The Journey

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
enscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes
of your life.

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

David Whyte, The House of Belonging

Now this is interesting:

Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources:  Dose self-control resemble a muscle?
Mark Muraven & Roy Baumeister, Psychological Bulletin (2000) No. 2, 247-259

Abstract: The authors review evidence that self-control may consume a limited resource.  Exerting self-control may consume self-control strength, reducing the amount of strength available for subsequent self-control efforts.  Coping with stress, regulating negative affect, and resisting temptations require self-control, and after such self-control efforts, subsequent attempts at self-control are more likely to fail.  Continuous self-control efforts, such as vigilance, also degrade over time.  These decrements in self-control are probably not due to negative moods or learned helplessness produced by the initial self-control attempt.  These decrements appear to be specific to behaviors that involve self-control: behaviors that do not require self-control neither consume nor require self-control strength.  It is concluded that the executive component of the self- in particular, inhibition – relies on a limited, consumable resource.

So… some situations extract a cost in self-control resources.  If that cost is high, the next event requiring self-control can’t be “purchased.”  More important, not being aware of the cost, I may not gauge accurately my ability to be skillful in engaging with the next event.  Others authors/researchers have talked about mindfulness as a muscle that supports awareness in the service of self-control (not getting hung up here on the self-non-self issue).  In essence, it’s about how seamlessly we can re-set from one exertion to the next and, I think, only practice will strengthen that particular muscle and replenish that well.

Time to log more hours on the cushion.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

In the meantime, as I sit through airports and cramped planes, trying to manage the anxieties of leaving home, being receptively attentive, and letting go of old stories, I will be reminding myself that buds open to blossom with the purpose of dying to fruit.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

It draws up memories of times I’ve tried to steady myself by latching onto some aspect of what I thought was solid about Me.  But it isn’t possible to grow and be locked down at the same time.  Nor is it possible to hold onto myself and hope to have a strong foothold.  So inevitably, I have found myself without the anchor I counted on.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Now, that’s the sticky point: applicability.  The further I get into practice, the more my romance with research on meditation has faded.  It’s not that I have lost respect for the researchers and philosophers who try ever so hard to connect the practice of mindfulness/meditation to something substantive that may lead to good health via new interventions.  But there you have it: the convolution and expanse in that sentence alone makes me take a deep breath and ask: how is this helping me understand and live Dharma?

Of course, some of these folks – Evan Thompson, John Dunne, Al Kazniak – could expound on the telephone book backwards and I would defend that as Dharma.  But I’m partial to brilliant minds with charming smiles.  Hence my very successful 30-year marriage to He-Who-Tolerates-All-Things-Genju.

After Zen Brain and a three-day excursion around Santa Fe, I dive into the second retreat of the Chaplaincy with Fleet Maull and Jimmy Santiago Baca teaching us to live “Dharma at the Edge.”  Last week, I met with a hospital Chaplain and we discussed the intensity of being with those who are dying.  For two hours we dug into what it means for a family member to not look away from the suffering of a loved one, to make life-and-death decisions on their behalf, and what being a supportive advocate means in that context.  I was infected with her enthusiasm and her commitment to living her livelihood.  I’m glad I met her before I set out on this second phase because I am having a hard time folding aspects of this process into my practice.  Again the question arises: how is this helping me understand and live Dharma?

Yesterday, the answers was to download my garden as an app.  Over the next 10 days, who knows?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

A Daily Joy to be Alive

No matter how serene things
may be in my life,
how well things are going,
my body and soul
are two cliff peaks
from which a dream of who I can be
falls, and I must learn
to fly again each day,
or die.

Death draws respect
and fear from the living.
Death offers
no false starts. It is not
a referee with a pop-gun
at the startling
of a hundred yard dash.

I do not live to retrieve
or multiply what my father lost
or gained.

I continually find myself in the ruins
of new beginnings,
uncoiling the rope of my life
to descend ever deeper into unknown abysses,
tying my heart into a knot
round a tree or boulder,
to insure I have something that will hold me,
that will not let me fall.

My heart has many thorn-studded slits of flame
springing from the red candle jars.
My dreams flicker and twist
on the altar of this earth,
light wrestling with darkness,
light radiating into darkness,
to widen my day blue,
and all that is wax melts
in the flame-

I can see treetops!

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.

Jose Ortega y Gasset,
quoted in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson

We had an interesting discussion in sangha about opportunity and destiny.  I had read a passage from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s autobiography A Place to Stand.  Baca is a writer and poet who was incarcerated for 15 years for drug-related crimes.  He was illiterate up to the age of 21 years; as a child his family was the target of his father’s drunken rages and Baca became phobic about going to school.  The turmoil in the family was so intense that he became lost in the battles (given his experience of bigotry advancing in what was available as education may not have been possible anyway, I imagine).  He slowly wove a life of drug use and crime.  Just prior to reading Baca’s book, I had skimmed through Fleet Maull’s Dharma in Hell (OK – full disclosure: I’m cramming for the Core Chaplaincy retreat next week at Upaya).  Maull went through his own hell serving time which, in his case, deepened his Buddhist practice (before prison, he was Buddhist while running drugs etc. – go figure).  Both men have formed organizations and developed programs for prisoners; Baca founded literacy and writing programs while Maull founded the Prison Dharma Network.  Canadian inmate Roger Caron, on the other hand, didn’t fare as well.  Infamous as an armed robber who repeatedly attempted escapes, he wrote Go-Boy! and two other books.  Unfortunately, despite the success of his book and rubbing elbows with the well-heeled in Canadian social circles, he dropped into several abysses that eventually lead to a desperate armed robbery in 1992 while high on cocaine and stricken with Parkinson’s disease.  His life closes in a hell of dementia and advanced Parkinson’s.

In sangha, we shared about the way in which our landscape shapes our vision, our choices, our destiny.  We wondered if it would have been different for Maull had he been assigned to the laundry section and not the medical facility where he became attuned to the need for hospice care.  Would Baca have become the prize-winning author if he couldn’t envision the opportunities opened to him within the container of his fate?  Of course, we wondered about the rolling hills and abysses of our own landscape.  Did we see what was available or carve it out of a parched ground?

Interestingly, the quote by Gasset above took on greater significance in the context of Baca and Maull’s books.  I don’t know anything about Gasset (yet) other than what I found via the Oracle (Google).  A philosopher, he asserted that who I am is inseparable from the circumstances I am in (don’t quote me on this!).  It harkens back to the embodied mind of Varela and the process of self as emergent.  But, I’m in over my head here.  The take-away lessons from Baca and Maull are about letting go (without erasing) and entering a dialogue with the container of our lives – be it a wide panaroma or a small container in an urbanscape.

In the context of gardening my life, it makes me look more deeply into the factors that shape my body, speech and mind – not only in the wide swath of fields, hills, and valleys but also in this tiny cut of soil I’m rooted.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

I’ve never quite understood the whole vision terminology in the first place but learned enough to know that 20/40 means you don’t think the moose crossing the driveway is a big dog.  So, the fact that after the surgery he still couldn’t find the jam jar on the fridge shelf 10 inches away did not compute.   My logic is impeccable: if you can see something at 20 feet away as clearly as I can when I’m 40 feet away, and if we’re both 10 inches away from the damn jam jar why the heck can’t you see it too!  Try as he could, he could neither explain nor help me understand this predicament.  I, on the other hand, have many explanations that involve unpruned neural pathways, avoidance, gender differences in object pattern recognition, and subtle aversion to my homemade jam.  But none of this actually resolved the problem so he has learned to pick up and read the label of each jar on the shelf and I’ve learned to leave the room to write my blog until he bellows, “Found it!”

All poking at hubby aside, growth, spiritually and otherwise, is about vision.  First, it is in the transition between seeing with old and new eyes (the term refers to one of Joanna Macy’s stages of “work that reconnects”).  Seeing with old eyes is watching an old movie or reruns of a TV show; the brain uses an auto-fill similar to the way your computer fills in a word when you type the first few letters.  Nothing changes because nothing changed. Using new eyes brings things into relief from a familiar ground, highlighting the edges and contours that would have been missed when transmitted through the lens of the old eyes.  Of course, you know we’re not talking about the eyeball anymore.  It’s now about the way in which our assumptions, stories, and desires draw us into the lines, contours, shading, and tone of our experiences.  It’s also about the repetitive nature of how we attend to our environment; what I see today will differ from what I see tomorrow (or the next moment) – all at the mercy of being internally 20/20 or 20/800.

Wendy Johnson, in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, describes one of her teachers, Harry Roberts, who asked the gardening students to look over the vegetable garden and into the coastal meadow that rose behind it.  Over a year, they described each week what they saw – developing trust in their vision.  About a year after they began this practice Johnson describes noticing the appearance of a sliver of green under dried brown grass.  It took that repeated effort with unattached vision, entrusting that clarity would emerge with time and seasons, to see that one spot in a field which could protect and support new growth.

Second, growth requires a powerful range of vision. It isn’t enough to simply focus on the blossoming and shoots of this season.

“Remember in your thinking,” Harry once said to me (Johnson), “That this is a Buddhist community.  And we are trying to live like one.  Buddhism is forever.  It’s not a crash program for the next five weeks.  We are looking at things from the perspective of five hundred years.  Buddhism is not a religion.  It is a way of life.  If we make it five hundred years we will make it for five thousand.  We are building for the future.”

We need to cultivate the power of this range of sight.  Playing with this concept, I imagined that the Buddha and other enlightened teachers saw our potential from 2600 years ago and we perhaps only began to appreciate that potential about 200 years ago (conservatively estimated); that gives us a vision range of 200/2600.  Not quite spiritually blind but still likely to need correction.  Now the question remains: what will be necessary in our practice as individuals and a community to adjust that vision so that it is 500/1000 or 2500/5000?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

When you go down deep enough into your ground you find your true place in the valley of ancestors that inhabits every backyard.

from Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson

The land of the farm, like most of the Ottawa Valley, is dark soil for two to four inches that sits on top of quick clay.  Compressed by the weight of continental ice sheets of the last ice age,  this clay formed the ground of the Champlain Sea until the waters receded.  Digging up various sections large and small, it’s common to find sea shells and imprints of creatures that once lived in the brackish waters.  The larger fields have been turned over often, green crops plowed under to increase the organic content, wheat crops rotated with corn to replenish the depleted nutrients.  On a smaller scale the flower and vegetable gardens have benefited from turning in well-aged compost, rotation of vegetables in the boxes, and a moving stage of flowering plants.

The surface is broken open to native crops put in service of enriching the ground.  Digging past the four inches of topsoil, I am unearthing the quick clay of 10,000 years ago which mixes in with last month’s composted local broccoli stalks and limp lettuce.  But there is also a subtle international net that draws in the nourishment from far-flung soils.  This clay which has lain here for these thousands of years now meets mango skins from Mexico or Thailand, strawberry hulls from California, peach peels from British Columbia, and coffee grounds from South America.  Microbes, pollen, floral skin and bone cross cultural, political and chronographic boundaries to shape the ground.

This is how life takes root today and how wide the arms of nourishment can be thrown.

Is penetrating into our true nature any different?  The hard ground of our practice was likely just as compressed by a heavy frozen weight that slowly melted allowing our deepest ground to assert itself.  It’s only when we surface from the glacial sea of self-absorption into the drying air that seeds can take hold.  It is only when the clay is turned with what is present and available that we can be enriched by the living and dying of all matter from near and far.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Roger and Blanche sold to the next owners who upgraded the house, adding electricity and running water.  Not much of a farmer, this fellow is best known in the mythology of the farm for the railway spike-sized nails he used in his “renovations.” I don’t recall much of what they did outdoors other than ruin a beautiful barn by using it as a run-in shed for his cattle.  The two feet of manure over the 30 x 60-foot concrete floor took three summers to dig out and kept many of my plants fed for years.

Over the years, the various plots around the house have evolved.  We turned the north garden plot into the rose garden.  The south garden was a collection of ambulatory plants that grew, blossomed, and seeded themselves in new spaces each year.  At one time, I grew a rock garden then a series of exotic species that likely only lived long enough for a gardening magazine photo shoot.  Now it’s settled into a collection of plants that splash blues, yellows, and reds in sequence from Spring to Fall.  About five years ago, the west side became a burst of sandcherries and barberries and the east a woodland garden filled with hosta and ferns.  The Japanese garden went into the southeast space when the makeshift deck rotted away.  The vegetable garden is now neatly boxed in north of the roses.

But this is just a timeline of seeds and flowers, fruit and feeding.  There have been innumerable attempts behind each plant that survived the hard ground, droughts, heat, and through those attempts, I have learned many things.  Some lessons are about planting and growing things, some about living and letting things die.  Most of what I learned is that allowing self-seeding plants the run of my garden isn’t the same as giving them space in which to exert their freedom to blossom.  The first encourages the bullying nature of some plants; the latter allows a respectful relationship with me and the others plants in its vicinity.

Gardening is about awareness and relationship – consequential relationship.  It’s also about taking a stand, and standing by your principles.  At the same time it’s about giving up control and learning from your mistakes.

from Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson

Relationship is like that.  Sitting at my desk, listening to the voice on the other end of the phone one dark afternoon, I understood that not having taken a stand, not establishing the perimeters and parameters of a relationship in its germination had created this choking, shame/blame tirade I was hearing.  I wondered as I listened carefully if I was allowing the bullying to continue or if I was bearing witness to the suffering that had been generated through unknowable causes and conditions.

Practice is like that too.  Is sitting with the overwhelming suffering that arises masochistic or is it a moment of respectful silence in which the real roots can be uncovered and the plant uprooted?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju