Doing This Life

I went to bed last night with the urge to write.  I woke up, and it is still here.  I came to my local coffee shop just down the road, where I'm now sitting on the deck in the unexpectedly warm weather of November 1st.  Low clouds are rolling over the Catskills, and I feel nested in the valley with the warm gray wind pushing everything through.

I didn't actually have a plan as to what to write.  Sometimes I do - I get a bug up in me when I read something, or overhear a conversation that sparks a sentiment.  This morning it's just the wind in the pines, the swaying red paper lanterns above me, the feeling of emptiness like there's nothing in me to get tangled or hooked on.

On my mind these days is the most recent turning of the old, familiar wheel of Wondering How Best to Contribute to the World, so perhaps I will begin here.  Now that I think of it, that's where the spark came from last night as I spoke with a good friend about our respective journeys into work.  I spoke of feeling a bit like the priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.  He is a man wandering in Mexico in the 1930s, having lost his faith but looking to do good work and make sense of the unraveling of society around him.  My feeling of affinity is less about being some noble person than it is about trying to do some good in a society that seems clearly dysfunctional but also does not present immediate solutions.  How do I live an ethical life where I can both care for myself and also address pressing problems from a local to global scale?

In my reflections on work, the word "minister" has been on my mind these past few weeks.  The Benedictine nun who supervises me in my hospital chaplaincy training asked me to try out using the word "ministry" rather than "work" to describe what we do.  Interesting, I thought, with a little feeling of discomfort.  My mind's first inclination is to go the noun "minister," and the image of a Protestant clergyman with the black shirt and white collar insert.  Though I dress in dark shirts when at the hospital, and though patients do sometimes seem to think I am a pastor, that image feels a little strange and inaccessible to me.

The verb "to minister," however, has a little more grip for me.  Wiktionary says that it means "To attend to (the needs of); to tend; to take care(of); to give aid; to give service."  This moves me closer to the way I want to be in the world.  I feel like the act of ministering transcends the idea of work as a 40-hour divided part of my life.  I can minister by busing my own dishes at the coffeeshop, by picking up litter, by listening to the lonely person in a too-white hospital room, by volunteering to anchor some bookshelves at the local library (can you tell what I've been up to recently?).  I can minister by really putting energy into the endless/impossible practice of the three pure precepts in Buddhism - abstaining from killing, practicing good, and actualizing good for others.  In aiming to be an upright person (an insurmountable task, usually daunting to even try to comprehend), I can perhaps minister to the world.  

The world certainly needs carpenters, plumbers, nurses, social workers, painters, baristas, clerks, doctors, librarians, drivers, and all the other jobs that make up society.  But with what intention do we undertake our tasks?  Do we keep working as a highway repair man and hope that someone else will address Stand Your Ground violence?  Do we keep generating clever advertising campaigns and figure that someone's working to stop the accelerating extinction of thousands of animal species?  How can we minister to the world?

If we don't take responsibility for the whole enchilada, then we have to decide whose responsibility it is.  And that brings us to the mess of modernity.  Someone's fracking for natural gas, and polluting the air and water in the process.  So we have to hire/elect some people to decide how much the Gas Company should pay, and to whom, to meet someone else's standard of offsetting the "externalities" of drilling.  The Gas Company can get lawyers whose responsibility it is to minimize the company's responsibility.  We create organizations to keep tabs on both the government regulators and the Gas Company itself.  We create oversight committees that bring the various groups together to talk, and then issue reports that go out about what seems to be the state of affairs.   We bring in some more lawyers to decide how little or how much the Gas Company needs to disclose about its process, and who might be responsible if such-and-such a scenario might theoretically happen.  

We use up so much energy, time, and money because we perpetuate a society of division and narrow self-interest and then apply layer after layer of argument to defend ourselves from liability.  Guess what?  We're all liable.  Yes, there are Amazonian tribes deep in the jungle who have been minding their own business for perhaps millennia.  There are Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama, Wendell Barry and Julia Butterfly Hill.  Maybe we think of these folks as less culpable because they are prominent do-gooders.  But I am fairly sure that they feel responsible for this whole mess too.  It's not about perpetrators, victims, and heros, although we can certainly delineate a story along those lines.  It's about encountering all aspects of ecological destruction fully, and having the courage to be responsible.  To minister to the world. 

We don't need to go out and find more problems so that we can flagellate ourselves with some story about how we're not doing enough.  That's just another way of making life Me-centric.  Oh, poor me, I'm so overwhelmed by the state of the world because I'm so sensitive and really aware of the problems out there.  Notice that this implies that I am special and better than those folks who haplessly go around seeming not to know that the whole thing is burning.  It is our job simply to wake up to what is, to cultivate an ability to face all situations with a sense of responsibility.

What happens when I do that, when I really look at the police's abuse of power and melting glaciers and broken healthcare?  Won't I freak out and lose my mind?  To be flippant, yes, we're lucky if we lose our minds, our habitual way of relating to the world.  To be more practical, I do well when I don't worry ahead of time about how it's going to be.  That's just a game run by my little egocentric hamster in the wheel, designed to perpetuate the hurry and chatter of holding myself separate from the rest of the world and avoiding responsibility.  In fact, I can just look at these situations, and feel.  I need to begin with just feeling.  Just letting myself be sad, or angry, or whatever, without immediately jumping into fear - "I can't let myself be with this feeling because what will I do with all that feeling?"  I run that racket a lot, but I know from occasional glimmers of experience that I don't need to.  I can feel things fully, and I'll be okay.  

Perhaps ministering to the world is just entering each moment by living the question "How can I help?"  And then listening with the ear of the heart, as encouraged at the beginning of the Rule of St. Benedict.  My Zen teacher told me that trying to be good or do the right thing (i.e. acting on my ideas rather than responding openly to the situation) will immediately stifle my ability to help.  I can feel that, when my mind takes over and sells me a bill of goods made up of impatience, anxiety, desperation, and being separate from the world.  So my practice these days is to slow down, keep slowing down, notice my breath, and let my waters get calm as best I can.  How can I minister to the world in each moment?  How can I help?

 

A Feeling of Mist Coming Down

This morning I woke up on the slightly anxious side of the bed.  I only got a few minutes of grace before my mind went into chatter like a squirrel on a mild dose of adderall.  Even though the themes aren't fresh, and are in fact well-worn like stones at a 2500-year-old pilgrimage site, they can still grab me.  The flavor of this morning's neurotic chit-chat is:

a) I'll never make enough money.
b) I'm separate from the rest of the world and everyone else.
c) A generalized feeling that I'll die penniless and alone, perhaps before I get to my entitled life expectancy of about 75.

This chatter came and sat meditation with me, which I thought was quite generous on its part, to devote a half hour of its precious time when it could have been out harassing any number of other people.  It persisted into my morning tea (it chose a nice black assam, fair trade of course).   It quivered a bit when I started journaling about what was coming up for me in the moment, but showed good spirit and redoubled its efforts to throw me off of being present.  Then we read a poem together, and things... shifted a bit.

from Walt Whitman's Song of the Broad Axe:

                                                                      5

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch'd wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,

Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-lifters of the departing,

Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth,

Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where money is plentiest,

Nor the place of the most numerous population.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,

Where the city stands that is belov'd by these, and lobes them in return and understands them, 

Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,

Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,

Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,

Where the slave ceases, and the master of slave ceases,

Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons,

Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of death pours its sweeping and unript waves,

Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority,

Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay, 

Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on themselves,

Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,

Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,

Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;

Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,

Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,

Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,

There a great city stands.

This passage really resonated with me.  Where is such a place? Do great cities that even get close to this ideal exist?  Do great towns, villages, hamlets exist like this?  Did they ever?  Is Bhutan, with its mythic status among liberals, a bastion of such virtue and uprightness?  Portland?  Austin?  Minneapolis?  Brattleboro?  Flagstaff?  Bend?  Asheville?  Detropia?

I think this passage opened things up for me because I imagine the feeling of living in such a place.  Is it a place where we take care of each other?  Is there good, sturdy work for the hands?  Is it the kind of place where we cultivate the patience to help each person give their unique gift to the world?  Is it a place where wanting to steward the world is all you need to find a home?  Is it the kind of place where we see scarcity everywhere except in the coffers of the Perpetual War Machine? Is it the place where we tolerate the sentiment of "I wish I could help, but...," in ourselves and others?  Is it the kind of town or country where we spend much of our precious life seeking out who to praise, who to blame, who is responsible for each thing, dividing and measuring this seamless and defiantly beautiful world?

The feeling that Whitman evokes of this great city is beautiful.  Holding that feeling in my heart, I look at the world we are in and feel a deep longing to transform it.  Are we headed towards a vision of society that we love, or are we coping and telling our children all of our rationalizations for why things don't work out?  When I see you and you see me, can we really see each other as the same, made of the same stuff with only the thinnest illusion of separate identities?  How can I be responsible for the oil-covered pelicans, the homeless man sprawled on the sidewalk, the girl whose mother is attending to the smart phone rather than her? 

I know it all starts with me, though I so rarely know how to begin.  One way of describing my zen practice is learning to trust in not knowing how to begin.  Trusting that each situation is unique and I can't know ahead of time how to enter it, yet needing to enter it since I am fully in this world all the time.  It feels like a tall order, especially on mornings like this when I'm anxious and feeling separate from  everything.  I want to defect to a narrow self-interest - figure out how to take care of myself, and if I have any energy left over, then I can care for someone or something else.  But do I get that choice?  Can I withhold and treat myself as separate?  When will I have enough, or have things just right, so that I can then enter the world and take up caring wholeheartedly for everything around me?  These questions reveal their impossible nature, and if I've got grace and luck, I can see them, let them go, and enter the world again in this moment, just as I am. 

This morning holds nothing special, nothing to communicate or hold on to.  In a few hours or a few days, it will almost certainly have passed from my mind, and if you've read this, probably yours as well.  This is as it should be.  What could I offer as a solid lesson to myself or others that clearly exists and persists in time?  Nothing.  These words are just an offering, hopefully as transient as those white dandelion seeds taken up by the wind.  If you take courage from them, or a feeling of being less alone in the world, or anger at how I've got it all wrong, then you have my deepest thanks for offering your response as a gift.  

from William Stafford's "Whatever Comes":

In the fall, rain of the happy tears returns with its big step over the mountains. 
Gray sweeps here again, draping trees and buildings. 
Air floats up the cellar stairs with its fresh face turned toward the open. 

The new season means its all right -- time is. 
Sure, those evil things happened in your life, but they're over. 
Here comes the rain to forgive, wide as outdoors and so welcoming it doesn't care whether it knows you.

I'm laughing at the person I was. Who cares how serious my face looks? 
Now -- on the mayor's hat, on the poor woman at the corner, all over fashionable people -- 
comes the wide gray forgiving rain.

Any Edge Will Do

A few days ago I started again, getting out the whetstone and attempting to sharpen my practice.  I started a two month period of giving up facebook and recorded music, to feel what comes up for me when I stop up those leaks of vital energy.  I'm also off of all added sugar for the rest of the 2013 - sugar, cane sugar, evaporated cane juice, honey, stevia, agave, maple syrup, turbinado sugar, etc etc...   Were there even this many types of sugar when we were kids?  It now seems like an industry mainly targeted at convincing me that whatever sugar I'm eating is okay because it has a longer fancy-pants name.  

Some people have asked me what I'm aiming for in these experiments, especially the eschewing of recorded music.   For me, it's important to pay attention when I get a whiff of an addiction.  To claim that I really see my addictions clearly is way too boastful, as I consider them to be blind spots.  But sometimes I get a faint scent on the wind, and if I'm lucky I can muster the courage to undertake further inquiry.  For sugar, it comes up pretty often.  I notice that I've been eating several cookies at the monastery on Sundays, I've been adding more honey to my coffee each day, or I'm eating more dark chocolate with the rationalization that "cocoa is healthy" but in fact I'm craving the sweet side of it more than anything.  I've abstained from sugar before for up to six months, and I can now draw up upon those experiments.  I can recall how good I feel getting clean of it, and how it becomes easier day by day so that within a week or two I don't miss it at all.  

The recorded music fast is something new.  I've bounced it around in my head ever since my friend Peter told me years ago about a friend of his who did it.  That memory has stuck with me and has fascinated me for a decade.  Coupled with that, I've really begun in the past year to notice how strong of a drug music is for me.  (I don't think it's a coincidence that this awareness has come at the same time that I spend a large amount of life sitting quietly, listening to the stream nearby, and hiking alone in the woods).  I can and do use music, especially the music that I've collected over the years, to manipulate my moods.  I can search through thousands of songs to find just the right one to nurture a feeling of elation or sadness, to counteract my loneliness, to wallow in self-pity, or really anything else I can imagine.  Having an alienated psychedelic morning?  Radiohead.  Road trip through the winding hills to pick blueberries?  A Bob Dylan rambling ballad is always reliable.  Angry about social injustice?  Joe Pug (if you don't know him, check him out).  

The insidious thing about using the music drug is that I am really trying to keep control.  I am attached to a mood and don't want it to stop.  Or, I'm not okay with my present feeling (usually sadness or existential boredom) and I want to literally combat it.  I want to manipulate my feelings rather than just be with them, learn to see them clearly, and let them pass (which they always, always, always do, despite what my little hamster-wheel mind tries to convince me of).  They come and they go.  But with music, I have such strong feelings associated with certain songs that I try to use them to control my emotional landscape.  Sometimes it's even my trying to lose myself in the music - to go ignorant and dull (even through high-energy music) rather than turn around and face my present feeling with curiosity and an open heart.

This attempt at control rests on inherently shaky ground, however.  I notice that I'll sit in the car for a minute or two or three or four looking for just the right song to start my drive to work that morning.  I'll come home and spend minutes looking for just the right iPod mood to make dinner to.  In this searching, there is a feeling that I'll find just the right music, and that it will somehow make my mood okay.  If I don't find "just the right music" in an "acceptable" amount of time, I notice that I begin to get frustrated with myself.  I start thinking about how I should clean out my music collection, or wondering why I accumulate all this music that really isn't "doing anything for me."  I think about how I should be more decisive, or how I should be willing to accept what comes along and just get on with my day.  Next thing I know, I'm immersed in a land of Shoulds, Clinging to Control, and Feeling Bad about Myself.  Sound familiar? 

This experiment is about attempting to let go of control, and paying attention to what happens.  Already in the three mornings without music, I've noticed a slight agitation in myself when driving to work.  What is that?  A vague feeling in my chest or in my gut.  I might label it frustration, but what is it if I don't buy into a label and just feel it?  Is there more depth or color to it?  How does it feel to call it Anxiety about Being with Myself Just As I Am?  Do I feel any truth in that sentiment?  If so, what then?  Do I respond by escaping elsewhere - rich food (oh no! I'm off sugar!  well, bacon then...)?  facebook (cut-off again by my own @#&! experiments)?  An actual book?  A run?  Making art?  Call a friend?  Can I just be with it for a minute, make friends with it, invite that feeling in for a cup of earl grey and catch up on old times? 

There is nothing inherently good or bad about any of these responses, as far as I can tell.  What I attempt to notice, though, is the feeling that I'm attaching to and turning into a solid idea of How Things Are.  I have some sort of feeling in my gut, and the next thing I know I've labeled it firmly and laid out a path of necessary action.  These experiments in abstention are a way for me to back up a little bit in this cycle of sensation, feeling, labeling, and acting.  It takes a lot of practice to just be with these sensations and not get lost in the reactions of my mind.  Each time I do, though, I get a little bit of space, a little breathing room, a little freedom.  Not freedom from having sensations keep coming up in me, but a little freedom to be less reactive.  There's some secret here that my teachers point to, that my favorite authors point to, and that my own experience points to.  I can't quite grasp it with my mind, but I think that's part of the point.  

So, how do you want to turn the wheel of your life?  Where is the knife edge of practice that you want to dance along?  Where do you get a hint of something that you want to pay close attention to?  How will you go about doing that?  I have nothing to offer but inspiration, and only that if you feel inspired by all these ramblings.  But know that I draw inspiration and strength from you, my community of friends and fellow practitioners of all things good, bad, ugly, and beautiful.  Thanks for reading, and may your practice be strong. 

Withdrawing to the Mountains

Snow came again last night to Mt. Tremper.  At first just a few inches of icy fluff, the kind that lifts and blows away gently as you plow through it with rubber boots.  By this morning, it had grown to six damp and dense inches, perfect for snowballs launched off the iron bridge on the way to the monastery.  Now it's hovering like a swing state between melting and icing thing over.  The Beaverkill Creek ate it all up as it fell, the dark water still swirling in contrast to the heaps of white perched delicately on the banks and the boulders in midstream.  In spite of tomorrow's equinox, winter is refusing to go gently into spring.  I love it.

Jess was reading an article to me today from the recent issue of Orion magazine.  In it the author offers some thoughts on the nature of our ecological and societal collapse, and then reflects on his answers to this question: At this moment in history, what would not be a waste of my time?  His answers (in bulleted brief - he elaborates in a paragraph or two for each one):

1) Withdrawing.
2) Preserving non-human life.
3) Getting your hands dirty.
4) Insisting on nature's value beyond utility.
5) Building refuges.

The one that grabbed me was, of course, number one. 

Withdrawing.  I have been reflecting all afternoon on this option in my life.  Am I withdrawing right now?  In choosing to live in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, and to prioritize study and practice of zen over other pursuits available to me, am I withdrawing?  If so, does that "mean" anything?  Am I violating a moral imperative?

I have heard from many thoughtful young people, and a few older than myself, that the question of whether and how to withdraw is a big one in life.  As we continue to destroy the planet we live on, we face an infinitely complex crisis, larger than any one aspect of human society or the biosphere.  It can feel so overwhelming that withdrawal seems to be the only option.  How could someone not withdraw in the face of such interwoven injustice, destruction, cruelty, greed, and anger, especially when it is clear that we are all thoroughly involved in perpetuating it?  What can I do to create a positive change in this maelstrom of life?  Is it reasonable to throw myself metaphorically into the gears of this machine of destruction?  Is that something other than withdrawing? Is middling along in the status quo but thinking a lot about social critiques a way of withdrawing from action? 

As I dig deeper, I reflect on what it means to withdraw.  I have discovered and verified time and again that even sequestering myself in a remote monastery for a week of uninterrupted silent practice cannot free me from entanglements of the world.  I can have deeply felt moments of calm in a still zendo, and then come downstairs and feel anxious about the conventionally grown vegetables in the salad.  As I move through life, either in silent reflection, choosing groceries, or ripping lumber on a table saw, I am in the world and the world is in me. In this sense, I'm not even sure how I could withdraw. 

Here at the monastery, we talk of zazen (seated formal zen meditation) as sitting in order to open up to reality just as it is.  For years, before I had my own zazen practice, I thought of meditation as retreating from the world.  You sat still and blocked out distractions from the outside.  Then you worked to somehow clear away distracting thoughts in your head.  I thought it was withdrawal, and I thought it was possible.  Now that I practice, I am beginning to deeply experience the impossibility of that.  When I practice zazen, I see how completely porous (and then non-existent) the boundary is between "me" and "the rest of the world."  There is no withdrawing - in fact, my practice is to enter the world as thoroughly and ceaselessly as I can. 

So if I can't withdraw in a silent zazen retreat, what does withdraw even mean?  I have no clear understanding of it.  I like the idea of withdrawing from systems that are oppressive, unjust, and/or broken - capitalism in America, our healthcare and health insurance systems, all societies that run on massive resource degradation, etc.  I think there is something noble in withdrawing from them.  It is a rejection, a moral statement that reflects our character as we choose to not participate and then accept the consequences of that action. 

But how do we withdraw when the whole system is dysfunctional and we can't escape participating in it?  The health care system in the U.S. seems to be a perfect example.  The system is terribly broken, as indicated by the number of uninsured, the cost of insurance to those who do buy it, the degrading quality of care when you actually get it, and the ineffectual political system where we perpetuate it with greed and fear.  I can't in good conscience participate in such a system, yet I have no alternative.  If I opt out, then I take a risk of losing my shirt in a big way if I ever need in-depth medical care.  Getting fleeced by for-profit health insurance companies (who have been shown to make concerted efforts not to pay when the time comes to use your coverage) seems to be the "safer" choice, where I basically become complicit in order to protect my meager ass(ets).  Really??  How do I withdraw from this?  Do I take one for the mythical Team and go without insurance, while diligently writing letters to my congressman laying out the facts and hoping for change?  Even the Dalai Lama says that we should give up hope as a strategy. 

This question perplexes me.  I'm currently a high-maintenance mammal on an overtaxed biosphere that desperately needs a lighter load, yet I'm certainly not close to withdrawing from that position either.  My existence is a burden on the planet, yet I love this experience of being alive and moving through the world.  I love sitting zazen quietly, taking photographs, building small structures, cooking Indian-fusion burritos, hiking in the hills.  If I built a hut on the mountain, hauled a 50 lb. sack of rice up there, and sat facing the wall and watching my beard grow, am I withdrawing?  I'm still eating and breathing, and I'm still engaging in all the struggles by choosing to not fight them tooth and nail.  While I am living as this loose arrangement of atoms called Chris, can I withdraw from anything?  Or is my only option to lean into it, to make a sincere effort to wake up and clarify my role in this seamless, beautiful catastrophe of life? 

No answers here.  We work our jobs and collect our pay.  We're gliding down the highway and we're slip sliding away too.  It seems this is my practice, to accept what I can and change what I can't.  And all the while, keep cultivating patience and taking a view so long that it brings you back to this moment, this breath.  How will you begin right now to withdraw, and to advance? 

winterscape

 This morning no words -

memorizing the sky, trees

touch the braille colors.

 

 

Watch the sky glow gray,

all is soft ice.  A lone crow

calls nothing special.