No more

I can’t promise to show you no more pictures of boring graffiti, but I can promise no more blog-posts for November, 2009.

When I announced my commitment to participate in November’s National Blog Posting Month by posting something (anything!) on each of November’s thirty days, I didn’t envision how quickly the month would fly by. But here I am on the brink of December with thirty posts under my belt: just like that, NaBloPoMo is no more.

Over the past thirty days, I learned it’s not too difficult to post something (anything!) every day if you keep a well-stocked photographic pantry to use on days when light is scarce and inspiration is scarcer. It also helps if you keep a daily journal you can plunder for posts.

More than anything, though, it helps to have an arbitrary commitment to post even when you feel you have nothing significant to say or share. There have been more than a few days this month when I’ve felt like Mother Hubbard looking at her proverbial bare cupboard, but I somehow posted anyway. In retrospect, it was good to have made the promise to post, because that promise kept me posting whether I felt like it or not. Some days you feel like you have something to say, and other days you don’t…but even on the days when you don’t feel particularly profound, you can almost always stir up something, even if it’s only a dirty, gritty version of stone soup.

Occasionally, it’s good to remind yourself that you don’t need huge, uninterrupted chunks of time to spend on your writing: just a few minutes here and a few minutes there can be “enough” if you’ve made a commitment to make good use of those minutes. A few weeks ago, at a particularly busy point in the semester, one of my teaching colleagues asked me if I’d found much time lately to write, and she seemed amazed when I replied that I’d been writing and posting every day. This particular colleague is a poet, and she says she works best when she can devote four or more hours to a work-in-progress…but I can’t remember the last time I had four straight hours that weren’t interrupted by work, chores, or social commitments. If I wrote only when I could steal four uninterrupted hours from my various demands, I’d never write at all. I’m lucky, I think, that prose is so much easier to write than poetry: a genre I can literally squeeze into the tiny gaps in otherwise busy days.

November is ending right in the nick of time, as December is the busiest, most grading-intensive time of the semester: it will be good to have one less arbitrary commitment to worry about these next few weeks, when I’ll be facing a seemingly endless series of seemingly bottomless paper piles. Whereas blogging can (and does) get squeezed into those occasional moments when I find or make time, paper-grading really does require the kind of uninterrupted concentration my aforementioned colleague devotes to poetry.

I don’t see any poem-writing in my immediate future, just a lot of paper-grading. Given the many to-do’s that stand between me and the end of my current semester, I’m happy to return to an unpredictably occasional blog-posting schedule, saying “no more, for now” to November’s NaBloPoMo commitment. It’s never too early, after all, to start stocking one’s pantry for next year.

 

Handyman’s special

They say the cobbler’s children have no shoes, and it seems the proprietors of Pill Hardware in Central Square, Cambridge are so busy helping other folks with their home improvement projects, they don’t have time to give their old sign a new coat of paint.

 

Only connect

J and I have an ongoing joke about the number of perfect strangers who talk to us whenever we go anywhere in public. We regularly get asked for directions, or if we’re dressed in Bruins gear on the way to or from a hockey game, folks will ask us who the Bruins are playing, or what the score was, or what we think about a particular player. Folks will inquire about J’s camera, or they’ll make chitchat about the weather, how crowded the trolley is, or any other sort of random topic. It’s as if in place of the proverbial “Kick me” sign, someone stuck a sign on our backs that says “Talk to us: we’re friendly!”

J and I speculate that we must look normal, nonthreatening, and otherwise approachable: if you’re lost and need directions, you don’t want to look like a creep by asking a solitary member of the opposite sex for help, and you don’t want to bother a couple who looks Too Young, Too Hip, or Too Completely In Love to take time for your problems. J and I, on the other hand, apparently look Just Right. We don’t look like we’re too cool to be bothered, but we also don’t look like we’re so lonely and desperate, we’ll latch onto anyone who strikes up a conversation.

J and I look, in other words, perfectly average, and it seems that random strangers like to talk with average folks. Over the several years we’ve been dating, J and I have given countless directions to out-of-towners, once helped a guy in Atlanta buy baseball tickets from a sidewalk scalper, and last weekend tried (unsuccessfully) to explain to a young bewildered Asian woman why there were so many sports fans on the T even after the Red Sox season is over. (Apparently, they don’t play ice hockey where she comes from.)

Although neither of our respective exes was actively antagonistic toward strangers, neither J nor I had this experience of being so popular with strangers when we each were married. Although I occasionally had folks ask me for directions when I lived in Boston and took the T to and from school, strangers didn’t regularly talk to my ex and me when we were together in public. J and his ex-wife didn’t go to as many events as J and I do, so they had fewer opportunities to talk to strangers, but still, J insists that he didn’t talk to as many random folks when he was married as he does now that he’s dating me. Whatever secret conflicts and resentments both J and I experienced in our previous relationships, I’m guessing that tension was apparent to the strangers who didn’t talk with us. Sometimes you get a “vibe” that a silent couple is harboring hidden hostilities, and apparently J and I don’t project that vibe. Whereas my ex-husband often accused me of flirting or trying to upstage him if I simply behaved in my normal outgoing fashion, J doesn’t feel threatened if I speak up and act friendly with folks, so I do.

Yesterday afternoon, after having stopped to chat with a neighbor we’d seen raking leaves on our way to brunch, we dropped by another neighbor’s house for an open house fundraiser for Connect Africa, an organization that provides business and educational support for Ugandan villagers. While J and I browsed crafts made by Ugandan women working to support AIDS orphans, we chatted with the neighbor who had organized the open house, her husband, the friend who founded Connect Africa, and several women who were also browsing the handicrafts. “You should buy one,” I advised one woman who was tentatively considering a pile of intricately woven baskets. “Then you can use it to carry the jewelry you’ll want to buy.” I pointed to a small basket I’d filled with beaded bracelets and necklaces, and the woman nodded. Later, while J and I were selecting a colorful woven mat, agreeing that we’d find somewhere to put it, I saw the woman I’d talked to standing at the jewelry table filling a basket.

J and I ended up buying two armfuls of handicrafts, much to our hostess’ delight. “This is great,” J remarked, admiring a goblet-shaped basket he’d chosen as a desk-organizer. “Every time I look at this, I’ll think about where it came from, and the story behind it.” After we’d said our goodbyes and headed home with our African treasures, J observed, “You just spent more time talking to the neighbors in one afternoon than my ex-wife did the entire time we were married.”

 

For a gray day

When I first started blogging, I shared only words, not pictures…but as soon as I started pairing word and image, the pictures began to take a life of their own.

Ever since I got my first purse-sized digital camera, I’ve taken lots of digital photos, and most of these have ended up languishing on my hard drive, stockpiled for a theoretical future date when I’ll need or want to revisit them. More recently, though, I’ve started posting photos to Flickr even if I have no clear idea of when or whether I’ll blog them. Instead of hiding these “maybe-babies” on my hard drive, I’ve begun to store them online so they’re there if I need them, or if anyone else is interested. It’s easier, after all, to find a tagged and titled photo on Flickr than it is to find an anonymous file in a nested folder on your hard drive.

These days it’s dark when I walk Reggie before teaching, and soon it will be dark when I walk him after classes are over, too. It’s difficult to take blog-worthy photos when it’s dark outside or on days that are nondescript and overcast. It makes sense, then, to have a stash of colorful images set aside for a gray or rainy day, spots of time stored online for future contemplation or even delight.

I shot today’s images last Sunday morning, before going to practice at the Cambridge Zen Center. Mindfulness, unfortunately, is a phenomenon that can’t be saved for a gray day: you can only find it Here and Now.

 

I stand as nigh

Yesterday morning I gave consulting interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center, as I do about once a month. Consulting interviews give Zen practitioners a chance to have a private, one-on-one conversation with a teacher: a time to ask questions, talk about things you’d be too embarrassed to mention at a public talk, or simply check in. As a Senior Dharma Teacher, I’m supposed to be the one “answering” student questions, the assumption being that someone who has been practicing long enough to earn the title “Senior Dharma Teacher” must know her way around the karmic block. But of course, I’m as new to the metaphysical neighborhood as the next person, so I never know exactly what will come out of my mouth when someone enters the interview room looking for Answers From The Teacher.

I’m always amazed by how sitting face-to-face behind closed doors with someone creates a heightened sense of awareness, an experience just as intense as any silent meditation session. Perhaps it’s the sanctity of the Zen Center’s interview room, a place where I’ve spent many a face-to-face session on the student cushion puzzling over some metaphysical mystery or (more typically) struggling with some personal conundrum. Given this history, it seems outright comical to find myself sitting, about once a month, in the teacher’s seat. I always feel a bit like the Wizard of Oz when I don my long, bat-winged Dharma teacher robes. Walking down the street, I’m just another average Joe, but when I put on my Dharmic Disguise, people think I have answers, insight, or clarity they lack.

“Ignore the woman behind the curtain,” I’m sometimes tempted to say when students enter the Interview Room at the sound of the bell that signals “next”…but I don’t. As much as the Wizard of Oz turns out to be another clueless guy from Kansas, Dorothy and her companions need to believe that someone like the wizard exists. Before Dorothy and her companions are ready to realize they already have the things they seek, they need the feedback of an impartial third party to validate their quest. The Wizard of Oz doesn’t give Dorothy, the Tin-Man, the Cowardly Lion, or the Scarecrow anything they didn’t already have…but somehow they each needed to make the trip to Oz to realize what was already as apparent as the ruby slippers on Dorothy’s feet.

Like the Wizard of Oz, I don’t have much in the way of Answers to offer those folks who are brave enough to sit face-to-face with me behind the closed door of the Zen Center interview room. Instead, I try to listen and be present with whatever question, problem, or situation each individual brings, and when I do open my mouth, I hear myself saying variations on the same basic responses. “Yes, I’ve experienced the same thing,” “You’re on the right track, so keep going,” and “You already understand” all sound like pat answers, the Dharmic equivalent of a doctor saying “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.” But all of these responses are nonetheless entirely true. In most cases, even beginning practitioners already understand, in their heart of hearts, what they need to do in Situation X, or they already are halfway down the road to their own solution, and they simply need encouragement to keep going. And yes, there is very little any given Zen practitioner can tell me in interview that I haven’t done, thought, or otherwise experienced myself, too: there are only so many flavors of suffering we all keep rehashing and reheating in recipe after recipe, ad nauseum.

Before arriving at the Zen Center on Sunday, I took my usual walk around Cambridge to clear my head before practice began. In a park at the end of Auburn Street, between Central Square and MIT, I stumbled upon a plaza with the words of Walt Whitman inscribed on the sidewalk: “If you are a workman or workwoman, I stand as nigh as the nighest that works in the same shop.” In the 1855 version of Whitman’s “Carol of Occupations,” Whitman reassured readers that divinity isn’t some distant person or concept; it’s as close at hand as your nearest neighbor. Similarly, the answers any of us seek aren’t far off or even separate from ourselves: you needn’t visit a Zen Center, go into a special room at the sound of a bell, or ask a teacher.

The answers any of us seek are like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, already on our feet, or like the wisdom, courage, and heart the scarecrow, lion, and tin-man already had. The answers any of us seek are as close and familiar as our own nose: something immediately close at hand, but sometimes hard to see. The dialogue between so-called-teacher and so-called-student on Sunday mornings in the Zen Center interview room is like looking into a mirror. In case you need help finding and seeing your own nose, a teacher sits as nigh as a face-to-face neighbor ready to reflect back that which you already own and understand.

 

Unexpected

Last night on my way to practice at the Cambridge Zen Center, I took the T to Harvard Square, ostensibly to go notebook- and pen-shopping at Bob Slate. In reality, though, I simply wanted to lose myself in an anonymous throng of fellow pedestrians, as is possible in a city like Cambridge. (As true as this Ben & Jerry’s ad is when it comes to the pace of passing pedestrians, it gets its geography wrong. The throngs passing through the Harvard Square T station are largely composed of Cantabrigians, not Bostonians. So much for market research.)

Before I left for Cambridge yesterday, I had duly planned to blog, as I do most days: one of the repeating items on each day’s to-do list, in fact, is “blog.” But as I did this time last summer, this past week I’ve felt a bit of the blog-blahs. In the past, I’ve gone walking around Harvard Square when I’ve felt my Muse was hibernating; sometimes a simple change of scenery helps you see things in a new, more creative way. Or sometimes not. One of the things about both writing and meditation practice, I’ve learned, is you can’t generalize based on past experiences. Something that worked last week, last month, or last year might not work the same way if you try it again. The standard investment advice of “your results may vary” applies not only when you compare yourself with others but also when you compare your current situation with whatever happened previously. That was then, and this is now.

And yet, we continue to make this sort of comparison because comparing seems to be a deeply entrenched aspect of human nature. One of the recurring themes I encounter in the questions I field as a Senior Dharma Teacher giving consulting interviews at the Zen Center, in fact, involves this sort of comparison: “I read somewhere that you’re supposed to do/feel/experience X when you meditate, but when I meditate, I do/feel/experience Y. Is this/am I normal?” The standard answer to the “is this/am I normal” question is YES. The books say “X,” but your results may vary. It’s not that the books are wrong, and it’s not that your experience is wrong: it’s that the Present Moment hardly ever looks how you, the books, or anyone else expected.

Finding yourself, again, in a situation that Isn’t What You Expected, now what? The openness of this “now what?” is the space where the Present Moment unfurls, flowers, and bears fruit. But what unfurls, flowers, and fruits today probably won’t be identical to what you’ve grown used to. What two leaves, flowers, or fruits are identical? The beauty of any walk through Cambridge or any other city–the beauty of any stroll among fast-paced Cantabrigians, Bostonians, or others–is that you never know quite what to expect. If you knew exactly what pen or notebook to buy, what need would there be for shopping? If you knew exactly what you want to blog today, tomorrow, or the next day, what room would there be for exploration, serendipity, and surprise?

 

The wisdom of mist

It’s still raining from yesterday and last night, although “rain” is perhaps too strong a word for this mist that falls without the sound of raindrops. You can see it in the air, and you can see it in the drops and rivulets that gather on impervious surfaces. But you can walk through it, like a cloud, without feeling you’re getting wet.

It’s a metaphor often used in Zen that meditation practice is like walking through mountain mist: without realizing it, you get soaked clear through. And I guess that’s how things have been with my own Zen practice: as I do it, it doesn’t feel like it’s working, but all these years later, look at how wet I’ve become.

I think many things are like that: if you do something daily, you get better at it without really knowing it. As Ken Kessel JPSN once said, we become what we practice, or as Malcolm Gladwell writes, it takes 10,000 hours of doing something diligently to become proficient at it.

I know that over the years, I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours on my meditation mat, and as many hours (at least!) scribbling lines in cherished black notebooks. And I’ve probably spent the equivalent of 10,000 hours blogging, or snapping photos if you could somehow tally the total time it takes to snap, snap, snap day after day, taking bad shots along with the good and gradually learning how to sort one from the other.

It’s not a mystery, this method of doing something every day whether it seems to be working or not. It’s simply the wisdom of mountain mist: an imperceptible influence that cannot be denied.

This is a lightly edited version of this morning’s journal entry, illustrated with images from yesterday’s misty-morning walk down Modica Way in Central Square, Cambridge.

 

A rainy day

David Fichter’s murals look better on a sunny day…but it was raining when I arrived at the Cambridge Zen Center on Sunday morning, and I’m in the habit of taking a walk before sitting down to meditate. So despite the drizzle, I left my purse in the car and walked with just my camera and a raincoat: just me, the rain, and a neighborhood full of images.

In response to Rurality’s comment on yesterday’s post, today I’ve been sitting with a question: what is wrong with quick picture-posts? As a writer, I feel guilty when I post “just” a picture, yet I continue to stockpile more photos than I could ever blog, even if I posted “just” a picture a day. So what am I waiting for? Why am I saving images for a proverbial rainy day when I know the secret to successful blogging is simply showing up?

So here I sit on the evening of a sunny day sharing pictures from a rainy day. This is how Central Square, Cambridge looked on a wet Sunday morning, before I arrived at the Zen Center to meditate to the sound of raindrops. What better way to spend the morning of a rainy day?

If these rainy-day images of David Fichter’s “The Potluck” have left you hungry for more, you can revisit my sunny-day photos of “Sunday Afternoon on the Charles River,” another Fichter mural in Cambridge, MA. And if you still haven’t gotten your fill of photos, I’ve finally uploaded a photo-set from the May 3rd soccer match between the New England Revolution and the Houston Dynamo. Enjoy!

 

Wealth

In trying economic times, you don’t have to be a starving artist to be on the lookout for an alternate source of income. This offer of cash for your Warhol is a not-so-gentle jab at Brandeis University, whose doomed decision earlier this year to bolster their budget by selling the school’s art collection turned out to be a public relations disaster, earning them nothing but ridicule.

In the aftermath of my friend JW’s death last week, I’ve experienced a new appreciation for the intangible wealth that is friendship. I shot these photos on my way to the Cambridge Zen Center for a Dharma teachers’ meeting this past weekend, and it was like stumbling onto treasure to see my long-time friends Jen and Jody there. “Make new friends but keep the old,” an old song advises. “One is silver and the other gold.” Old friends are as precious as gold because they’ve seen you–and loved you–through years of changes and challenges. Seeing Jen pregnant with her second child, I remember the joy I felt when we spent some time alone together during her first pregnancy and the happiness of her double baby shower with another long-time friend, Stella. I knew Jen before she was pregnant, before she was married, and before either of us grew into our long Dharma teacher robes. Jody, too, has been a friend through many changes: a musician who once collaborated with my ex-husband, she’s stuck around while he hasn’t. It’s wonderful to spend even a short time with someone who knew you when you were one half of a couple and still loves you after the dust of divorce and heartache has settled.

In the aftermath of loss, being able to come together with old friends to commiserate a shared loss is invaluable. Last night, I made a two-hour drive to Rhode Island and back to attend JW’s seven-day Buddhist memorial ceremony at the Providence Zen Center. One of the three jewels in Buddhist practice is the community called sangha, and to me it was worth a four-hour round-trip to hug a handful of friends after having chanted, shared stories, and wept in a Dharma room packed with fellow mourners. JW himself was a treasure: a man whose kindness, loyalty, and good humor helped Zen practitioners all over the world for the 20 years he worked for the Kwan Um School of Zen and its international sangha. Approaching PZC last night, I felt a twinge of emptiness knowing JW wouldn’t be there, omnipresent clipboard in hand, to greet guests and see to their needs. That emptiness melted, though, when I heard a Dharma room of people, all gathered in JW’s memory, who were already there chanting for him. Make new friends, and keep the old, even if some of your golden friends have left this suffering world behind. The memories and love you carry in your heart are priceless indeed.

This is my belated contribution to last week’s Photo Friday theme, Wealth. Originally, I had intended to end with this “pot of gold”-themed photo of Goldenstash, which I spotted on my way to the Cambridge Zen Center this weekend, but I got sidetracked by another, more intangible sort of wealth. It’s all good.

 

No words

Email is an impersonal way to find out a dear friend has passed, but sometimes there’s no better way to break bad news. In my Zen school, we chant Kwan Seum Bosal–the name of the bodhisatta of compassion–when someone is in need and Ji Jang Bosal–the name of the “Earth Treasure” bodhisattva–when someone dies. Right now, the names of Kwan Seum Bosal and Ji Jang Bosal are echoing around the globe as members of my Zen school learn via email that one of our own–a long-time and dear Zen-friend–has passed, leaving a bereaved wife and many devastated friends.

In the immediate aftermath of shocking news, you have no words to express (much less explain) what has happened: all you have is a sad, stunned feeling, like a punch to the chest. The beauty of chanting, I’ve found, is that you don’t have to say anything. Once you take up your moktok–the hollow wooden instrument used to keep time during chanting–and open your mouth, the familiar melody takes over, like an oft-repeated prayer that prays itself. When Zen Master Seung Sahn died several years ago, Zen practitioners around the world chanted “Ji Jang Bosal” in his memory; when MBTA operator Terrese Edmonds died last spring, folks at the Cambridge Zen Center, having read the news in the paper, intoned the same chant. It doesn’t matter how near or far death strikes; when you receive word of bereavement, either your own or that of another, there’s only one proper response: Ji Jang Bosal.

Years ago when I lived at the Cambridge Zen Center, we’d come together every evening to chant Kwan Seum Bosal for those in need or Ji Jang Bosal for those who’d died: as a community, we carried one another’s heartaches. Every time I go to the Cambridge Zen Center to practice, I look at the names written on cards on the altar: one card listing those who are struggling, and one card listing those who have died. It’s a reminder that we’re all in this together: at any moment, any one of us will find ourselves suffering or bereaved, and at any moment, any one of us might die. We chant to give one another solace in times when words can’t express our sympathies, and we chant to remind ourselves that none of us is immune from suffering and death.

When I lived at the Cambridge Zen Center, residents would sometimes use the main meditation room for solo practice during the day, when others were at work or in their rooms. Sitting meditation nicely lends itself to solitary practice, but the sound of chanting seeps through walls and windows. Whenever I’d come home to the Zen Center during the day and would hear the sound of one of my house-mates chanting, I’d pause to listen: Kwan Seum Bosal means someone needs help, and Ji Jang Bosal means someone is grieving. In that brief moment of listening, I’d silently chant along with my unseen house-mate, not knowing the precise story behind her or his intention. From day to day, the names and faces we chant for may change, but the chant itself–and the emotion behind it–stays the same.

I was living at the Zen Center when both of my grandmothers died, and I was living at the Zen Center when my father was diagnosed with (and successfully fought) cancer. In all three cases, chanting by myself and with others brought me great emotional solace: it was something I could do, I found, even when my heart was broken, the fluid ribbon of a familiar melody carrying me even when my voice trembled with sobs. In the aftermath of tonight’s email, I have no words, but I have a clear intention: Ji Jang Bosal Ji Jang Bosal for the one we have lost, and Kwan Seum Bosal Kwan Seum Bosal for those of us left behind.