brushless soul wash

In my thinning collection of books that I lug from place to place, I have a small dog-eared paperback which is a collection of words and phrases from other languages that are really useful yet difficult to succinctly translate into English.  Some favorites are "uovo di Colombo - an idea or solution that seems obvious only after you realize it," or "sohbet - conversations dedicated solely to mystical, meaningful subjects."  There are so many that I love - in Japan, a shrine for broken sewing needles where they are laid to rest in a block of tofu to thank them for their life of service to us.  Instructions whispered to a dying person to help her transition peacefully through her journey after death.  A broad sense of taking things lightly because we see how life really is.  They are all fantastic, and grab me because they touch on something that I knew existed but at the same time did not know.

The one that is bobbing in my ocean of consciousness right now is dharma, a word that I forget is only really familiar to Buddhists and Hindus.  We use it in Zen, and more broadly in Buddhism, to denote something like the teachings that can be gleaned by paying attention to the way of reality.  However, in my little book of phrases, it is translated as "each person's individual journey through life, and their own way of finding it."  I think this is meant to reflect more of Hindu perspective (with which I am not deeply familiar), yet it speaks volumes to me at this moment.

The little boy in the picture above is me, around 1981.  I'm on a pony (or is it just a small horse?) accompanied by my dad, who to me looks really young.  He is 43 years old in the photo, and I was going on 4.  I was the last of his children (five in all from two marriages), and I was lucky enough to have him in my life for all of my childhood.  We went to Chincoteague, VA many summers of my early life, and I think this must be from one of those trips.  I look happy, like the day might have been endless and drenched in the smell of ponies, dust, straw, and the nearby ocean.  

Today, in my thinning collection of hair, I run my fingers gently and look out the window at the late summer sky.  I have just finished a year of living at Zen Mountain Monastery, where I have been a practicing student for several years already.  The year was so full, like extra life was lovingly crammed into a box of space and time.  Sometimes it was graduate school for my soul, sometimes it was a kindergarten time-out to learn real patience and love for the traces of my old, wounded inner child.  I think I sat around nine hundred hours of meditation, which encompassed every experience I could imagine under the sun.  I got dusty and dirty with outdoors work, but spent the majority of my work time holding down the basic bookkeeping for the place.  The whole year was full of light and shadow, and, as we sometimes invoke in zen, in the end it was nothing special.  

How did I end up living in a monastery for a year?  I know it begins back at the Big Bang, which helps me feel more humble and integrated with the unfolding of the cosmos.  Billions of years of time have led up to the fact that I'm here writing this, and you are there reading this.  This present moment is just as full and complete for every other person and thing in the world.  We're not exceptional, us humans, but we are very lucky to laugh and love, to do our best and fall down and get up again.  What a gift, to live this one wild and precious life!  

When I look at that picture of me and my father, I wonder just how many people touched my life in ways that I cannot even recall.  How many people steered me towards goodness and kindness with their own actions?  How many wordless teachings came to me through the endless intersections of lives along my journey?  I remember reading the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching in the beginning of college, and how much it blew away everything I thought I knew about living my life.  What led that Asian philosophy professor to go to Penn State to teach her course that opened the door for me? How is it that we recognize the good, the beautiful, and the true things in life, yet it sometimes take a lifetime to be able to break bad habits and cultivate good ones?  

I started out writing this post as a reflection on my year in the monastery, to try to sum up what I have learned.  That is, of course, not even close to possible.  To touch it lightly, though, I suppose what I've gained is a little more loving spaciousness, the ability to let the world and myself be just as they are.  In that space, I can pay more attention and slow down a little more.  When life is speeding up and tight, I can't really perceive what I need and what needs to be done.  In the spaciousness, I can let things take as long as they need to take.  And in that space, there is kindness.  

There is a door at the end of the hallway, open just a crack, with sunlight coming out.  You push on the door gently, and it opens bit by bit.  It takes a while to step into the Light Room, but it is very much possible.   In that room, it seems that life is what it always was, and you are who you always were.  It's just that the perspective has shifted, broadened, and grown deeper through a loving acceptance of what is.  

Not that we can expect life to always be smooth or easy, but we can meet it with grace, patience, and enthusiasm.  And we can learn to do it in any moment, in every moment.  

pendulate appraising

I'm not who you want me to be.  

In a way, I'm sorry, I suppose, for the discomfort this has caused, may cause, and perhaps will cause in the future.  To be certain, I never was.  It's just who I am.  I love the eerie sound of a shakuhachi flute.  I have quirky sense of humor.  I like walking through the woods with you, but just as much without you.  I still think capitalism has clearly failed, and I don't want to trade my life for money.  I still think most of humanity is not going to survive all that much longer - maybe 100 years if we're lucky?  I love spacing out looking at the sky.  I often don't want to sit yet another period of zazen.  But I'm not really sorry, now that I think of it.  

Truth be told, you are not who I want you to be either.  You're not more considerate in the moments I want you to be more considerate.  You keep making rich desserts when I'm failing to conquer my sugar addiction.  You lean in for more contact when I want to withdraw and collapse.  You love Led Zeppelin in a small, closed space at such a high volume.  You want to sit more zazen.  

And we both belong, so much so that it can't be measured.  It's an aspect of reality that is so true it can't really be conceived of.  You belong, like sitting on a bench with a beautiful woman on a sunny Friday afternoon in late May.  You belong like someone telling you they missed you and giving you a long hug.  You belong crooked, and you belong straight.  You belonged at three years old on a pony, just being there with the smell of the mane and the hay and the hot earth.  

I belonged in a drunken cab zooming through Beijing, going nowhere past beautiful, terrible buildings in the night.  I belong in the shade of a hickory, listening to friends talk about big ideas.  I belong in the tide that is swelling to eat Miami.  I belong on an old steel frame bike, whizzing gracefully through the night along a nameless river.  I belong in the seamless giving and receiving of a waltz, a swing, a tango past the slender flower in a cobalt vase.  

We all belong.  We are all coming home in every moment.  Children being naughty, presidential hopefuls with red-faced hate, policemen with twitchy guns, nuns and hookers and businessmen and mechanics and pit bulls and a million drops of water in the passing cloud.  My white skin next to your black skin, it belongs.  A man's lips on another man's lips, they belong.  Hip hop and tapioca pudding and carbon in the atmosphere, it all belongs.  

Where do we go from here?  Where does this real dream head next?  Belonging is our right by still being here in the moment, but that's also where it ends.  No entitlement, no privilege blinders, no apologies for abusing our power.  From this moment, our responsibility unfolds into the future.  Where do we imagine we are headed?  Do we like the feel of that place?  Do we like this sunny park, this concerto that weeps with my eyes, this American apartheid state, this big box pavement extravaganza, this sweaty addiction, this inability to promise our children anything about life with an honest gut?  

It's a fierce mandate, this singular precious life.  So easy to let it slip... four thousand nervous laughs and a glance away, when facing the wave might just be the wide open medicine we need.  The whole world wants you to wake up, and not in some affirmation or self-congratulation or bliss-chasing dreamsicle.  It's right there with the next bullet, the next kiss, the next iceberg, the next flood, the next laugh, the next here and now.  

Slowly and gently abandoning the monolithic paradigm of a separate self.  It feels like the beautiful work of a lifetime of single steps, learning to trust the unfolding of things, of myself.  

Just Thinking

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot—peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.
—William Stafford

early april

a thousand miles of touch,
this white beard a scratch
in the bright snow...
now green tea falls clean
on a dreaming tongue.

No Praise, No Blame

What have the clouds been up to today? You can't

blame them, you know.  Their edges just

happen, and where they go is the fault of the wind.

I'd like my arrival to be like that, alone and

quiet, really present but never to blame.

And I'd never presume or apologize, and if anyone 

pressed me I'd be gone, and come back there

only some harmless, irresistible presence

all around you, like the truth, something you need,

like the air.  

- William Stafford

creative tension

A friend here at monastery, who has worked for years in large corporations and is now kind enough to be the treasurer for our order, recently told me about planning meetings.  He and the other members of the board and various steering committees are envisioning how best to direct the growth and development of the monastery.  He said that in his last job, they talked about the gap between where the organization was, and where it wanted to be.  In that gap, he says, lies "creative tension."  This phrase immediately fascinated and energized me.  Creative tension...  Where am I right now, and where do I want to be?  What is the nature of the gap between these two states?

It seems to me that we all live in this gap all the time, though we may not always recognize it when life resists our efforts to parse it out into discrete portions.  Perhaps it is more clear when we visualize an artist, a sculptor let's say, looking at a nine foot high block of wood in front of her, holding her mallet and chisel.  She has a vision in her head, and at some point begins the rough hewing of the piece.  She likely has no idea exactly how she wants it to be, but the process is clear - shaping and carving out an expression of her experience from this big chunk of the world.

But you and I, we also live in this gap.  As I sit in a chair looking out the window on a brisk sunny morning, and think of all the things I want to do before a noon appointment.  How do I choose what to do?  How can I learn to make good predictions about how I'll feel getting certain things done and letting go of others?  Each moment I act is creating a path - choosing one way to proceed and letting go of all other imagined ones.

As I sit now at 38 years of age, what do I want to accomplish before turning 40? 45? 60?  Before I die? My life in all these different lenses is a response to the creative tension.  If I really want to write that great novel (just an example, it probably isn't in me :-) then how long can I put off starting it?  Without a goal of having done it by a certain time, it is too easy to let the time slide by with fantasies of future greatness.  If I want to have it done by the time I turn 40, I need to devote many hours to it each week.  Then I'm responding to the creative tension by taking steps.  And, as I take these steps along the way, the creative tension changes its quality, texture, and shape.  I'll need to account for progress I've made on my path, and any outside factors that have come up along the way.  It is evolving all the time.  This process is alive.

I've spent a lot of my life standing on the proverbial Threshold, wondering sometimes how best to proceed. This year of practice at the monastery is pointing me towards the Fierce Urgency of Now, seeing how fleeting and precious this life is and how good it feels to take decisive action from right where I stand.  How can I step into my life fully?  How to respond more seamlessly to this creative tension?

Bit by bit, I'm coming to see that there is no Later, there is only Now.  This moment of sitting and writing is the same moment of my whole life, of the whole unfolding of the universe.  The past is gone and only in my imagination.  The future is not here yet and is only a fantasy.  It will always be this way.  There is only this moment.

So each action is a letting go of the ideas of past and future, and an embrace of What Is, all wrapped up in one.  Learning confidence in my life comes from realizing that it will always be this way.  Everything is a chance and a risk, and brings with it the reward of the unexpected, fresh opportunities of being alive.  When I act from best intentions for myself and the world, then I have fulfilled my duty as a human being.  I have responded to the creative tension of being Chris as best I can.  All else is beyond me, as I have no control over this flowing river of life.  But, the very next moment, I need to respond again, and again.  This is the joyful duty of being a full human being.

What will you do with this one wild and precious life?  How will you enter this sweet moment that is being given to you over and over again?  Even if it seems like not a great moment (when the smoke alarm is going off, your partner is angry with you, and someone on the news is talking about Trump's chances of being president), it is still a perfect moment.  It is yours to make of it what you will.  You are an artist of life - what will you paint next? It's never a burden, though perhaps it is inevitable that we will sometimes see it like that.  It is always a gift.

winter announcing

today is winter's medallion,

the wind shaving bright fractures

in sloth January dreams.

small towns nurse on the firm mountains,

wide Hudson now

whitecaps of cold on cold.

a lean cherry tree

prays bare solitude in the lacy frost.

minds creak with a sudden view

of an ice necklace,

piercing my sky iris

with slender elegance.

a canoe drifts

home to the arctic,

a bleached cedar clings to a gnarled cliff.

and yet...

alone in the embrace of all winters,

the small room catches

passing sunlight and

pools of sweet time. 

smooth mug, vivid sweaters,

wild children eyes and laughter -

the perfection of following

this thread through, nostalgia

for right here and now.

there is no halting,

just potentials of gravestones

and trees decomposing to Beethoven

in a forgotten stretch of frozen woods.