Being-Body

Through the last night of sesshin, I stayed on my cushion in the zendo. The hours slid by, and human forms floated out of the room, until in that still blackness there were only my cousin and me. A young man’s body in filmy dark robes. A woman’s body of unseen light and breath. Around 3 a.m. others joined us again; the morning unfolded into bells and breakfast. Finally there came the not-altogether-welcome challenge of forming a sentence; turning the basic sense of reality into..these things..called words.



Hogen says it all comes down to Time and Space. That there is no experience not defined by and embedded in these things-- nothing that is not time and space itself.

In sesshin, this is self-evident.

It is also clear that consciousness often runs thick with plans and fear; with desire to control the unfathomable unfurling of life.

And it is clear, too, in sesshin, that there is a freedom from this: going straight up and straight down; jumping off the rails of conventional concept.

I knew nothing for many days, but I knew Evan would find me afterwards. And that we would go to town together.

The air in Portland was wet, and fire hydrants stood open in my neighborhood, sluicing runoff rivers into the city streets. We found food and drink, but the visit conferred a more basic sustenance—talking, not about things to but into them: up them and around them and down to where their roots give way to soil.

There is something about being a woman which has always been true, but which I have only lately come to enjoy. That there is a body here, and a light about it. That this human body is not a side note to practice. There is no existence outside of its experience, passion, and understanding. I am relating to women as a woman, which is lovely. And to men as a woman, which is delicious. That old fear of their fierceness—of what stirs under the surface—now isn’t really fear at all, but something I can walk up to and strike: “show me.”

People who know what they are can get a lot of work done together. Finally, I went to my apartment, breath in my lungs, and slept for the first time in forty hours.

As I slept, one of the Dharma books I am so famously tired of reading inched toward my head. In the morning I opened Shobogenzo Tashintsu and found Master Dogen continuing one thread of my discussion with Evan: on reading minds; the negligible value of such a thing; and, more importantly, what is being “read” or not.

The nature of mind is as it is, regardless of how you perceive it. I can see that I spent a week and a night with a master. I still do not see that my entire life is this way, even though as the story says, it sits on my very nostrils.

Nothing to do but keep breathing the truth, and see what words weave forth from my tongue.