This is what happens when you hang around Genju too much!

Have a wonderful weekend and may we all be reborn from the womb of prajna to serve all beings!

Try telling an orally fixated kitten that you too like to lick your bowl clean.  It’s a Zen thing, I explained.  Clean your bowl!  As you can see, he’s not impressed.  I’m fascinated by Sprout’s practice of defending himself.  My lacerations will heal soon and the sting does little to deter me from testing out what actually triggers his grab-and-slash reflexes.  So far I’ve sorted out that it has little to do with territory (but he has yet to meet the other two cats) or food (ample and free-range).  It does have much to do with that vulnerable underbelly.

Form.  The first of the Five Skandhas and the one that stands as the exemplar of the boundlessness, the unknowability of the other four.  Red Pine in his commentary (1) says that it represents our obsession with the material.  It is “our first line of defense in contesting attacks on the validity of our existence…” and we need to believe it exists.  We try to define ourselves in terms of the structure, shape, and extension into space and time of our body.  Oh and, how we fail.

Red Pine goes on to say we disregard the other four skandhas at our own peril.  We risk entrenching form as the only path to understanding emptiness and forget the intricate role all five play with each other.  One of the things that always fascinated me about this section of the Heart Sutra is the dropping out of “sensation, perception, memory, and consciousness” from the recitation.  It worries me that we don’t chant them with the same thundering detail as we do with form.  It elevates form as something to truly be wary of and without attention, our stance to the other four becomes one of benign neglect.  And, truth be told, becoming caught in believing the solidity of sensations, perceptions, memory, and consciousness is more cause for worry than form by itself.

Let me put it this way: when the body fails us, we may have a sense of assault on our image, identity, potential, and so on.  However the power of the delusion that we are identified by our form lies not in the body but in what we sense in it (pain!), perceive of it (Oh this is never going to end!), memories we have of it (the last time I was laid up forever!), and consciousness of the experience with it (why me!?).

So repeat regularly:

Feelings are the same as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as feelings
Perceptions are the same as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as perceptions
Mental formations are the same  as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as mental formations
Discernment is the same as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as discernment. (2)

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(1) Heart Sutra, translation and commentary by Red Pine
(2) Skandha terms from Heart Sutra version translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi & Joan Halifax Roshi © 2003 

Back to books.  Tasty ones.  I remember the day I dug into Analayo’s Satipatthana and just about swooned at the deliciousness of taking nibbles out of the sutra, one word, one sentence at a time.  It should be tedious but it’s not.   Or perhaps it’s a peculiarity of mine that most won’t point out in polite company.  Liberated Life Project asked on the Facebook page:

If you weren’t doing what you’re doing right now for a job, what would you do to earn your livelihood? Quick… first thought, best thought!

I replied: study, learn, write.

How’s that for smacking up against my most intimate truth?  I think I’ve momentarily arrived at that place where studying is truly for pleasure, learning is amazing just for what it entails, and writing is a joyous expression of weaving the threads together.  More than all that, I hope I’ve learned to let go of the nay-saying voices: the folks who deride my love of reading about Buddhism, the ones who stand proud on their fundamentalist views that Buddhism is only about beliefs, or the ones whose faces pucker in fear and disgust when I start a sentence with “Well, Red Pine’s translation of the Heart Sutra is fascinating for its…”

Study.  Learn.  Write.

There’s a lip-smacking delight in this.  I said to my coach (did I mention that I have one?): When you return from your journey of 10,000 Leagues under the Self, I’d like to study a sutra and start on my path of learning.  His response in summary: “Why wait until I return?”  In effect, he suggested I start immediately by intensifying my daily practice: meditations morning and evening every day until our next meeting.  I was thrilled.  We’re into Day Two.  And I’ve deliciously failed already!  Look, Ma!  I’m Learning!

Study this.  In that moment of waking, notice the sinking mind.  In that moment of turning away from the edge of the bed, notice the holding back.  There really is a space for a choice.  ”Failure means you’re in the game,” he said in our first session.  I may well end up MVP!

Learn something.  Red Pine opens his commentary(1) of the Heart Sutra with a translation of “prajna which means ‘wisdom’ and is a combination of pra, meaning ‘before,’ and jna, meaning ‘to know.’”   Wisdom is something that comes before knowing, a “beginner’s mind” that is transcendent and not tied to discrete entities, and by definition not something that can be “learned.”  I’m still in the game!

Write.  In a word, practice.  It’s no different from getting up, sitting down, and opening ourselves to this unfolding panorama of life as it is.  It’s tedious; muses are highly disrespectful of agendas and scheduled appointments.  It’s frustrating; the black squiggles on the page or in the mind don’t always lend themselves to transparent coherence.  It’s terrifying; it will never measure up to what the mind created in that interstitial space between sleep and waking up.  Do it anyway.  Stay in the game!

Someone asked me in a meeting whether the meditation session we run on Sunday are different from the one on Thursday.  Although I gave an answer that would encourage engagement, this is what I wanted to say:

There is no answer I can give you that will bring you to your life right here, right now.  If your choices are based on the particulars of time and distance, no schedule or location in space will never be the right one.  No plan of practice or topic of the day will bring you to that most intimate secret in your heart.  No matter what the schedule, personality of teacher, or some vague peculiarity of community, if you do not choose to step out into your life you cannot arrive in it and learn the magic it is.

Prajna.

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(1) The Heart Sutra, translated and commentary by Red Pine

The first night we put the trap out filled with kitty kibble and a can of salmon mash.  If Sprout showed up at all, we likely missed it in the out-of-sync  periodic window checking.  By bedtime, we had deliberated every contingency of leaving the trap out overnight versus taking it in.  The advantage of leaving it out was that we might capture him – or something with four legs anyway.  The disadvantage was that if it did trap him and we didn’t know it, he was left in the cold with no shelter.  Bringing the trap in meant another day of cultivating distress tolerance.  Besides we had no idea it was going to work anyway and my mind pulled in at the what-if gas station and filled its tank to overflowing.

Doubt is formidable foe.  It erodes all the accumulated wisdom or at the very least punches illusionary holes in the safety net of knowledge.  In the face of the hindrance of  doubt (which is not the same as Great Doubt), I tend to build endless loops of  ”but-what-if-and-then” scenarios or put on  my Chicken Little costume (is it really a costume?) and scurry around the house traumatizing the cats.  Frank googles “how to catch a feral kitten.”

Sardines.

Yes.  Pungent, oily, slimy small fry fish.  We laced the kitty kibble with the stuff, slathered it on the cage wire, set the door (I wanted to put a blanket in it just in case he needed the comfort) and laid it out on the deck.  No Sprout.  Apparently the delightfully sunny day and the vast acreage of mice-filled fields were more appealling than store-bought sardines.  However, by nightfall he slithered up to the deck like an adolescent past curfew hoping Mum and Dad were asleep and he could catch a snack without waking them.

We sat at the kitchen table ready to pounce outdoors at the sound of the trap being sprung.  I still had deep doubts about its safety which fed a firestorm of fears that he would be hurt in the process.  After all, our good intentions had not done well for his mother and my brain now had this one-way neural path that anything I might do intending good would end up bad.  Ah, Doubt.  You insidious, entrapping, pungent creature.  Get thee behind me!

I used to think that doubt was counteracted by confidence.  Now I sense that doubt is rousted by the willingness to take that risk we would anyway if not crippled by our need to always have a good outcome.  Furless, clawless, top-heavy creatures that we are, the common assumption is that we use our brains to compensate for our inability to risk in the same way a sabre-tooth tiger or polar bear would to survive.  Perhaps not.  Lumber we might but there was certainly a willingness to take the risk by going out to  hunt or to turn and face the rampaging beast in order to protect our offspring.

We are not risk averse because we are defenseless.  We are defenseless because, in taking a risk, we fear what an unfavourable outcome might say about our competence.  Meet Sprout.  Five pounds and quite disdainful of the sardines.  While in the trap, on the way to the vet, he delicately ate all the kibble around the fish.

There may seem a contradiction between the title of this post and the lead picture.   Or perhaps not.  I look at this picture and see this steady trek across the fields, hugging the small ravine in places only to leave it for a gentler slope up the hill; a wondrous result of meeting the day which doesn’t reveal the deeper effort to not believe my thoughts.  It was our first snow shoe trek of the season; in truth, it was our first snow shoe together in years.  The day, the sunshine, the acres of crusty snow was a finger-snap, breaking through the trance of anxious misery over a continuously mentally failing mother, ailing cats, and life’s other vagaries.   The outcome of that trance has been a heaviness in the seat of both body and mind.

While the heaviness in my seat is a health consideration, I must admit the mental torpor in its cognitive manifestation is what causes me grief.  For the most part, my days are filled with assessing situations, negotiating, shifting gears, and trying to stay out of the mind of others.  It’s fast-paced, unrelenting, and not for the risk-averse.  In contrast and I don’t know if it is cause or effect, in matters of my own well being, I am far more likely to take the slothful path.  I could bring that analytic mind to bear on the conundrum of wasting the 2 hours scheduled each day, every day for 15 years to get to the gym.  There is a clear predictive equation between my nastiness factor and the sugar content of a morning snack that would benefit from my wisdom about highly processed carbohydrates.  The luxury of a meditation room attached to the general offices seems far less seductive that the mantric clicks on Facebook.

I should be clear (making an effort at arousing the analytic mind here) that it’s not about fuzzy thinking.  It’s about the unwillingness to consider the alternative to “Meh.”  Call it resistance, tentativeness, captive of past and future, it amounts to the same thing.  There is a sedating seductiveness to not rising up and taking charge of the direction of our mental life. And the consequences are as debilitating as any physical disease that comes from not dealing with the fat-ladened arteries or the bulging belly.

When we aren’t willing to rouse ourselves to stop the downward or outward spirals of self-defeating thinking or self-abuse, we  open the gateways to superstitious thinking.  If perceiving reality isn’t likely to soothe our fears, then magic will, says our deluded mind.  Unrelated events take on great significance, skies are filled with portents of success or failure, and our actions (which are our only belongings) become caricatures of rituals to keep bad things from happening.  Ironically, in the shackled mind the world becomes a scary place – a galaxy far, far scarier than the fear of taking charge of how we think.

Sloth and torpor.  Not for the mentally faint of heart.

In time.

I’m learning that I have what David Whyte calls “an adulterous relationship with time.”  It’s not enough, fulfilling, generous, kind, eternal or protective.  It betrays promises that wounds will heal and dogs get their day.  It is capricious in its affections giving to others what it swore would be mine exclusively.  That, of course, gives me license to adulterate our marriage; and, like all bad marriages, I seize the right to lay blame at time’s feet for disappointing me.

The time demanded of me by the the tangle of the Heart Sutra requires that I step back into this awkward, narcissistic relationship I have with time itself, long before I can dive into the twists and turns of paradox and paradigm shifts.  I have to be willing to sit with a word, to sift it, to let the silt and the muck stir and settle.  That willingness is mediated by having a good marriage with time.

Instead, I find myself promiscuous with my attention.  As I sit in zazen, my mind wanders into worry about the kitten whom I haven’t seen this morning.  The evidence of a now-empty food bowl is insufficient.  I turn on time and accuse it of not having me at the window to coincide with the kitten at his food.  In the spaciousness of zazen which is synonymous with the spaciousness of time, I feel the tension in my legs and my back.  They are priming to rise and check outside the window in the kitchen.  Time says, zazen is marital therapy between you and me; if we’re ever going to better ourselves in the other’s presence, we must agree to hold this discourse of stillness.  So I sit and we have this gentle probing conversation about how worry energizes me into action, how that action is not discerning of what is possible, and the ways in which it renders the power of time impotent.

I relapse during walking meditation as I reach that pivotal point in the room where I could continue forward into the kitchen (and the window) or I can turn to the right and go to my cushion.    Just one quick minute.  Give me just a moment to go and check.  It doesn’t mean anything.  I’ll come back!  But we had that conversation already.  I turn right and face the brilliant sunshine pouring down on my cushion and Midas-like turning the pine floor gold.

These gossamer threads of worry and flurry are a symptom of a failing marriage with time.  They are probably the most seductive of the five hindrances because they create the illusion that we are actually accomplishing something.  In fact, they are the thieves of our intimacy with time.  Transforming that marriage, regenerating  intimacy, requires an act of courage.  It means saying no so we can say yes; saying yes so we can say no.  It means reaching into the heart of who we are and honouring our practice of fearlessness.

Some of you may recall my story about some kitty karma we generated a few months ago.  Our adopted cat Pumpkin, actually the neighbour’s cat found the al fresco service at our place was more reliable and settled into the metal storage shed.  The neighbour estimated her age at about 11 years and commented that she tended to get pregnant a lot.  I don’t know if that assessment was relative to most barn cats or a particularity he was assigning to this cat.  We had to admit that she did tend to look continuously bulbous at the belly.  So when she showed up with her Sprout, we weren’t surprised.  He is a handsome little bug which psychological studies would predict increases the attachment – and should he go to university, he would score higher grades, get better jobs, and be more successful than your average barn cat’s off spring.

Sprout and Pumpkin did well over the Fall and into the first snow.  We continued to provide fodder and began the process of taming the little guy with kitty treats.  I caught him at one point and even managed to get him to accept a few moments of cuddling.  Of course, honouring Pumpkin’s age, now 13 years, we made plans to get her spayed as soon as it was clear that Sprout was no longer nursing – which he was but he wasn’t going to let anyone know.  Then last weekend, Pumpkin began to seem somewhat out of sorts.  We took her to the vet – agonizing over leaving Sprout for a few hours without Mom.  The vet cleared her health-wise and we talked about the ease of having her spayed.  No worries.  She’d be in and out in a day and outdoors the same day.  Technology had changed dramatically, we were assured.  Well, you likely know the ending to this section.  Pumpkin died from the anesthesia.

If you want to meet terrifying silence, tell the world you are going full time as a poet.  Who would give me a word of encouragement if I did?  It has never been easy to go full-time as a poet in any recorded portion of human history.  When we announce to the world that we are about to go full-time as a poet, people do not come up to us, slapping us on the back, saying, “Great career move, David,” or “I hear they are taking them on at Lockheed right now,” or “Marvelous.  I hear there’s a decent dental plan comes with the verse.” (p. 123)

I remember telling my parents I had left my job as a Chemist in the Federal Government to become a free-lance writer.  After the ear-piercing silence, they shook their heads, mystified that I would walk away from a good pension plan (health care!) for a life of… of … of what? my father demanded.  Even worse was my defensive attempt to explain that Frank had a good job as a self-employed consultant.  They could not grasp the link between how he “did” his job and how the money came in; there wasn’t a bi-weekly pay cheque.  This was crucial.  That flow from production to recompense was what made their world feel safe and secure.  Of course, their perplex mystified me equally because they had both endured losses of their treasured careers through the capriciousness of political upheavals.

I amuse myself these days having conversations with the (likely aggravated) spirit of my dear Dad.

“Well, Dad, I’ve decided to close my private practice to become a Chaplain,” I announce to his portrait on the ancestor’s altar.

“A Chaplain?  Does that have a better salary than a psychologist?”  His right eyebrow would begin a syncopating twitch. It makes the little mole on his eyelid a bouncing ball I follow to sing along with the “career catastrophe” song.

“Um.  Well.  No.  I don’t know.  I mean, I don’t know if Chaplains get paid.  Not in private practice anyway.  In hospitals, they get about $32 an hour.”

“And what do you get paid now?”  I can feel the rabbit hole opening up because he’s never understood how self-employed professionals pay themselves.  ”Draw?” he would ask.  ”That’s what you do with crayons!  How much is your cheque made out for each week!”

“Well, it doesn’t matter what I get now, Dad.  I’d be following my heart – you know, doing what’s important to me… for the world… to ..er..um… save all beings… creations… numberless… vow…”  I’m floundering and the other ancestors on the altar are now looking very interested in how this is going to end.

He seems to be silent long enough for a few ashes to topple from the incense stick.  ”Saving all beings, eh?”  He glances over at his mother who in her portrait is about to walk over to him and plead my case.  ”Like a Bodhisattva.  Well, make sure you read the contract carefully before you sign it.”

I’ve never really considered that Bodhisattva-hood is a career choice.  It seems to just arise for most people I know whom I think of as compassionate beings committed to easing suffering in the world.  Perhaps they just make it all look simple.  Or perhaps it is really just that simple; choose the path.

The Heart Sutra is emphatic that seeing through the illusion of separateness and an abiding self is the step to being unhindered to be of service to the world.  Grounded in this understanding that separation and interconnection are the figure and ground of our life, we break free of the things that hinder us, that hold us back from being who we are, which cloud our vision, our dreams, our intimate truth.   “Without hindrance, the mind has no fear.”  Anger, desire, sloth (my favourite), restlessness/rumination, and doubt cannot shake or stir us from our career choice – poet, writer, Chaplain, Bodhisattvas all.   Without these blockades in our path, we enter fully into that pilgrimage of discovering who we already are.

Over the next few months, I took the time (to speak) with person after person (in the organization)….  I began to see that in an extraordinary way the conversations themselves were doing all the work.  It forced me to ask the next question: “If this kind of conversation will bring you the work you want for yourself within an organization, what kind of work do you really want to do in the wider world?  What are your elemental waters?  What courageous conversations will bring you to your poetry?”  Each of us has an equivalent core in our work, whether it is the path of the artist or the explorations of the engineer.  Even if we already possess the work of our dreams, there is a way of doing that work that will deepen and enliven it, a way that begs for a daily disciplined conversation. (p.135)

Thank you for the daily disciplined (if somewhat raucous) conversation.

Standing at the han every morning of Rohatsu was a practice of noting the preferential mind.  This is a North-facing door and when one side was open the wind ripped through the little room.  Thankfully, I was protected by the door directly in front which kept the wind from blowing onto me.  I’m not sure I really noticed the cold anyway; I was so focused on the sequence and timing of the strikes that a troop of marauding yeti would have got pass me.  One morning, one of the teachers came by and gently closed the door  saying, “It doesn’t have to be open all the way in this cold.  It’s too cold for you.”  I bowed gratefully and stood there as the wind bounced off the door and funneled directly onto me.  Good intentions.  I did open the door fully when the teacher left and later we had a good laugh about helping hands.

Kornfield explains in Bringing Home the Dharma that we can get stuck on the pleasant aspects of our experience.  Freedom only comes when we fully experience and then release whatever is present, “no matter how beautiful or how painful.”

As we stay present with mindful and wise attention, we notice three things will happen to our experience: it will go away, it will stay the same for a while, or it will get more intense.  Which of these occurs is none (of) our business! Our job is to allow the experience of the phenomenal world to unfold in all its infinite richness — to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think, to rest in mindfulness and freedom at the center of it all.  (pp. 88-89)

This is really helpful, when I’m stuck in these awkward or painful experiences, to know that the shifting is not my job.  Or more correctly, preventing the shift is not in my job description.  Staying present to it is, and while you may wonder at the wisdom of standing in a North wind, being present allowed me to “think” calmly and act skillfully.  A rare moment, I’m sure will not shake up the universe too soon again.  But seriously, my other bag of tricks is to get angry or frustrated or to wish everyone could see how much I’m suffering and for them to launch a rescue effort.  It was just so much easier to note that the teacher was trying to help and that I could simply open the door again – close it fully.

Choices.  Just a quiet way of not giving away my power.