At the end of a retreat conducted in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, retreatants are invited to take the Five Mindfulness Trainings.  These are the lay precepts cast in terms of positive engagement by Thich Nhat Hanh.  At one level that is so; at another, they continue to contain elements of the “do not” found in all calls for ethical behaviours.  While the terminology is not as directive, the commitment to not kill, not steal, not engage in sexual misconduct, not speak in anger or untruthfully, and not to use intoxicants is very much evident.  It’s unavoidable really.  The first step of any practice whose intention is well being begins with restraint.

This aspect of ethics is a touchy one for many of us.  We don’t like being told what to do; even more, we dislike being told what not to do.  And yet, in the liminal space between moving forward and holding back, there may be something valuable that can emerge.

So today, I’m watching the many ways in which I can act with restraint, hold back, pause.  Not as a process of denying myself or others but rather as a practice of awareness, of not obstructing the possibility of something different arising.

So it was with this past weekend.  Frank and I attended a retreat organized by the local sangha which practices in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition.  It was being held in a center that is the home of the Grey Nuns (now the Grey Sisters).  The building is a residence for the Grey Sisters, a retreat center, a community resource for counselling and activities, and a museum of the history of the Grey Nuns.  And what started out as a practice of being in the present became a journey into my past.

You can read about the founder of the Grey Nuns, Marguerite D’Youville, here; a fascinating story of one woman’s life in the New France of the 1700′s, surviving adversity, and transforming her suffering into a path of service.  Her work with the poor was so reviled by the culture of the mid-1700′s that she and her supporters were mocked with the name “Les Grises” – the “grey women” or the “drunken women.”  Yet, despite the enormous opposition, they grew as a community and persevered to found and fund numerous hospitals, shelters, and schools globally.

Where does my past fit in this?  Walking down the hall of history at the retreat center and reading of the various schools the Grey Nuns founded, I realized I had been taught by them and two in particular might well have watered the seeds of practice for me.  As a child in elementary school, I only knew them as The Nuns and Sr. Leger in particular as the woman who saw through my defensive posturing and deep into my potential.  I lost touch with them only to reconnect with them in the Grey Nuns retirement residence in Montreal about 10 years ago when I was there for another retreat (in TNH’s tradition again).  There are few specific memories however what I remember of our relationship is set deep in my bones.  I know this because when went to meet Sr. Leger, I stood up taller and shook the cobwebs out of my brain.  She was never one to be tolerant of my tendency to sloppiness – whether it was in body or mind.  And through her persistence, I realize now that she transmitted to me an unrelenting devotion to the spirit of practice.

The pictures in the hallways were interesting relics.  What penetrated me was the interconnections and the surfacing of the past in a new perspective and with new understanding.

I didn’t plan it this way.  In fact, if I had the foresight to plan my life as it is at this moment, I would have thrown in a few more Joomla K2 modules and extensions that auto-fed my brilliant ideas directly onto the blogs or ping-backed when there was chocolate nearby.

In seriousness, I also learned something really important about the “back-end” codes of greed, anger, and delusion embedded in the templates of corporations.  Some you can play with even if your last code writing was FORTRAN.  Some you are best to leave alone.  Practice has taught me through sufficient rounds of humility work that learning the difference between them is important to emotional longetivity.  

The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara while moving through the deep chaos of renovations saw that form is emptiness.  She lost her head over that insight.  I take it only as a comment on the profoundity of the teachings and not a reflection of the vast complication that is my life at the moment.  However, Avalokite presents an important consideration which is the point of our practice: how do we lose our heads skillfully?

IF you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

With apology to Rudyard Kipling who began his poem with the implication that success lies in keeping one’s head when all about are losing theirs, I am beginning to understand that the object of practice is very much the losing of one’s head. My head.  Lost, fallen, tumbled off its precarious perch atop a spindle of a spine.  Strangely, this is a good thing because as that unwieldy lump falls off, I am left with nothing to rely on but my intimate connection with who I am.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating…

I was blessed with a number of conversations over the last week with friends and colleagues who are good at holding my feet to the fire of trust, patience, transparency, and meeting aversion.  Perhaps the best teachings I received were to drop away from the anxiety that keeps me from speaking my truth.  The tendency when we fear loss is a natural gasp, an intake and holding of the breath which easily translates into a holding on.  When I see this as nothing more than a knee-jerk response fueled by thoughts of loss and not any loss that is real, my head falls off.  That frontal lobe dominance, that story-machine which churns out the miserable and the macabre – it withers and shrivels and drops off.  

This is a challenging practice.  It calls on us to hold our seat in the firestorm yet not be foolishly consumed, to be flexible in our commitments yet honour them, to hold true to our values yet find a path that is mutually nourishing.  It calls on us to lose our head and find our heart.

Avalokiteshvara lost her head one day.  And as I contemplated in the deep course of practice, I found the heart of what is true, intimate, and pure.

Sheldon Cooper, quirky and brilliant, is fascinating – an irritating, compelling portrait of rational over-drive welded to self-defined realities that are seemingly impervious to the salve of relationships.  In the interview, Parsons explains how the character works and its power as a lesson in modelling tolerance.  

What?  Irritating people as teachers?  

We should look in the mirror.  Bazinga!

Have a wonderful weekend!

In the case of cruelty, you recognize that, however cruel and vicious your assailant, you understand, even though it makes no rational sense. Yet you have no sense of moral superiority or righteousness. 

The last sentence was a heart-opener.  I had shared with a colleague the frustration of seeing someone “get ahead” despite what I saw as all his shortcomings.  And digging into the raw truth I said, Why not me?  Somewhere along the back-and-forth of our conversation he used the word “jealous.”  While it didn’t feel right, it made me sit up and listen to my tone, examine my intention, and dig deeper.  Was I really jealous?  Was it about belonging in a place and space to which I was not entitled?  Was it greed?  Unearned assets?  I’m going to need a convoy of backhoes and bulldozers to get into this one!

When I tie in McLeod’s statement of being released from a sense of moral superiority and righteousness, I can get a glimmer of what might be happening.  True, I react strongly to injustice.  But is righteousness the appropriate response to injustice?  Is there even such a thing as a personal injustice or is that just a euphemism for self-centered?  Oh dear.  Pants down again!

Practice tells me that the path out of this is one of gratitude.  Accepting that there are many places I will never enter.  So being grateful for all the millions of hectares of space I can enter is important to see and practice seeing clearly.  I’ve already been chosen.  There is nothing more to add.  Nothing more to demand.  But it doesn’t stop there.  These friends, colleagues, and teaching moments are just ingredients for the meal.  They are wasted left in the fridge and no more nourishing than the poison of all hindrances.

Time to get cooking!

These roses had been planted by my father in the back gardens of their home and were a showpiece of the neighbourhood.  And, typically, they were also a focus of some warm-hearted competition with their neighbour who managed to grow some of the most beautiful tree roses I’ve ever seen.  All summer long, Bruce and Dad would go on about the best way to prune, cultivate, and feed these plants.  The fence between their houses fell to disrepair.  The crabgrass invaded one yard as the dandelions parachuted into the other.  And they argued on – sometimes about the weeds but mostly about the worthiness of the floribunda over the hybrid tea.

After my father died (has it been ten years already) and my mother’s dementia left her planting the florist-delivered long-stem red roses, the house was rented to a stream of people and the roses – by now considered heirloom varieties – died.  With only five bushes left, I became obsessed with possessing them.  But the possibility that rescuing them would also kill them stopped me at the planning stage until one year I decided to dig deep and commit to whatever outcome evolved from my action.

It’s not enough to step up and take a chance.  There’s the follow up, the follow through.  Call it what we will, the real work begins after the commitment is made.  We know that about pets, plants, and people important to us.  But what about our own lives?

I suggested to our meditation group that we learn to fall in love with ourselves.  Embrace ourselves as we would a lover – filled with enticement and wonder at this being we are.  Seeing every act and engagement with ourselves as inspiring and vital to our life.  Someone commented to me that it seemed egotistic.

That’s the fear we have, isn’t it?  That self-love is a slippery slope to self-centeredness and narcissism.  So we withhold, become Scrooge-like in our tenderness to our hurt and sorrow.  And when that deprivation becomes too intense to bear, we react through grasping and greed.

Perhaps a considered approach would yield more nourishing fruit.  Preparing the ground each day to receive the treasured aspects of ourselves, to be held, watered, and feed so that healthy growth is possible.  Patience when we are dormant to our potential and welcoming when there is sight of aspirations that lean to the sun.  What might happen then?

You’ll have to tell me if there’s a theme building through this week.  Oh by the way, it’s so nice to be back writing every day.  Thank you for being so patient with my wild absences.

This is the Norfolk Pine.  It began one Christmas as a desktop tree.  You know, the kind you see on the counters of banks and drugstores, plunked in a red foil diaper and pinned with a plastic bow that would make even a shih tzu die of shame.  I think we bought it because it was the year my father died and none of us had the energy to put up the usual tree.  It likely sat on our dining table – back in days when we had a dining room and not a zendo – decorated tastefully with an ornament or two.

It started to fail over time and I had enough vitality myself to just get it to the outer room.  We call this euphemistically the “sunroom” perhaps meaning only that it faces south and gets a lot of sun.  It is insulated but has no source of heat so in the winter everything freezes.  The tree in its little pot sat on the shelf in the window from about March to the following May or June.  I recall I was desperate to clean up the “sunroom” so I could use it as a potting shed.  That meant everything had to go!  I picked up the pot with the now-dessicated and dead tree – which came as no surprise being left for over a year in a room alternately hot and freezing cold with no water or nourishment.  As I started to pull the little tree out, a flash of colour slipped out of view: there in a wedge between the main trunk and a branch was a little spot of green.

Over the years, the Norfolk has grown to about three feet.  One Christmas, when I ran out of energy again, it served as the Seasonal Tree, happily reincarnating to its role before it was born.

There is surely a theme here, building defiantly to some conclusion.

Did you know cyclamen are tubers and not bulbs?  In the grander scheme of death and destruction, it probably means little to most of us that a plant is more akin to a potato than a tulip.  In terms of caregiving however, it might make some difference.

I’ve always loved the astonishing flowers of the cyclamen; angel wings swooping back poised to descend on earth yet never quite completing the landing.  Over the years I’ve bought several of these plants and enjoyed the displays all the more for thinking they were like forced tulips – lovely and poignantly impermanent for being constrained in a pot.  The cyclamen were even more exotic because they could not grow in my garden and were only available pre-grown.

When the first one I had began to die, I called in to the CBC gardening show and asked about saving it.  The instructions I got were simple: water it without letting it touch the “bulb.”  It died anyway and I resigned myself to having short-term romances with the plant, composting them when the flowers wilted.

One day while watering the plant, I noticed that the leaves were flattened exposing a view of the bulb shifted off-center.  Immediately I blamed our little Zen Master Sprout who had been seen occasionally testing the plants for their snooze factor.  Because, in my view, this particular plant had lasted the longest of all the plants (it might even be ten years old), I put some effort into reading up on how to revive it and solve the mystery of the transported bulb.

Apparently, cyclamens grow from tubers.  It would seem my dear plant is and is not my dear plant at all.  It is several generations removed having produced shoots from its tubers and happily procreating all these years.

Then I learned about the cyclamen fruit, a round pod left after the petals dried and fell off.  This I had thought was the end of the plant; it signalled a parting of company as I walked it to the compost heap.  In fact, it was the beginning – of sticky brown seeds and new life.

There’s a lesson in this.

Following up the theme of quiet persistence from last week, it was lovely to see this little fellow sprouting.  (Oh yes, Zen Master Sprout is doing well, thriving on generous amounts of tolerance and occasionally being put in his place by our Matriarch Cat, Desireé.)  This is an orchid.  I got one several years ago in full bloom but was never able to encourage more blossoms.  Being the lazy sort, I would from time to time do a bit of hortigoogling but the suggestions all seemed to require too much effort.  So I watered the dear thing haphazardly as I do with most of my plants and it lumbered along in much the manner of most pot-bound beings, that is to say it sat contented not to shrivel up and die.  One might say that orchid showed some quiet persistence but I suspect plants are generally resilient and thankfully robust to our neglect and ignorance.  

Last Fall, I came across a type of orchid called a “Just Add Ice” which is not a species but a technique.  About the same time I read about a blogger pal who had received an orchid as a gift.  He worried about caring for it and whether he was up to the ministrations such a rare and delicate plant would need.  I felt a bit guilty at first glancing over at my orchid which was languishing in a pool of murky water; then I felt competitive.  Could I get mine to bloom before his?  I also recalled during one samu or work period at Upaya, the resident gardener came into the dokusan room where I was cleaning up.  Using a damp cloth, she gently wiped down the each of the leaves of the lusciously blooming orchid.  I asked her how to make these things bloom and she looked at me with that “oh you still don’t get it, do you?” look.  

With a caretaker so attached to outcomes and desirous of sensual pleasures, no wonder my orchid remained resolutely barren.

So I formed a clear intention to put some effort into caring for my orchid in a more conscious and attentive manner.  I even bought two more to keep it company on the shelf where they get indirect sunlight all day and cool temperatures at night.  I logged onto the Just Add Ice website and read (quickly and somewhat impatiently – but hey… transformation takes time!) about the care and feeding of orchids.  I even got a measuring cup to mix up the right amount of nourishing broth to feed them.  

Over the winter, the two I bought struggled to recover from the severe neglect they had endured in a cavernous hardware/homeware center.  When I tried to repot them, my heart dropped at the sight of rotted roots.  But, remembering to hold that intention to care close, I repotted all three and set up a reminder to fertilize them once a month on the first Sunday and to water them with 3 ice cubes on the other Sundays.

The instructions had said a new bloom should show in a month.  And this was the test: to read that but not become invested in it.  To look at the three orchid plants and see them as unique systems that had their own time-table of recovery, nourishment, and expression.  To step back each Sunday from the pots and not want to make it different from what it was.  And to welcome the anticipation and the deflation when that shoot with a mitten offshoot heralding a blossoming spike didn’t manifest.

This is a practice of Right Looking Away, Wise Disregard.

And then one day… one day…