Category Archives: 108 thoughts

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trudging the wrong path diligently

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moon1 I’ve gone missing. Typically, I go missing in action, meaning that I tend to be so activated that I get lost or even miss who I am or whither I goest. Did I use to write diligently every day? Execute (in many meanings) brush paintings each week? Read books and review them regularly? There’s a fire that is fuelled by longing and a heat generated by desire. It keeps things bubbling and moving forward so that there is for all intents and purposes a semblance of order wrested from chaos. In that blazing it is possible to do all manner of things. It is possible to have insights and revelations, paintings and prose, lovings and lustings. It is possible for each of these havings to be flavoured as  wholesome and unwholesome.

When I wrote every day, it was from a need to clarify my misunderstanding of the dharma, of practice, and of what my life was, is, has become through the generosity of myriad beings, causes and conditions. It was the same in painting or photography. Practice, clarify, clarify, realize, realize, make real. This was and is practice. It is a stepping out into the marketplace, albeit it was a shady, tucked-away nook. I also wrote to create a space between what I practice professionally as a psychologist and what I practice personally as a Buddhist. That’s a tougher process of clarifying because they are so intricately woven together. Neither conduit of a way of being lends itself to segmenting situational identities let alone body from emotions from sensations from thoughts.

It goes without saying that I write because there is an egoistic part of me (only a part? I ask my unrelentingly needy self) that wants to be heard, read, reflected upon and otherwise validated, valued, and thereby mirrored in the neurons of those myriad Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Is it really ego or is it just human to want to feel part of a larger cosmos, some community that is a summation of all its parts and then with added value? It can be that too, I suppose. There is a sense of belongingness that emerges from all our efforts, except that we often fail to see it for all the artificial smoke and fake mirrors the ego throws out.

Write or not, I have come to understand that the path is not revealed in the writing. Nor is the path itself the writing. Every word is wrong and every conclusion is misinformed. Why? Because to start with the idea that something needs to be revealed or that some connections require a mirror to be realized (made real) is already wrong-headed. Now the bottom line in all of this is a simple question: do I actually have anything to say? These days, I would say, “Less and less so.” There are moment when I think, “Oh, that needs a rebuttal!” Or, “Egads, do people actually accept that as the definitive word? Maybe I should saddle up the old destrier nag and armour-up!” Then I sit down, have a cup of tea, and the thought passes.

And yet… and yet… this wrong-headed path needs to be trudged not just by dismissing the myriad dhammas as themselves wrong-headed but by sitting down observing how right- and wrong-headedness arise as co-joined twins discernable only by how we meet them.

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the great matter of the poppy & the peony

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imageThe garden is flourishing in these endless cycles of wet and heat. It has exploded brilliant blooms of irises and poppies which were short lived in the relentless downpours of May. And now, in the muggy days of June, the peonies are surging out in giant fireworks of white and pink.

I’ve always hated peonies, and these in particular for having been planted in the most awkward of places on what passes for lawn. It took me a decade to uproot every last bulb only to find them skulking back into the interstices of my favoured flora.

Now, 20 years later, I’ve transformed my irritation into a marginal peace about them but, I claim, it’s only because they once belonged to Roger whose father built the farm in 1932. Roger is gone now, predeceased by his wife Blanche who had painted the living room the same shade of rose I did a generation later.

The poppies flank one side of a small garden (small being a relative term for something less than 8 by 30 feet) while the unrepentant peonies flank the other. This year they seem to be the punctuations of the Great Matter of Life and Death.

Perhaps my mother’s passing is resonating further with me as we divest ourselves of the material aspects of her life. Selling the house in Montreal, sorting through the final remnants of her collections, and falling over pictures and portraits of her journey in this realm, I find myself wondering what might have been different had on petal dropped this way or that, had one bud opened in June and not May, had one rose bush blossomed blue and not white.

Or perhaps I am feeling more and more the karma of aging as I trip and stumble over bumps and uneven ground in my path. Sitting on my zafu at the retreat Frank and I lead, I felt a piercing through my knee which the mind tackle to the ground and pummelled into an admission of stupidity for allowing it to happen. I marvelled at the logic that says, in retrospect, you should have known it would happen and prevented it. The talks at the retreat were on equanimity and compassion, the former being key to Dogen’s admonition that we examine the constructed selves and the latter to being illuminated by the myriad things as these masks drop to the ground. And through it all that mind-mask howled its misery and portended death of a broken kneecap – of independence, of living, of ever amounting to anything worthwhile.

The poppy stripped of petals and bloom is saying the same thing and the peony still in its naively held breath of birthing is saying the same thing. All things end, begin, end. But they don’t howl. Or clutch at the soreness. Or winch at the fire piercings. They seem animated by the truth of life and death, being and ongoing being. Voicelessly punctuating  here and now.

Perhaps it is time I allowed these myriad things of the Great Matter to pierce me truly, really.