Expect the unexpected

On Thursday night, I went to the Zen Center to teach the meditation intro class, then I stayed for the weekly Dharma talk and Q&A. A man sitting behind me asked the Senior Dharma Teacher about his first meditation retreat, beginning his question with a sheepish admission: “It didn’t go how I expected.”

Immediately other long-time practitioners and I erupted into laughter: yes, indeed! Retreats never go how you expected, because life never goes as expected. As the man sitting behind me described how he’d hoped the week after retreat to go smoothly with plenty of time to practice, but instead his time had been frittered away with unplanned obligations, I smiled and nodded. Been there, done (and continue to do) that.

I submitted the last of my Spring semester grades this past Monday, then I had hoped for a gentle reentry into Summer leisure. Instead, I’ve spent the week checking off to-dos, some planned and others unanticipated.

This week I had a routine mammogram (check), scheduled eye exams for later in the summer (check), and found, booked appointments with, and completed seemingly endless new-patient intake forms for a new dentist (check, check, check). I made a list of summer tasks–so many things to clean, weed out, or organize–and I started filling my calendar with Zen Center obligations, weekend outings with J, and a July trip to visit family in Ohio.

All of those tasks were expected–things I’ve been meaning to do for months, but were delayed until the end of the semester, when I’d have more time. What I didn’t expect, however, was for the heating element on the dishwasher to die–a repair I’ll schedule next week–or for Roxy to eat an entire leather leash yesterday, necessitating an emergency trip to the vet for x-rays today. Who would expect a dog who has never been a chewer to suddenly develop an appetite for leather?

Tomorrow J and I have tickets to a Connecticut Sun game–plans we’d made months ago–but whether or not we go is contingent on the state of Roxy’s digestion. Will she vomit chunks of leather like she did this morning, meaning a return trip to the vet, or will the special food they prescribed help everything “come out in the end” quite literally?

Only time will tell. In the meantime, I never expected I’d spend this morning sifting through dog vomit, looking for chewed bits of leather, and I never would have predicted that now I’d prefer to find bits of leather in Roxy’s poop instead.

Today’s photos are from a short walk I took at Hammond Pond Reservation after Monday morning’s mammogram, before the week turned hectic.

 

Like muscle memory

It’s been more than three years since I’ve sung the Evening Bell Chant at the Cambridge Zen Center: yet another practice interrupted by the pandemic. But when three attendees at last night’s meditation intro class asked to hear the temple bell, I decided to show them the bell the best way I could, and that was by hitting it.

The Evening Bell Chant is a short–two- or three-minute–solo chant sung at the beginning of evening practice by someone who accompanies themselves on the big brass bell that sits like a tank in one corner of the Dharma room. It is my favorite chant, either to sing or listen to, largely because of the bell itself, which reverberates with a thrumming pulse. That sound spreads throughout the room–there is no missing or mistaking the bell when it is struck–and when you are the one hitting the bell with a worn wooden mallet, those vibrations thrum through your entire body. You hit the bell, but it feels like your own body is ringing.

The lyrics to the Evening Bell Chant are in Korean, with a translation in the back of the chanting book. The sound of the bell, those lyrics explain, cuts off thinking, and the sound of the bell coupled with the mantra repeated three times at the end Destroy Hell.

Hearing the sound of the bell,
all thinking is cut off,
Wisdom grows;
enlightenment appears;
hell is left behind.
The three worlds are transcended.
Vowing to become Buddha
and save all people.
The mantra of shattering hell:
om ga-ra ji-ya sa-ba-ha
om ga-ra ji-ya sa-ba-ha
om ga-ra ji-ya sa-ba-ha

Usually when I sing the Evening Bell Chant, I have to keep one eye on a laminated printout with the lyrics and pattern of hits in LARGE PRINT: there’s nothing worse than forgetting your lines or literally missing a (bell) beat when an entire Dharma room is listening. But last night, as soon as I sat on the cushion and picked up the mallet, the words came back like muscle memory. It was as if the bell itself were singing the words.

 

Whatever the hour demands

Earlier this semester, a teaching colleague, M, asked me how I’ve managed to teach five classes a semester for what seems like forever. (Apart from the two years I was under contract as a “full-time temporary” assistant professor at Framingham State, I’ve always moonlighted, stitching together a crazy quilt career by teaching part-time at multiple colleges.) When M taught at two colleges a year or so ago, it nearly crushed her soul, so she wanted to know how I continue to do it without having a complete mental breakdown.

The short answer, of course, is that I’m good at having breakdowns quietly and on my own time: just because someone is keeping their shit together on the outside doesn’t mean they aren’t stressing like a motherfucker on the inside. Instead of saying that in so many words, however, I shared some benign banalities about being organized and setting boundaries and not giving a part-time job more free labor than it merits: the usual blah blah blah.

But the full answer to M’s question is more complicated. How can I teach five courses at two colleges semester after semester without burning out entirely? Well, I think I’m able to do this now because of what I used to do back then, back in the 1990s when I lived in a Zen Center and regularly sat long meditation retreats.

I haven’t sat a long retreat in years, but every day I use the insights gleaned during countless weekend and week-long silent retreats, and that is this: you can survive pretty much anything if you take it not just day by day, but hour by hour and even moment by moment.

I’ve always said that sitting a Zen retreat is like going to an automated drive-thru car wash. You show up, put your car in neutral, and let the machinery of the retreat–namely, a schedule that dictates every hour of your existence–pull you through. You don’t actually do anything on retreat; you just show up and follow whatever the schedule dictates: now I’m bowing, now I’m chanting, now I’m sitting, now I’m eating, now I’m working. You show up and do whatever the hour demands.

I have reached the point in both my personal and professional life where my days unfold like a Zen retreat, with everything assigned to its allotted hour. This is when I wake up, this is when I feed and medicate the diabetic cats, this is when I load the dishwasher, clean the litter boxes, and walk the dog. This is when I check email, grade papers, and prep the next day’s classes; this is when I teach today’s classes; and this is when I drive home, squeeze in some reading, then watch television with J before going to sleep, ready to repeat the cycle all over again tomorrow.

You put your ducks in a row because not worrying about logistics–like what I should be doing now, and what I should be doing next–frees up energy to do the teaching and writing and human be-ing that keeps your life fueled and flowing.

 

The greatest Bodhisattva

At the end of another Saturday spent doing laundry, restocking the cat food cupboard, unpacking pet supplies, emptying wastebaskets, and taking out the trash and recycling, I remember something Zen Master Soeng Hyang said years ago at the start of work period during a retreat at the Providence Zen Center. The greatest Bodhisattva, she said, is the person who puts extra rolls of toilet paper in the bathroom. Some jobs are glamorous, some are important, and some are absolutely essential.

 

Face to face

Last night I went to the Zen Center to teach a brief meditation intro class. While the Zen Center was closed during the height of the pandemic, this class happened virtually via Zoom and has only recently moved back in-person.

Teaching meditation online is…interesting. It’s perfectly possible to tell someone the basics of Zen meditation via Zoom: here is how to keep your body, breath, and mind. But when you teach meditation in person, you can hear the person next to you breathing, and you have a peripheral sense of their posture: are they nodding, slouching, or slumping?

When you teach meditation on Zoom, you can see your students’ faces, but you don’t have a three-dimensional, multisensory sense of their physical presence. Watching someone meditate is about as interesting as watching paint dry, but meditating alongside someone gives you a much more intimate understanding of how present they are.

Teaching a thing is only partly about talking: telling students about Zen is as helpful as telling someone about a delicious and nourishing meal. If you want to learn how to meditate, sit beside someone else who is meditating, and like an old ox teaching a youngster how to pull a straight furrow, your yoke-mate will teach you more than words can say.

 

The opposite of words

This morning I sat one meditation session at the Cambridge Zen Center, then I walked to Harvard Square, where I bought myself a large cup of dark hot chocolate at LA Burdicks. It was the first time I sat cross-legged on a cushion among other meditators–and the first time I sat writing at Burdicks–since the last time I wrote in this notebook: Sunday, January 5, 2020.

Today is exactly two months after my 53rd birthday. Before the pandemic, I’d established a loose habit of practicing at the Zen Center, then walking to Harvard Square and writing journal pages at Burdicks around my birthday, but the pandemic put a stop to that.

Oh my goodness, it’s good to be back.

I’ve always enjoyed writing in cafes, sustained by the soft stimulus of having other people in the room with you. It’s a collegial sense of anonymity: there is no need to talk to anyone, but your mere presence is enough to establish a friendly connection. You and I might not have much to say to one another–we might not speak the same language, and we might not have much in common in terms of politics or perspective–but we can sit companionably side-by-side, you sipping your chocolate while I sip mine.

This quiet companionship–this practice of sitting with strangers, quietly sharing the same space–is exactly what I’ve missed the past two years that the Zen Center has been closed. I don’t go to the Zen Center for a few minutes of friendly chit-chat before and after practice, although I enjoy that. Instead, what fuels me is the actual act of sitting with other souls I don’t need to talk to.

Perhaps this is a peculiar side-effect of doing language for a living. When I teach, I talk; when I grade papers, I read; and when I write, I’m steeped to my eyeballs in words, words, words. I love language–I make my living wrangling with words–but when I rest and reset, I crave the opposite of words. Although the Zen Center has offered a rich array of online practice opportunities throughout the pandemic, what my spirit has craved these past two years is the act of unplugging in person: something that can’t transpire over Zoom.

So here I sit at a tiny table for one while a woman in a wheelchair scrolls on her phone at the table next to me, a hipster in headphones taps at a laptop across the room, and a pair of women chats amiably in the corner, all while a steady stream of masked customers comes in, orders drinks to go, then leaves.

This cup of dark hot chocolate is exactly what I’ve yearned for these past two years. I can drink hot chocolate at home while Zooming with distant friends and virtual sangha, but the thing I’ve missed is a quiet Sunday morning spent sipping spiritual sustenance among strangers. It’s been a long time coming.

 

Still shuttered

It’s been almost two years since I’ve been to the Cambridge Zen Center, which remains closed because of the pandemic. On November 24, 2019, I blogged about giving consulting interviews there, writing “My meditation practice isn’t limited to the four walls of the Zen Center–even when I don’t drag myself to Cambridge to meditate with other folks, I continue to practice on my own–but there is something about sitting alongside other meditators in a Dharma room that is steeped with practice energy.”

I had no idea when I wrote those words that a pandemic would cleave our lives into the Before and After Times; I had no idea when I wrote those words that the Zen Center would close its doors, offering online-only practice for nonresidents. When I wrote those words, I took for granted that the Zen Center would always be there for me to return to when I had the time and inclination. There was so much we took for granted during the Before Times.

Apart from giving a talk, online consulting interviews, and two no-show Intro to Zen classes, I haven’t “attended” any of the Zen Center’s online practice sessions. Although I regularly meditate at my desk, I just can’t bring myself to meditate in front of a Zoom screen. I already spend too much of my life tethered to my laptop; when I meditate, I want more than anything to unplug.

What I miss about going to the Zen Center is the “going to.” I miss parking in Central Square on a Sunday morning, taking a quick stroll to take pictures of graffiti, and slipping out early to walk to Harvard Square for hot chocolate at Burdicks. I miss being in the Dharma room: the familiar feel of sitting on a cushion, the “smells and bells” of the altar and its iconography, and the deep silence of an intentionally quiet place.

Someday, eventually, the Zen Center will reopen. In the meantime, it’s strange to exist in a world where it’s “safe enough” for me to teach in full classrooms, shop in stores, go to museums and even restaurants, but not safe enough for me to sit in a quiet room with a mask, following my breath. When I lived at the Zen Center, one of our guiding teachers used to say that if you were healthy enough to go to work, you were healthy enough to practice, but these days my job is open and the Zen Center is closed. It’s a pandemic oddity I still haven’t come to terms with.

 

Retreating

In this time of social distancing and self-isolation, there is a meme going around that suggests introverts have been waiting their whole life for this moment. This might be true, but so is this: Buddhists of all stripes–introverted and extroverted alike–are similarly well-prepared for these extraordinary times, as hunkering down is something Buddhists do religiously.

When I contemplate the next few weeks (or more) of social isolation–the staying home, the sheltering in place–what comes to mind is a Zen retreat. Going on a retreat turns the simple choice of staying inside into an intentional spiritual practice. Right now, countless people who don’t consider themselves Buddhists are waking up to the realization that the Universe has signed them up for a long Zen retreat without asking first.

How do you turn self-isolation into a retreat? You make a schedule and stick to it. You intentionally alternate sitting and walking. You pay attention to mental hygiene, which is as important to your sanity as hand-washing is to your physical health. You cultivate gratitude and embrace boredom. And in the end, you recognize your intrinsic, unavoidable connection with all sentient beings in this contagious and contaminated world.

Yesterday on a video conference call with some other professors, a colleague remarked that he was diligently recording brief video lectures so that when or if he gets sick, his online course will carry on without him. While others are hoarding toilet paper and cans of soup, this colleague is preparing for the inevitability of his own mortality.

A split second after my colleague made this remark, a thought appeared: how will I continue teaching if I grow deathly ill and die…or worse yet, how will I continue teaching if any of my students were to sicken then disappear? This is a thought I’ve never contemplated: in all my years of teaching, the hyperbolic language of “surviving the semester” and even simply “passing the class” were innocuous and mundane. It’s not like my class or any other is a matter of life and death.

But then again, isn’t everything in our daily lives a matter of life and death? My earlier assumption that there would inevitably be a “next semester”–an “after” that follows this “before”–now seems terribly glib, presumptuous, and naive. Who was I just last week that I took so much for granted?

The thing about Zen retreats is this: absolutely nothing happens. You stay inside and spend hours staring at the floor. Every day, you eat the same boring breakfast–always oatmeal–at the same boring time; every day you show up and follow the same boring schedule whether you feel like it or not. You do this because when you sign up for a Zen retreat, you choose to put yourself in a situation where you have no choice.

None of us chose to live in these interesting times: we all are trapped in a situation that none of us willingly signed up for. But if self-isolation follows the model of a Zen retreat, here is what will happen, eventually: a couple days, weeks, or months into this crazy exile, something unforeseen and even magical will happen. Eventually, if you stop fighting against inevitabilities, you will see nothing more than what is actually there. You will taste the same bowl of oatmeal for the very first time, and you will notice anew that this morning’s angle of sunlight on the floor is somehow just like yesterday’s while being entirely unique.

None of us signed up for this: we were thrust into a dying world the moment we were born. But now that we are stuck here, isolated in our separate homes but united in our shared mortality, what will we do with this fragile moment?

 

High octane

This morning J had to wake before dawn for a work call, so after I finished my morning tasks, I drove to the Cambridge Zen Center, sat one meditation session, then walked to Harvard Square to write my morning journal pages at Burdick’s Cafe.

Although I was sleepy at the Zen Center, the brisk walk to Harvard Square and a small cup of high-octane Burdick’s dark chocolate woke me right up. Practicing at the Zen Center always feels like plugging into a power source: even during meditation sessions when my body nods and dozes, I can feel my inner battery charging with every breath. There’s something energizing about returning to a familiar place and a familiar practice, like climbing back into a well-worn saddle.

When I lived at the Zen Center, I’d often go to Harvard Square, claim a table at a restaurant or cafe, and write in the bustling anonymity of a clean, well-lighted place. Burdick’s on a Sunday morning nicely suits this purpose. You can generally find a table for one if you wait for quiet couples to finish their beverages then bundle up to leave, and once you’re settled in, the waitstaff doesn’t care if you take a half hour or so to nurse your hot chocolate over journal pages or the morning paper.

Some days I bring stationery so I can write a quick, chocolate-fueled letter; today, it was just me and my notebook. Like meditation, journal-keeping is a habit I’ve practiced for decades, so doing it generates its own energy, like a turbine turning a gear. Meditation fills my lungs, walking gets my blood flowing, writing stimulates my brain, and high-octane dark chocolate gives me a buzz that lasts the whole day. This is how you weather a sleepy morning that started before dawn.

 

Matter matters more

This past summer I read Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. Steinke’s book is one I’ve been yearning for since realizing I’m perimenopausal. Unlike the countless books that describe lowered hormone levels as a malady to be fixed, Steinke’s book describes menopause as a passage to be navigated.

Steinke’s book is part memoir, part cultural history. Steinke recounts her own experience with hot flashes, insomnia, and the crazy-making changes of middle-aged womanhood, and she also explores cultural attitudes toward post-reproductive women. (Spoiler alert: these attitudes aren’t pretty). In a society that fetishizes nubile women, women who have outlived their natural fertility are a nuisance and a threat. As a result, menopause is either marketed as a medical problem to be cured through hormone replacement, exercise, and other products or it is dismissed as the punchline to a misogynistic joke.

Several years into perimenopause, I’ve come to see the experience as inherently spiritual: a kind of involuntary retreat where you are subjected to physical discomforts you didn’t choose and thus can’t control. There is no escape from the suffering of insomnia, night sweats, and hot flashes because your own body is the source of that suffering.

When I teach meditation, I explain how the body is chained for better or worse to This Present Moment. The mind can (and does) wander across time and space: close your eyes, and you can immediately transport yourself in your imagination to distant lands or far off eras. The mind can and does wander, but the body is itself a root. Regardless of how flighty or scattered my mind may be, my body is always Right Here.

Meditation is nothing more than a conscious decision to bring the wandering mind back to the rooted body. The moment you focus your mind on your body–the arch and angle of your spine, the tender gaze of your eyes looking toward the floor, and the rhythmic rise and fall of your breath–you witness the most wondrous of reunions: your mind returning to your body, your self unified with itself, at last.

On a long retreat, your body’s aches and pains–all those pangs, itches, and grumbles–are a goad urging you back to your practice: a reminder to your Mind that your Body is still here. Instead of running away or trying to distract yourself from physical discomforts, you hunker down and make a conscious decision to stay: stay in the moment, stay in your own body, stay in your own experience. This simple act of staying is transformative. By staying with your own discomfort, your suffering transforms into strength.

In a battle between mind and body, body always wins. When we are young and able-bodied, we tell ourselves otherwise, internalizing the myth of Mind Over Matter. But the wisdom of our elders–the wisdom of our own aging bodies–is that Matter Matters More.

When I told a middle-aged friend that my meditation practice helps me cope with nighttime hot flashes–the middle-of-the-night eruptions of heat and restlessness I call my Dry Roasts–she misunderstood, thinking that meditation somehow made these surges less severe. But that’s not what I meant. Meditation doesn’t stop the waves of heat roiling through my body; instead, meditation helps me weather them. Instead of running from my body–instead of recoiling, resisting, or refusing–I return to it. I recognize these waves of heat and energy as a call from my body to my mind to come back from from its restless wandering and stay with my body as it smolders in its own dying fires.

In Zen we say you have to digest your karma like a cow chewing its cud. The flames of a hot flash are not unlike the flames of karma. In either case, the heat arises unbidden; in either case, you are powerless to time or temper the emotions that are visited upon you. What you can do, however, is choose to return–return–return. Here is my body, damp with sweat, sticking to my own skin. Here is a heat that arose without warning and will last as long as it chooses before passing away.

When I am lying in bed awash in what I call my waves–surges of heat that originate in my torso then pool and pulse in my extremities–I think of the ancient anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose visions of the embodied Christ are full of fire, sweat, blood, and tears. Julian didn’t have a cerebral Savior but a bruised and bloody one. That rooted embodiment is how she knew her Savior was real.

Reading Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary was a relief, like finding a wise companion who whispers “You’re not the only one.” It is a rite of passage for female teachers to explain to adolescent girls the changes that will come when they start to menstruate, and for the questions our teachers didn’t answer, my peers and I turned to the well-worn copy of Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret we secretly passed among ourselves.

When you hit menopause, however, you’re largely on your own: no more teachers, no more Judy Blume. In a culture that loves to ogle nubile femininity, post-reproductive women are largely invisible, left to figure things out for ourselves. Thank goodness for women like Darcey Steinke who are wise enough to light the way.