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.

 

A silent place

There is a strong, silent place I’ve found on retreat that lingers: once you’ve mapped the route to that place, you can return to it whenever you need to. That place is not distant, and it takes only a moment’s awareness–the span of a single breath–to return there. But the way to this place is elusive, and many spend their entire lives traveling far and wide to find it, to no avail. Like a dog’s own tail, it slips beyond your reach the more (and the more fervently) you chase it.

There were moments at Saturday’s hockey game, for instance, when I felt myself retreating to that place of calm as I waited, watching and alert, for the precise moment to snap a shot. Photography is nothing more than target practice, and to hit a target, you need an awake and alert eye. It is the strength and solace of that silent place that gets me through overloaded semesters, grading all-nighters, or early-morning teaching prep; it is the strength and solace of that silent place that helps me juggle two jobs when many struggle to handle only one.

The secret of this strong, silent place is not secret, but it hides under misleading names: calling it a place, for instance, is already a mistake. If you call it a place, you’ve already wandered from it; if you call it a thing, you’ve already mislaid it; and if you call it a person, you’re already estranged. “It,” after all, is not even an “it”: “it” is neither one thing nor two, incapable of either speaking or being spoken of.

And yet this strong, silent place is the most mundane location of them all: neither far nor near, it’s a place where we all dwell. Everyone knows it without realizing it, or has it without knowing. I think mothers know it best, this strong and silent place from which all things are born and the impossible can be done, but only with great love. Mothers know that life is borne from great pain, and mothers know that love never tires.

Click here for a photo-set of images from the grounds at the Providence Zen Center, where I went on a one-day retreat yesterday: a pilgrimage back to my personal power source.

 

Meditation

You’d think that last week’s Photo Friday theme, Meditation, would be an easy one for someone who practices and teaches Zen meditation, but the exact opposite is true. Because I practice meditation, I actually have very few photos of meditation.

Taking a “meditation” photo offers the same challenge as capturing the ponytail shot in my last post: how do you take a picture of yourself sitting and not taking pictures? The Dharma room is, after all, one of the few places where I don’t carry a camera, so I had to go all the way back to August, 2007 to find a handful of images I shot after practice at the Open Meadow Zen Group one morning. Notice I that I shot these photos after (not during) morning practice. These aren’t photos of meditation; instead, they’re photos of the scene of meditation. Over the years I’ve taken more than a few pictures of Buddha statues, Buddhist ceremonies, and pretty Dharma rooms…but statues, ceremonies, and Dharma rooms aren’t themselves “meditation.” The accoutrements of meditation aren’t the same as meditation itself, and that makes “meditation itself” particularly difficult to capture in images.

Over the years, I’ve illustrated most of my Zen posts with images that don’t look particularly “Zenny.” Rather than returning again and again to the same old images of statues, ceremonies, and Dharma rooms to illustrate the practice of meditation, I usually illustrate my Zen posts with whatever images I have at hand. This is, I suppose, a particularly “Zennish” way of considering the question of how to depict “meditation.” Meditation isn’t a special thing limited to a special room where you sit on special cushions while wearing special clothes, and the simple act of just looking at (and just snapping pictures of) whatever you happen to see can also be a kind of meditation. Yes, the trappings of Buddhist iconography help put practitioners in the mood to meditate, but meditation isn’t dependent upon them. If you don’t have a pretty Dharma room, a cushion in the basement will do.

If I had to pick, in other words, the scenes and objects of meditation in order to illustrate what meditation “is,” what scenes and objects wouldn’t I choose? Would I show you the sink where I follow my breath while washing dishes, or the car where I follow my breath while driving between Newton and Keene? Would I show you the streets and sidewalks where I follow my breath while walking, or the bed upon which I follow my breath while folding laundry, reading, or settling into sleep? Would I show the laptop where I sit following my breath as I type these words, or would I show the kitchen table where I will follow my breath while eating a late lunch after posting them?

The scenes and objects of meditation are many, and I’ve spent these past five years quietly blogging them, sometimes affixing the label “meditation” and sometimes not. But even when unnamed or unattributed, meditation is as close at hand as the breath on your lips.

This is my belated contribution to last week’s Photo Friday theme, Meditation. I was tempted to post a photo of virtually anything as my depiction of “meditation” but decided a trip to my photo archives was a more aesthetic (and cooperative) choice.

If you’re intrigued by the pretty Dharma room that illustrates today’s post, you can join us this Sunday for a one-day retreat at the Open Meadow Zen Group in Lexington, MA.

 

On the beat

It’s become something of a tradition. On mornings when I’m scheduled to give consulting interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center, I arrive in Cambridge early, park my car at the Zen Center, then take a walk through Central Square, camera in hand. It’s almost a given that I’ll mosey over to Modica Way to see what’s up with the wall, knowing that street art is such a random and ephemeral genre, there will always be something new.

Revisiting the same neighborhood every month or so (for that’s about how often I give interviews at the Zen Center) is an interesting exercise. About ten years ago, when my then-husband and I lived for several years at the Cambridge Zen Center, I walked the streets of Central Square every day, so I had the familiar knowledge of a pedestrian. These days I walk with a camera, so I see the same streets differently. Not only do I now view these once-familiar streets as an occasional visitor rather than regular resident, I now walk my once-daily beat specifically looking for things. When I lived in Central Square, I was typically intent on my destination as I hurried from here to there, then there, then somewhere else. When I lived at the Zen Center, I was so busy juggling the demands of my Zen Center duties, marriage, college teaching, and graduate studies, my attention was often elsewhere as I analyzed or obsessed over yesterday’s failures, tomorrow’s challenges, and today’s to-dos.

These days, I’m still busy…but when I take my occasional Sunday strolls through Central Square, I’m on only one real errand: to see what I can see. Because I’ve walked these streets and sidewalks so often, I can screen out the old and ordinary, those things that were there last time, the time before, and the time before that. It’s not so much that I ignore these usual suspects, but I’ve learned not to be distracted by them. Like a beat cop who’s on a first-name basis with both the innocents and the troublemakers alike, I’ve learned which things I need to keep an eye on and which I can let slide. The way you notice something Really Unusual, I’ve found, is by first learning which things you can let slip from conscious awareness. Once a quick glance reveals a crowd of innocents standing around the T station, shooting the shit as always, you can zero in on the lone troublemaker trying to pass incognito in their midst. “Hey…you! Don’t you have somewhere you ought to be?”

This practice of selective attention–the ability to let the normal stuff slide through conscious awareness so the things that are New and Unusual almost demand your awareness–is something I first learned as a teenage birdwatcher. The way to find a bird in a tree is to look for any color, movement, or shape that doesn’t look like branch, leaf, or sky. New birders are sometimes fooled by wind-fluttered leaves, squirrel nests, or other foreign objects, mistaking tree-snagged plastic bags, for instance, for birds: “What’s that?” Once you’ve seen enough dry leaf clumps, random bits of litter, or branch snags, though, you become familiar with what those things look like, so you teach your brain to associate “bird” or even “something interesting” with “anything that doesn’t look like the usual stuff.” The same process of perceptive elimination works with auditory stimuli as well. If you want to excel at the art of birding by ear, you needn’t learn every possible birdsong or call. Instead, familiarize yourself with the usual ambient soundtrack of your daily neighborhood–the chips of cardinals, chirps of house sparrows, and twitters of finches–so you can sit up, alert, when you hear Something Different.

This all has relevance to meditation practice…but then again, what doesn’t? New practitioners are often dismayed and alarmed by the sheer volume of Stuff that passes through their minds during any meditation session: how can they possibly pay attention to it all? The answer, of course, is that you can’t, so you needn’t try: just as it’s futile to push any given thought away, it’s equally impossible to tend to, touch, or even notice every single thought as it passes. The point of meditation isn’t to stop the flow of thoughts, nor is it to manage it; there will be moments, minutes, and more when “you” get entirely swept into the stream and pop up, suddenly aware, what feels like hours later: “Where was I?” The point of dipping into your own internal slipstream isn’t to keep yourself separate and apart from its murky wetness. Instead, the thing you learn from occasional slips is that your mind is infinitely buoyant, eventually popping back into awareness like a fisherman’s bob automatically finding the surface. Awake!

The more you meditate, the more you’ll come to be on a first-name basis with your own usual suspects, both the innocents and the troublemakers. “Oh, here I go again,” you find yourself thinking mid-meditation. “The same old litany of neuroses, worries, complaints.” On one three-week meditation retreat, for instance, I literally spent days obsessing about food, meditating at first upon a mandala-like pizza with a mouth-watering array of fantasized toppings (“with extra cheese, pepperoni, sausage, and mushrooms, please!”) and then making a truly obscene list of foods I’d eat the second the retreat ended (“And can I get that with hash browns and eggs scrambled with onions, and some pancakes, and a slice of peanut-butter pie, please?”) A saner soul would have called it quits, figuring that anyone who spends so much psychic energy fixating on food simply isn’t cut out for meditation. Instead, I did what any Zen master would recommend. Every time I realized my mind had wandered, again, I brought it back to my mantra, again…and again…and again, welcoming every instance where I brought my mind back as its own kind of awakening: “Oh!”

When you’re a rookie practitioner, new on the beat, you’re on your walkie-talkie calling for backup every time a Food Fantasy, moment of Angry Angst, or another Lustful Interlude walks into your line of sight: “Danger, danger! Come quick!” After you’ve been doing this meditation thing for a while, though, you come to know everyone: “Yeah, kid, I saw that guy. He’s been hanging ’round doing nothing since before you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Let’s get back to looking for bad guys.” It’s not so much that you ignore your thoughts when you meditate: no veteran cop worth his badge ever fails to watch his own (and his rookie partner’s) back. But after you’ve been meditating awhile, your own Psychic Shit doesn’t bother you as much as it used to. You’ve seen it all and survived, so while things still rattle you, you know your inner equilibrium will find “center” eventually.

Like being perfectly aware of the neighbor’s television you can hear through your paper-thin walls but which you’ve learned not to focus on when you’re concentrated on something else, meditation is about training yourself to be aware of the present moment while not being attached to the endless stream of shady characters who amble down the street called Consciousness. Taking an occasional walk through my old Cambridge neighborhood, I don’t have to snap photos of everything. But knowing a little bit about the place, I snap into awareness–Awake!–when I see something that strikes my eyes as new.

 

What it’s not

These days, I’ve been meditating almost every day after lunch, sitting for fifteen minutes on a mat and cushion stationed in J’s basement with the dogs, one room over from the washer and dryer. J’s basement is dry but unfinished, so the floor beneath my mat is poured cement, and I sit facing a bare concrete wall occasionally adorned with a sleeping spider. On days when either one of us is doing laundry, I meditate to the sound of the washer running through its cycles; on days when the washer is quiet, I listen to the dogs sleep, each snoring on its bed while I sit breathing on a not dissimilar-looking meditation mat.

I mention this to note all the things that my daily meditation session is not. I sit for fifteen minutes, not thirty. I sit after lunch, not first thing upon awakening. And although I sit on a traditional mat and cushion, my practice space is otherwise painfully plain and simple, an out-of-the-way basement nook that looks nothing like this but instead embodies quite literally the truism after the ecstasy, the laundry. My meditation spot in Keene is pretty; my meditation spot here at J’s is plain. Both places are perfectly sufficient for the work of Zen practice, which is simply a matter of waking up wherever you find yourself, whether that’s with the dogs, on a fancy cushion, or one room over from the washer and dryer.

As much as it might be difficult to define exactly what Zen is, it’s easy to define what it’s not. Zen isn’t somewhere distant and removed from the dogs, laundry, and basement spiders of your everyday life, and it isn’t something that requires the purchase of special trinkets or tchotchkes. The smells and bells of Buddhist iconography can make your practice pretty, but such decorations aren’t absolutely necessary. Zen is a matter of practicing where, when, and how you can, and a plain raft will ferry you to the other shore of This Present Moment just as surely as a pretty one will.

 

Showing up

All this week, I’ve still been feeling the blog-blahs I’ve previously described: when I think of something to share, I can’t find time to blog it, and when I find a spare moment to write, I can’t think of anything to share. A typical writing conundrum.

Last night, J and I went to see the New England Revolution play the Chicago Fire at Gillette Stadium, and as always we each took hundreds of pictures. Afterward, I came home, duly copied mine to yesterday’s photo folder, took a quick look at what I’d shot, and turned off my laptop, saving for some hypothetical rainy day another folder of photos that probably will lie neglected on my hard-drive. Someday, sometime, I’d like to sort the photographic wheat from chaff, post the best to Flickr, and post the bloggable…or not. At this point I have an oceanic backlog of photos from three Red Sox games in California this spring, a handful of Boston Cannons lacrosse games this summer, and all the silly random photos I snap from day to day, uncertain when (if ever) I’ll ever get around to re-visiting much less sharing them.

I have no idea when (if ever) I’ll get around to sorting through much less sharing the rest of last night’s soccer photos…but in the meantime, here are two shots of camera-wielding fans I particularly like. This morning I gave consulting interviews at the Zen Center, and one thing I find myself emphasizing time and again to the folks who ask me questions is the importance of simply showing up. Most of the questions people ask me have to do with struggles they’ve been having in their life or practice because they have some idea of how they should or want to be. Across the board, the people I meet in or out of the Zen Center interview room (and I count myself in this number) want to be calmer, healthier, more balanced, sweeter, skinnier, wealthier, smarter, or whatever: more of this, and less of that. And this very thought that “I’m not X enough” or “I’m much too Y” is exactly what keeps you, me, or any of the folks I encounter from realizing that everything, already, is pretty much okay as it is.

And so this morning, I found myself insisting time and again that Zen, life, and everything else isn’t about getting things right, perfect, or “good enough.” Zen, life, and everything else is ultimately about showing up, trying your best, and accepting that as “enough.” Just show up, I hear myself saying again and again, and see what happens. So here I am on a Sunday afternoon, just showing up with the same old blog-blahs and seeing what happens when I toss a couple paragraphs and pictures together: enough?

 

Dry spell

Even though New England has been getting its fair share of torrential rain this summer, my blogging has been in a dry spell. It’s not exactly that I haven’t had things to say, and it’s not exactly that I haven’t had time to write. It’s more like I haven’t been able to coordinate these things so I have “things to say” when I find “time to write,” and that adds up to many days without blog posts.

It’s not the first time I’ve had the blog-blahs, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I’ve been writing long enough to know that sometimes, you run out of things to say (or at least it feels that way); I’ve also practiced (and taught) Zen meditation long enough to know that sometimes, you go “dry” in your practice (or at least it feels that way). New writers and new meditators often think these dry spells are a sign they’re doing something wrong: “Maybe I’m not really cut out to be a writer,” or “I tried meditating once, but it didn’t work for me.” What new writers or meditators don’t know–the sole secret we seasoned veterans have figured out–is that it doesn’t matter whether it feels like you’re “doing it right”: you just keep trying anyway.

I can’t call this current bout of blog-blahs “writer’s block” since I’ve been faithfully writing in my journal nearly every day, and there have been many times when a dry spell has completely derailed that practice. And I can’t call this current bout of blog-blahs a “spiritual crisis” since I’ve experienced a recent renewal in my meditation practice, coming back to my cushion to meditate regularly after too many months of practicing only sporadically. So in everything but my blogging, life has been stable and healthy; indeed, I’ve wondered whether this current blog-block is caused by the happy fact that everything right now is going fairly well with me, and there’s not much narrative excitement in a blog-post that duly reports “I finished grading those midterms,” “I made enough money last month to cover my bills,” or “I accomplished almost all the items on yesterday’s to-do list.”

In other words, this bloggish dry spell happens at a time when I’ve comfortably settled, for the moment, into Normal Life. Every year as August approaches, my heart reminds me it’s my anniversary of independence: today marks four years since my then-husband and I separated, a personal milestone I usually mark by blogging some sort of State of the Psyche address. This year, I don’t feel I have anything significantly new or different to add from last year: perhaps one way that shock settles into stability is the way that ultimately, you stop counting the months, minutes, or years between Then and Now. These days, I don’t feel particularly mindful of the fact that it’s been four rather than three years since my separation and divorce; these days, apart from an occasional slip where I use my married name, I can almost trick myself into thinking it was someone else, not me, who was once married.

And yet, interestingly, one lesson I learned from my almost thirteen-year marriage is one I’ve heard echoed recently by my still-married friends: relationships, too, have their dry spells, and the seasoned veterans who stay married somehow figure out how to wait them out. Although my ex-husband and I eventually called it a day, what kept us married for almost thirteen years–and what kept us trying to be decent human beings to one another even down to the day we separated, and after–was a shared commitment to keep trying, anyway. Even if you’re not doing marriage “right”–even if you’ve determined, at long last, to call it quits for good–you keep showing up to that realization: you face it rather than fleeing from it…or already having fled too many times and for too long, you keep coming back.

Perhaps the twin mottos of “keep trying anyway” and “keep coming back” are the motivational bookends that embrace successful writing, Zen practice, and human relationships alike. Even if you think you’re doing it wrong, keep trying anyway. When you’ve all but given up, keep coming back: if this page, this moment, or this relationship eludes you, just show up for the next one. Did yesterday’s page of writing really stink? Keep trying to write a page today. Did you fail even to show up on your meditation cushion, again? Keep coming back, regardless of how often or how long you’ve gone AWOL. Did your last relationship fail, or does your current relationship (marriage, friendship, other) feel dry and routine, beset with a terminal case of ho-hum? Keep trying anyway, and keep coming back: in a word, just show up. Dry spells come and dry spells go, or as my grandfather used to say, “Marriage is easy; it’s just the first fifty years that are hard.” Even if a dry spell lingers, even that dustiness can be grist for the mill.

 

The only vehicle

It’s a joke only a Buddhist would get, which made its placement on the bumper of a pickup truck parked this morning at the Providence Zen Center in Cumberland, RI all the more perfect.

“Mahayana” is the term used by Buddhists from China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and Tibet to refer to their particular flavor of practice: the so-called “Great Vehicle.” Calling your own way of spiritual practice “great” is, well, great…except that referring to the “Great Vehicle” of Mahayana Buddhism automatically implies a so-called “Lesser Vehicle”: Hinayana, the pejorative name used by (of course) Mahayana Buddhists to refer to the Theravadan traditions of Thai, Burmese, Sri Lankan, Cambodian, and Laotian Buddhism.

You can get away with joking about Great Vehicles among the Korean-influenced Zen Buddhists at the Providence Zen Center: we all know that the “Great Vehicle” also refers to the Bodhisattva way, which does not discriminate between “greaters” and “lessers” in its endeavor to save all beings from suffering. From a Zen perspective, there is no “great” vehicle, only the One Vehicle that is This Present Moment. Whether you take a pickup truck, car, plane, train, or boat–and whether you’re Thai, Chinese, Cambodian, Japanese, or American–the One Way that’s the High Way is the very moment you’re currently in: no “vehicle” necessary. The moment you wake up and remember you’re Right Here, Now, you’ve already arrived.

 

Scrambling

I’ve been scrambling this past week, trying to catch-up with too many to-dos as I prepare to leave for a conference tomorrow. On Friday, in the midst of this schedule-madness, I taught meditation to a classroom of senioritis-inflicted students at Lincoln-Sudbury High School in suburban Boston; on Sunday, I gave consulting interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center, stopping to snap a few pictures of some new stencils on the street-art mural along Modica Way.

At both the high school and the Zen Center, I reminded anyone who would listen to come back to the present moment, everything is already complete, and you already have it, you just don’t know it. Ah, the fatuousness of Zen teaching. If I really, truly believed these things–if I’d really attained them at the core of my being–I wouldn’t be scrambling, staring stressfully at my to-do list, or calculating in a panic the hours between now and tomorrow morning when my plane takes off with or without me and my still-to-do to-dos. Or would I?

If everything is already complete, then my scrambling, stressed self is also Buddha; if I already have it but just don’t know it, then part of the “It” of enlightenment is the stressed, worried mind I already have. If Zen is a matter of returning to the present moment, which I’ve taught time and again to anyone who will listen, where do I get this idea that my Zen Self should be placid and serene, as if a smooth lake is the only form “water” is permitted to take?

This idea that my Zen Self should be calm–this idea that I should have a “Zen Self” that is separate from and more pristine than my Regular Self–is a pervasive form of Zen sickness, an idea that clouds the clarity of This Present Moment as much as any lurid daydream or daunting distraction. This present moment is It, I try to remind myself whenever I find myself listening. The act of scrambling isn’t a matter of rushing to a place where I’ll find It, finally, when all my to-dos are checked off and I have a moment, finally, to let go a sigh of relief. This act of scrambling is itself It: nothing more, nothing less. Had I been listening to myself when I reminded those squirming high school students or those earnest practitioners in the Zen Center interview room, I would already know that.

 

Buddhist-flavored?

Forget about attaining the Zen of cleanliness or peace of mind in a gumball. If you’re too broke to buy good karma, apparently you can drink your bad karma away with a six-pack of Buddhist beer.