There’s a book of variations of kanji script that is the calligrapher’s Bible.  Every kanji character is reproduced in dozens of versions, some by ancient masters of shodo, some by unknown clerical scribes.  Because I don’t actually read Japanese, it takes hours to find the kanji character I want and then to track down the variations.  Then it’s about practicing the strokes, hour after painstaking hour.  The deeper practice in working with the variations is that they don’t tend to look like the original script.  It requires a level of understanding of the stroke sequence to grasp (or even read) the variation.  But more, it requires trust that all the lines are present in the final variation even if you can’t see them.

I’ve started to understand this process as one of transformation not unlike what happens when we commit to spiritual practice.  We start with the traditional ways of doing things, focusing on form.  Slowly as we begin to understand the unfolding of breath and body, we can play with variations.  I think benefits from that phase of practice only accrue when we acquire  a level of trust in our ability to represent the whole with only the hint of a part.

Last week was my personal deadline to finish editing my Chaplaincy thesis and putting together the portfolio.  I’ve felt somewhat ambivalent about whether I actually accomplished anything in the last two years.  Sure, there were tons of papers on wide-ranging topics and reams of reflections and oodles of analyzed data.  But I wondered if there had there been any real transformation?  I think I saw a hint of it as the portfolio took shape – a shift in adaptability, an openness to new perspectives, an accommodation of concepts that didn’t assimilate well initially, a willingness to be vulnerable in black-and-white (which is an improvement over being black-and-white to avoid vulnerability).

No, I’m going to be more self-supportive than that.  I was astonished by the shifts in my perspective, my connection with the work, the training, the way of being as a Chaplain.  If you asked me if I noticed any change, I’d have said I didn’t.  But there it was in folder after folder, neatly slipped between transparent sleeves and falling nicely into the spiritual journey of the 10 Ox Herding pictures.  While I truly cannot point to it as I sit here, I have to trust in the variation of my life script that is contained in that package flying south thanks to UPS.

Practice is patience, endurance – as trust forms.

Leakage.  It’s a term that describes the seepage from all the drippy ickiness stuffed away in the back of our emotional brain.  When reality isn’t what my ego anticipated, the resulting train wreck leaves leaking tankers of disappointment, resentment, frustration, and other toxic materials.  Lately, I’ve been preaching about the “Just World hypothesis.”    That’s when we hold a world view of deservingness: good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.  As Buddhists we are not supposed to have preferences for who wins a lottery or who gets gished in a traffic pileup.  We are supposed to practice a different world view: good things happen; bad things happen.  But I’m willing to bet that the level of seepage suggests we’re still holding onto the “good-bad” piece of the Just World hypothesis.

In my Just World, people who lie and fabricate information to get ahead end up languishing in obscurity with shrunken mouths and bloated bellies.  Apparently this doesn’t happen.  Learning that my hypothesis has scant data to back it leaves me feeling like bad things are happening to me.  And rationally, if “bad things happen to bad people” and I think bad things are happening to me, what the heck does that say about me!  Oh, I know what you’re thinking: Now she’s really gone off the deep end into the sewage!  And you’d be right.  That twisted thinking that I’m bad fires up my anxiety.  It puts me in a sticky place where resentment and impatience with the course of my life erodes the container of practice, leaking toxic drippings all over the path.

It’s not enough to practice being present to these sticky feelings.  It’s also important to strengthen the container so the toxic material can be held gently and handled with care.  This practice of containing the difficult and unwanted is not about suppression or dramatic indulgence (that’s what got us here in the first place).  It’s an act of generosity to ourselves and all those around us who would suffer deeply from the leakage.  When I acknowledge what I’m feeling, it’s like putting a tracking tag on a barrel of toxic waste.  Even if we can’t transform it just yet, we at least know where it is.

Practice is patience.  Practice is endurance.  Roll out those barrels and print off those labels.  There’s a load of work to be done on these tracks.