Problems in Paradise

The waterfall sounded wrong when I got to the porch this morning. I couldn’t see, but it didn’t sound like the usual amount of splashing. I set my laptop down and traipsed down to the koi pond to see what the problem was. Immediately I could see that the water flow over the rocks was much lower than usual.

Now our waterfall here at the Temple is actually a trick. The water appears to be moving only one way—down. But it is actually moving in a circle. The part where the water moves back up to the top of the waterfall is, however, hidden. Off to one side of the pond, hidden under a plastic ‘rock’, is a submerged pump that pushes the water up through a buried plastic pipe. It unnaturally flows uphill until it reaches the top and then naturally tumbles down over the rocks.

Sometimes I feel like the water is a caged animal that we are making perform tricks endlessly for the amusement of the zoo-going audience. Forced upward again and again, to do its lovely watery thing of following gravity and falling down.

But other times I suspect the water particles vie for the chance to take the ride. Like humans in an amusement park jostling each other eagerly as they wait their chance for another ride on the roller coaster. Into the dark mysterious pipe. The thrill of flowing upwards (not a usual occurrence for water). Then out into the light and the exhilarating and effortless falling down. Finally exiting the ride, back in the pond to tell stories of adventure and bravery to their waiting friends who weren’t chosen for the trip.

Of course I know the water doesn’t choose, it merely responds to the forces around it. It always says yes. When the wind blows across the top of the pond, little waves appear as the water. Without thinking, water allows itself to be touched by the wind and the energy of the wind expresses itself as ripples. And when the water in the pipe is pressed by the pump, it moves in the direction of least resistance, which, in this case (when the pump is working properly) is upward. Naturally rising.

What are the winds and pumps of my life? Is nighttime the same for me as water in the pipe? Are there invisible forces that restore my potential energy – that raise me up during the night so that I can again tumble down through my next day? So much happens in darkness. Maybe it’s the dark and invisible work of my gut that invisibly digests my food and sends the potential energy to each one of my cells to burn in whatever way they desire. Maybe metabolizing is like water falling down a waterfall.

But really, the pump submerged in the pond is like the heart that is carefully hidden away in my darkness of my chest. Like the water in the pond, my blood is a closed system. The heart beat and impels the blood through the vast web of watery roads in my body. The miles of piping that wander everywhere and bring the energy of oxygen—giving each cell the potential energy to follow the gravity of its natural function.

I once had a procedure done where they smeared my chest with goop then pressed hard with a cold metal sensor around to ‘see’ the blood flow in my heart. Aside from being messy and slightly uncomfortable, it was amazing. Amazing to see the wild pumping of this vital hidden engine. My heart itself was nothing like a hallmark card.   It was more like a small anxious animal of amorphous form. In constant motion. Every beat a matter of life and death. The blood constantly passing through. Generating enough pressure, but not too much. No waterfalls here, just a closed system of water and tissue and bone pumping the urgency of life day and night.

The waterfall in the pond is small potatoes compared to the cascade of blood through our bodies. The pump submerged in the water is of simpler stuff than the beating heart of each one of us.

Seeing the low water flow, I thought of calling Oldin, our sangha member who is an EMT, thinking that he knows a thing or two about pumping things. But decided rather to call Corwin, our pond master and figurer out of mechanical things. Hopefully, he’ll be able to come over this morning and correct our watery problem. In the meantime, I’ve pulled the plug to save the pump from its straining.

All is quiet now.

You Belong Here

The other day I was looking out the window with my grandson and I pointed out the man across the street wearing a mask. ‘You know people didn’t always wear masks,’ I said to him. He didn’t respond because he doesn’t know how to talk yet, but I think he got my point. Especially as I went on to explain about the pandemic that began one month after his first birthday. Before that, I told him, you only had to wear a mask if you were getting a stem cell transplant or robbing a bank. (He smiled faintly.)

It was a shock for me to realize again that the particular circumstances of the world at our birth are what we call ‘normal.’ I remembering studying World War II in fifth grade – writing my report the night before with my mother taking dictation on the typewriter and me almost in tears with anxiety as I tried to find my own words for what I was cribbing from the encyclopedia. (It wasn’t plagiarism as long as you said it in your own words.)

For me, World War II had ended at some point in the distant past. Little did I know that it was just fifteen years before that men and women around the world had been killing each other in extraordinary numbers—that a mere twenty years before, our country was fully engaged in a convulsive effort to fight militaristic expansive actions of Germany and Japan—and that the outcome was far from certain.

The fear and confusion around the bombing of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 is now nearly twenty years past. My grandson will study it in school as something inevitable and unimaginable. And his first experience of pre-school this fall will be in small pods with teachers wearing masks and with all kinds of other regulations about how much contact he can have and with whom. I am incredibly saddened by this. But he is not.

I feel the weight of all the things he will not be able to do, but he, like all of us, only knows what he knows. ‘People wear masks and I can’t play with the kids who live next door.’ He will meet the circumstances of his life fully, and like every human being before him born on this planet, he will try to make the best of what he encounters. I don’t complain (often) about having to wear shirts and pants, and I suspect masks will just be part what a decent and caring person in his world wears.

The other day, a friend pointed me to a wonderful essay on Camus’s The Plague, by Robert Zaretsky. In the essay Zaretsky writes about the character Rambert who is a journalist who had come down from Paris to Algeria to write an article. While writing this article the city was locked down because of an outbreak of the plague. Rambert tries all kinds of ways to get out of the quarantined city so he can return home. At one point, he goes to the local doctor, Rieux, and asks for a medical pass verifying his good health so that he can travel back to Paris. The doctor replies, ‘”Well you know I can’t give that to you.’ And Rambert, frustrated, says, “But I don’t belong here.” And Rieux’s reply is quite simple and utterly true. “From now on, you do belong here.”’

From now on, you do belong here. Or as another friend says, ‘This is the new abnormal.’ Our world will never be the same and we are all trying to figure out how to live in this new world. For most of us, it is still a strange and disquieting world. Are we still in the first wave or is this the beginning of the second? Will I ever want to go out to a restaurant again? Will the Patriots play any football games this fall and if they do, will the decision of three of their key defensive players to ‘sit this season out’ diminish their chances? We all live with these weighty questions.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Mothers and fathers love their children and want to keep them safe. We grandparents are happy to help out as we can – in person or on Zoom or through the occasional phone call.

Explaining How the World Works

As my grandson and I go on our various adventures, I often explain things along the way. He’s just a year and a half old, so I try to keep it simple. ‘There’s someone on a bicycle. This red pick-up truck is parked here.’ And, being a teacher, I’ll often give him little quizzes to see how much he understands. ‘That’s one of the front wheels. Can you find another wheel?’ Mostly, he doesn’t react to my narrative, nor respond to my leading questions. Of course occasionally, to my amazement, he does. ‘Go get that puzzle piece across the room and bring it here so we can finish the puzzle.’ It may just be the context or the finger that points across the room or the random correlation of all things in the universe, but sometimes he appears to know what I am saying.

But I know that he is always listening and I trust that even my baroque explanations of how plants metabolize sunlight into sugar and other such mysteries do indeed lodge somewhere in his wondrously developing brain. His great grandmother who died six months before he was born taught me that. Her name was Sylvia Blacker and I had the great privilege of knowing her for a number of years before she died. I treasure many memories of her great forthrightness and fierce love. She was, till the last moment, full of life.

Melissa and I kept her company during her final week of life as she found a way to accomplish her final disappearing act. We had rushed up to her home, in Milton, MA one Friday night after getting a call from the Hospice worker who said the end was near. We arrived in time to talk with her, but she was clearly not ready to die so the weekend turned into the days of the next week. Melissa’s brother and sister-in-law arrived shortly after us. We all camped out in their childhood home house and did our best to keep her comfortable. She was so happy to see us but as the days went on, she began to talk less and less. By the third or fourth day she was rarely responsive.

One day, mid-week, someone was talking about her in her room as if she wasn’t there. Having read that people in comas sometimes report a keen awareness of what is going on in the room around them, I said ‘You know she can hear everything we say.’ At that point Sylvia, who had not talked or responded for several days, opened her eyes and said: ‘You bet I can.’ She then closed her eyes and went back to her internal processes. We were shocked and delighted. It was typical Sylvia. She died several days later, slipping off while Melissa, her treasured daughter, and I were out for a walk. But I’ll never forget her words.

So spending time with my grandson, I assume that he understands my words whether he chooses to respond or not. It may be that the sound of my voice is the full communication. It may be that his wildly pumping little heart is receiving the coded messages from my wildly pumping big heart. I do my best to be a gracious host to this visitor who has come from some unimaginable distance to stay here with us for a while.

In any case, I intend to keep chattering away as I appreciate the secret gift he gives me that allows me to see my own world with fresh eyes.

Sitting Long and Getting Tired

I just heard this morning that a second member of my first Zen practice community has died. Those of us that sat zazen together at the Living Dharma Center the early 80’s are getting to be of an age when death is not unexpected. But like most of the other people in that community, I had lost touch with her and was surprised to receive the news this morning via email. The community itself fractured after a few years with repeated revelations of sexual predation on the part of the teacher. He too is dead now—long after most of us had left to find other teachers or to strike out on our own.

Now we’re left with stories—though I suppose that is what we had even from the beginning. The original story was that: 1) We were a unique Zen group and the (only?) true inheritors of this wondrous tradition. 2) The most important thing in the world is to have an experience of enlightenment, of waking up. And 3) Students do not have the wisdom to truly understand the actions of a Zen Master. Though all of these statements have some kernel of truth, I no longer believe any of them.

But at that point, we did believe and we sat rigorous and silent retreats together for years—getting up long before sunrise and sitting as long into the night as we could manage. It was a badge of honor to be the last one out of the meditation hall and I remember long nights of secretly peeping out from under my lowered eyes to see how the competition was doing. Though it was a rather shallow motivation, I was inspired to push myself beyond what I thought was possible through the inspiration of my fellow practitioners.

We sat retreats in a large country house in Coventry, Connecticut. We were a wonderful community of idealists who were willing to work hard together. Though we barely knew each other, we grew close in the silence, struggle and comfort of the silent meditation hall. We supported and admired each other in this work of waking up that seemed of incomparable value.

As I recall, the majority of the members of the Living Dharma Center were women. Our teacher would pick one woman at a time to elevate to the level of secret consort. Periodically, this would become public knowledge, there would be a big meeting. Many people would then leave the community in anger and disappointment. Others, however, sensing the importance of the true teaching carried in this imperfect teacher, would stay.

St Paul once said that ‘All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful.’ He was speaking of the world of awakening—the world where we no longer live according to someone else’s idea of good and bad. When we realize that we are awake (something akin to what Christians call being ‘saved’) we have a new freedom. We are no longer constrained by the shoulds that have ruled our lives up to this point. We see that we are saved not by the merit of our own actions but by the grace that is the source of all life. We are free.

The danger of this place, however, is that we use our newfound freedom as my first teacher did—to satisfy the demands of ego. We can easily fool ourselves into thinking that we are somehow different from everyone else—that we get to make up our own rules—that we are no longer blind. We all now know the harm that teachers, spiritual and otherwise, can do from this place of solipsism.

But even though I came to see this teacher as a real danger to those around him, I am grateful for his teaching and for the community that briefly gathered around him. So these days I mourn the loss of my sisters Susan Parks and Elizabeth Pratt who were (and are) both role models to me. Thank you both for your gentleness, your fierce commitment to life and your passion to get to the bottom of it.

I peer out from under my sleepy eyes this morning and vow to continue the work we began together so many decades ago.

On Writing

This morning the sky is clear again, but not my head. As I lay in bed, my fuzzy eyes didn’t want to open. There’s no grand rush today. This is the last day of our vacation/stay-cation and I’m not even going to morning Zoom Zen meditation. Yet still, I do my best to get out of bed in time for this quiet writing.

I often wonder what I am doing in this daily writing and sharing. Certainly part of this practice is simply to help me clarify my own life. There are all these wonderful teachings that I know, but the process of living and integrating these teachings is a life-long venture. Writing helps me see what I see and know what I know. Writing helps me appreciate where I am, even if it’s some place I would rather not be.

I also write for the small group of friends, family and students that faithfully or occasionally read these posts. A couple times a week I’ll hear from someone who reports that something I’ve written has helped them feel more at home in their lives. I am especially gratified when something I write validates some wisdom or struggle in someone else’s life. My highest dream for my writing (and for my life) is that it might be of use to others.

Writing is a way of giving back what I have learned. Each of us has a particular wisdom that we gather and uncover through our lives. We seem to be born with some way of being in the world. For some it’s a natural sensitivity to the moods and struggles of others. For other people, it’s the capacity to see the positive side of difficult situations. For still others, it’s the ability to bear the darkness of human pain and survive to tell the story. We each have some truth or capacity that is so obvious to us, it’s hard to understand others don’t have this and that sharing this deep and evident perspective might be the gift we have to give the world.

As I write, I try to be as honest as I can. This is not an easy thing for a religious teacher and writer. The sound of my own voice can easily carry me into realms that sound quite lovely but are not so useful. This is a professional hazard. We fall in love with our own words and lose the essential connection to our life itself. It’s easy to say the right things, but saying the right things is not enough. There’s a wonderful saying in Zen that the teachings are so simple that an eight-year-old can say them, but even an eighty-year-old cannot live them. I’m only sixty-seven and a half and still working on this.

I’m much more interested in living the teachings than in proclaiming the teachings. Though the wisdom teachings of all traditions have a beauty and elegance that touches me deeply, they are merely pointing to a way of being that is more than any words can capture. The words themselves—though necessary, useful and part of the path—are also one of the places along the way we can (and will) get lost.

I’m trying to follow some emerging aliveness of life itself. This is what I love and what delights me—in the garden, in meditation, in playing with my grandson, and in this daily writing. When I write what I already know, it feels like hard work and I get bored. When I’m following something that is arising in the moment—something I don’t yet fully understand—I’m interested and educated myself by what emerges. I trust that if I am genuinely learning and moving deeper into my life, then what I have to say and share may encourage others to do the same.

Considering the Heat Wave

It’s cool and just a little breezy this morning. But the morning Globe reminds me we’re in the middle of a heat-wave here in eastern Massachusetts. Temperatures above 90 and even near 100 are expected for the next few days.

I’m finding it’s hard not to suffer in advance. Right in this moment, it’s a lovely day—clear sky and few wispy clouds illuminated by the sun as yet hidden below the horizon. I sit comfortably on the second floor deck and already I’m worried about this afternoon’s heat.

The next-door neighbor’s air conditioner units poke squarely out of two windows not twenty feet away. I suppose they are sleeping coolly behind their closed curtains and purring machines. Three sparrows chase each other—unconcerned through the open sky. A couple of large trees a few lots to the north rustle their leaves and prepare their shade to be ready with the rising sun. Do these native oak and maple trees mind this blazing summer heat? Do they notice the creeping rise over the decades? What is their plan for when things get bad?

These summer heat waves that I’ve known since I was a boy do seem to be worse. Or is it just me? I’ve visited some of the mansions of my childhood, all of them have shrunk to human-scale. It might be the successive heat waves and contracted the lumber, but I suspect it’s just the creative nature of remembering.

One of my all-time favorite bumper stickers is: ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood!’ (I can’t remember if there was an exclamation point at the end, but I insert it here because there should be, even if there wasn’t.) I have often pondered the true meaning of this everyday koan.

From one perspective it’s a blow against rigid determinism—an assertion of our power as adults to meet and transform the challenges of our childhood. What happened to us is, of course, a done deal, but we have the creative power to use our skills and capacities as adults in service of our younger selves. Terrible things happen to everyone. It’s not all equal, but each one of us can only meet our own lives and only in doing so can we learn to stand up for ourselves and for others as well.

Our past is right here and remembering is a creative exercise. The stories we tell ourselves are constantly being reworked in service of the present moment—whether we know it or not. Can we work consciously with these stories so they can support the next stages of our growth and development rather than be the burden that weighs us down? It’s not easy work, but reckoning with our past is the foundation of our current experience.

‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood!’ might also be an encouragement to be right now who we did not feel allowed to be as a child. What if it’s OK to be silly and to waste time? What if it’s fine to get my clothes dirty and not to care? What if I can be fascinated by the little ordinary things of my life right now?

This is perhaps why some of us adults like to be around children. They help us remember what we have forgotten and see what we have lost sight of. Their exultations and tragedies allow us to better see the wondrous and ever-changing nature of the world around us. And in taking care of children, we take care of our younger selves—give the love and reassurance we had longed for—give the permission and the safety that might not have been there for us.

But it’s still going to be hot this afternoon. I suppose I’ll just have to remember to put on my sunscreen, drink lots of fluids and practice not being very productive while I sit with my grandson in his small plastic pool and watch him learn to not breathe in when he puts the hose to his mouth.

Before the Grandson Wakes Up

A small backyard in Waltham, Massachusetts. A carefully tended patch of grass held by a rectangle of granite stones lies still under the clear blue sky and the hum of air conditioners in the early morning. By the garage, two Jack-and-the-beanstalk type sunflower plants rise above a minor jungle of tomatoes and peppers. They hold their proud heads aloft to capture the first rays of the morning sun—already risen but as yet invisible to us shorter creatures.

I’m glad to be alone in the coolness and the contained beauty of this space. A brightly colored plastic toddler slide brings the disruption of real life to the contained orderliness of the yard. Life is happening here, within this growing family where I am just an occasional visitor—father, father-in-law and grandfather. I appreciate the complex web of interconnection that constructs the launch pad for the next generation.

As of yet, the little adventurer is still innocently toddling. Delighted by cars, trucks, flowers and dirt, he lives fully and fiercely within the benevolent containment of his privileged life. He knows only this—there is no possibility for comparison. He allows us serve and protect him without question. Without question we are delighted and amazed.

There is no other world for him—or for any of us.

No matter how big our vision, no matter how deeply we may penetrate the mysteries of the universe, we are all held and protected within the immensity of wonder. And yet within our necessary limitations, nothing is left out—nothing is lacking.

The warmth of my morning tea is pleasant against the coolness of the morning. Memories of and ancient life as father and husband of a young family flit within me like darting birds. Human families of all shapes, sizes, colors and clothings. Forever repeating and exploring the patterns of humanity. We play our preassigned roles with as much grace and determination as we are allowed—burrowing into the beating heart of things right where we are.

On Vacation

I’m up in Vermont–enjoying paddling on still waters–alone as the sun rises, reading books, drinking coffee and waiting for my grandson to wake up so I can play with him.

Below is an image of my hand and the morning sky reflected in the water over the edge of my kayak — almost still–hand, water and sky reflect each other.

I’ll be back to writing daily later this week. For  now, just rest, play and family time.

Being Awake (but not in the good way)

I’m awake in the middle of the night and I can’t get back to sleep.

Ezra Bayda once wrote that he counts his exhales backwards to zero from fifty and that this activates his sympathetic nervous system which then takes over from his worried and anxious mind. I’ve been trying this sporadically for several weeks at night and I want to report that sometimes it works. Sometimes I’m asleep before I get to zero. Sometimes I can feel a shift in my brain where the energy moves from activated and anxious to stable and at ease. It’s quite nice. Sometimes.

But not last night.

I woke up at two a.m. to the sound of fireworks. For five minutes the successive explosions echoed through my silent neighborhood. I wondered about the young guys (my assumption) that were setting them off. Was their intention to disturb the easy sleep of the old folks? Did they set a few off then run to another location to avoid the police who might be coming? Were the police coming? (In that moment, I pictured the police as two reasonable guys in a car who would accost the perpetrators and restore quiet to my night—not, I’m aware as I write this, as a enforcers of a system of inequality based on skin color and economic class.)

I thought I would easily go back to sleep. It had been a long day and we were already packed to leave on vacation the next morning. But after a while, I turned over and realized I was awake. I tried to stay cool and curious. I’ve been sleeping through the night these days and thought this would be over soon. But it wasn’t.

For the next hour or two, I lay in a state of semi-consciousness. I did the counting backwards on the exhalation thing—I must have stopped and started three or four times. The instruction is, if you get lost to begin where you left off you don’t have to start again at fifty, you just begin where you left off. I would gather my intention and begin counting downward only to find myself some unspecified time later thinking darkly about some pressing issue of my life and relationships.

Realizing I had wandered away into a realm of anxious thinking, I tried another strategy I just read from a Buddhist teacher. He said, when you realize you have wandered away from a gentle focus on the breath to pause and calm your mind and relax the tightness in your head. I thought these were wonderful instructions when I read them and I almost wrote them down. But last night, my intention to calm my mind and relax the tightness in my head produced minimal to no change in my experience.

The things I think about during these occasional nightly rumination sessions are familiar. I am compelled to think about specific unresolved issues (content varies with the night). I strategize endless conversations to get to the heart of things and set things at rest. It’s hard work. My mind circles over and over the same territory. A lot has to do with locating blame. Something is wrong and it’s either my fault or someone else’s fault. I am the self appointed sheriff and my job is to find the bad actors and set things right.

I know, in these sleepless thinking sessions, that thinking is not the way out, but I can’t help myself. I am mildly curious about how long I will be awake. I try to ‘look around’ and learn what I can here in the underworld. I’m not very successful. I find some comfort in Norman Fischer’s phrase ‘Sometimes, this is how people feel.’ This at least locates my solitary burden squarely in the family of human beings.

I also try to trust that these places of obsessive thinking are my body’s way of working things out. I am chewing the cud of my life—trying to digest the roughage into useable bits of nutrition. I imagine how patiently cows spend a lazy afternoon chewing and chewing the grass they ate in the morning. Not one of them complains about the repetitive activity. They’re happy to stand there chewing—perhaps adding in the occasional pissing and farting for variation.

But me, I have to work to be patient—to realize that this is my only life—here in the dark and uncomfortable night. I look at the clock occasionally. I notice that this place is not continuous. I feel awake, but I suspect I am drifting in and out of awareness, even as I keep prospective track of ‘how long I was awake in the middle of the night.’

I open my eyes and it’s quarter after five—late for me. I have no idea how or when I got to sleep. It feels like I was just thinking about the many problems of my life. And I wonder, do I manufacture these problems to keep myself entertained while my brain just happens to be switched into worry mode? Or are these endless issues the roughage that sometimes need multiple chewing sessions?

Universal Movement

1.
Is everything growing
legs or is it just me?
These days when
I set something
down like my pen
or my watch
or my keys, some
universal force
of dispersion or
attraction seems
to lure it somewhere
else and I’m left
searching for every
thing on my own.

2.
Like a game of
hide-and-seek
the things of my
life wander away.

I try not to take
it personally as
I’m sure they delight
in their liberation.
I imagine their
wonderful adventures
unburdened by reason
and responsibility. They
must behave without
regard to their
parochial purposes—
freely dancing their
secret unclothed dances
and ominously chanting
their wondrous
incantations with
no witnesses to
remind them of
propriety and necessary function.

I’m happy for their
independent escapades
but sometimes I worry
and wander to where
I saw them last.
I look carefully and call
out softly. When they still
don’t come sometimes I
have to take a deep breath
and pause so as not
to get upset. (That just
encourages their
bad behavior.)

Eventually, most things
come back. I don’t ask
too many questions or
make a big fuss when
they sheepishly reappear.
I’m happy to see them
and have them with me
again. Their increasingly
frequent excursions remind
me of the days to come
when our mutual
wandering will increase
toward full entropy.

I suppose in that
wondrous darkness we
will all dance endlessly
together without containment,
but for now I’m happy
with our limited partnership—
temporary though it may be.