Tag Archives: enso

Unknown's avatar

500/5000 vision

by

About two years ago, Frank had eye surgery that restored his vision to 20/40 – meaning he no longer needed corrective lenses. Having lived from childhood with 20/750 vision, he’s learned many adaptive (and not so adaptive) ways to cope with Coke-bottom eye wear and eventually with contacts which corrected his vision to legal limits.  The surgery took restorative treatment further with two new lens implants; I think one is even a bifocal lens!  The ability to relish a blue sky and that finally being able to really see me didn’t send him screaming into the hills is not the punch line to this story of our relationship.  The gift of new visual range brought into harsh relief the ways we had sculpted our growth around each other to manage the limitation.

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

Unknown's avatar

turning the clay

by

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