my skin, the sound of the heat or the air conditioning starting up, shutting off. Breath by breath, I can shed all identities and be the big sky in which all things, I among them, are change.
When my brother married Jennifer four years ago, Mom came up from Florida to the wedding and afterward spent a week with me in Putnam Valley. Visits north had gotten rare; travel was hard for her. That week, there were so many places I wanted to take her, places where there would have been a wheelchair for her use. But she didn't want to be seen in a wheelchair, so we didn't go.
My mother was a model. Her good looks were her stock in trade, though as she grew older, she came to appreciate some of her other assets. Still, as recently as a couple of months before she died, she commented about how, because she'd always been careful to apply moisturizer to her neck as well as her face, she did not have a crepey neck. At 85, she was still holding on to her beauty, even as it fell from her grip. We let go incrementally, and console ourselves with what we've not yet lost.
I turned 63 this past spring. I think a good deal about my aging body. I'm in good health, and am only as limited as my failure to maintain a rigorous exercise schedule makes me. But I see the announcements menopause has written on my skin, my belly, and I know there's more to come. Already I look to see how I identify with various aspects of my physical appearance and capabilities, and they are numerous. Once again the question arises: who am I?
Impermanence. It all goes. There is nothing fixed. Not a mind state, not an emotional state, not a flower, not a piece of fruit, not a tree, a rock, a mountain, the great quadriceps I had when I cycled the streets of New York City, not the jaw line I had when I weighed thirty pounds less, nor the brown hair or the spotless complexion. Zazen is an invitation to be present with impermanence, noticing the breath in perpetual change, the body's comforts and discomforts, the temperature of the air on my skin, the sound of the heat or the air conditioning starting up, shutting off. Breath by breath, I can shed all identities and be the big sky in which all things, I among them, are change.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Giving
It's not that I'm so incredibly generous. Really, it's a compulsion with me. Mind you, it doesn't put it's imprint on my every act of giving. It seems to have to do with wanting to connect, instantly, or repeatedly, with people whose organic connection to me I don't trust, so I manipulate it. Remember R.D Laing's book, "Knots"?
It's sort of like filler, or insulation: stuff this perceived gap with gifts (both humble and extravagant) and favors and I don't have to feel the burning heat of loneliness. Which brings me once again to Pema Chodron who talks about cool loneliness. How many ways are there to say it: the things we do to postpone discomfort create ten times their weight in future discomfort. There is no real or lasting insulation from the truth that does not cause far more suffering than the truth would cause.
Sometimes, I give with strings attached. I couldn't possibly calculate how many friends this has cost me because I suspect I repeated this behavior often without knowing about it. But I know about one friendship where the connection was so strong that we managed to keep it alive long enough to come out two years later, our love for each other still in tact. A. and I are so lucky, because it might have been otherwise.
Sometimes, I give because I feel a debt. Sometimes I'm a counter and I don't like owing.
Sometimes, I give for the sheer joy of it. There are people who have given me so much that I can't help but shower them with appreciation. It's one of a number of ways of saying thank you about a million times over.
I have a lot. It's nice to spread it around--shirts from the stack in my bedroom cupboard, table linens from the kitchen drawers, hydrangea bouquets from the garden, Pyrex storage containers on sale at Sears.
There's a lot I can't do to help relieve suffering, but this I can do--cook a meal, make a bed, give a massage.
And zazen is the place for sitting with all of this, with the "best" and the "worst" of my motives for giving. And the breath of zazen makes space in and among all these impulses and actions and offers the possibility of extending that breath out into the world where breathing and giving mindfully, and breathing and not-giving mindfully are a dance, a song, a prayer.
It's sort of like filler, or insulation: stuff this perceived gap with gifts (both humble and extravagant) and favors and I don't have to feel the burning heat of loneliness. Which brings me once again to Pema Chodron who talks about cool loneliness. How many ways are there to say it: the things we do to postpone discomfort create ten times their weight in future discomfort. There is no real or lasting insulation from the truth that does not cause far more suffering than the truth would cause.
Sometimes, I give with strings attached. I couldn't possibly calculate how many friends this has cost me because I suspect I repeated this behavior often without knowing about it. But I know about one friendship where the connection was so strong that we managed to keep it alive long enough to come out two years later, our love for each other still in tact. A. and I are so lucky, because it might have been otherwise.
Sometimes, I give because I feel a debt. Sometimes I'm a counter and I don't like owing.
Sometimes, I give for the sheer joy of it. There are people who have given me so much that I can't help but shower them with appreciation. It's one of a number of ways of saying thank you about a million times over.
I have a lot. It's nice to spread it around--shirts from the stack in my bedroom cupboard, table linens from the kitchen drawers, hydrangea bouquets from the garden, Pyrex storage containers on sale at Sears.
There's a lot I can't do to help relieve suffering, but this I can do--cook a meal, make a bed, give a massage.
And zazen is the place for sitting with all of this, with the "best" and the "worst" of my motives for giving. And the breath of zazen makes space in and among all these impulses and actions and offers the possibility of extending that breath out into the world where breathing and giving mindfully, and breathing and not-giving mindfully are a dance, a song, a prayer.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Whodaboy
The list I promised: there isn't a list. I can't quantify the fruit of these years of practice. I don't want to.
-------------------------------------------------
Sometimes I like to just watch Anakin breathe. I love the way his ribs spread as he draws in air, and he only belly breathes. I never expected that I'd have a small dog. He's stylishly cute, a chic little dog. But all that stuff--style, cute, chic--those are the consequences of years of breeding, followed by the mystery of what made him, since he's a mutt, none of which he knows the first thing about. What he knows is the safety of someone he trusts near him, the pleasure of a full belly, the exhilaration of running across the lawn with his ears flying and his tongue lolling, the requirement many sounds make of him that he announce a deer in the woods or a truck on the driveway.
Favorite quirks: He doesn't have opposing thumbs, of course, but he uses his paws skillfully to hold a rawhide chewie as he tears at it. In an outdoor game of ball, he loves to turn 180 degrees in the air to make his catch. He has a missing tooth. Sometimes I draw his top lip back to see the tiny space where a tooth used to be.
A couple of months ago, he must have found something nasty to eat in the woods. His stomach was so upset that he didn't eat for two days, and I could hear the gurgling gas from across the room. That night when we went to bed, he turned onto his back and for a long, long time I rubbed his belly to help the gas move through. The next day he was well enough to eat.
I think I'm his first choice in companionship (although his best friend Chaco, and Chaco's family Carol and Pam are closer than second choice), but I know that in my absence he'll stick close to whomever he identifies as the person most likely to feed and care for him. He's gotten pretty attached to Joy; when she wakes in the morning and comes out from her bedroom he greets her, so glads to see her--it's a real occasion, brief but celebratory.
He's pretty cagey about knowing patterns in my behavior. If I invite him to walk up to the mail box at around 4 or 5 PM, he knows there's a good chance that shortly afterward, I'll be leaving him at home alone for a few hours, and he'll try to stay outside, as though that improves the odds that I'll take him with me.
We have funny little routines neither of us ever tires of. When I've been out for a while and return to the house, I call him through the door and he starts to yelp. He waits for me to open the door and then after a brief moment of jumping up to welcome me home, he goes running through the house to find his toy of choice which he brings to me for a bit of play. When we're walking from the elevator to the door to Joy and Evan's apartment, I sometimes take off his leash and he runs ahead to the door. Then he turns to look over his shoulder at me and I throw up my hands and gasp and he comes running back to me. At my side again, he makes a sharp U-turn and runs back to the door. In this way we work our way to 15D, me laughing, him panting.
He has many names. Anakin, Ani, Whodaboy, Whoda, Treasure Boy, Mr. Whitchick. He comes to all of them. When I call him by name to come back to the house from the woods, my voice is clear, and he hears me and comes running like returning to his home is the most wonderful thing in the world.
I don't think I ever believe that he's human, but I do forgot that he's a dog. Then I realize that his whole body is covered with hair, that he walks on four legs, that he sniffs lamp posts and licks his penis, and I remember precisely that he is a dog. But what is this? I ask myself. What is "dog"? What is this dog? And what am I? Who am I?
After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.
from James Agee's "Knoxville: Summer 1915"
-------------------------------------------------
Sometimes I like to just watch Anakin breathe. I love the way his ribs spread as he draws in air, and he only belly breathes. I never expected that I'd have a small dog. He's stylishly cute, a chic little dog. But all that stuff--style, cute, chic--those are the consequences of years of breeding, followed by the mystery of what made him, since he's a mutt, none of which he knows the first thing about. What he knows is the safety of someone he trusts near him, the pleasure of a full belly, the exhilaration of running across the lawn with his ears flying and his tongue lolling, the requirement many sounds make of him that he announce a deer in the woods or a truck on the driveway.
Favorite quirks: He doesn't have opposing thumbs, of course, but he uses his paws skillfully to hold a rawhide chewie as he tears at it. In an outdoor game of ball, he loves to turn 180 degrees in the air to make his catch. He has a missing tooth. Sometimes I draw his top lip back to see the tiny space where a tooth used to be.
A couple of months ago, he must have found something nasty to eat in the woods. His stomach was so upset that he didn't eat for two days, and I could hear the gurgling gas from across the room. That night when we went to bed, he turned onto his back and for a long, long time I rubbed his belly to help the gas move through. The next day he was well enough to eat.
I think I'm his first choice in companionship (although his best friend Chaco, and Chaco's family Carol and Pam are closer than second choice), but I know that in my absence he'll stick close to whomever he identifies as the person most likely to feed and care for him. He's gotten pretty attached to Joy; when she wakes in the morning and comes out from her bedroom he greets her, so glads to see her--it's a real occasion, brief but celebratory.
He's pretty cagey about knowing patterns in my behavior. If I invite him to walk up to the mail box at around 4 or 5 PM, he knows there's a good chance that shortly afterward, I'll be leaving him at home alone for a few hours, and he'll try to stay outside, as though that improves the odds that I'll take him with me.
We have funny little routines neither of us ever tires of. When I've been out for a while and return to the house, I call him through the door and he starts to yelp. He waits for me to open the door and then after a brief moment of jumping up to welcome me home, he goes running through the house to find his toy of choice which he brings to me for a bit of play. When we're walking from the elevator to the door to Joy and Evan's apartment, I sometimes take off his leash and he runs ahead to the door. Then he turns to look over his shoulder at me and I throw up my hands and gasp and he comes running back to me. At my side again, he makes a sharp U-turn and runs back to the door. In this way we work our way to 15D, me laughing, him panting.
He has many names. Anakin, Ani, Whodaboy, Whoda, Treasure Boy, Mr. Whitchick. He comes to all of them. When I call him by name to come back to the house from the woods, my voice is clear, and he hears me and comes running like returning to his home is the most wonderful thing in the world.
I don't think I ever believe that he's human, but I do forgot that he's a dog. Then I realize that his whole body is covered with hair, that he walks on four legs, that he sniffs lamp posts and licks his penis, and I remember precisely that he is a dog. But what is this? I ask myself. What is "dog"? What is this dog? And what am I? Who am I?
After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.
from James Agee's "Knoxville: Summer 1915"
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Zazen: Why?
When I first started sitting nearly nine years ago, we recited the Heart Sutra almost every night I went to the zendo for meditation, and always on Saturdays when we chanted a full service. Some years later, I attended a series of classes Dennis Shofu Keagan taught on the text, falling miserably behind in the reading, but feeling thoroughly engaged in our conversations. It's a text of about 25 lines. Among them are these, sacrosanct to the degree that anything can be sacrosanct in Zen:
no path, no wisdom and no gain.
No gain--thus Bodhisattvahs live this Prajna Paramita
with no hindrance of mind--
no hindrance, therefore no fear.
Far beyond all such delusion, Nirvana is already here.
And among those lines, the one that seems to be the holy of holies is the first one, "no path, no wisdom, and no gain." No gain. There is nothing to be gained from the practice of zazen. It is an end in itself, not a means to something else. It won't get us any of the things, abstract or concrete, we thought we needed to be happy, even as the things we think we need to be happy change.
On the other hand, there are consequences to everything we do. Whether we call it gain or loss, things happen as the direct result of our actions. We just don't have a lot of control over those consequences. A lot of what makes us so maddeningly neurotic are our efforts to control the outcomes of our actions. From the mundane--I'm going to go to Whole Foods first thing tomorrow morning so that they'll still have a loaf of Sullivan Street Bakery's Pugliese loaf; sadly the Sullivan Street driver falls asleep at the wheel and the fresh bread now lies scattered all over 287 East. To the lofty--I will be at my mother's side when she dies and she will not feel alone, except that my mother was unconscious for the hours before her death and I have no idea what she felt. It's all the same: we do what we do and we get what we get, but the complex web of causes and conditions is beyond our capacity to predict, notwithstanding card counters, handicappers, doctors, lawyers, and all the rest of us who are forever calculatinbg the odds.
When I'd been sitting for a few months my teacher Susan asked me why I sat. I answered something that seemed fitting at the time, but really, I had no idea. And every now and then I still find myself asking myself, "Please remind me why I do this." Were I to try to answer that question now, I'd say something tautological: I sit to sit, I wake to wake, I am present to be present.
Back in the 1980s when I was deeply involved in the 12 Steps, I liked something I heard from time to time. Better to pray for God's will than for what you think will bring you peace and happiness; your imagination is too small to do the possibilities justice. My vocabulary has changed since then; I don't talk "prayer" and "God." But the consequences of my life in practice are of greater value--i.e., have greater potential to relieve suffering--than anything I'd have thought to seek. Though it may be that life on the cushion does not get better--although I'm bound to say that I am more tolerant of it as it is, which is, in and of itself, an improvement--life apart from the cushion improves vastly. For a casual inventory of those improvements, please see tomorrow's blog entry.
no path, no wisdom and no gain.
No gain--thus Bodhisattvahs live this Prajna Paramita
with no hindrance of mind--
no hindrance, therefore no fear.
Far beyond all such delusion, Nirvana is already here.
And among those lines, the one that seems to be the holy of holies is the first one, "no path, no wisdom, and no gain." No gain. There is nothing to be gained from the practice of zazen. It is an end in itself, not a means to something else. It won't get us any of the things, abstract or concrete, we thought we needed to be happy, even as the things we think we need to be happy change.
On the other hand, there are consequences to everything we do. Whether we call it gain or loss, things happen as the direct result of our actions. We just don't have a lot of control over those consequences. A lot of what makes us so maddeningly neurotic are our efforts to control the outcomes of our actions. From the mundane--I'm going to go to Whole Foods first thing tomorrow morning so that they'll still have a loaf of Sullivan Street Bakery's Pugliese loaf; sadly the Sullivan Street driver falls asleep at the wheel and the fresh bread now lies scattered all over 287 East. To the lofty--I will be at my mother's side when she dies and she will not feel alone, except that my mother was unconscious for the hours before her death and I have no idea what she felt. It's all the same: we do what we do and we get what we get, but the complex web of causes and conditions is beyond our capacity to predict, notwithstanding card counters, handicappers, doctors, lawyers, and all the rest of us who are forever calculatinbg the odds.
When I'd been sitting for a few months my teacher Susan asked me why I sat. I answered something that seemed fitting at the time, but really, I had no idea. And every now and then I still find myself asking myself, "Please remind me why I do this." Were I to try to answer that question now, I'd say something tautological: I sit to sit, I wake to wake, I am present to be present.
Back in the 1980s when I was deeply involved in the 12 Steps, I liked something I heard from time to time. Better to pray for God's will than for what you think will bring you peace and happiness; your imagination is too small to do the possibilities justice. My vocabulary has changed since then; I don't talk "prayer" and "God." But the consequences of my life in practice are of greater value--i.e., have greater potential to relieve suffering--than anything I'd have thought to seek. Though it may be that life on the cushion does not get better--although I'm bound to say that I am more tolerant of it as it is, which is, in and of itself, an improvement--life apart from the cushion improves vastly. For a casual inventory of those improvements, please see tomorrow's blog entry.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Riding the "D" Train
Lately, Jane has been talking up the matter of relieving suffering, our own and that of all beings. Or maybe she hasn't been talking it up any more than usual. Maybe I'm just hearing it enough to actually produce a thought about it independent of her.
See, it's not just the heat. I've been in a funk for a couple of days, listless, unmotivated, doing the bare minimum. Sadly, this is all familiar to me. Happily, I encounter far less of it now than I did as a younger woman. Faced with a night at home if I don't go to yoga--and I am not going to yoga--I actually considered that I was enrolling myself in a night of low-grade dukha. And then I actually considered that instead of wandering from email to another 20 minutes of "A River Runs Through It" which I recently DVR'd, I can run a bath and add some sea salt and soak, and breathe. I can pick fresh flowers for the altar and sit. I can, recalling Patty's talk last night about Kanzeon (a/k/a/ Kwan Yin/Avalokiteshvara/Bodhisattva of Compassion)think on myself compassionately. I really don't have to add to my own anguish.
I love what Barry Magid says about depression and antidepressant medication: If the intention of practice is to be of service, and Zoloft or Paxil enables a practioner to be of greater service to herself and others, then it cannot be a violation of Buddhist precepts to use it.
The great humiliation of depression is the self-centeredness that comes with it. And though its origins may be in the body, it very quickly moves on to obsessive thought. And is it ever a drag. A bath, fresh flowers--I am reminded now of our many sangha conversations about the paramita of dana (generosity): no giver/no receiver.
Being one with the Buddha in the ten directions.
Being one with the bath and the flowers in the ten directions.
This night your days are diminished by one.
Take heed: do not squander your life.
Get off the train now.
Every stop is the last stop.
See, it's not just the heat. I've been in a funk for a couple of days, listless, unmotivated, doing the bare minimum. Sadly, this is all familiar to me. Happily, I encounter far less of it now than I did as a younger woman. Faced with a night at home if I don't go to yoga--and I am not going to yoga--I actually considered that I was enrolling myself in a night of low-grade dukha. And then I actually considered that instead of wandering from email to another 20 minutes of "A River Runs Through It" which I recently DVR'd, I can run a bath and add some sea salt and soak, and breathe. I can pick fresh flowers for the altar and sit. I can, recalling Patty's talk last night about Kanzeon (a/k/a/ Kwan Yin/Avalokiteshvara/Bodhisattva of Compassion)think on myself compassionately. I really don't have to add to my own anguish.
I love what Barry Magid says about depression and antidepressant medication: If the intention of practice is to be of service, and Zoloft or Paxil enables a practioner to be of greater service to herself and others, then it cannot be a violation of Buddhist precepts to use it.
The great humiliation of depression is the self-centeredness that comes with it. And though its origins may be in the body, it very quickly moves on to obsessive thought. And is it ever a drag. A bath, fresh flowers--I am reminded now of our many sangha conversations about the paramita of dana (generosity): no giver/no receiver.
Being one with the Buddha in the ten directions.
Being one with the bath and the flowers in the ten directions.
This night your days are diminished by one.
Take heed: do not squander your life.
Get off the train now.
Every stop is the last stop.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
It's not going to get any better.
I was at sesshin (retreat for extended period of zazen) with Susan Ji-on Postal and Dennis Shofu Keagan a few years ago. On Saturday afternoon, I went into the room set aside for dokusan (face to face meeting between a student and teacher) with Dennis. I don't remember how we opened our conversation about my practice. I just remember hearing him say, "It's not going to get any better," and feeling the most immense wave of relief.
The "it" must have been some discontent with the quality of my meditation. For years I could hardly bare my own monkey mind. I wanted easy, breezy samadhi, and it wasn't happening. Surely, I was doing something wrong. Surely, if I could just figure out the right thing to do, I could have it my way. Dennis's pronouncement allowed me to give up the fantasy. I wasn't doing anything wrong. As long as I was willing to be with things as they were, monkey mind and all, I had nothing to worry about, no source of discontent. I remembered we laughed as my eyes filled with tears. A huge burden had been lifted from me.
These years later, I still take great solace from Dennis's teaching. It's this capacity for acceptance that allows me to soften to the things I would otherwise make someone wrong for--myself and/or all the world. That's the starting point for something like skillful action. Resistence in all its forms sets up a playing field that pits me against someone or something. Surrender floods the field with compassion and wisdom, and lets me go forward without the weight of blame holding me back. This is the freedom of which the first of the Bodhissatvah Vows speaks: "Beings are numberless; I vow to free them." This is how, every now and then, I actually get it right, making a choice to turn toward less suffering instead of more. It's a turn I can actually feel in my body. There's a reason why we call Zen whole body practice.
Thanks, Dennis. I needed that.
The "it" must have been some discontent with the quality of my meditation. For years I could hardly bare my own monkey mind. I wanted easy, breezy samadhi, and it wasn't happening. Surely, I was doing something wrong. Surely, if I could just figure out the right thing to do, I could have it my way. Dennis's pronouncement allowed me to give up the fantasy. I wasn't doing anything wrong. As long as I was willing to be with things as they were, monkey mind and all, I had nothing to worry about, no source of discontent. I remembered we laughed as my eyes filled with tears. A huge burden had been lifted from me.
These years later, I still take great solace from Dennis's teaching. It's this capacity for acceptance that allows me to soften to the things I would otherwise make someone wrong for--myself and/or all the world. That's the starting point for something like skillful action. Resistence in all its forms sets up a playing field that pits me against someone or something. Surrender floods the field with compassion and wisdom, and lets me go forward without the weight of blame holding me back. This is the freedom of which the first of the Bodhissatvah Vows speaks: "Beings are numberless; I vow to free them." This is how, every now and then, I actually get it right, making a choice to turn toward less suffering instead of more. It's a turn I can actually feel in my body. There's a reason why we call Zen whole body practice.
Thanks, Dennis. I needed that.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Lunch with Francis
I visited with Sondra at the hospital this morning, and then Francis and I went to lunch at a little French place on First and 20th. We got a shaded outside table and apart from various sirens, enjoyed our Croque Monsieur (Francis) and roasted vegetables on baguette (Susan).
What is it when you're about to say something and you know it's a really lousy thing to say and you have it in you to not say it but then you go ahead and say it anyway, knowing it's not even going to bring you much satisfaction? What on earth is that?
Whatever it is, I had one, or I did one, or I surrendered to one. There I was sipping on my diet Coke and expressing my personal discontent with how persons X and Y have responded to Sondra's health crisis this winter, spring and now summer. Francis listened and nodded. I kept talking. After I'd had my say, he took a beat and then he talked about why he doesn't take up the way of making people wrong in regard to how they respond to Sondra (my language, not his), about how it seemed more important to stay connected to people in whatever way they permitted than to make them wrong. Then he talked about someone I'd failed to mention (mere oversight) who'd read him the riot act a couple of months ago. "She was crazy," he said, taking a single French fry from the bowl between us. "And I decided that she's really a good woman and I would just continue to relate to her goodness, and leave her craziness alone."
May I, in days and years to come, learn the wisdom this nearly 90 year old man with no spiritual practice exhibits every day. May his compassion be my teacher and may I learn well. May my mouth be reserved mostly for eating and drinking, for breathing when my nose is badly congested, for singing and chanting, for blowing bubbles with bubble gum, for presenting proudly to my dental hygienist because my dental hygiene is excellent.
What is it when you're about to say something and you know it's a really lousy thing to say and you have it in you to not say it but then you go ahead and say it anyway, knowing it's not even going to bring you much satisfaction? What on earth is that?
Whatever it is, I had one, or I did one, or I surrendered to one. There I was sipping on my diet Coke and expressing my personal discontent with how persons X and Y have responded to Sondra's health crisis this winter, spring and now summer. Francis listened and nodded. I kept talking. After I'd had my say, he took a beat and then he talked about why he doesn't take up the way of making people wrong in regard to how they respond to Sondra (my language, not his), about how it seemed more important to stay connected to people in whatever way they permitted than to make them wrong. Then he talked about someone I'd failed to mention (mere oversight) who'd read him the riot act a couple of months ago. "She was crazy," he said, taking a single French fry from the bowl between us. "And I decided that she's really a good woman and I would just continue to relate to her goodness, and leave her craziness alone."
May I, in days and years to come, learn the wisdom this nearly 90 year old man with no spiritual practice exhibits every day. May his compassion be my teacher and may I learn well. May my mouth be reserved mostly for eating and drinking, for breathing when my nose is badly congested, for singing and chanting, for blowing bubbles with bubble gum, for presenting proudly to my dental hygienist because my dental hygiene is excellent.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
It only takes an instant--
--in just an instant, dukkha--dissatisfaction--arises, and even as I note its arising I wonder how long I'll be stuck with it.
This morning I made a rice salad for supper with the sangha later. The recipe in the cookbook included capers, and I'd decided a couple of days ago to make a grain salad with capers, something to contrast with the orzo and apricot salad I made for Thursday's sangha lunch. Yes, I knew the tomatoes had to be skinned and seeded, that the olives had to be pitted and chopped, that the basil and onions had to be chopped, the capers drained, rinsed and drained again. But I didn't calculate how long that was going to take.
The answer: Too long. Because I still had to flood some of the gardens with water and make lunch and eat and rest and bathe and dress. And it didn't look like there was going to be enough time to rest. Which ruined everything.
I laughed at myself. A day of such leisure and beauty and I'm having a fit of pique. Then I jumped in the pool (in this heat can a woman with a pool ever justify a fit of pique?), and did some stretches to open up my back and completed my chores and ate lunch (sardines, sliced tomato, whole grain toast) and here I am with time to blog. And somewhere in there the fit faded, the pique petered out, or mostly it did. I can still feel remnants of it, tucked into a couple of pockets in my belly, my hip. I hope I wear them well, a couple of fine details in the garment of my humanity, my fallibility, like pin tucks or pleats. What the well-dressed practitoner wears to the rest of her life.
Post Script: The price of pique. Exhaustion.
This morning I made a rice salad for supper with the sangha later. The recipe in the cookbook included capers, and I'd decided a couple of days ago to make a grain salad with capers, something to contrast with the orzo and apricot salad I made for Thursday's sangha lunch. Yes, I knew the tomatoes had to be skinned and seeded, that the olives had to be pitted and chopped, that the basil and onions had to be chopped, the capers drained, rinsed and drained again. But I didn't calculate how long that was going to take.
The answer: Too long. Because I still had to flood some of the gardens with water and make lunch and eat and rest and bathe and dress. And it didn't look like there was going to be enough time to rest. Which ruined everything.
I laughed at myself. A day of such leisure and beauty and I'm having a fit of pique. Then I jumped in the pool (in this heat can a woman with a pool ever justify a fit of pique?), and did some stretches to open up my back and completed my chores and ate lunch (sardines, sliced tomato, whole grain toast) and here I am with time to blog. And somewhere in there the fit faded, the pique petered out, or mostly it did. I can still feel remnants of it, tucked into a couple of pockets in my belly, my hip. I hope I wear them well, a couple of fine details in the garment of my humanity, my fallibility, like pin tucks or pleats. What the well-dressed practitoner wears to the rest of her life.
Post Script: The price of pique. Exhaustion.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Ellen
It doesn't help to know that we were all jerks in high school. When I see you enter the room I remember only one thing: Here is someone to whom I was unkind. At dinner I have the chance to say so. You have the generosity to say I was aloof.
You have a niece and a nephew. You have a boyfriend. You and your dad, 85, will travel to London and Paris this fall.
You ask about my life. I can't talk about all the years, but I can telegraph something about the years since Evan was born, the family Joy and I have made with him, my writing life.
When I get ready to leave, I say wholeheartedly, "Our meeting is all I could have wanted from these hours." Me too, you say. We put our arms around each other, once, then again.
Jane, my teacher, says she borrows from Darlene Cohen when she says, "Choose connection over opinion." Don't you love that? Don't you just? Choose Ellen over my idea of Ellen. Choose seeing the sunset over some idea of sunset, or Anakin over some idea of dog. And life over some idea of life.
You have a niece and a nephew. You have a boyfriend. You and your dad, 85, will travel to London and Paris this fall.
You ask about my life. I can't talk about all the years, but I can telegraph something about the years since Evan was born, the family Joy and I have made with him, my writing life.
When I get ready to leave, I say wholeheartedly, "Our meeting is all I could have wanted from these hours." Me too, you say. We put our arms around each other, once, then again.
Jane, my teacher, says she borrows from Darlene Cohen when she says, "Choose connection over opinion." Don't you love that? Don't you just? Choose Ellen over my idea of Ellen. Choose seeing the sunset over some idea of sunset, or Anakin over some idea of dog. And life over some idea of life.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Danbury High School Class of 1965
We're having our 45th reunion tomorrow night at a little place in Danbury called Two Steps Down. When I went to our 40th, it was the first high school reunion I'd attended. It was shocking for me to realize how few people I knew, and how few among them I remembered. A couple of people said nice things about encounters we'd had decades before and how meaingful they'd been. That and seeing my first girl crush made it worthwhile.
Tomorrow evening, I don't really expect to see anyone I knew. I'm going on the off chance that I'll connect with someone in a way I can't imagine now. Just sort of serve myself up to the possibilities. I want to honor the years that have passed since we walked the halls of DHS, all I didn't know about them (and myself) then and all I don't know now. I hope I get the chance to look someone in the eye and share the awareness that for all the time that's passed, life is very short but maybe here's a chance to touch each other in a way we didn't then.
Don't think I don't know that it could be a real snooze. I might leave the place feeling as alienated as I felt as a high school girl, at a loss about what to say and hearing little or nothing I can engage with. I just think it's worth a shot. There are so many chances we miss, and as the evening gatha says with such clarity and kindness, "This night your days are diminished by one."
The Unwritten
Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught
they’re hiding
they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire
even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser
what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything
maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil
every pencil in the world
is like this
-W.S. Merwin
Tomorrow evening, I don't really expect to see anyone I knew. I'm going on the off chance that I'll connect with someone in a way I can't imagine now. Just sort of serve myself up to the possibilities. I want to honor the years that have passed since we walked the halls of DHS, all I didn't know about them (and myself) then and all I don't know now. I hope I get the chance to look someone in the eye and share the awareness that for all the time that's passed, life is very short but maybe here's a chance to touch each other in a way we didn't then.
Don't think I don't know that it could be a real snooze. I might leave the place feeling as alienated as I felt as a high school girl, at a loss about what to say and hearing little or nothing I can engage with. I just think it's worth a shot. There are so many chances we miss, and as the evening gatha says with such clarity and kindness, "This night your days are diminished by one."
The Unwritten
Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught
they’re hiding
they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire
even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser
what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it
to make out the real names
of everything
maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil
every pencil in the world
is like this
-W.S. Merwin
Thursday, July 15, 2010
We'll just go on from here.
"We'll just go on from here." That's what Francis said after Sondra got out of her hospital bed a couple of nights ago and fell, of course, because since her stroke in late March, she hasn't been able to stand unassisted. The hairline frature to her femur will heal with less fuss than Francis had thought. So Sondra's third round at a NYC hospital will soon fade into her third round at a NYC nursing home, and with any luck--about this I am clear, this woman is in need of luck--she'll go home to the Village loft she and Francis share before too long. And we'll just go from here. Which really is all we can do, all any of us can do, regardless of our circumstances, and never mind whether we've been Zen pratitioners for decades or sat once and ran screaming from the zendo, never mind whether we're recovering Catholics or born again, Reformed, Conservative or Orthodox, kosher, traif or chazerai, Fundamentalist or assimilated. It's all there is. There's just here. There's just now. Thankfully, there is also just us.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
met-AH-for, like in Il Postino
1. I've been noticing the way we people like to talk up our anger and resentments like tasty little morsels that get only more flavorful with extended chewing. I've been checking out how we go looking for other people to chew with us, much the way we like to share a meal. And I've been trying not to sit down at that table. It's really hard. Or it was at first. We're social animals, pack animals, tribal. Can I still be in your tribe if I don't want to share in the ritual of making a case against the offender of the moment? I didn't want to lose my place in the pack. But the more I do it--or don't do it--the better I get at it. Mind you, the person who's passing the bowl to me doesn't necessarily end the meal when I don't serve myself. Often, she just piles it on herself. And I watch. And listen. And feel hungry. But not for what she's eating. Honestly, how long dare I extend this metaphor? Not another moment.
2. I love a bunch of poems by H. R. Hummer in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (out of print, but worth tracking down used at allbookstores.com). They're narrative and often extended metaphors. That anthology was published in 1986. When, some years later, Hummer published an essay called "Against Metaphor," I was so bummed out I didn't read it. Oh, ostrich, I love you, your tail feathers fanned, your webbed feet splayed, your rounded bill buried in the shifting sand.
3. No-metaphor love:
Beagle or Something
By April Bernard
The composer’s name was beagle or something,
one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with chorales and canticles and this piece,
a tone poem or what-have-you,
chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
The music occupied the car where
I had parked and then sat, staring at
a tree, a smallish maple,
fire-gold and half-undone by the wind,
shaking in itself,
shocking blue morning sky behind, and also
the trucks and telephones wires and dogs
and children late to school along Orange Street, but
it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that caused an uproat,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was surprised to have one—for convenience
I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half-spent but clanging
truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed
hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.
4. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. But all language is a pointing finger. Only the absence of language is the moon.
5. Shine.
2. I love a bunch of poems by H. R. Hummer in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (out of print, but worth tracking down used at allbookstores.com). They're narrative and often extended metaphors. That anthology was published in 1986. When, some years later, Hummer published an essay called "Against Metaphor," I was so bummed out I didn't read it. Oh, ostrich, I love you, your tail feathers fanned, your webbed feet splayed, your rounded bill buried in the shifting sand.
3. No-metaphor love:
Beagle or Something
By April Bernard
The composer’s name was beagle or something,
one of those Brits who make the world wistful
with chorales and canticles and this piece,
a tone poem or what-have-you,
chimes and strings aswirl, dangerous for one
whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears.
The music occupied the car where
I had parked and then sat, staring at
a tree, a smallish maple,
fire-gold and half-undone by the wind,
shaking in itself,
shocking blue morning sky behind, and also
the trucks and telephones wires and dogs
and children late to school along Orange Street, but
it was the tree that caused an uproar,
it was the tree that caused an uproat,
it was the tree that shook and shed,
aureate as a shaken soul, I remembered
I was surprised to have one—for convenience
I placed it in my chest, the heart being away,
and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking,
golden-orange, half-spent but clanging
truer than Beagle music or my forehead pressed
hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.
4. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. But all language is a pointing finger. Only the absence of language is the moon.
5. Shine.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Dream of A Naked Blog
Language is like a garment I'm accustomed to styling, fashioning. But here in this forum, I'd like so much to be transparently simple, without artifice.
I live in a large house surrounded by woods with a small dog named Anakin. He, the woods, the changing sky, the wind, these are my companions. But I have these other companions too:
I sit at home, when I sit at home, in front of the altar I've set up on a small green blanket chest. The altar cloth is a plain white hand towel which I bought at one flea market or another. In a handblown glass vase, a gift to Joy when she was up to her ears in the work of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, I have two stems of blue hyadrangea and one stem of the yard high beefy white snapdragons gardener Myra (Goddess of the Pruning Shears) has put in. The incense bowl was a gift from my friend Joe from Vermont. The tea candle holder is jasper from a rock store near the Hoover Dam where Joy and I went one afternoon when we were visiting her brother Stan and his wife Cheryl in Las Vegas. The figure is all that's left of the Buddha Joy and Evan gave me years ago; I took it with me when I went to teach in Oklahoma. Twice, it had an encounter with a tennis ball I was throwing for Anakin and each time there was less of it left afterward. At this point he is head and upper torso, and kept upright in a glass blown by Georgia Lee Hussey, a former Sarah Lawrence. The glass sits on a very small leather bound journal given to me by my friend Darren Henault years ago. It's pages are full of notes about a book I either finished and published or am still working on. I don't remember which.
I remember teaching a class in which I asked my students to explore the history of a single object belonging to a character in the story they were working on. My altar is a novel, each object a chapter, each relationship a complex web of love and sorrow and gratitude.
Above the altar hangs a piece of old linoleum which my then girlfriend Linda framed for me when she was working for Laurie in her frameshop. Black wood. White matting. Blue floral linoleum, worn edges, and every footstep that crossed it, every spilled cup of coffee or tear or blood, every table dragged across it, the feet of every bed that held aloft someone sleeping or making love or dying--it's all there. On a small brass upholstery tack next to the framed linoleum hang beads: mixed stones from Francis and Sondra, tiny green beads from which hang a floral jade charm from Amra, Iranian worry beads with a long silky green tassel from Taha, jade beads from China from Marc and Jen.
Nearby the altar is a narrow bed, the bedspread from a tag sale in Peekskill. Who slept under it? My writing table from an antique story up near Rico and Eloisa's country house, where someone served many someones scrambled eggs, baked ham, day old bread. And on it goes. On the shelves near the table, framed pictures of Francis and baby Evan, Elise and toddler Natalie, my grandmother, me at 9, me and Marc, me and Kris's boys Zev and Leo, a framed letter from Robert Farber, a small painted work by Robert from the period during which he was working on the show which became "I Thought I Had More Time."
If I say more than this about the woods and the wind, about the altar and the bed and the pictures and time, I'll lose something I think I've gotten close to here. It has to do with speaking and being quiet at the same time.
Thank you for listening.
I live in a large house surrounded by woods with a small dog named Anakin. He, the woods, the changing sky, the wind, these are my companions. But I have these other companions too:
I sit at home, when I sit at home, in front of the altar I've set up on a small green blanket chest. The altar cloth is a plain white hand towel which I bought at one flea market or another. In a handblown glass vase, a gift to Joy when she was up to her ears in the work of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, I have two stems of blue hyadrangea and one stem of the yard high beefy white snapdragons gardener Myra (Goddess of the Pruning Shears) has put in. The incense bowl was a gift from my friend Joe from Vermont. The tea candle holder is jasper from a rock store near the Hoover Dam where Joy and I went one afternoon when we were visiting her brother Stan and his wife Cheryl in Las Vegas. The figure is all that's left of the Buddha Joy and Evan gave me years ago; I took it with me when I went to teach in Oklahoma. Twice, it had an encounter with a tennis ball I was throwing for Anakin and each time there was less of it left afterward. At this point he is head and upper torso, and kept upright in a glass blown by Georgia Lee Hussey, a former Sarah Lawrence. The glass sits on a very small leather bound journal given to me by my friend Darren Henault years ago. It's pages are full of notes about a book I either finished and published or am still working on. I don't remember which.
I remember teaching a class in which I asked my students to explore the history of a single object belonging to a character in the story they were working on. My altar is a novel, each object a chapter, each relationship a complex web of love and sorrow and gratitude.
Above the altar hangs a piece of old linoleum which my then girlfriend Linda framed for me when she was working for Laurie in her frameshop. Black wood. White matting. Blue floral linoleum, worn edges, and every footstep that crossed it, every spilled cup of coffee or tear or blood, every table dragged across it, the feet of every bed that held aloft someone sleeping or making love or dying--it's all there. On a small brass upholstery tack next to the framed linoleum hang beads: mixed stones from Francis and Sondra, tiny green beads from which hang a floral jade charm from Amra, Iranian worry beads with a long silky green tassel from Taha, jade beads from China from Marc and Jen.
Nearby the altar is a narrow bed, the bedspread from a tag sale in Peekskill. Who slept under it? My writing table from an antique story up near Rico and Eloisa's country house, where someone served many someones scrambled eggs, baked ham, day old bread. And on it goes. On the shelves near the table, framed pictures of Francis and baby Evan, Elise and toddler Natalie, my grandmother, me at 9, me and Marc, me and Kris's boys Zev and Leo, a framed letter from Robert Farber, a small painted work by Robert from the period during which he was working on the show which became "I Thought I Had More Time."
If I say more than this about the woods and the wind, about the altar and the bed and the pictures and time, I'll lose something I think I've gotten close to here. It has to do with speaking and being quiet at the same time.
Thank you for listening.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Right Speech
Ango: peaceful dwelling.
So can I peacefully tell the man who is sitting in the car next to mine in the strip mall parking lot that he is doing injury to himself, his family and all sentient beings by idling his engine with the air conditioning on while he waits for his wife who's either buying stamps or having her eyes examined or trying to decide between poppyseed and sesame bagels?
What about a friend who is agonizing over the mouse held tight in the grip of a glue trap on her newly remodeled kitchen floor? Can I ease her way by inviting her to get over it?
Rilke said, "Patience is everything." I don't doubt it. But so is intention. And ego.
The man in the parked car? My intention, were I to speak to him, would be to get him to change his behavior, and possibly his world view, a long shot. If his world view included concerns about global warming, he probably wouldn't be running the engine. And my introducing the subject might actually fuel (!) his disdain for tree huggers like me. But I don't think there's a lot of ego here. It's not just for me that I'd ask. And it's not just for me that I dropped my letters in the mail box, got in my Prius and headed for home. But I'm not through with this inquiry. I suspect one of these days I'm going to take on a member of this man's tribe. I can't make his dwelling peaceful in such an encounter, but I can dwell peacefully in my own intention to wish him and me and all sentients beings a forestalling, a remediation of the environmental catastrophe I think we're facing. Except I don't think I'm going to say it like that.
My friend and the glue-trapped mouse? That's pure ego. Intention? To get her to change her behavior--actually I don't care what she does about the mouse. I just want her to stop talking about it. Probably, a kindly stated, "Can we move on to something else?" would cover it.
There's a tradition in my family. We call it "honesty," but it's got a sinister side. I saw it in my mother as a sense of vindictive entitlement--she learned it from her mother. I see it in myself--not the vindictiveness but the urge to purge. Thankfully, there is room in zazen (seated meditation) for this urge and all others. Where I dwell on the cushion (in my case, on the chair) all such things are passing clouds. Or they are whole dark skies from which I need not avert my gaze. And in the world beyond zazen? Pema Chodron writes about a pause of three complete breaths before we act. In that short while whole weather systems come and go. What's left to say or do in the wake of three inhalations, three exhalations? Less and less, I hope I find, and maybe, just maybe what remains is of finer stuff, righter stuff.
Someone asked Suzuki Roshi why he practiced zazen. He said it was with the hope that in the face of an emergency, he'd know what to do. Me too. Big sky mind can hold it all, the ease, the upset. I hear that siren blaring. Now's my chance. Breathe, yes. Speak, maybe.
So can I peacefully tell the man who is sitting in the car next to mine in the strip mall parking lot that he is doing injury to himself, his family and all sentient beings by idling his engine with the air conditioning on while he waits for his wife who's either buying stamps or having her eyes examined or trying to decide between poppyseed and sesame bagels?
What about a friend who is agonizing over the mouse held tight in the grip of a glue trap on her newly remodeled kitchen floor? Can I ease her way by inviting her to get over it?
Rilke said, "Patience is everything." I don't doubt it. But so is intention. And ego.
The man in the parked car? My intention, were I to speak to him, would be to get him to change his behavior, and possibly his world view, a long shot. If his world view included concerns about global warming, he probably wouldn't be running the engine. And my introducing the subject might actually fuel (!) his disdain for tree huggers like me. But I don't think there's a lot of ego here. It's not just for me that I'd ask. And it's not just for me that I dropped my letters in the mail box, got in my Prius and headed for home. But I'm not through with this inquiry. I suspect one of these days I'm going to take on a member of this man's tribe. I can't make his dwelling peaceful in such an encounter, but I can dwell peacefully in my own intention to wish him and me and all sentients beings a forestalling, a remediation of the environmental catastrophe I think we're facing. Except I don't think I'm going to say it like that.
My friend and the glue-trapped mouse? That's pure ego. Intention? To get her to change her behavior--actually I don't care what she does about the mouse. I just want her to stop talking about it. Probably, a kindly stated, "Can we move on to something else?" would cover it.
There's a tradition in my family. We call it "honesty," but it's got a sinister side. I saw it in my mother as a sense of vindictive entitlement--she learned it from her mother. I see it in myself--not the vindictiveness but the urge to purge. Thankfully, there is room in zazen (seated meditation) for this urge and all others. Where I dwell on the cushion (in my case, on the chair) all such things are passing clouds. Or they are whole dark skies from which I need not avert my gaze. And in the world beyond zazen? Pema Chodron writes about a pause of three complete breaths before we act. In that short while whole weather systems come and go. What's left to say or do in the wake of three inhalations, three exhalations? Less and less, I hope I find, and maybe, just maybe what remains is of finer stuff, righter stuff.
Someone asked Suzuki Roshi why he practiced zazen. He said it was with the hope that in the face of an emergency, he'd know what to do. Me too. Big sky mind can hold it all, the ease, the upset. I hear that siren blaring. Now's my chance. Breathe, yes. Speak, maybe.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
ango, peaceful dwelling
The Japanese word for practice period is ango. It means "peaceful dwelling." When Jane spoke about this matter tonight, she made a connection that interests me, quoting Dogen's phrase, "the dharma gate of joyful ease." Where is this dwelling, this peaceful place, and what gate opens onto joyful ease?
Suzuki Roshi said, "It is enough to live." Sometimes I remember that. Sometimes I even believe it. At those times, folding the laundry, washing the kitchen sink, making the beds, weeding a garden, playing with Anakin--any one of these is enough, is more than enough, is great wealth. In these acts there is peace and ease, in any moment of mindfulness too, even mindfully listening to a friend as he details the future he's planning to have with his ailing wife, those details fraught with fantasy and delusion, he as he is and I with him as he is. The simple fact of it all.
Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer opens with this sentence: "I will be her witness." There's the ticket, to not turn away from things as they are. And to what place does that ticket give you--give me passage? Ha!
'Night.
Suzuki Roshi said, "It is enough to live." Sometimes I remember that. Sometimes I even believe it. At those times, folding the laundry, washing the kitchen sink, making the beds, weeding a garden, playing with Anakin--any one of these is enough, is more than enough, is great wealth. In these acts there is peace and ease, in any moment of mindfulness too, even mindfully listening to a friend as he details the future he's planning to have with his ailing wife, those details fraught with fantasy and delusion, he as he is and I with him as he is. The simple fact of it all.
Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer opens with this sentence: "I will be her witness." There's the ticket, to not turn away from things as they are. And to what place does that ticket give you--give me passage? Ha!
'Night.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Shuso Entering Ceremony
In the fall of 2001, I watched wide-eyed as Glynn Debrocky of Empty Hand Zendo took the Shuso's seat, the seat of head monk for the practice period ahead. Traditionally, the ceremony includes a brief Q & A: three times the teacher asks the student to be shuso. Twice the student says, in effect, I respectfully demure. At that first Shuso Entering Ceremony, I thought Glynn was actually hesitating; I didn't understand it was part of the ritual. This morning, I understood that head student Patty Pecararo's responses were prescribed. I also understood this call and response between teacher and student as an expression of deep humility. I can't. I cannot. I will.
Look with me at ritual as container. Processional: The teacher enters the zendo with two attendants, one behind her, one before her, each of the two holding an inkin (small temple bell) and striking them in alternation, the attendants and their sound the vehicle that carries the teacher to her seat. Gesture: Someone directs the Shuso to her seat with a hand extended toward that seat. Within the ceremony it is an act of kindness and caring: Here is the way. Configuration: Four attendants, chosen by seniority, form a square in front of the altar, and stand like still sentinels, witnesses.
When the half hour ceremony ended, there were four or five of us still in the zendo, cushions and chairs to be set right, sutra books to tuck under zabutons, altars to replenish with stick incense, candles to extinguish. We worked in silence, silence a ritual in its own right, the container for our mindful care-taking, the tasks quotidian, joyful.
Now begins the work of the weeks ahead, one period of zazen at a time, one breath at a time. This Shuso's commitment: Something akin to a vigil in which she who watches and the object of her watchfulness are not two, not one. With hands palm to palm, I bow and in my own way take my seat beside her.
Look with me at ritual as container. Processional: The teacher enters the zendo with two attendants, one behind her, one before her, each of the two holding an inkin (small temple bell) and striking them in alternation, the attendants and their sound the vehicle that carries the teacher to her seat. Gesture: Someone directs the Shuso to her seat with a hand extended toward that seat. Within the ceremony it is an act of kindness and caring: Here is the way. Configuration: Four attendants, chosen by seniority, form a square in front of the altar, and stand like still sentinels, witnesses.
When the half hour ceremony ended, there were four or five of us still in the zendo, cushions and chairs to be set right, sutra books to tuck under zabutons, altars to replenish with stick incense, candles to extinguish. We worked in silence, silence a ritual in its own right, the container for our mindful care-taking, the tasks quotidian, joyful.
Now begins the work of the weeks ahead, one period of zazen at a time, one breath at a time. This Shuso's commitment: Something akin to a vigil in which she who watches and the object of her watchfulness are not two, not one. With hands palm to palm, I bow and in my own way take my seat beside her.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Jumping the Gun
Practice period starts tomorrow. But I've been thinking about this blog for several days, with excitement, anxiety, curiosity. I'm not accustomed to exposing myself this way. Email is between me and one carefully selected individual (though as some readers can attest, I've certainly been less careful, from time to time, about what I say there). And my writing life is a construct, fiction. In fact when I tried nonfiction, I discovered I hadn't the stomach for it.
Excitement: a new forum, a new form, coming clean, poking around. Wassup with just this, with just sitting, with just breathing, with the sky and the trees which witness my life through the skylight above my writing table?
Anxiety: a new forum, a new form, coming clean. Making a perfect ass of myself.
Curiosity: How's my tolerance these days for making a perfect ass of myself? How do I blog without making it about me, ass, cow, sunflower, dog (I should only be so lucky)? Because really, that's the point. How do I enlarge my vision vis a vis the bodhissatvah vows:
Beings are numberless. I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them
The awakened way is unsurpassable. I vow to embody it.
And do I, by virtue of even mentioning them, give full expression to my own hubris?
This blog is dedicated to my teachers, to Jane Shuman, my muse, to Patty Pecararo, hand in hand, to Misha Merrill who guides us all, to Susan Jion Postal who birthed this practitioner, to Darlene Cohen and Michael Wenger, teachers with each breath, to Suzuki Roshi with endless gratitude.
See you tomorrow.
Excitement: a new forum, a new form, coming clean, poking around. Wassup with just this, with just sitting, with just breathing, with the sky and the trees which witness my life through the skylight above my writing table?
Anxiety: a new forum, a new form, coming clean. Making a perfect ass of myself.
Curiosity: How's my tolerance these days for making a perfect ass of myself? How do I blog without making it about me, ass, cow, sunflower, dog (I should only be so lucky)? Because really, that's the point. How do I enlarge my vision vis a vis the bodhissatvah vows:
Beings are numberless. I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them
The awakened way is unsurpassable. I vow to embody it.
And do I, by virtue of even mentioning them, give full expression to my own hubris?
This blog is dedicated to my teachers, to Jane Shuman, my muse, to Patty Pecararo, hand in hand, to Misha Merrill who guides us all, to Susan Jion Postal who birthed this practitioner, to Darlene Cohen and Michael Wenger, teachers with each breath, to Suzuki Roshi with endless gratitude.
See you tomorrow.
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