True Intimacy

"Please take good care of yourself. This is always the best way to take care of everything. In your daily life, please accept yourself as you are and your life as it is.

Be intimate with yourself.

I want you to take good advantage of every chance you have to be a truly intimate being."

—Maezumi Taizan Roshi (1931-1995)

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I dreamed I came upon a large old building as evening fell. Through the windows I could see people of all ages sitting down to dinner together at large tables, chatting companionably. Several of the building's residents were coming home from work; I followed them inside. I asked a woman with very short hair if they sat zazen together, and if it would be possible to join. She took me to see the waiting rooms for sanzen, and then we went down into the bowels of the building to see the zendo.

It seemed that the residents also had an amateur theatre company, because to get to the zendo we had to pass through a room crammed with ornate ruffled costumes in luminous orange and yellow silk. The zendo itself was smallish and dark and womblike, with some non-traditional sitting equipment and no altar.

I came back out into the theatre area, where a trio of friendly young residents were reading through a play together. One of them, I knew I had come there to meet. He had dark skin, long dark hair, and a kind open face. His body seemed distorted, as if his chest were missing. In spite of being so short and deformed, he was absolutely beautiful, and I was riveted on everything he said.

I realized I had dreamed him before, and not realizing at first that I was in a dream at that moment, I began to cry silently in wonder that I was finally meeting him, that I was socially and emotionally engaging with this wise, warm, beautiful soul. His voice was so familiar, the way it curled around the words and caressed them.

I asked him where he was from, knowing it must be Northern Ireland, because he sounds just like the men in Belfast. He said something I didn't catch —no, he was from the Orkney Islands. Interesting, that. (The dreamer's grasp of geography was wanting, and she/I imagined the Orkneys were near New Zealand, confusing them with Easter Island. That would explain his dark countenance, I reasoned—he'd have some Maori blood or something.)

I woke up feeling—still do—such an outpouring of pure feeling. As if in this dream I finally stumbled into an answer to a slowly-dawning truth: that trying to hold myself apart from feelings a) doesn't work anyway, and b) is just wrong in every dharmic sense.

As to what it's "about": it's obvious; if you know me and see something, the answer is "yes, that's it." The inner guide who steps out the darkness of the psyche; that giant building; the yellow and orange; the missing heart-center—these are not unrelated to SF Zen Center, monkhood, and my own recent instinctive misguided vain hope of avoiding the heart's quiet truths.

With no medical history of such things, I've had these terrible headaches lately. They're debilitating, and they last for days if I'm not careful. Secretly, I've known what they're about. As if I could keep secrets from myself.

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Last night we watched a movie that dealt quite beautifully with the deep bonds between humans, and climaxed with one of the great love poems of the twentieth century. (The film was "In Her Shoes," directed by Ridley Scott, who also brought "Aliens" to the world!)

It was e e cummings:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)



We turned off the television and wheeled it back to its hiding place.

Quietly reverberating inside was someone saying, "That's almost right. Really, it's 'I am your heart. I am your heart.'" This is what's higher than the soul can hope or the mind can hide.

Just as gravity is itself the orbit: falling, opening, becoming...this is not something to turn away from, but the very truth itself. Not something to shut out of "my life", but this very life itself

(and this can be offered to the internet because it's not the property of "my" little heart, or some phenomenon that excludes anything...as if it possibly could).

My fingers are cold, and the light on the windowsill is so beautiful. Just right now.