Category Archives: Zen

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.

 

Anti-matter=natter…

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All the choices in my life today are staggering when I stop to consider, that within a fairly wide range, I can do just about anything that can be dreamt of. On some things I would have to spend every penny that I have in one day, still I can actually live the life of the Gods of not too long ago.

I can be anywhere in the world in one day. I can eat food from thousands of places around the globe; fresh. I can be in snow and within hours be on a warm beach. I can send a thought or a clear image to thousands of people instantaneously. I can fly. I have at my fingertips the accumulated knowledge of mankind, of every tribe, every empire, every clan, every school that has ever kept records of its teachings.

It’s all at my beck and call.

What am I doing with this awesome power?

I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a cold drink of tonic water and lemon.

I’m watching a group of local Warriors engage in modern athletic competition (war), with a group that is known for having Blazed a Trail all the way to Portland, OR from far-flung distant points to the East many years ago.

I am connected to another person through a small device that lets me plan a future meal, while also connected to yet another person to arrange a meeting three weeks hence thirty miles away across a cold and deep Bay in the Pacific Ocean; 7,000 miles from where I was born.

All of the things that I can do today are possible through the help and effort of countless other beings, humans and otherwise. Beings that invented, built, transported, wrapped, delivered, set-up, and in some cases made possible by giving their lives during the thousands of discrete transactions that had to take place, so that I could have this evening as a small God-ling on a small planet in the incalculable immensity of the Universe, and still, I  suffer from the mistaken idea that I matter.

And,

I can make a small difference

And,

That matters

 

 

Just a thought…

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A nice day started with a powerful acupuncture treatment, a shopping trip to Costco and a bunch of other stuff including staying in touch with old friends in far-flung places from disparate  parts of my travels from there to here, physically and temporally.

We are all challenged by being whoever we are, especially if we have any degree of self-awareness and are working on being that way, and that’s the only kind of people I choose to spend time with nowadays, life is too short. However, it can be even more of a challenge to be our friend, or partner, or mate, or any combination thereof.

I used to comment to my wife that she was driving me nuts, and she would point out that it was a putt, not a drive. We all have some real Bodhisattvas in our lives. People who not only put up with us, but choose to spend time with us, and, often choose to live with us. Yikes!

I have certainly been blessed with the people that I can call friends and those that act that way towards me. Go figure!

In a conversation with a friend this evening a formulation occurred regarding dealing with hurt feeling or a sense of personal affront. It went something like this.

We offer the “resentment” up in the opened palm of our hands, both of them, as if it were a stunned bird we found on the ground. We hold it up so it can become aware and gather its energy up for the flight back to where it belongs.

It may take some time for this to take place. So we wait, palms open.

In the meanwhile we also see (visualize) our hearts opening up in the same way the palms are offered. Open and up. Then, we can see that our open palms are also in the position to accept the help that comes to us from the Eternal. And, we need not know what the particulars of that help are, just be prepared to be, in a position mentally, physically and spiritually to accept what is given.

We will be aware of something going on in this process because it will actually feel like the right thing to do. And that, is sufficient.

Just a thought…

A movement of the mind,

The heart, the body; all

Three in concert being

That whole which is

Greater than the parts.

 

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.

 

Being whatever and wherever…

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Below is a portion of a response to friend who was sharing about the recent death of his father. As is so often the case for me, when I’m talking/writing to someone about real things, I am really talking to myself and letting some inner aspect dictate (in the truest sense), an answer or insight (either large or small), about something that is personal to me experientially, and universal.

Sadly, so often when I’m talking to myself like this, there is  an innocent bystander trying to extricate themselves from my self-knowledge pronouncement. Oh, well. At least its helpful to somebody.

 

Thank you for sharing the obituary as well as some of your thoughts and feelings regarding this rich, precious, unavoidable and deeply touching time in your life. We are fortunate when we can experience the fullness of these “later” life lessons, they are sometimes much more difficult because they are so unpredictable. All our suppositions and musings can get a good trouncing from the dormant and sometimes cleverly disguised feelings, memories, perhaps even wounds and often the unintended glancing blows that families impose/visit on each other. 

My experience is that meditation just opens doors. It’s not a solution as such. The solution, if there is one, can be seen as a by-product of meditation, not the purpose. Meditation allows us to experience our “Selves” in the raw, just as we are; changeable, vulnerable, reactionary, defensive, aggressive, knowing, un-knowing confused, competent, remarkably resilient and possessing a deeper core that we hadn’t needed to activate, yet. Yet, there we are in our miserable splendor. So much to be grateful for. Prayers of thanks spring to the heart of their own at these times. You are well placed.
I have just passed Linda’s 1st anniversary and it has taken that long for things to settle into their little places, now they have a chance to get some rest. Turns out everything just has to move through time and space; atoms and pyramids. The living and the dead.

As a Buddhist monk of my acquaintance says, “We all have to be someplace, and we all have to be doing something.”

Usually what and where we are and what we’re doing is not important, what matters is our state of mind while doing and being whatever and wherever.