Category Archives: religion

Lean into the mountain…

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A week of snow, on and off, and some single digit temperatures. A taste of Winter. Just enough to get me kind of excited. I’d forgotten how the Winters up here can be an ongoing challenge. All modes of transport involve extra care. Walking is most dangerous in town, because most places don’t shovel their sidewalks, either correctly or at all and no parking lot or street parking is safe; once your out of your car, walk mindfully.

Modern times add a few extra concerns. When the Wi-fi broadcast signal goes out on Sheep Ridge, it may not come back on for the rest of the day or tomorrow. Arhggggg!!! Can’t access Facebook! Missing out on pictures of casserroles,  grandkids in school plays, and that newfangled dessert they’re offering at TGI-Fridays, and those cute  cat-videos. What amused us before cat videos?

Anyway, enough of a preview to make me look forward to Jan. Feb. and March. I plan to make those “retreat(ish)”months where I can hunker down and look at  my spiritual life in terms of meditation and being still. Spiritual belt-tightening as Reverend Alden used to call it.

In the meantime, this week I’m getting ready to go back to D.C. over Christmas and just relax, having gotten into the swing of things here on the ranch, I can see myself holding forth on the plane to the poor unfortunate sitting near me, how it’s good to get away from all that jus’ plain ol’ ranchin’; even though I’m just a Ranch Finger, part-time volunteer at that. Like the ladies at the Hospital gift-shop; helpful and necessary  but not vital to the operation, yet certainly to their own well-being.

The bulk of the herd is out to Winter pasture and there is only an Old Mare and a One-eyed Stallion to feed on the lower pasture and two nice Donkeys in an upper paddock who are not too happy to be there because they have no cover; but I bring them some carrots twice a day along with some alfalfa and go and break up the ice on the water trough they share with the horse herd, which also gives me a chance to yack and pet with them for a bit; sometimes one or two of the Breakfast Cats come along and and make nice with the Burros too. I named them Lewis and Clark, because they are so intrepid and can-do.

Also, four  Pack-Mules and Luna and her Colt, Roscoe , who was born one morning in a ditch of water in pasture below my cabin. That morning I felt I was in a movie, I milled around as he was being helped to drink milk, taken from his mother because he was too small to stand and get his own, and after four hours he stood up and he found the nipple. He survived after couple of other drawbacks and is now a rambunctious little colt who already acts like a Future Stallion. Those four mules will help keep him in line as he goes through his first Winter.

There are also two Elk carcasses down by the river that had been butchered and are now in the capable hands of the Magpies, Coyotes and a Golden Eagle who I have seen fly above.

I went by there the other morning to do a short Buddhist Funeral service for them and chant some bits of scripture that I felt appropriate while circambulating them in the snow. Magpies waited patiently. One line goes “…the things that are eaten, and those doing the eating are universally void of Self…”. There is nothing to judge, in any fashion. Everything has a reason for being the way that it is. There is always a “before”

The past is Prelude.

The question for me is, “What am I building Now and how does it influence the Future?” , and that is part of that looking within and seeing where I can do better; that this Winter will be partly focused on, the other parts are doing the things that need doing and those that are good to do. Hopefully, they combine more often than not.

Ascending the mountain I lean into

It for help and, it is given.

Standing in the stream I look up and 

See the water flowing towards and away,  down 

Behind me.

Yet, there I am.

 

Snow, flies, silence, buzzing…

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In the well-lit loft of the Wallowa Buddhist Temple in Joseph, OR, in Wallowa County, (“The County” as the residents tend to refer to it), I sit with seven other people, after a couple of meditation periods, for a Dharma talk and discussion. I look out of the large windows and watch the First Crop snow flakes of the year fall and settle, fall and land plump, wet and they clump, pile up and accentuate the bare trees and and fence rails and there is a relief that finally it has come. I drove about fifteen miles from where I live which  is about 300 feet lower in elevation and where there is just wet slush. At the temple, a short distance up Hurricane Creek Rd., it’s real snow. Winter.

The Dharma talk is given by the younger of the two female monks who reside, practice and offer Buddhist teaching at this temple.

As the snowflakes drop, large, gravid and at ease; I see in the windowsill there are three old flies trying to fly up the window to attain some necessary position within their House Fly Imperatives but only manage about a foot of flight before they settle back down on the sill, to try again and again. Life is now very short for these Winter Flies. Later in the day, or the next, their carcasses will be respectfully gathered up and with a verse from the Funeral Ceremony for Animals, will be placed outside, to mix with the snow and settle in to their next activity.

We are having tea and some sweet offerings brought by Sangha members and the Dharma talk is on a tiny portion of the mighty Avatamsaka Sutra, a Chinese text held in high esteem especially in the Chan/Zen traditions and is the basis of the Kegon school of Buddhism in Japan. Its very precise descriptions of inter-related phenomena and how they produce This, and the journey to complete enlightenment that is the understanding of all descriptions and their inherent emptiness. More or less.

The black flies fly upward, constrained by

Clear glass through which I see the white

Snow fall to ground. Heaven touching earth.

The flies are old with wings worn thin, and

Tattered by the efforts life. Like me; although

Warm, eating chocolate, sipping tea, at ease

Listening to the teachings of a deep, ever changing

Present intertwining all of the phenomena as the

Snow falls white and the flies fall black. Buzzing

(the background noise of Silence),

Sangha discusses intertwining while very quiet down

Drifting snow encloses the miracle within each

Condition of the world as it goes on, and on and,

Sure as snowflakes fall to earth, one day, perhaps

Today, if not, then certainly another. I will buzz one

Last time against the false constraint of a window

Pane of my conjuring, and pass through it and join the

Falling snows as they settle to nourish this Earth and

Every thing.

Never metaphor I…

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Last week a resentment swarmed up the stick I was using to poke at all the little ways the world and the people in it were not behaving in ways that pleased me.

At first, of course, justifications took precedence and those lasted for a good couple of hours; then the niggle that perhaps I was wrong and not seeing clearly arose and that took a couple of days and a sleepless night to become apparent as true. I also had to do some things. Sit still. Examine. Open my heart. Be willing. Be teachable. Give myself the Dharma. Accept the teachings as they came. Two dreams. One, pulling a large wooden splinter out of my right eyeball with tweezers in the bathroom mirror. The other, walking next to my teacher, and he, uncharacteristically, putting his hand around my shoulder as we walked and I felt only Love being transmitted.

He was one of the objects of my resentment because sometimes I don’t like the way he does things.

Almost twenty years of my accepting (haltingly and with bristling, carping and grousing at various times), this student/teacher- master/disciple intention experiment (“We’ll see how it goes…”) and having to remember my part. To examine, to accept; to make the teaching true for myself. That truth which transcends teacher and student, peasant and sage; and does not stand against itself.

My former father-in-law, a true Irish self-made-man, Joe L. used to say “You can’t have it every-which-way!” The truth.

Anyway, it takes what it takes and I have to remember that “one should always be disturbed by the truth”, because otherwise it’s just an agreement between what I know, what I think I know, and how the world appears in relation to all that, to me. Dead end.

Resistance is a many-headed dragon. It doesn’t need slaying, just some good nourishment and a safe place to rest and enough comfy pillows for all its heads. Luckily I have Resistance Whisperers in my life.

 

The view is great from here…

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Talking with a friend the other evening we got on the subject of being nice to others even though we don’t feel it. My friend thought that there was an aspect of in-authenticity or just being phony when we were nice to needy annoying co-workers. while not feeling that way, at all.

My thoughts were that the only thing that matters is how we act, not how we feel. Our feelings are extremely mutable; we feel rancor towards someone and they bring us a little gift when we have a birthday, now we like them. We feel friendly toward someone and they don’t respond to us in a way we want and now we’re on the fence about them; so on and so forth…

If we act in a kind or neutral way, despite how we feel, we are developing a mental/physical habit that will, in time, often change how we feel. This is good.

The phoniness comes from our intentions in acting nice. If our intentions are mostly selfish, then we are in phony territory, ready to homestead. But just a natural human aspect that could use a little help or tidying up.

Most of our “personality” and our general response system to the world, is just an accumulation of old habits (some of them older than we may know), that are so ingrained that we falsely use them to identify us, as “me”. One proof of this is the fact that many of us have had the experience of transforming some old and unhelpful habits that were not useful and during that process we were somewhat surprised that we had never noticed the negative aspects of that part of our “personality”. Hell, we may even have thought is was cute or manly.

The tricky part of this is to see the situation(s) clearly and our part(s) in it. We have to face and look very closely at our most cherished possession; our story of ourselves, and that many times, we just sort of scroll roll past those parts of the story that we know to be unhelpful, or just not fair, right, honest or even true. It’s tough to face the fact that mostly we are full of baloney; or just straw. We grow the straw, and lord knows we slice the baloney.

The good news is, that is not a problem, it’s the human condition. Not seeing clearly. Not being able to step back just a few inches, or feet, or miles from our insitence that our view may be blocked, or skewed and generally inaccurate.

That is the place where change is initiated, not just waited on while simultaneously waiting to die.

 

The view is great from here, its filled with me, 

I like what I see, except when I don’t;  and

A voice-over starts, just like in the movies,  that

Explains me, and how I act and feel, to me; and then

And there my view changes to go along with my story,

About me, you, them, those, this, that; and all them

Things that seem outside of the me, yet some-

How I know can’t exist without. How, how to

Connect? Is the truth just a glance away? Maybe?

 

 

 

 

 

Unmoored in a good vessel…

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So, apparently I write a new post on this blog every five months whether I need to or not.

When I restarted this blog I was moving to the Bay area in June of ’14 Now it’s almost May ’16, and I’m going to move back up North in September. Lots of movement, lots of changes and lots of hecticity on some levels but mostly leveling out.

 

This time of actually re-entering the world since my wife Linda’s death in Jan.’14, has been very rich and discomfiting, things are always like that when I have to face uncomfortable aspects of myself. My childishness, my yearning, my unwillingness, my being stuck; and the dichotomy that exists in that I also contain the exact opposites of those aspects of my Self. The serious grown-up who accepts his age and place in the culture and is comfortable in his own skin and sees those yearnings as the old habit patterns of a lost boy, the Zen practitioner who is sometimes so willing that he feels almost completely un-moored and drifting in concert with That Which Is.

All those seeming opposites just part of the whole. All is one. All is different.

I’m going to get back in the habit of writing for my own pleasure and practice  the Way of Being Teachable. There are so many things and people in my life that teach me constantly, I just have to remember that a good student can see connections that hint at meaning; that point one in a direction where there is no solution, no closure, no surety, no “I’ve got it.”; but rather to “That’s interesting.”

An old friend told me she had read all of my posts on this blog, so I reread them myself and was surprised what a shallow self-involved twit I can be, but also somewhat relieved to see that I was trying to Reach Out from that Self. And that’s OK.

I was sitting in meditation in the little Meditation Hall

At Kanzeon Home, where I live; and offering my practice

For the benefit of all beings because

I don’t know what else to do.

Everyone has to be somewhere, and

Everyone has to be doing something.