Dispatch from Mt. Tremper in the Heart of Autumn

At times it sounds trite, but these days it feels so fresh - I came to train here at the monastery because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and avoid coming to my deathbed and worrying whether I could have done more to wake up to life.  

These first six weeks of residential training at Zen Mountain monastery have been so many things - a microscope, a pressure cooker, improvisational dance, a dream, an escape, a stone well in the middle of an empty field at sunset.  As residents we are charged to do our best to pay attention in every moment and see what our minds are doing.  When we get lost, we acknowledge that and return our attention to this moment.  This process repeats itself endlessly.  As I enter such a strong of a container of awareness practice, many things about myself and the world are illuminated.

For instance, the teachers have given me the assignment for this year to be the bookkeeper.  Say it with me... yikes!  Having never had a desk job, and being generally averse to spending a lot of life seated in front of a computer, my initial reaction was strong resistance.  Due to being in the monastery, however, turning down the job is not really an option.  So now I'm the bookkeeper.  

What do I do as bookkeeper?  I enter lots of invoices for various retreats, try to stay on top of people paying their student dues, make sure the ins and outs of money flows match up precisely, assist the office manager in making sure the bills get paid on time, etc.  What else do I do?  I have some moments of deep struggle.  I'm on an unfamiliar PC, doing work that is very new to me, and trying to pay attention to a series of small tasks that all need to be entered with both accuracy and precision even if I'm doing 30 in a row.  I can't zone out or else I end up making mistakes, which I've certainly done in my first month.  If I do make a mistake, it's still bookkeeping - I have to go back and correct it and leave a paper trail for anyone who may look at it in the future and try to understand what happened.  

On a deeper level, I get to see and feel myself doing this job.  When I'm stuck, unsure how to proceed, and don't want to interrupt the office manager yet again to get help with a simple task, how am I proceeding in that moment?  Whatever I do is my response, from freezing up to getting angry at myself to just asking for help.  I feel stories come up, stories that feel deep and old.  I feel tense because I think that my identity as "someone who gets things done and is highly competent" is being threatened.  Is that really true?  I don't know.  I have to be patient and look more closely.  

When I slow down and pay meticulous attention, I also see this job as a chance to give.  Someone has to take care of the money.  It is foolish to deny that we live in a society that places great emphasis on money and how it flows.  I am sometimes honored, and subsequently humbled, that they have chosen me to keep the books even for a year.  They must see something in me that I don't always see, especially in my narrow, fearful moments.  It is also a chance to see myself in a new light.  Maybe I can be meticulous and detail-oriented in a computer job.  If it doesn't always come easy, so what?  I have found nothing in life worth doing that does not require some degree of patience and effort.  

So really, who am I?  Am I a carpenter who is now stuck in a desk job?  I have done a lot of carpentry in my life, but does that mean I am a carpenter?  That sounds suspiciously like there is a Platonic essence of "me" in the universe, which doesn't sit well since I've never actually found that.  Am I competent or incompetent?  Another hard question.  I'm put in a position with very little training and expected to do my best.  It is perfectly reasonable, and expected, really, that I will have lots of questions for a while as I learn how to do things.  Does competency have some independent existence, and I get to have it or not have it?  I don't think so, but it sure feels like that sometimes.  

Am I a thing (soul, bag of skin, carpenter, bookkeeper, poet), or is there just the process of life unfolding?  If I am a thing with a real existence, where and when is that thing?  I'm certainly not the same moment to moment.  I look different every day.  I'm physically different after every breath, every sip of tea, every meal, every trip to the bathroom.  No scientist has yet located either the soul or the mind in our bodies anywhere.  If there is just process, then how do I make peace with that when sometimes I really, really want to be a thing, especially a competent, thoughtful, kind, funny, handsome... well, you get it.  These are the kind of reflections that come and go when you're bookkeeping at a monastery in the mountains.

So am I just navel-gazing, asking ontological and epistemological questions while avoiding real encounters with life?  A valid question, especially in these times of dire need.  I think of this when people still burn down churches in the South in response to black people organizing for their own peace and safety.  I think of this when I read about mass shootings and the age of mass incarceration.  I think of this when I read about every side torturing people from the other side in Every War, Everywhere.  Someone needs to slow down this insanity train we call human civilization.  Is it me?  Am I doing my part?

I don't know, but I can tell you this.  Right now I don't see my way to a life of cloistered monastic living.  In some ways it would be appealing.  I get to live in a well-functioning intentional community of people committed to trying to be kind and honest with each other.  I'm really glad I get to practice in this intense setting for a year, because I so clearly see the benefit in examining and illuminating our true nature.  I think zen practice is really great for that.  Certainly not the only way, but a powerful one.  

What I want to carry out into the world is a softer, more pliable sense of self.  The more I practice, the more often I see that you and I are deeply, truly connected.  We are indeed all just aspects of this beautiful process of life unfolding.  When I can really rest in this process, I feel less defensive and more open.  I can listen and be more present with those in need.  I am kinder to myself, and want to be kind to others in turn.  I see more of the world as sacred and worthy of my care and regard.  I see that to truly turn outwards, we need to first turn the light around and examine ourselves - with curiosity, love, and patience.

Who are you?  How do you want to be in the world?  I know that we all want to do something generous with our lives, to contribute to healing rather than hurting.  How will we offer our deepest, brightest truth?  I don't think it is found in a solid thing, either out in the world or inside ourselves.  So where is it?  

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

           

                       - William Stafford

Changing gears on the same highway

Yesterday, I put away all my tools.  I shook out the sawdust from the nooks and crannies, and wiped off the well-used sawblades coated with a fine layer of pitch, copper, and paint.  I put a little lithium grease in the rotating base of my miter saw.  I swept out my truck, and wiped down the boxes that hold all these useful treasures.  I boxed up all the odds and ends from my past three years of carpentry here in the mountains - the remnants of nails, screws, glue, blades, chalk, and caulk.  It was a nice walk down memory lane, thinking of the the jobs I've done while laying out my life in the dappled shade of a Saturday afternoon.

I did all this in preparation for entering the zen monastery in the beginning of September.  I'm retiring for a year, perhaps more, to change the focus of my life.  I feel a little sadness at closing down my carpentry work, but not too much.  Mainly I'm feeling the energy of making a conscious change in direction, of switching the tack of my life for at least a while.

We live our lives as a response to the circumstances of the world around us, and the world of thoughts and feelings within us.  This move is a response to the life I live in, to the life I'm creating as I go along.  I think of it as karma - not a reward or punishment, nor a clear case of some kind of cause and effect.  For me karma is about working with the energy, patterns, and threads of my life without worrying too much about why things seem to be the way they are.  (In fact, the Buddha warned against trying to "figure out" karma in an explicit way.  He said it is infinitely complex and will make you crazy if you try to pin it down.)

There are various threads of my karma that I can roughly perceive in my life right now.  I'm drawn to zen practice (meditation, work, simplicity, frugality, and a worldview that I share with other practitioners).  I am privileged enough to be able to focus on practice for a while, which is no small thing in a world where many people need to struggle just to survive.  I am in the prime of my life physically, so I am able to give with my body and mind in ways that I may not be able to in the future.

Also, I feel that, right now, living in a monastery is a valid response to the tangible insanity of our modern culture.  Mass shootings have become common.  The climate has become unstable.  Systemic violence between the police and people of color seems to be everywhere.  Economic inequality and democratic breakdown are pairing to create a modern fusion of complacency and alienation unprecedented in human history as far as I can tell.

In my time in the monastery, I aim to explore the roots of these social and ecological problems in myself.  It has become clear in the past three years of zen practice that the greed and anger out there in the world are also present in me, as long as I hold on to the notion of a separate self that I need to defend from the world.  I can make the case that my anger is different from the anger of someone shooting people in a church, but I also see that the roots of experience that I touch in my meditation and reflection are the same roots that motivate racial hatred and killing.  As long as I hold myself as separate from the rest of the world in any way, then I will, at some point, necessarily have to defend this Self in thoughts, speech, or action from things that seem to threaten my identity.  How that unfolds is the story of humanity's shadow - wars, slavery, oppression, endless arguments about right and wrong.

For me, I've discovered that a powerful antidote to the fundamental problem of a separate Self is to turn the light around and examine myself.  Who am I?  What aspects of me or the world are actual, real Things?  As I investigate all the phenomena of the world, I have so far only discovered that everything arises and passes away.  If that is true, than what is my identity that I keep clinging to?  Why do I tenaciously cling to an illusory sense of self?  How can I soften that sense of self through being kind and loving?

My answers are not in any particular actions, but in how I am living my life.  It is the process rather than the content, if you will.  How can I sip a cup of coffee generously?  How can I be firm with someone compassionately?  How can I get closer to anger in myself or others?  How can I accept the world as it seems to be without necessarily endorsing the aspects that I dislike?  This is my journey right now.  It feels good, it is sufficient beginning, and yet it is only a beginning.  I hope every moment in my life is like that.  

In Buddhism we talk about merit, which I take roughly to mean good or useful energy.  We offer it or dedicate it to others, as a reminder that our practice is actually to help the whole world and not just move ourselves along some imagined path of self-improvement.  In that spirit, if I should make any merit this year, I offer it to all those who need it.  It's for you in your rough spots, as was all the energy that helped me through my hard times.  Maybe it's all the good things in our lives that we recollect and call upon in our efforts to make the world a better place.

In packing up my tools, I felt deep gratitude to those who have helped me along the way by teaching me, working with me, hiring me, criticizing me, supporting me, and doing everything else that needed to be done.  This goes beyond carpentry into chaplaincy, teaching, backpacking, painting, and writing.  It goes into the nooks and crannies of my life, into the marrow of my curious bones.  I am supported by the efforts of all those who have come before since the beginning of time, which is such a tremendous gift.  If you are reading this, the gift of this moment has been given to you too.  What a joy and a treasure...

tender moment from a Japanese master

A world without

the scattering of blossoms,

without the clouding

over of the moon, would deprive

me of my melancholy. 

- Saigyo

I like this poem for reminding me that my whole journey is nourishing.  It's not even that I find myself in a melancholy mood right now.  For me the power comes from the simple reminder that every passing cloud and shadow in my heart, as well as all the sunshine of joy, is a precious gift given to me.  It's the only life I have.  

child river summer

claims you in that sweet breeze...

the maples, not uprooted a sacred inch, are

        carrying you home.

those crowded thoughts

are rendered                  nowhere

in the wholeness of

a warm cradle solstice.

all these collected efforts are similarly empty

to the shadow tangibles

of ducks on the sky,

rocketing downstream

as a creatively simple braid

of eloquence.

our life is laughter and forgetting

        into the pickling tears of wiz-dumb,

speechlessly recalcitrant.

tonight left me Nothing

as the broadest gift conceivable

in the rhapsody of moon    

on rust

on shivering

  bright

   water.

drop spindle of june morning

it is not exactly joy

that brings me

softly through the barefoot pines

of a June dawn

it is perhaps the dew,

the awe of feathery grass clumps

under my rough arches,

the harsh press of 

acorn caps loving my whole journey

the sweet stolen moment

of solitude,

the vain attempt

to do the nothing work

of dissolving...

just an arc of breath

by the sycamore,

the slender black bird, hopping

on a dead branch

among the ribald orchestra of summer green.

rediscovered porch truths

speckled May mountain

said a prayer for all that is gone,

bowed carelessly with devotion

to what is.

a small listing hut gives shape

to the whole valley - you are a hermit everywhere.

sleeping on straw,

you midwife all the wild roses

and swinging arcs of cardinals,

razor red in the smudged green canvas of trees.

your hands and thoughts are so clear,

they must be integral

to this dream fabric.

look! a sleepy vice sits with rusty bolts,

perfectly still on a leaning table

between the lanky pines.

an old brass lamp hangs

in soft morning mist, glowing

on the stream's surface.

a bough tugs at my shoulder -

leaning, I gaze in the swirls.

On a Bridge Before Dawn, Recollecting Last Night's Rain

you friends friends friends
hurled sweetly
three hundred thousand deep
jewels bursting on the drive home pavement
in the high beams
wrapping the backroad car
in poetry demands

stepping in from the broad
sheet of blank canvas deluge,
did we join 
ordinarily
in dishwashing the slender volume
of preparing for sleep?

the roof sounds of steady gale
call all over this skin
and ease into dreams
(steady Cadillacs on
easy broken highways
filled with vacancy)

the lathe of sleepwake, sleepwake...
an old hand is working on
this body with a tested gouge,
the soul pickles in an oak barrel
with loose slats,
weeping into the gaps,
breathing the joy air of
a roughed-out container

this palette consciousness
of Wow
Flowering Gratitude
Fall On My Knees Simplicity,
all the Bestest things
to pallbear our dancing days
across the river dark
at appointed-by-no-one time

my old friends with Big Sky beards
coarse wilderness rivers
women with strong joy and laments,
hop on a prayer-bead string
and meander on down
the backroads,
lead me
with sweet songs
of a place n' time

a smooth cobalt bottle
eased through the rapids
and quietly turns
in the stillwater and last
moonlight

I pick up its emptiness
and turn it out
on the sand banks -
the gentle heft
of its thousand lifetimes
ripening towards
this ordinary today.

tanka of turning seasons

Taking wild refuge,

the sun has cut off torpor...

cold water sparkles.

Endless as sweet blue rivers,

spring sweeps road dust in soft curls.

from out of here

heartbeat larger than time

like a tall pine

splitting the sky darkly

things reconciling themselves

as old friends

jagged strokes simply enhance

the soft space of a silk canvas

across the roiling stream

stepping stones vanish gently

into the cool shadows

winterlong

a few barefoot steps

breaking into old ice crust -

sparrow laughs on down.

feeble winter in these sounds...

hard river cracks for young oaks.

This story could be true,

a thousand interpretations of light

gold and poison in my ambitious veins.

Coming down into that Montana,

that highway of broad masculine sky

was swift resuscitation.  It is with me now

in this boxy moment

the curving wall of obscuring breath.

Will my patience grow so free

as crabgrass, kudzu, wild white pines

on a full night of life?

I have always been lost

in the mountains,

even as they rescued me

laughing.

a dual winter

the yearning moon is
aching its way around
the other side of February earth.

in dawn's silver needles,
my gaze is enormous
my slightest movements appetitive...
my root fingers explore the old knots
of Rumi teaching.

making the whole winter a song,
we can pray it to the 
lake sky, joining all those living
in oppression
in our own faint way, real candles
in a long night of unknowing.

here on the edge, competent snow squeezes us still,
my relevance and Big Thoughts
eaten by the space between
sparrow's cluster of voice.

everything that last night's moon
wanted me to receive -
the dull silver light of which I'm tired,
the crazed squirrel leaping full and true on powdered limbs -
is infusing space with a vital breath.

joining it again, we upturn to
the memory of spring sun
and leaving our pine box
right in time.

Wild atlas of the cold sun,

trees pointing the shivering way

in the bare late morning

grasping with evil or good

all this art and ordinary life

become what they are

traceless... the old rafters

fill the kitchen with knots and nails.

a particular way out of this

All shades of people talk

'what is to be done?'

a starting point leans out a tenement window

on the ashen street,

young yet in these dark times she says

'the world is on fire'

somewhere, the sun shines

on an oil tanker bobbing the Pacific,

moonlight falls on a suit and tie

embezzling someone's million dollars.

a man from twenty years of innocent prison time

is suddenly turnkey free

without a whisper of sorry

from the crooked bars.

perhaps justice begins with loving ourselves

and not salting the wounded world

quite so much...

clear a space for contrition,

forgiveness echoes forgiveness.

graffiti our tight dead habits

with news of

Wanting to make good.

poetry ends and begins again -

redemption is without source or edge,

the space beyond what we can cage

with our Knowing.

that girl skinned her knees

listening to the world.

here are the gravel and flesh bits

for you.

In This Gift Trajectory

Wild for the safety of now,

I get a glimpse in the sage night

that if I got it all just right -

brick sidewalks of my childhood,

seeing each thought lovingly

cutting potatoes with full attention

in the chilly dawn -

I am still swaddled in the Endless

stream of things.

Everything ripening in its time,

each sweet or tart apple

drops

into the broad meadow,

full of seeds

full of sacred devotions,

bowing in the nonchalant free fall.

I walk through that field,

wild grasses and sky

slipping gently through my

rough hourglass hands.

cold comes in, always a surprise
when its vine is in your marrow
(you know)

it's as if the wind has permeated
like a feeling that photoshops the cosmos
into love, ambition, restlessness,
nothing rearranged but everything
touched and retouched
down to the space
between the subatomic whirlygigs...

my fingers, His fingers
touching the earth...
could have been a night like this,
upstate New York bearing deep witness
to the endemic pandemonium
of beauty, as expressed in modern dance of
shivers
rippling the hot mug enclosed
in these old two-step kind of bones

self-resolving threads

inkbrush drawing of night

hours before the moon busts

feathery down to earth,

ten million dreams

taking the shape of empty space

time to disappear,

flannel evening a rising tide

to dissolve the thin fortress

of today's Making Sense

lilting gently to sleep

everything rights itself

in the trade wind of Now

stone fireplace warms

an unperturbed cat

stretched, eyes closed to the flames

words sound like this - snow

drowning green needles, wood drifts

spelling broad kindness

Held and Belonging

river of wind, wide throttle in the big
big night embrace.  dreamt of feet slapping
slapping the pan earth, of belonging
belonging anywhere in that way of helpless
wounded healer.  cultivate such
such an approach, injured by dint
dint of walking a time, a peace
on this great earth, this pan earth
clods broken by my plow-effort-living
living separate for a while, such a 
fuss of dreaming it right from wrong

maestro trying to vanish in plain sight
sight of the blind thread of my journey,
tell me is the atom's song 
song really love?

stuttering on these thin ideas
ideas are big two-hand stones
smooth for making a ring of held fire
fire where I'm always belonging
warm belly and cold back to the
big night embrace.  fireflies or winter stars
stars respond to the plain, the
apparently usual small things
where we belong.

the perfect vanilla bean of nights

dark crusted yard
on a lumbering heart
with a broad hug of wind
and icicle dart

windchimes from nowhere,
a cast iron stove,
warm air is sweeter
in the orange empty glow.

both sides of my skin
are a savory mystery,
the tides of my grin
are shifting with certainty

multitude dreams
and empty word wells
leave a bit too much space
for those who would tell

a descendent of visions
a reader of leaves
i can't find my ground
nor want to bereave

profoundly okay
and dancing with friends
we cut to the core
as the beginning, it ends

on good days
I'm a carpenter by smell...
pine sawdust through and through
in my socks and mostly empty pockets

i sniff out a table top
in a delightfully split slab of black birch
rippled and laughing its way into another incarnation

light icy snow
smells like nothing,
like the sound of the creek below
as I smooth planks
alone in the low hemlock woods

I can't say if I'm a craftsman or not
this is what I do because I enjoy it
because I'm afraid to leap elsewhere
because of ends that sometimes meet
because of the smell of winter
on the sunset drive home
John Denver riding a dusty shotgun
in my old
truck

back on the case

thought it was the cold
but really i couldn't breathe
for the kindness of all things
the light sun on the even cold snow
all the chances of starting over
every breath of the in n' out life
this chance   this sweet privilege
of animating 170 lbs of Big Bang dust
on its way to spreading out
in the eternal cold of space

say, let me hold your hands
or even better
take this warm warm warm
mug of fighting the good fight
coffee-tracing words
of freedom

bursting from my ribs come
connections galore

Most Poems Should End with the Word 'Galore'

socks on the covetous feet
hungry for sleep
sleepy for hunger
stitched into soup

I'm just putting words together
a simple attempt to combust
this end of day.
Slide across the frozen world,
make me ask
is the grass that sweet?

Bring it all in
bunny ears galore.

                - Val and Chris

Inverted Reason

Everything's falling on snow

my head wrapped snugly around the wool hat...

these feelings have me

as they gaze on the frozen river dark.

The cinder hearth is a fresh take

on cold toes -

chopping kitchen leans a whisper

in these lonely ears.

Negation sentiment scratches it all to basics.

Begin I again...

Everything's falling on snow.

The gist gets you, right?

He's streetlamp swirl gone,

like every creation that falls into shadow.  

I Did Not Know This Would Come to Blood

given this stopped watch,
I closely examine the hundred broken clouds
passing across its crystal.

the citrus afternoon light
comes to me off the gold tarnished trim
and tiny tapered hands.

it's all I have,
this wanting
to be sufficient.

no one is turned away-
we gather around the hollow dancing wound
and consider the old-time revival dreams
that led us to this black, white, and gray prayer.

now medicine is bitter
and spilled
and relentless in its sharp surgery -
I can't withhold my mind
from the fray, from the unexpected
blues trauma.

steeping the tea, popping the m and m reds and yellows,
this cliche pain
drenches our undaunted band of explorers,
wholesome in tearing off the bandages
altogether now.

no capture

perhaps a poem here, spread across several days and episodes.

othello

standstill perspective

accuracy

showy

tidy satisfactions