Author Archives: Genju

Unknown's avatar

hidden promises

by

Sunday’s post announced that Zen teacher Joko Beck was in hospice care.  Scouting around the bloggosphere, I’m touched by how deeply this teacher drew so many of us onto the path of practice – and service.  I read Joko’s book Everyday Zen decades ago, wandering across it as I struggled with the role Buddhism played in my life.  I was in graduate school, mangling relationships and getting mangled in turn by the zeitgeist in Psychology that had yet to understand the concept of empathy.  We were a good match. 

In the turmoil of egos and crazy-making interactions, Joko Beck’s writings were a clean straight arrow shot into the air.  The tempo of a cognitive psychological stance resonated with my studies.  It’s not the intention of her teachings to activate the left brain but it is skillful means if the brain at hand is tilted so.  Whatever it was, I learned and grew from her books.  Nothing special, simply unfolding breath by breath, in my life as it was at that time – and it is now.

When I read the news of her dying, I lit a stick of incense. 

May you journey safely to the other shore, Joko. 

May you finally be free of carrying us, one-by-one, word-by-word, to our transformation. 

May you rest now, trusting in the labor of all of us who take your teachings into heart and plant them into ground. 

May you find your promise kept and no longer need to practice disappointment.

These are some of my favourite readings from Nothing Special:

The problem is that nothing actually works.  We begin to discover that the promise we hold out to ourselves – that somehow, somewhere, our thirst will be quenched – is never kept.  I don’t mean that we never enjoy life.  Much in life can be greatly enjoyed: certain relationships, certain work, certain activities.  But what we want is something absolute.  We want to quench our thirst permanently, so that we have all the water we want, all the time.  That promise of complete satisfaction is never kept.  It can’t be kept.  The minute we get something we have desired, we are momentarily satisfied – and then our dissatisfaction rises again.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment.  We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us.  This discovery is our teacher.

The promise that is never kept is based on belief systems, personally centered thoughts that keep us stuck and thirsty.

It’s useful to review our belief systems…because there’s always one that we don’t see.  In each belief system we hide a promise.

Unknown's avatar

unmediated passion

by

The poppies in the garden have me hovering anxiously like a mother hen.  It’s the first year all the plants survived and the buds are settled in the leaves like little Easter eggs.  As if it wasn’t enough that the magnolia bloomed luscious and succulent, I get poppies too.  To celebrate, I went out and bought myself a rake.  No, Frank is at no risk for being ousted as the man in my life.  This is a heavy-duty industrial grade set of metal tines that literally sing as they scoop through the grass.  I’m just that kind of gal, I guess.  A chain saw for one Mother’s Day, a Fiskar knife weeder for my birthday, a set of compost bins for “oh-what-the-heck” day, all made me swoon with delight – that is, if you can imagine yours truly swooning.

I love technology.  Low-tech, Hi-tech, Me-tech.  If there’s an activity then its affiliated gadget will keep me attentive for at least a year or so.  The only problem is – it keeps me from getting into the heart of what I’m doing.  Recently, there was a terrific article in the New York Times that is an adaptation of a commencement speech by Jonathon Franzen.  He addresses the way technology separates us from truly experiencing love – something that can only be achieved by experiencing the things that hurt.  I’m not crazy about the first part of his talk but the latter part really caught me.

Franzen talks about how he gave up worrying about the environment in the 1990’s because it seemed out of his reach to effect any change and it all seemed hopeless to him.  Somehow he developed a passion for birdwatching – despite a subtle need to stay distanced from that passion “because anything that betrayed passion is by definition uncool.”  Then something interesting happened: the anger and despair about the environment which had evoked fear in him became easier to bear as the love he felt for the birds grew and he learned more about conservation of their habitat.

Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

For Franzen, birdwatching allowed him to titrate his fears and gave him the context for activism.  A deep caring slowly emerged from his unmediated contact with one aspect of the environment.  So I find myself diving into the heart of the flowers in all manner of gardens, inner and outer.  Just like those bees that I see buried head-first and butt-deep in a clutch of stamen and pistils, I’m determinedly unworried about being uncool.  That’s the thing about passion.  It lifts us up and away from the fear of not getting it perfect or right or acceptable.  All that matters – actually – all that is true and real is that direct, unmediated connection from which love, brilliant and luminous, blossoms.