The Mind of Zazen in the Land of Fear

The crocuses stretch upwards and the trees explode in bud and flower, and spring has been stirring in my psyche as well.

In my teen years, I started having extreme depressive episodes every spring. It got worse when I went to college, and culminated ten years ago in a Really Terrible Realationship Cataclysm. Which I will not discuss here.

Suffice to say, in the intervening years--and thanks to a great deal of assisted insight and precise inner observation--I have come to understand depression as a complex phenomenon, having to do in part with unaddressed truths and the imperative for personal transformation.

Can you imagine a crocus unwilling to grow, trying to fight all of Nature to stay in the soil? Not a winning game. And so when the deepest parts of myself start to stir, I now listen. Or try to.

I've been sick in a special way that I have. It feels like a retreat: I spend hours lying there calmly, grounding the mind in the lower body, just...existing.

I emerged from this strange state just in time for a Corvallis Zen Circle zazenkai, or "day of sitting." I got up early so that I could have as much time on the cushion as possible.

I sat very steadily, casting off personality and focusing on cutting anything that was not the immediate present.

That night, I was eager to sleep. I knew there would be good dreams.

In a subterranean tunnel/parking garage, I'm helping the distinguished "Doctor General" (a cabinet-level bureaucrat) to her car, when she turns on me. I am gripped by fear, or something like it.

I ask her what part of me she represents, being a dream figure and all.

Her distorted face opens in a giant scream. It's primal, beyond concept, absolutely terrifying.

I try to match it. There's no room for melodic variation, but if I throw everything into that scream..something works. It's glorious and chilling, a joyful leaping out of the fearful pact of the dream, and into the quivering. oddly-painful, body that lies twisted in my own bed.

I fall asleep again with relish.

What happened next is particularly meaningful for me because I have such a history of nightmares. I still remember ones from when I was a child. As a young woman I would awake exhausted from dreams-- first, of being chased; and later, of turning and brutally killing my assailant. There's no worse feeling than to wake up from a dream of murder..except perhaps to not wake up.

---

I am led to an examination room by a darkskinned man whose touch incurs great warmth and trust. I, and another patient from a long line of American Indian boys who have climbed up to this clinic, find the room filled with beds, looking messy and vaguely unhygenic.

A boil in my back in lanced. It's painless, although I'm bracing and grimacing in anticipation of the scalpel.

A great deal of pus and blood is showing up on the bedclothes. The medic turns evil. There is the hint of some sort of sexual abuse.

"But you're in my mind," I cry. "How could you hurt me? I could ...make you have horns!" And a giant rosy crystal of a horn sprouts out of his forehead. The other man is growing a whole clump of crystals, too.

It's ludicrous, lucid, free from terror.

---

In yet a third dream, I comically deprive a male assailant of arms-- they just melt away into his body. And the woman--she's harder to disarm. (Maybe she's too similar to the "me" of the dream.)

But..wait, I can give her blue lips! Some garish paint distracts her pretty well. There's great befuddlement in the evil characters.

---

To have this fear of betrayed trust so beautifully transformed and integrated feels deeply therapeutic. And it comes directly from practice.

The mind of zazen marched smoothly into these dreams. That minute attention to the present, without analyzing the past or trying to plan to the future; disregarding the drama of the the various voices that arise, and attending instead to the underlying feeling. Contacting the basic human creature, the one so prone to wants and fears and hates, and slowly turning it toward some greater awareness.

This may never happen again. It's great good fortune, the karma of this moment. But things will never be completely as they were before. And I am so grateful.

Death Follows Birth

Even as the night
darkens the green earth,
the wheel turns.

Death follows Birth.

Strive through the night
with every breath
that you may Awake
past day, past death.

Reflecting on the impermanence of life, the inevitability of death, and his incredible example as a dharma practitioner, this is offered In love and appreciation for Sensei John King, who is dying of throat cancer. He is at left in the photo below, taken on this occasion of his dharma transmission.

Mysterious Spam Poetry

One glint of the Great Mystery:

Gmail has a great spam filter, and so I am spared ever having to read those awful messages for "V1agrA", "Vi0xx", etc.

Until today. I thought I'd take a look at just one (carefully not opening the virus-laden attachment). Perhaps they are all this bizarrely poetic, and I've just missed it.

corner already fire. companion bad mischievous news
again pride?
somewhere mischievous black black.
night bad appearance teach use.
allow appearance promised benefit wife.
we principle added different love.
window reference love similar.
reading bought my pride end.
she nothing least taught
rich evening

Is there a pill for poetic skill?

Life in the Retail Realm

I wrote this for the revamped Zen Community of Oregon Newsletter (name yet to be decided), the house organ of Great Vow Zen Monastery and the affiliated Portland Sangha.

To me, “life off the cushion” is life outside the monastery. It’s a life where I can eat whatever I like. Where I have my own room, with a door. Where the people I encounter may or may not have much insight into why they do the things they do, buy the things they buy, or drive the things they drive. Where fears and assumptions masquerade as political and social truth. It’s a pretty wild place.

Zen is about responding to the circumstances of our lives. When we have no money, we get a job. In this case, working part time in a quirky women’s clothing store. I’m also starting to do web design, and really enjoying the creative outlet and economic possibility of that undertaking. I won’t work in a clothing store forever. But I need money, and there’s plenty to learn.

When I go to the store, I put on clothing that makes me look more like a fashion consultant and less like a little Zen waif. I will help customers, or get ignored, or have my ear talked off. I will be asked to fetch thirty garments for someone who buys none of them. I will work alone, or without a break, for long stretches of time. Like any work, it can be satisfying, or infuriating, depending on the mind you bring to it.

The nicest part of the job is helping customers choose gifts for people they love. It’s very sweet to watch a little girl choosing the perfect earrings for her step mom. The hardest part of the job is the shoplifting; there are some typical behaviors to watch for, but there’s only so much you can do, especially when the store is busy. It’s so sad to come across a discarded tag or an empty hanger, and to know that some deluded person has created terrible karma for herself. One girl, who had been acting suspiciously, returned to the store with an eighty-dollar shirt she said had “fallen into her bag. It was an extremely awkward situation. But, having done the wrong thing, all your options are painful.

Most of what happens in the store is formalized. There are the rituals of offering assistance, answering the phone, ringing people up, and running the credit card machine. We tag merchandise, straighten the racks, and greet the UPS man. In spare moments, I fold and dust and sweep and straighten the racks. It’s like living in an altar.

Resistance is Futile

"Not Resisting. Yielding. Directly, vulnerably experiencing what is here, together with all the gross and subtle ways that this body-mind has cultivated to brace itself against the pain and agony of disturbance, condemning it, battling it, or even shutting down to avoid feeling it altogether.

When there is awareness, a reaction that is seen and understood to be a hindrance diminishes on its own. It may take a lot of repeated suffering, but a moment comes when the energy of seeing takes the place of the habit."

-- Toni Packer, The Wonder of Presence

Before this Nehan sesshin, I didn't relate to Toni Packer at all. I picked up this book today, thinking I'd pass it along to someone else. And then I saw words that described my experience perfectly. And another notion about myself and the world flew out the window! The entire book is brilliant, and just what I need right now.

The piece I meant to write, anchored by the quote “I am always with you,” was this:

This recent sesshin was really difficult. I know the basic instruction for dealing with racing thought and emotion: feel the feeling. Understanding that the impulse to think arises from a sensation lower than words, you feel that sensation, and you feel the impulse to fix or resolve or figure it out or otherwise force it to be different.

You become minutely aware of sensations in the body, the rush of adrenaline, the pang of yearning. Or maybe you don’t! These are like instructions for finding the surface in a raging storm at sea: sometimes you do break the surface and manage to inhale, but …it’s not always possible.

There is refuge in the stability of the body-mudra, the yogic posture of the Buddhas, rooted and balanced, upright through all assaults. And there is refuge in the breath, in attending to this body that breathes. But there are other refuges, false ones, ones that appear to give comfort, but only fuel the karma that is being uprooted. For me, these would be thinking, planning, and fantasy.

From minute personal observation, I can now report that, in the very depths of my being, when the going gets tough, I turn to two fantasies of comfort. The first is food—delicious, filling, flavorful food, its development and preparation. A universe of melted cheese and carbohydrates. At one point, I realized I had just reinvented tuna noodle casserole.

The second comfort is relationship: the gratifying love and appreciation of another human being; harmonious togetherness; maybe the thrill of discovery; some praise; some hugging. A couple people in particular—or their two-dimensional representations—served as reliable gratification-objects.

These depths of mind are not very flattering, but such is the karma of this person. It’s the material I have to work with—the unformed basis of Buddhahood if I hear the teachings right. I do know that judging or hating it just adds to the suffering.

And looking, again and again, is tremendously healing. It took every ounce of resolve to keep sitting, to sit through breaks and all the last night, and to continue noticing the mind and body with as much compassion as possible.

I wrote:

Trust
Relearned, remembered today
There is a place untouched and true.

An eye in every storm
Immediate, infinite
Deeply intimate


Somewhere under the roiling drama, there is indeed a quiet place to observe from, deeper than the stories that race around on the surface.

I guess the last thing I want to say is that I recognized my views of the world are Not Always Right. This is a basic teaching, but I’m talking about a systematic misunderstanding of my relationships with others in the world.

I suddenly realized, there was no need to be afraid at the monastery. Although I was in a state of minor emergency there for months on end. The Samdinhirmocana Sutra (and maybe others as well) liken the imputational aspect of mind to a flaw in vision. Like something in the eye that makes everything have a halo around it, or appear the wrong color. So we experience a reality mediated by these fundamental flaws, and experience it, without questions, as a real part of the world.

Birds build nests. Cats watch. Humans sit and know.

And look: I am jealous of A, suspicious of B, hampered by a strategy of unwilling surrender while here (at the monastery). Would it have hurt to spare them ONE kind thought all week?

I need them: I could not sit all night or all week without them. And they need me too. I forget my own basic dignity. And theirs. Who cares what C thinks she thinks of me? Or if I think it’s because of something I did two years ago?


We don’t see ourselves clearly: I don’t see myself; I don’t see others; and they certainly don’t see me clearly either. And it doesn’t really matter. My inner world of human relationships doesn’t reflect the truth: it’s the rather shallow experience of a scared, insecure person with an agenda of self-protection and gratification. People are actually much more interesting than my stories about them. And it’s pointless to waste thought on what I think their stories about me might be. That’s no way to live a life. (And yet I have, alas.)

The important thing is that our relationships are founded on wholesome ground. Whether I “like” these people at the moment or not, somehow we all come together anyway, and we sit, and things change. Just forget the story and focus on the intention.

Because people do change. And the people who come to spiritual practice are often pretty loopy, or desperate, or lost, and that’s fine. It shouldn’t be any other way. This is about resolving karma and seeing clearly; we need odd, quirky, deluded folks for that. And our own oddest and most dysfunctional selves are going to rise to the surface, blindly drawn toward the healing and destruction of the Dharma.



Gratefully borrowed from the vast ocean of the internet.

Flowers for Eldon

I’ve been sending out greeting cards. So many people I appreciate so deeply. And spring is here! Reason enough to celebrate when tiny flowers are pushing their way out of the dark earth.

One card said:

I am always with you.

It's true. But how could I give that card to anyone? What would they think? It's too profound a sentiment to buy for $2.50 at the shop. It requires a whole refiguring of conventional ideas of personality and the universe. You can't just put that in an envelope. Saying this type of thing is impossible, even for me, who is more and more expressive on more and more forbidden topics all the time.

But it's true. Memories of eating lunch with Hikari on a Tassajara ridgeline, or bouncing on oversized pillows with my sister, are vividly, vividly available. Usually they come for a visit after several days of sessin, when I'm trying to focus on the present. But they're IN there.

And beyond the storehouse of personality, "I am always with you" is true because the "something" which truly loves--which resonates and magnifies and opens to another being-- transcends this meaty body and self-centered little thought system. This person's personality isn't around for "always". So "I" and "you" are not the limited conventional selves.

It's worth finding that "I" that can never be apart from someone you love. Or love that fits the following:

Many rivers cannot quench love, nor floods drown it.
(Song of Solomon 8:7)

Love, and togetherness, outside of time and space. It's hard to buy a card that purports to talk about it, and it's not easy (I'm finding) to try to write a blog entry about it.

But I want to talk about someone I really love.

---

February 28 was the death-day of my almost-grandfather, Eldon Riddell, the Scots-descended sheep farmer whose family homesteaded in this area; they’re major landowners to this day. My parents did the back-to-the-land thing in the early 70s, and they were helped immeasurably by older folks who knew how to do things the old way.

As a child, I remember making repeated visits to consult with these old farmers. These people, none of them under sixty, were our friends and neighbors, farmers and beekeepers, fruit growers, and one rascal. These were larger-than-life figures to my small self. Their very names bear the scent of a lost era: Eldon Riddell, Fred Elliot, Wendell DeHaven, Art Bliven, Ray Adams, Marilyn Miller. They taught my parents to graft trees, to feed pregnant ewes properly, to mix cement, to keep ants from invading beehives–and that the injunction to love thy neighbor need not necessarily extend to trusting him. But that’s another story.

Of all these, Eldon was the greatest, most solid and kind individual. He and his wife Lora drove a gigantic sea-green Cadillac, lived in a vinyl-sided house, and gave us our first television–a mammoth piece of furniture. There was an old violin he would play, but rarely.

We would drop by unannounced, come in the back door and into the rust-and-yellow kitchen. Or trot out to the big white barn, where we’d find Eldon in his signature overalls, working with the sheep. They were known all over as the finest-looking animals in the Willamette Valley: not only were they healthy and happy (the company of a barn full of contented sheep is supremely comforting), but their conformation and wool quality was also exceptional. Eldon would regularly visit New Zealand and import Border Leicesters—beautiful intelligent animals with Roman noses and long silky locks of wool.

My little sister and I called Eldon “Grandpa” because our surviving grandparents were far away and, until we were a little older, somewhat estranged. I know my parents had their own relationships with him; I know they relied on him and trusted his advice. He raised roses as a hobby; he and my mother often compared notes.

On memorial day, my mother would cut flowers from our garden to give to Eldon. He had plenty of his own; his car was filled with flowers, but he needed a lot. He would visit graves all over the area. Many were so old, so otherwise forgotten, that his flowers were the only ones.

Finally, it was his turn. When Eldon fell ill and died, I was ten and eleven years old. It was my first exposure to extreme sickness, and then death. I have never seen my father cry like he did at Eldon’s funeral.

In the years since then, I grew up and moved to California. My parents divorced, sold the farm, and moved away. Eventually, the crooked path of life and practice drew me back to Oregon, and to the areas I frequented as a child.

So, I’m freshly out of sesshin, the flowers are pushing themselves into the world, the earth is waking up. And I realize, it’s February 28. Eldon’s day.

At the Safeway, they’ve gotten the first tulips. I know without checking that they’re from Mt Vernon, Washington. My mother lives there now; it’s the tulip capital of the world. (All tulips are from there, and all tulip bulbs. Even ones that say ‘from Holland’. They ship them there and then they ship them back. Or so I’m told.)

I buy two bunches of tulips, mix the colors, and save half for the zendo.

Dusk is falling as I start driving north, up towards my old life, towards Monmouth and the Pine Crest cemetery. It’s a beautiful ridge with tall trees, half a mile off the highway. Eldon’s family once owned the property, and they still control most of the surrounding land.

In that graveyard are graves from some of the earliest settlers, people who came west on the wagon trains. More recent immigrants are just beginning to be buried there: people from Mexico putting down roots, sending their children to the schools, and planting their dead in this earth. Eldon’s family, over four generations, is there as well.

Eldon’s grave is exactly where it’s always been. There’s Lora. A son and their oldest daughter have passed too.

In addition to the flowers, I have brought three sticks of good incense, and a Droste chocolate pastille, al little orange-flavored disk of fine milk chocolate. It will double as an incense burner: I’ve carefully bored three little holes into it.


I place the flowers. I light the incense and get them stuck in the chocolate without it melting too much. And I stand there, watching the light fade across the valley, watching the clouds. When I was little I took so much natural beauty for granted, but even then I found the Willamette Valley clouds heart-stoppingly beautiful. Darkness overtakes the hills I know so well, and the glints of headlights travel the highway down below. I’m crying.

I don’t intone anything dharanis or gathas for Eldon, much as I wish for his soul’s repose. He was one of those Christians who opens your heart to the whole faith; once the longest-serving member of Monmouth’s First Christian Church. Palms together, I just say that I love him, that I miss him.

Standing there, I realize that he taught me a tremendous amount about dedication and integrity and love, just by being himself. So I say that too. I was still a child when he died, but I desperately miss a benevolent older man, whose warm smell and scratchy cheek are still close at hand, who helped my parents, and who adopted us, in his way.

I go back to the car. I’m not thinking of anything. Llater I will reflect on how we create community and family. On how we find kindred souls because we need to take care of others, and to be taken care of.

In the failing light, I see the dark mass of flowers, and very dimly, the tiny glints of the incense, pouring fragrance into the night, long after I drive away. I take backroads home, to Corvallis.

---

OSU DEPARTMENT INDUCTS MEMBERS OF WITHYCOMBE CLUB
05-28-04

CORVALLIS - A long list of exceptional Oregon State University animal sciences alumni and others who have given outstanding service to the state's livestock industry were honored today by the OSU Department of Animal Sciences as charter members of a new honorary association called the Withycombe Club.

The induction ceremony was part of an awards luncheon held on the OSU campus. The event included presentation of a large donation to the OSU Animal Sciences Department.

"The department established the club as a way to give special recognition to individuals who have made significant contributions to animal agriculture," said Jim Males, department head. "Launching the Withycombe Club is also an opportunity to celebrate our long and productive history as one of the first departments formed, established in 1907, in the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences."

Posthumous inductees:

Eldon Riddell was a third generation
Willamette Valley sheep producer. His
father was an original importer of the
Romney breed. At the time of Eldon's death
in 1985, his Romney, Border Leicester, and
Suffolk flocks were some of the best known
in North America. He regularly imported
Romney and Border Leicester rams from
New Zealand and his Border X Romney
rams were sought after by commercial
producers throughout western Oregon.
Eldon's son, David, is carrying on the
tradition of breeding productive rams for
Oregon's commercial flocks.

The Clock is Running

I'm off to sesshin for a week, starting this evening. I have agreed to be the timekeeper for the retreat. I'm one of the few who will admit to enjoying the job. The relationship between time and consciousness becomes very clear. And even better, I'm excused from washup after meals.

In what might appear to be other news, I've been trying for some time to compose an essay that discusses the war from a personal point of view —not in the abstract, but in terms of its impact on ordinary people in small towns in Oregon.

It's all to easy, even in Corvallis, in the circles I frequent, to forget that real people from our community are serving and fighting and dying violently. The reality of the war as it is actually experienced is so easily buried under ideas and principles and reflexive beliefs—on both sides.

This essay in today's Oregonian does a better job than I ever could, and I must confess I don't mind lacking this young man's qualifications to comment on the war's impact.

I am particularly struck by how the piece concludes. (In my own life, the senseless and violent death of an acquaintance forced me to address some burning questions about the purpose of this life. Eventually, this propelled me to the Zen practice. In talking to others, I have found there there is a sizable demographic of practitioners for whom a senseless death in their lives marked the beginning of a search for truth: a dharma gate.)

Finally, the piece is political in that it deals with a political event: the war. It is not particularly partisan, however, and it asks us all to investigate the question "Is this suffering worth the benefits?" Everyone will have a different answer to this question, and even that may change with time. Regardless of the answer, not to appreciate the price paid for one's current lifestyle and circumstance is shortsighted, even arrogant.

Finally, at the end, a poem by William Stafford. Whatever is needed to snap us into awareness of this moment: masterful poetry and senseless death are both our teachers.

---

When the wake of war rips at the heart

Monday, February 20, 2006

My cousin Adrian Stump was killed in the mountains of Afghanistan a few months ago. We grew up together. We were going to share our first legal drink when he came home for Christmas.

He didn't show. The helicopter he piloted was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade launched by one of the "terrorists" we often hear about, the ones who hate freedom. It took the military three weeks to gather his body, which was ripped apart by the impact of the grenade into his helicopter.

Christmas was depressing. My aunt and uncle had lost their first-born child; I had lost a great cousin and even better friend.

I tuned the world out. I didn't come out of my room for three days except to make attempts at eating. I drank more than usual. I smoked more than usual. The numbing effect made Adrian's passing slightly more tolerable.

I gave up on the news because every time I turned it on, a slide show of my life with Adrian would reel inside my head, and I would cry until my body became limp from exhaustion.

I almost cried during the recent State of the Union address when President Bush asked us to never forget the families who have lost a loved one in this war. I thought of what my family has been through these past months.

I was told that neighbors could hear my aunt's scream blocks away when the government vehicle arrived and uniformed officers told her that she would never see her son again. Human brains are not wired to handle the emotion that floods a mother's body at the moment her son's heart no longer beats. The brain cracks, and the body collapses. My aunt's eyes are empty now; I have a hard time looking into them because I don't see her pain, I feel it. And it's at that moment that I realize I'm experiencing only a fraction of what's coursing through her body.

As I watched the president speak, I heard him say that freedom is on the march, and I wondered, is it? I thought it odd that freedom is the bastard offspring of military intervention and mass murder. I thought it odd that in a world so large, a single man has the power to kill thousands of people without answering legitimate questions from the people he is supposed to be serving.

My friends and family went out for drinks on the day we had planned. Adrian didn't make it because his body was blown to pieces, cremated, then spread in the Blue Mountains in Oregon.

Now I sit through my classes and wonder if the discussions we have are even worth the mental energy. Are we talking about the meaning of life? No. Are we talking about how to realistically arrive at a better world? Or is it simply liberal fantasy? Probably the latter.

I don't like being alone because there's too much time to think about how sad and angry I am that an Oregon National Guardsman is dead because the soldiers in Afghanistan were transferred to Iraq and replaced with guard units who were supposed to respond to local catastrophes.

Everyone tells me that my cousin's death was not in vain. I look into their eyes and know they are lying to me and to themselves. I know they are trying to make me feel better; I nod my head. There are people -- good people -- who honestly believe that Adrian's death wasn't in vain. And to them, I shake my head but say nothing.

Our existence on this planet is not very significant. The world keeps spinning when we die. People move on. But when the world loses someone like Adrian, it should stop, if only for a moment. Rains should pour. Our collective self should pause and reflect: Are we acting as pawns to some other powers that distract us from what truly matters in our life: family, friends, ourselves? Are we doing what we truly love in our lives?

Religious or not, it is a miracle that we are here. We don't have much time, though. Time eventually catches up and runs its course on our bodies. My cousin's death called me back to the nucleus of my life: family, friends and myself. So much had distracted me for so long.

I won't attempt to explain what a great person my cousin Adrian Bovee Stump was because words just don't apply. Emotions do. You listen to him with your eyes and your heart because words lack substance. They cannot describe Adrian or people like Adrian.

After his death, I envisioned myself on my deathbed, staring blankly out a window and asking, "What was it all about?"

If your life isn't on the path you would like it to be, begin a new one. The clock is running.

Harry Beckwith of Pendleton is a senior at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif. Adrian Stump of Pendleton died in Afghanistan in September. This essay was originally published in The Santa Clara, the university's student newspaper.

---

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

Things About Lay Life

Greatest Things About Lay Life
•Estate Sales; and the handembroidered linens and 20th-century kitchen ware that occasionally result.
•Going out to Breakfast; and the waffles that accompany.
•Bookstores; the great weakness and joy.
•Cinema; especially bargain matinees of art films.
•Helping people on the street.
•Jazz 90.1 from Rochester, NY.
•Access to cheese/fish tacos/protein in general.
•Freedom in preparing and consuming food of my choice.
•No wake-up bell.


Hardest Things About Lay Life
•Lack of dharma conversation; and just missing my friends.
•Traffic and other pedestrian dangers.
•The onslaught of print media; so many words....
•Paying the bills..or not.
•No wake-up bell.

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)

---

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.

---

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.

My Other Life

I was once a graduate student conducting research into the genetics of aging and lifespan. I authored a Genetics paper Genetic Analysis of Tissue Aging in Caenorhabditis elegans: A Role for Heat-Shock Factor and Bacterial Proliferation.

Received my PhD in early 2002 and went to live at Tassajara the following year. There are few things I miss after taking that unavoidable leap. I'll always have the skills I learned in graduate school: comfort with a destinationless grind; familiarity with Photoshop; appreciation of a flexible schedule; enthusiasm for commuting on foot.

Not to mention extemporaneous speaking. As a child and teen, I had a stutter, and I prayed for an end to it. After five years of routinely defending my research strategies before an audience, it was gone.

Zen Teachers of Tomorrow: Part I

When I went to Seattle to visit my childhood friend, Adam Price, his daughter Nia fixed me with a look I've only seen in the sanzen room. I was completely visible to this tiny person, it seemed.

In keeping up with my favorite little girl, I found this photo on her web site:



I can't wait to hear her talk.

Consciousness Of/In/As Objects

This next post is launched somewhat bashfully. The new site monitor lets me see traffic coming into this very little blog, this rarefied corner in a vast universe of vaguely self-centered content. And although I cannot see who you are, the site monitor shows where you're from.. and I do not always have the slightest clue who the three loyal non-family/non-dharma-friend readers might be!

Anyway, hello out there. You know I am not a complete new-age idiot. Please enjoy what follows.

Corresponding with Josh Bartok has been an unmitigated pleasure. I'm interested to see how he responds to this one:

"What I'm thinking about" is the teaching that this mind creates the world. That this mind does not reside entirely between my ears or even within the confines of this body. I am increasingly under the impression that consciousness dwells within material objects other than this body. I have heard that all things supposedly have (no--ARE) the Buddhanature. Is this related, perhaps?

This percpetion of the ordinary aliveness and sentience of "things" will probably dissipate; perception for me gets quite mystical (and also quite UNmystical), depending on the time of month!

I guess I'm interested in what is reliable; the Dharma is that which is true at all times and under all conditions. So my own transient impressions of anything can be just that--interesting and subjective. And I can endeavor to relate that to a rational body of teachings. For example, my personal, subjective, experience of dukkha is informed by the presentation of the Four Noble Truths. Along the same lines, I'm trying to reconcile this other feeling--that everything participates in consciousness and has/is awareness-- with what I have heard about the nature of "things". Although I'm only beginning to explore and articulate this, it seems to relate to something that's been percolating for a long time.

That's rather an embarrassing and complex pastiche of thoughts I've just put forth. I'm not sure how well I've expressed myself, and I'm tempted to "send" it quickly before I get cold feet. :-)

In that same spirit I throw it out there, unedited, and forget what I've said.