300,000 Words

When the COVID lockdown began in earnest in mid-March 2020, I decided it would be a good idea to write a morning reflection to send to friends, students and acquaintances as a gesture of solidarity and support in response to the ‘unprecedented and uncertain’ times we were in. My intention was to write most every morning throughout the pandemic, which I expected would last a month, or maybe even two or three. Like most everyone, I was wildly wrong about the length of time we’d be in lockdown, but somehow I have managed to keep writing almost daily pieces for these past fourteen months.

My urge to write also sprang from my sense that I have particular perspectives and experiences as a Zen teacher, life coach, artist, gardener and human being that may be helpful to some others beyond my immediate circle. A previous stint of morning writing had led to my first book: THIS TRUTH NEVER FAILS: A ZEN MEMOIR IN FOUR SEASONS, which, though not a best-seller, was exactly the book I had always hoped to write. It was honest, down-to-earth and people from many different backgrounds found it touching and encouraging.

As I’ve been writing these past fourteen months, I’ve also had the intention to get down on paper some of the things that I share on a daily basis with coaching clients, students and friends. Though I don’t believe there is any secret formula for life, I do see the power that wisdom teachings from many different traditions have to transform our lives. As I have been writing whatever comes to me in the moment, in the back of my mind has been that these writings might be shared with a wider audience. From the beginning, another book has been lurking in all this cyber-writing.

This morning, exactly fourteen months from the day I began, I woke up to the realization that I can’t continue my daily writing at the same time as I comb through my accumulated jumble of thoughts, observations and reflections. The four hundred some entries totaling over 300,000 words will need my daily attention to reveal some deeper patterns that might be turned into a book.

I’m reminded of the joke about the boy who gets a huge pile of horseshit for his birthday. He is delighted. When someone asks him why he says: ‘With all this horseshit, there must be a pony in here somewhere.’ I’m beginning to dig for the pony. Of course, as a gardener, I also love the horseshit itself, though it does need to be composted for the maximum benefit for the plants themselves. So I’m beginning to compost as well as dig.

The book I dream of is a collection of these short improvisational writings that could sit on your nightstand and be a source of comfort and joy. My working title (that has about a 1% chance of being the final title) is: DEPENDING ON WHAT ARISES: ZEN REFLECTIONS, CONSOLATIONS AND REVERIES. Like my first book, each chapter would be one day’s writing. It would stand on its own, but will also hang together with the others as a collection that has some kind of loose beginning, middle and end. What the thread that connects is is still to be revealed.

For those of you who have been regular or even occasional readers of these daily reflections, thank you so much for your attention. And for those of you who sent occasional shout-outs of the appreciation and encouragement via email, Facebook or in person—a thousand thanks. Knowing that a small group of people out there has found these daily meanderings of value has allowed me to continue to expose and embarrass myself.

As usual, I feel that I have been the primary beneficiary of these past 300,000 words. I’m always listening to what I say and write because I don’t really know it until I say or write it. All the advice and insights are really to help me remember and appreciate the broken/whole person I am.

I offer deep bows to the universal source—to the creator through which all things are born. Our thoughts, words and actions come through us but don’t really belong to us. Our job is to take responsibility for everything that arises and to use it in service of the healing and appreciation of the world. This is indeed the deepest joy for many of us human beings—to give away all we have as an expression of the love that runs through us.

Blessings upon blessings.

Maybe

I write a phrase, then wait for what follows. Then hold still as nothing more comes. Then I delete the first words and fall back into silence.

Maybe all that has been written before is enough. Maybe it’s time to say less—time to hide quietly beyond words and positions and insights. Maybe it’s time to allow what has come before to be what has already happened.

Maybe it’s time to stop. Maybe just this morning or maybe tomorrow too. Maybe only occasionally. Maybe not at all for a long while.

We’ll see.

The Song of Life

The rain has quieted things down this morning. It was pouring just a little while ago as I lay warm in my bed in the dark in my new bedroom. Now it has stopped and the contrast sounds silent. Just the cooing of a morning dove and the slight ringing in my ears as I strain to listen. And, of course, the distant hush of traffic.

Pleasant Street, where the Temple is and where I lived for the past eleven years, is a main thoroughfare between Worcester’s downtown and the northwestern suburbs—Paxton, Holden, Barre and beyond. The street where we live now is a couple blocks up from Pleasant Street and significantly quieter, yet still, as I have reported, the rush of traffic on a quiet morning is the background drone, even through closed windows. But it’s only in the morning, when my ears are tender with sleep and before the busyness of the day that I notice the ubiquitous drone.

This inevitable sound of civilization is modified by the morning doves and accompanied by a usual morning chorus of assorted and mostly invisible birds. I’d like to be an invisible bird—singing with no accountability—no reviews or opinions to worry about—no social media presence to be cultivated if one is serious about spreading one’s words. As an invisible bird, I sing only to sing. The song arises in me. I am the song that I sing and there is no before the song, or after the singing. In the moment of the call there is only the call—a blessed relief from the self I unavoidably drag along for most of my human life. (Was I good enough? Am I good enough? Will I be good enough?)

Yet, even now, I catch glimpses of the song that I am.

A friend who was recently part of a public ceremony in which he was celebrated, spoke of how amazing it was to hear from others who recounted small moments of being touched by his presence. Unknown to him, his song has been singing itself for all his life. We humans are finely tuned into each other.

Your song is not just the song you think you are trying to sing or hope someday to sing or are sure you cannot sing. Your true song is the one that sings itself through you. It began the day you were born. It’s the one you can’t help singing. Unbidden, each morning it arises on its own and through you. Each of us, regardless of intention, sharing as freely as the invisible birds that populate the trees around my new house.

This song, this light, is mostly invisible to us. We can never step outside ourselves to see who we are. We are invisible to ourselves and yet are invited to sing anyway—to let ourselves be who we already are—who we can’t help but being. It’s not about sophistication or knowledge or advanced degrees or power or prestige. It’s about the wondrous functioning of the universe through each of us.

What if this is really true? Or what if this is even partially true? What if the ancient internal critics that so fiercely defend your inadequacy are less true than the beauty of the song that you already (helplessly) are?

The crows squawk, the sparrows chirp and the doves coo. An airplane flies overhead and then disappears.

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)

Hi Mom

I’m thinking this morning of my mother and my wife and my daughter and mothers everywhere—giving birth to other human beings and thereby open themselves to the great joys and sorrows of never-ending vulnerability and wondrous attachment.

Deep bows of appreciation and awe.

Here’s a poem for my mother and for all mothers from all sons and daughters:

Hi Mom

Inconceivably long ago, through you
came my two small legs and arms—
my eyes, ears, and all the rest—
surprised and bawling at first,
I imagine, then later on, larger
and laughing too— walking and
talking—full of wonder about this
beautiful world of flowers
that must also include the wild
sadness woven through each family
as we wander together and apart
in the great astonishment of being human.

059

Begin Again

My new stonewall isn’t going so well. I had begun a series of smallish terraces behind our new addition to follow the step-like rising of the siding and hide the cement foundation below. I began with the granite cobblestones I had lying around from other deconstructed projects. At first, it went well enough. Though the stones themselves are of various thickness and length, their overall rectangular dimension made it reasonably easy to stack them together.

I was about a quarter way through the project when I realized two things: 1) I wasn’t going to have enough stones to finish the project and 2) I wasn’t sure that the lovely looking walls I was constructing would be strong enough to hold the soil through its natural cycles expansion and contraction with water, ice and root systems. When I consulted my local rock-yard expert, John at Sansoucy Stone just up the hill from me, he informed me that: 1) my intuition of the containment issue was probably correct and 2) the granite cobblestones came from India and were relatively expensive.

So I wandered through the stone yard with John looking at various options. At the most ambitious end was the pile of stone that was random rocks to construct a true New England style wall, calling for the attendant balancing and fitting of wildly different shapes and sizes. At the other end was a pallet of thin and relatively flat shale from northern Pennsylvania which I had used several years ago to create a sculpture at the Temple. In between were many options, including a variably buff-colored schist from northeastern Connecticut that was relatively flat and came in relatively thin pieces. I was enchanted by the mottled rich color and, from the outside of the cylindrical stack on the pallet, it looked relatively easy to work with.

I had two pallets delivered to the end of my driveway and promptly got lost in other projects. Yesterday, I finally deconstructed the lovely quarter-wall of cobblestones and promptly repurposed them again to define the boundary of a new arcing garden on the other side of the addition. I also began laying the first courses of my second attempt at the terraced walls using my new schist. It is indeed a lovely stone. Each piece sparkles with evidence of its ancient provenance of clay, heat and pressure over inconceivable stretches of time.

This morning I learned a little more about these stones:
Schist is a foliated metamorphic rock made up of plate-shaped mineral grains that are large enough to see with an unaided eye. It usually forms on a continental side of a convergent plate boundary where sedimentary, such as shales and mudstones, have been subjected to compressive forces, heat, and chemical activity.

So the Pennsylvania shale that encountered the pressure and heat from the colliding tectonic plate of the Atlantic became schist in eastern CT—the schist I am now attempting to stack with elegance and solidity into series of small and rising walls behind my cottage here in Massachusetts. And, grabbing individual stones from the pallet, I find the variation in thickness and shape to be more robust than it appeared in the neatly stacked cylinder. They do not easily stack one on top of the other as they had in my imagination.

Such is the natural course of most worthwhile projects. Initial enthusiasm and dreams encounter the wondrous complexity and ambiguity of the real world. It is here that the real creativity begins and a certain amount of stubborn determination is required. The very real stones I now have demand more time and attention than the ones of my dreams.

So I take a deep breath and hold the vision of terraced walls stepping gracefully up the incline at the back of the cottage while I appreciate the variability and solidity of each stone—persisting in the process of attention as I learn what these rocks and this project have to teach me.