water freshly boiled
stiff neck all crunchy in the morning
long pour of black tea.

my eyes are level with the man
sitting on the shelf.

why do
these circles originate and radiate
in all the colors of my existence?

nowhere to rest, only a sweet sweet illusion
of ground to stand on... if
I stretch the little flying carpet of my life
just right, I can pause
and start with loving myself.

reconciled hunger

bagels bacon family dynamics
snow out the window
12th floor in upper east side
watch it all get tight let it all get loose

we regard this whole life as a
                                                       beautiful dream
sirens down below
gazing out the broad clean windows
an absent-minded mug
wakes me up in my own left hand

jaw line tenses with the sound
the round of old small arguments (not me? not mine?)
relaxes with the touch...
all the electri city runs down
into the sound ground
going home upriver to the source of the streams

out there, newborn babies across
the frosted park.
joy is not in these phenomena
it is ethically-sourced in the waltz
of changing everything

thumbing a book of old Thailand's someone else
infuses this swarthy light
defuses the questions of wrong/right/wrong
oscillation unclothed is a dance...
can't wait on sidelines,
dive in with cutting teeth both feet
letting go, when you're fretting so,
thrive

Suppose

Why fill a perfectly decent space
with words?

The mug holds
milk and coffee river delta
just as it is.

Talking makes me blind,
all the colors and shapes
send me telegrams
to abandon the search
and come home...
didn't you hear?
War is over if you want it.

Was Worth Thinking About

Supremely important, this moment,
the opportunity to advance
the capture of consciousness
the appetitive nature of
the mind bouncing all photon/neuron-rich
off bright-flakes-pink-door-coffee-steam

with swift lack of uncertainty,
show the permanence
find it pig-uprooting-truffle style,
bring it all back home
(no obstacle that it can't be found)

distracted in a dog-smells-bacon ludicrous delight,
toasted bread advances past the red metallic sentry mug
and comes all up in this nose
(borrowed for this lifetime)
and the alchemy (wham!) points lusciously to:

a late morning bakery sojourn,
penning idle words for
whom... ?

Sure, I'll Make Dinner

howling wind to please me,

Thai soup to please my woman...

I wonder (believe it?) if the world has reached

Peak Authenticity

and perhaps we're now in a decline,

leading indicators of public servants

at odds with the served public,

tension everywhere and triggers on unexamined fingers...

Look at my hands...

I stir the rice with the casual bamboo spoon,

the windchimes stir the cold dark,

a little pot of domesticity here in the cabin

under a blanket of dark as cold as space,

starry sugar crystals scattered

in the black rich vault,

tattered pines taking this cold affront

and tossing down dead gauntlets all over the yard.

When I cook with these hands, 

thoughts of society's fabric

take warp and weft in the steam.

A car door closes, the red car in the dark

delivers an opportune rest in the thinking...

glasses clinking on the table

now able to radiate our simple Yes

into the hungry night and full companionship.

Old Ford Gets You There

Parking brake stories -

reach under in rusty salt

sludge, release it all.

winter in the truck points to

my stuck spots... so she pushes.

Inspired by my friend, a poem a day

One of my many poet friends is turning out a poem each day in January.  Jealous of that container of practice, and inspired to keep creating things myself, I'm jumping on that wagon.  We'll see how it goes.  Today's poem (unpolished and off-the-cuff, which is part of the challenge I think):

Formulating Winter

Cinnamon streetlight

and quiet function of the first

intrepid flakes,

an ice of gray sky

coming with soft-built dreams.

Uniquely precious - an exhale

upon closing the newspaper

of our national inequity racket,

and a glance down to the half-frozen 

banks of owned water.

Words on a melting winter tongue,

snow catching itself on silver

explanations of my controlled

tripped-over verbosity.

Harmonious advance of white through

the heartfelt pines -

a pocket of Right Now

spatters this tight room

into freer space.

Clutch of afternoon firelight...

only tumbling clowns of old notions

are left to clean

the rubbish of a tent revival rendition 

of my former lives...

vaudeville, burlesque, old whiskey,

a woman leans out the window into the night

(exhaling slowly)

 down to the half-melted river

with bracing, free water.

the morning dreams of ice

The cold spell is ending, and the ice will soon begin to vanish.  On my walk this morning I snapped/beeped a few pictures of the Esopus River and Woodland Valley Creek, both right behind my house.  Something about ice speaks to me and calls for me to embrace it.  Winter was a big part of my shadow side in leaving California (can I survive the winter? can I thrive in it?), and it has been therapeutic for me to just go out and enter it.  Here are a few pictures, taken before my fingers went stiff.  They are an offering to winter which we will miss dearly if it truly does begin to disappear...

 

 

 

  

And to cap all this off, here is a poem by Billy Collins, one of my new favorite poets.  He was poet laureate for a time (the big Poet Laureate, I believe) and he writes accessible, beautiful stuff.  This is from his most recent collection called Aimless Love.

Fool Me Good

I am under the covers

waiting for the heat to come up

with a gurgle and hiss

and the banging of the water hammer

that will frighten the cold out of the room.

And I am listening to a blues singer

named Precious Bryant

singing a song called "Fool Me Good."

If you don't love me, baby, she sings,

would you please try to fool me good?

I am also stroking the dog's head

and writing down these words,

which means that I am calmly flying

in the face of the Buddhist advice

to do only one thing at a time.

Just pour the tea,

just look into the eye of the flower,

just sing the song --

one thing at a time

and you will achieve serenity,

which is what I wold love to do

as the fan-blades of the morning begin to turn.

If you don't love me, baby,

she sings,

as a day-moon fades in the window,

and the hands circle the clock,

would you please try to fool me good?

Yes, Precious, I reply,

I will fool you as good as I can,

but first I have to learn to listen to you

with my whole heart,

and not until you have finished 

will I put on my slippers,

squeeze out some toothpaste,

and make a big foamy face in the mirror,

freshly dedicated to doing one thing at a time --

one note at a time for you, darling,

one tooth at at time for me.  

 

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.

Healing Through the Here and Now

I used to know how to start these entries.  Something would just come to me while I was in the shower, at the dinner table, biking around, wherever.  I'd let it bounce around my head to see if it settled on its own.  If not, if it found the resonant frequency of urgency, then I'd sit and type out some paragraphs.  Always off the cuff, always a shooting star burning out of its own accord when I ran out of gusto or cleverness. 

These days, I'm never quite sure where to begin.  Where does anyone begin anymore?  With the school shooting in Connecticut just two weeks before Christmas, what can me make of the world as we look it squarely in the face?   

 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I'm in the process of becoming a formal student in the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism.  The founder of this order, John Daido Loori, often said that we need to take responsibility for the whole catastrophe.  Another question he loved, really the same question, is: where do you find yourself in all of this? 

Where do I find myself in the school shooting?  Did I do nothing wrong? Are the only guilty parties the gun dealers, a poor mental health treatment program, and the shooter's friends and family who failed to intervene earlier?  Can we blame reified concepts like "gun laws"?  I think all of these have a hand in it, but I'm also in it too, inextricably in the mix whether I like it or not.  Where the metaphysical meets the tangible, I create those patterns in the world - every time I act out of fear and anger, every time I promote an Us and Them mentality, every time I shrug off helping someone in need.  These acts ripple outward.  I think its what we call karma. 

Yes, some people in certain situations have more direct influence.  I desperately want them to awaken to the urgency of problems such as easy access to guns and poor access to mental health resources.  They are not somehow more guilty than you or I, though.  The moral imperative (I believe) is to live out this urgency for change and awaken to just how broken our society is.  That is where I find myself, and my responsibility for this whole catastrophe.

I'm signing petitions and talking with friends and strangers.  In doing so, I see it as my job to not recreate the same suffering that the shooter and now all the survivors are going through.  How angry and scared he must have been, how deeply lost in the delusions of his own mind.  How angry and scared the surviving family and community members are, how deeply they are immersed in the grief of this experience.  I can hear the anger and fear in those who want to cling to owning guns.  I can hear the anger and fear of those of us who want to decrease the number of guns floating around our country.  I can feel my own fear every time I encounter someone who is mentally ill and is suffering without relief.  What part can I play in easing these fears, in quenching some of the fire of hate and blame? 

My mind, the same divided mind that creates Us and Them, wants me to believe that we need to find out who to blame and how to make specific changes to our laws to hopefully avoid this type of incredible violence in the future.  It wants to say that I'm on the right side, and someone else (must be!) on the wrong side.  It's true that we need to change, and that I want to be an agent for that change.  However, I feel more and more these days that if I enter this fray with labels in hand to slap on everyone's forehead, I may perpetuate the very problems I'm wrestling with.  How else might we go about it?

I'm not sure how I imagine things unfolding from here.  What if we all put a little more energy into just living for peace?  What would that look like?  What if we all faced up to our fears and connected a little more with a person in need?  What would that feel like?  What if we were a little easier on ourselves and those around us?  What ripples will that send out to the world?  What if we keep the longer term goals in mind, and begin by accepting that right where we are is the only place to begin?  Where else can we begin than this moment?  What else can I do but heal and accept? 

Coming Back to This

 

I'll cut right to the chase.  What am I indeed up to?  Where have I been and where am I going?

I'm currently settled in the town of Mt. Tremper, NY, in the southern part of the Catskills.  It is quiet and green, with good hiking and biking in abundance.  There are many places that look like this picture above.  This one is the view from a small bridge about 200 yards from my apartment.  If you go north another 100 yards, you're at the gate of the zen monastery where I practice.  Best commute ever - walking through natural beauty to a place dedicated to awakening. 

 Jess and I have split up.  We are... friends.  She is living at the monastery now, halfway through the first of her 12 months as a full-time resident.  We see each other several times a week when I go over to sit zazen, work, or socialize.  It is a blessing to have a shared practice that feels very deep for each of us individually and also informs how we want to relate to other people, including each other.  

This fall, like every fall, the monastery sangha dedicates itself to a period of ango, which translates as "peaceful dwelling."  It is a three month period of intensified practice, where you commit yourself to practice beyond your ordinary routines in eight areas: Buddhist studies, art practice, body practice, concentration on a simple task, stewarding the earth, liturgy studies, two intensive retreats, and zazen practice.  The focus of this ango is The Bodhisattva Way of Life, including a study of the book by the same name.  

It is really interesting to devote myself to religious practice and study.  It is something that I have never really done in my life before.  When I was a child, I did not take Sunday school at church seriously at all.  While in college, I studied Buddhism in great depth, but always as an intellectual endeavor, from the viewpoint of art criticism, symbolic studies, history, cultural anthropology, etc.  Here and now, it is a whole new game for me.

The focus of much of our study is around three key virtues of the Bodhisattva way - effort, generosity, and patience.  My art practice is painting watercolor (which I'm totally new at, and is really fun), and I have spent several afternoons sitting and painting the experience of patience.  This is really wild for me.  We're encouraged to go beyond symbolism or simply painting something that we think of when we think of patience, like Ghandi's face or something like that.  Instead, I just sit with the experience of patience and... paint.  So far I've turned out some landscapes, like a maple tree by a river or a pumpkin on a tree stump, and I've also painted some gritty patterns and images just made of lines.  I don't know what any of them mean, which is great. 

As always in zen, this practice and others rest on the fundamental practice of zazen - sitting in quiet meditation.  What do I discover when I investigate deeply into my experience of the world?  Who is the I that is experiencing things?  What does it mean to experience "something"?  If everything seems to be changing all the time - emotions, perceptions, my ability to perceive, the physical world - does that mean anything for the story that I carry about How Things Are?  Where are my footholds in my sense of self when everything dissolves under close scrutiny into smaller constituent phenomena, that in turn dissolve again? 

As my skepticism deepens, how does that in turn inform my practice of effort, generosity, and patience?  For me, I find myself humbled again and again by what shows up in my investigation.  It seems that we are all connected, both in a spiritual sense of sharing similar outlooks on life, and in an ecological sense of being made up of similar systems.  I draw on this sense of connection to energize my practice.  I enjoy seeing others awaken to deep introspection, and my effort becomes more dedicated.  I give more generously, as I see that clinging to things feeds my narrow, rigid sense of self while giving away creates an open, spacious feeling of connection.  And patience feels like the deepest practice right now.  In a world that we are all degrading but deeply want to preserve (consciously and unconsciously), I am aiming to cultivate patience so as to keep practicing, keep coming back to the meditation cushion, keep making myself available to friends, keep aiming to live more lightly on the planet, etc.  If I indulge a sense of haste and urgency, then I end up cultivating anger at myself and others for all sorts of reasons, which is actually an impediment to anyone walking this path. 

So this is the practice that takes up much of my life.  I fill in from the edges with writing letters, reading books, and missing good friends who are far away.  I do some carpentry to pay my small bills each month.  I'm really loving life here right now, and opening up to what comes with each day.  I wish you a wonderful Here and Now wherever you are, and look forward to seeing you again.

Doorways

So, I have just returned from Puebla, Mexico, a city of a few million people on a plateau southeast of Mexico City.  I was there to attend the international conference for the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (AAGT).  Every day, as I walked the beautiful streets of the historic downtown on the way to the convention center, I passed by dozens and perhaps hundreds of doorways like this one.  They hold large, exquisite doors, made of wood and stone and sometimes even copper or bronze.  There are doorways that must be at least 15 feet tall with smaller doors cut into them, because the full size ones are probably too unwieldy to open on a regular basis. 

As I wandered past these doors each day, I felt as though I was moving through a city full of potential.  Many of these doors open into inner courtyards, revealing a whole other world.  Giant marble or stone fountains rest gracefully in these tiled courtyards.  Small trees and large flowering shrubs grow up in the sunlight coming through the open roofs.  Balconies look down on the courtyard from inner apartments, government offices, or church libraries (many of the buildings in Puebla are/were related to the Catholic church).  Vines climb up trellises, children peek out, old women slap masa slabs to make tortillas, men in suits talk briskly about the business at hand.  Worlds nested within worlds, mysterious parts that when revealed make up a wonderfully complex whole. 

Being at the Gestalt conference, I felt the promise of doorways in a personal way as well.  I had the great privilege of talking informally and at length with some well-seasoned Gestalt therapists - Erv Polster, Bud Feder, Lynne Jacobs, Ruella Frank, and other folks you've never heard of.  In these conversations, I felt doorways opening to the next steps in my life.  I've been doing part-time Gestalt training here in the Bay Area for about three years, and am ready to take the next steps of both deepening my own therapeutic journey as well as launching into practice.   This conference helped me to gather the courage to go further along this journey of self-discovery as well as honing my ability to offer my deepest, brightest truth to the world. 

I realize that a brief description of Gestalt may be helpful here.  Gestalt therapy is an approach that is rooted in the here and now.  That is, whatever is appearing in your mind and body (psycho-somatic) is your reality in this moment, and therefore is the only place to begin (as opposed to theoretical anything).  Through a deeper awareness of old stories that we are carrying in our bodies and minds, we can begin to make our present more flexible, dynamic, and fresh while decreasing the likelihood that we will continue to repeat old behavior patterns that are no longer serving us.  Increased awareness is the goal - from there, our life will inevitably feel fresher and more exciting.  We'll less often feel like we're living the same movie over and over, and instead have more contact with the amazing, ever-changing world around us all the time. 

My training to practice Gestalt is also a journey into myself.  I uncover new gems from time to time, nuggets of insight that I can carry around and chew on.  Mainly, though, I simply notice myself and others more, with an eye towards avoiding the Meaning Stories that we all so often put on ourselves and others.  Things I've done in the past don't mean that I'm a good or bad person.  They have vanished in time, and I may have feelings about them that I can work with in the present.  Things other people have done or are doing don't necessarily mean they are good or bad people, either.  Instead of putting a meaning story onto what they do, I can practice observing the world outside and simultaneously observing my own embodied reactions.  Some examples: When he is loud and red-faced, I clench my jaw.  When she talks about that, I think she is missing the point.  When I hear political debate, I just know that the conservatives are failing to understand reality.  Noticing them is the crucial (and some might say sufficient) step in changing ourselves from habituated reactions to fresh perspectives (like perhaps I don't know as much as I think I do about How the World Is).  All it takes is time and practice, lots of practice.  And a good Gestalt practitioner (like me) to help you out :-) 

What is next for me?  A trip out to the east coast with Jess, leaving in the beginning of June.  We'll be settling in New York state, in a town called Mt. Tremper.  It's near Woodstock, not too far from New York or eastern Pennsylvania.  We'll be staying in a little house by the river, so you should come visit.  My journey there will unfold by contacting some local Gestalt trainers to continue my work, while keeping an eye towards co-creating community with a focus on healing and heartfelt connection.  I'm looking forward to gardening, working with my hands, and helping everyone wake up, as much as possible. 

 

What does the next doorway open onto?  If I can stay with the not-knowing, avoid the meaning-making and the grasping, then whatever it is will be much more available to me.  Then I can awaken to the profound, infinitely rich beauty of how things are.