Released Once Again

I’m happy to report that I have been released from the dark realms that held me so tightly yesterday. Isn’t that the way it goes? No guarantee on how long or how short the hard times (or the good times) last, but for sure everything changes and everything ends. I easily fall into thinking that if I work hard enough and am skillful and compassionate enough, I can make the good things last and the bad things go away when I want them to go away. For some stretches of time, this may appear to be so, but when I step back just a little I see the great rhythms of life are fundamental. Everything comes and goes. Everything that rises falls. Life leads to and includes death.

Yesterday I used the image of the darkness and difficulty we encounter being like a cocoon that holds us. Cocooned without reason / I am slowly digested / by the darkness / that embraces us all. Indeed we are all in the dark about what that comes after this life or what comes after this death. Theories and beliefs abound, but what comes next—even what comes in the next moment—is unknown. Sometimes this is more obvious than others.

In writing the poem No Choice, I pondered for some time whether the darkness embraces us or presses in on us. These two phrases came to mind and I felt I had to choose one, but I was quite ambivalent. To be embraced by the darkness is much more hopeful than being pressed in on by the darkness. It was more comforting to go with the embrace rather than the more ominous pressure, but I think the darkness I was speaking of includes both aspects.

This morning, on the internet, I found this resonant description of what is going on in the cocoon:

Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar is transforming into a new creature. … The fluid breaks down the old caterpillar body into cells called imaginal cells. Imaginal cells are undifferentiated cells, which means they can become any type of cell. Many of these imaginal cells are used to form the new body.

I don’t suppose the caterpillar likes the whole breaking down thing one bit. But the idea of imaginal cells—cells of possibility that come only after being broken down–feels deeply right to me.

Despite my best efforts, I find myself in dark places again and again. Years of meditation and coaching don’t seem to protect me from the natural rhythms of life. I suppose this is a blessing, but it is one of those hard blessings that I have to take a deep breath before I’m willing to say I’m grateful for. But I have increasingly learned to trust the landscape and the process of darkness. There is a death that is required—and not just the death when the heart stops beating.

Moving through our lives, we lose so much. We have to let go of our children as they grow up and move on with their lives. We have to let go of who we used to be, what we used to be able to do, of friends and colleagues gone from our lives. Some endings are so slow we hardly notice them and some happen with such speed and power that we feel ripped apart.

In Zen we talk about the possibility of participating in loss – about joining in with the very process that is breaking us down. It still is sometimes wildly painful, but when we say ‘yes’ to what is going on, there can be some ease in the middle of the dying itself.

The Christians talk about resurrection. I don’t know what happens when our hearts stop beating, but I do believe that we all die and are reborn again and again in this lifetime. When we allow ourselves to die to who we were, to die to our opinion or whatever we were clinging to, then we are reborn as a new version of ourselves. In the dying and the breaking down we are humbled—brought to the earth. Our conceited illusions of power and control are dissolved and we are able to proceed on with some slight bit more of wisdom and compassion for ourselves and for our fellow human beings.

No Choice

Coherence dissipates
and resolve flees headlong
in front of the forces
of night. Overmatched
once again I resign
myself to the underworld to
impatiently await the end
of my infinite sentence.
Held prisoner and perfectly
cocooned without reason,
I am slowly digested
by the darkness
that embraces us all.

On Not Working Hard

This morning I wake up with a headache. Allergies?   Lingering cold symptoms? It’s hard to say. I’m not feeling inspired. I start writing about the fall colors which are now peaking and then switched to the story of my first COVID test (negative) but both feel contrived and boring. So I figure I’ll take the risk of hanging out here in the doldrums and see if there is anything to notice right where I am.

It’s a challenge to avoid working hard. My new definition of working hard is doing what you do because that’s what you do. Working hard is losing touch with the purpose but going on with the activity. ‘I write every morning so I must write every morning because that is what I do.’ If I follow this logic, I end up becoming a well-intentioned copy of myself. I go through the motions and follow the pattern but the joy is lost. When I lose my connection to intention, it’s all hard work. I can still put words on a page, but it’s not fun or alive in the writing nor, I imagine, in the reading.

One of the things I learned in the improvisational dance company I was with so many years ago is that you can tell the difference, both from the inside and the outside, when performers are genuinely in the moment. In our time rehearsing, teaching and performing, we explored the possibilities and the challenges of presenting the creative process itself as the performance. From the inside of a dance, the work was to be aware of what was arising within yourself, within the other dancers and within the space as a whole. We practiced not planning in advance—which is much harder to do than it sounds. When the mind comes in to ‘help out’ in a self-conscious way, the dance becomes artificial, predictable and boring. The best dances were surprising to both the dancers and to the audience.

This improvisational presence is the discipline I am most interested in—in writing and gardening as well as in meditation and in life. I want to practice and live in intimate responsiveness to what is arising in the moment. True beauty is a kind of courageous authenticity—a willingness to follow some inner necessity—not a carefully curated arrangement of appropriate materials. This is what most interests me in my daily writing. Of course I want to offer whatever wisdom and experience I have, but I want to do it in such a way that I get to learn too. I don’t want to blab on about what I knew yesterday, I want to find and share what is arising new in this moment.

As I write, I’m conscious of meaning and shape and the craft of it all even as I hold fast to not knowing where the thing itself is leading me. I go back over what I have written several times, both in the process of writing and after I finish to adjust and refine. I am trying to use my self-consciousness without being ruled by my self-consciousness. A high-wire balancing act. I am curating my presentation self in service of presenting some authentic self. I’m always choosing and editing—revealing some parts of myself while hiding others. But my intention is to use all these kinds of awareness to more clearly present some moment of aliveness that is beyond my conscious control.

When I know where I’m going, or even when I think I have to go somewhere, it’s not much fun. It’s hard work. And I am increasingly determined to avoid hard work. Life is too short and too precious to just go through the motions. I don’t mind working hard when there is some inner necessity. When the thing itself is alive, it’s all adventure. I’ll happily dig holes, pile rocks, or sit in the chair with my laptop morning after morning—as long as I have the sense of following and offering something more than myself.

Like a dog sniffing and sniffing, I wait for and follow the arousal of that invisible scent. Sometimes I dash off into the dark woods and get totally lost. Other times this impossibly sweet and subtle fragrance leads me leisurely forward. Other times, there’s barely a trace. Still I wait and trust as best I can.

Learning to Jump

My grandson is trying to learn how to jump. I don’t know where he got the idea. Maybe this is part of the curriculum at his nursery school. Walking, running, then jumping. He’s a good little runner and easily runs ahead when we walk together. It makes me a little nervous as falls are common, but he shrieks with pleasure in the running and who could deny him that?

Yesterday, after his two hour after-school nap where he recovers from how much he’s learned at nursery school, he go very excited when I asked him if he wanted to go out for a walk in the rain to go to the corner and watch the cars. Getting him into his blue unicorn rain suit is not an easy task. So I distracted him by being silly and dancing with my bright orange raincoat while his mother and grandmother double-teamed him into the rain suit.

But he drew the line with boots. For some reason he has decided that rain boots are an abomination and to be avoided at all costs. He cooperates in holding his feet up for sneakers, but mounts a vigorous and boisterous campaign whenever someone tries to fit his feet into the boots. Whether this is a principled statement of fashion, a misguided fear of rubber objects or a comfort issue, we don’t yet know. He won the battle so we both headed out in the light rain in sneakers and rain gear.

We both love rain and puddles, me and my grandson. I remember playing outside in the summer rain with my brother, creating dams in the gutters to make giant pools as the rain cascaded down and we got soaked. I remember walking in the fall rain on the residential streets on the outskirts of Nagasaki, Japan. I was sixteen years old and feeling very far from home as the night fell. I walked and walked and was somehow comforted by the familiar rain that fell on me and on my family so far away. I remember starting a fire in the rain after a wet day hiking in the woods with my sister. We gathered a cache of the tenderest small sticks that were still somewhat dry and carefully nursed our small flame until it was a warm and cheerful hearth in the middle of the wet forest. And this, is my newest rain memory—holding a small already wet hand, walking down the large steps by the back door—in palpable anticipation of puddles.

The first one we encountered by the corner of the house was only an inch deep. My grandson immediately dropped my hand, darted to the puddle and began stomping his feet with great delight. Little flurries of stomping would yield to small shrieks of laughter and looking up for my approval of his wondrous functioning. What is it about stomping in puddles? Is it a walking on water thing? Or the power of making the water jump and dance?

Later in the day I heard short item on the radio of some 12,000 year-old footprints that have been unearthed in White Sands National park. The big discovery is the mile-long trail of footprints of a mother or young man carrying a toddler at a quick pace. (Apparently there was danger and anxiety even before our current President.) The same news cast also mentioned large footprints of prehistoric animals that also contain hundreds of little human footprints. The current theory is that the large footprints made a puddle and the little footprints were our toddling and dancing ancestors splashing like my grandson.

But back to our rain and our puddle. As he was stomping his sneakered feet (which were already wet two minutes out of the house), my grandson began crouching down with both feet on the ground and the straightening up quickly. At first I wasn’t sure what he was doing, then I realized he was trying to jump—trying to go airborne—to get both feet off the ground at the same time. Though his coordination and his likelihood of success seemed quite low, his determination and joy was boundless. So I joined in.

I don’t do a lot of jumping up and down these days. Not that I’m against it in principle, it’s just an activity with very little practical value. Occasionally walking quite fast, or even running gets me somewhere (across the street?) as necessity dictates, but getting both feet off the ground is almost never necessary. But yesterday was different.

People driving by, in the rain, on the outskirts of Boston, saw two jumping figures – a large one in a bright orange raincoat and a small one in a blue unicorn rain suit. And if someone had been patient enough they would have even seen the unicorn clad one leave the ground for just an instant – both tiny wet feet happy to self-power themselves off the surface of the earth for the first time.

And which was more miraculous—a small chubby toddler rising briefly toward the heavens or an old man jumping up and down in the rain, laughing and laughing?

Everything Is

Everything is
the full expression
of its own explanation—
complete in its
flashing particularity.

Just this
specific
revelation.

Don’t dream
of some other heaven
heaven or otherwise
let yourself be
distracted from the
holiness at hand.

Only when the mind
surrenders its endless
search does This
reveal itself.

All avenues of pursuit
close and hope
for something else
dies. Then the embryo
of the true self is
born at last into
what it has always been.

Discrete incarnation.

The Possibilities Unfixable Problems

A friend of mine once told me there are three kinds of problems in long-term relationships. First there are the ones that you solve together effortlessly and hardly notice you’ve solved anything. Second, there are the problems that require joint effort, but after some time yield solutions—we can feel justifiable pride in our working together to bring these issues to conclusion. Finally, there are the problems that you never solve—they come back again and again and you can never quite seem to resolve them. These are the perpetual issues of the relationship. My friend said that not only are these insoluble, these ongoing issues present in every relationship are the bridges to intimacy.

I distinctly remember hearing this framework with relief and puzzlement. I was aware of these categories in all my relationships – with my wife, with other family members, with colleagues and with myself. There are always areas of easeful functioning, some places of working hard together to work out differences and then there are the ongoing points of tension that don’t ever get really solved or figured out. I was relieved to hear that these ongoing difficulties are not simply a failure on my part, but are inherent in the nature of relationships.

I was surprised, however, to hear that these insoluble issues are (or can be) bridges to intimacy. I’ve never quite understood what that meant but the very least it encourages me to hold ongoing problems in a new light. What if the problem is not a problem? What if the ongoing tension, at whatever level, is not something to be fixed, but something to be explored and wondered about—a path to deeper understanding and connection? What if there is something going on that is mysterious and interesting rather than annoying and problematic?

Ongoing issues in relationships rise and fall in their intensity and in their purported meaning. Sometimes the fact that I like to leave five minutes early and you like to leave on time is only a minor irritant that I can easily adjust to. Sometimes it is the incontrovertible evidence that you never really respected me and we should never have gotten together in the first place.

The longest (and most problematic) relationship we have is, of course, with ourselves. We all contain many different selves and often have quite stormy relationships within ourselves. Like any relationship, some things we do quite well, some things we have to work hard to manage, and some things get us tangled up again and again. What if these unfixable parts of ourselves are essential and can lead us to deeper wisdom and intimacy?

In Zen, we sometimes put it this way: Our miserable karma becomes our wonderful dharma. Karma is a way of talking about the innumerable currents of the life in which we find ourselves. Our current situation, our personality, our strengths and weaknesses—all of this is just what it is—our karma. We can protest our situation and call it miserable and problematic, but whatever the circumstances in which you find yourself as you read this, this is who and where you are. Dharma refers to the teachings or the Way. It can mean formal Buddhist teachings, but on a deeper level dharma points to the revelations of life itself, in whatever form they arise.

Our miserable karma becomes our wonderful dharma encourages us to hold our problems, especially the ones that come back again and again in a new way. That the unsolvable problems of a relationship are the bridges to intimacy is a similar teaching of the possibility of transformation.

All of this presupposes only one essential skill for relationships and for life: the skill of STAYING. To cross the bridge, to find intimacy requires staying in the fire of discomfort—requires hanging around long enough to allow something else to happen. Staying is a skill that does not mean just being physically present, but being wholeheartedly present—turning again and again toward that which is hard to be with.

Personal Practice – Notice places of irritation and judgment that arise today – toward yourself and toward others. (This in itself is an extremely difficult assignment as irritation and judgment arise so constantly that they appear just to be part of the world rather than mind-states that arise within us.) When you are able to catch the rising irritation and/or judgment, take a moment to notice what it is like for you. What are the thoughts? What are the sensations in the body? What feelings arise? Then (and this is the really hard part), just do nothing. Stay in the place without trying to fix or push away or get through anything. Notice what happens.

Forgetting Class Two

We had our second class on forgetting yesterday. The teachers, Ann Jacob and Stan Tomandl, are wise and gentle. They live and work and teach together in Victoria, BC, Canada. They describe their work as:

specializing in working, learning and teaching about
altered consciousness that comes during life’s joys, grief, 
creativity, dreams, illness, trauma, memory loss, remote states, 
delirium, coma and other tender and strong moments
in our living and dying   

I first spoke with them when my father was in a nursing home. He was nearing the end of his life and was physically very weak and was occasionally disoriented as he tried to recover from a stroke and a subsequent brain surgery. My step-mother and I set up an appointment to speak with them to get some tips on how to deal with his disorientation which had begun to include fits of anger and paranoia.

I remember sitting in a small institutional room in the facility with my step mother and Ann and Stan on speaker phone. Their support and kindness was palpable. They were also wonderfully curious. How was it for us? What were the challenges? What were we noticing? They affirmed everything we said.

I suppose this is the key to everything, isn’t it? To affirm what is here.

The way to connect with ourselves, with others and with the world around us is simply to say yes. We don’t have to object or correct or judge or even understand. Whatever presents itself is true. Of course it’s not the whole truth, but it certainly and definitely is one aspect of the truth. Why not be curious rather than suspicious? Why not explore what is here rather than trying to make it conform to how we think it should be?

The world so generously presents itself to us in a thousand different forms. Our everyday response is often to refuse what is offered in favor of some opinion of how we think it should be. It’s as if we were given a gem of immense beauty and rather than appreciating and marveling, we spend our time wondering if the color might be adjusted or the shape might be improved upon.

In the class yesterday Ann spoke of a time when she got a call from the care facility where her elderly mother lived. The facility was in Cleveland, but her mother was convinced that she was in Mexico, not Cleveland. When Ann talked with her mother, instead of trying to convince her that she was in Cleveland, Ann invited her to talk about Mexico. Ann said her mother was quite delighted to be in Mexico and gave vivid descriptions of the colorful goings on. Eventually, Ann’s mother noticed that she was sitting in her favorite chair and was curious how that got to Mexico. Then she noticed the familiar painting on the wall and other bits of her everyday life. Eventually she re-oriented to her agreed upon geographic status and the staff was reassured. But not before a delightful visit, for Ann and her mother, to Mexico.

Of course, when people are in altered states, it’s not always this sweet and easy. When my step-mother and I spoke to Ann and Stan about my father’s fits of anger and paranoia, they were equally affirming. When we mentioned that he was worried that the staff were talking about him, Stan laughed and said that he was probably right. When we talked about his anger, they encouraged us to appreciate the appropriateness of this emotion as a response to being forced to live in a strange place. They affirmed my father’s experience and offered us a new perspective to bring to our dealings with him.

During the class yesterday, I was struck by how applicable these teachings of how to connect with people in altered states are for our everyday life. What if we approached everyone as if they were in an altered state and needed special care to be with? Aren’t we all in Mexico in our heads? It may appear that we live in Cleveland, but we each live in the middle of our own universe. Many of us appear to be relatively normal, but our inner worlds are wild and mysterious. And we often long for the affirming attention that will allow us to lower our walls of defense—allow us to let someone else in, and perhaps even allow us to be curious about the universe that they live in.

Affirming someone else’s experience does not magically smooth out differences and make hard problems go away, but it does soften the painful divide of separation and judgment. With this softening of the boundaries, the possibility arises that we can be together to face into the challenges and opportunities that endlessly arise. And this, in itself, is a blessing beyond measure.

Missing the News Cycle

I have just returned from a three-day Zen retreat. Though I didn’t go anywhere, my Zoom Zen retreat included a retreat from my daily writing and from the news cycle. I have not looked at or heard the news since Friday afternoon. It’s now Tuesday morning. I feel slightly proud of my news fast and am quite ambivalent about checking in again this morning. I’m eager to look and I’m enjoying the current smallness of my world—safe and cozy in my warm room as the cold autumn rain falls in the morning darkness.

Before the retreat, I had slid into the habit of not just reading the Globe, the Times and a few other news sources in the morning, but also checking in periodically through to day to see what was happening. I enjoyed the little thrill of briefly clicking on the rising headlines on the Times web site. What’s the latest outrage and disaster? Tracking Trump’s steady deterioration in the polls was like seeing my football team slowly wearing down their opponent in a game it looked like we were going to win.

But I also noticed an addictive quality about it all. ‘Just a peak,’ I’d tell myself, but then I’d scroll on for longer than intended and only break away with the ringing of the phone for my next meeting. I had decided once or twice not to look anymore that particular day, only to find myself clicking on again, ‘Just to check in.’ Not a good sign.

While I believe it is important for all of us to stay informed in this time of gross misinformation and with the upcoming high-stakes election, I am also aware of the pernicious impact of this constant checking on the quality of my life. If you’re working on a political campaign and have to respond to the latest moves of your opponent, then staying glued to the latest actions, rumors and insults is essential. If you’re an ordinary citizen, the moment-to-moment developments may actually be more distracting and disturbing than informative and necessary. (Of course, the appeal of being distracted and disturbed should not be underestimated.)

Beneath the current political battle however, another more subtle and dangerous struggle is raging—the digital competition for your eyeballs on the screen. Huge amounts of money are being made on getting people to click onto particular sites. Our digital attention is a commodity that is being bought and sold in huge quantities. The more we click and the longer we watch, the richer and more powerful some people are getting – regardless of who wins or loses the election.

The digital world is wondrous. Our recent Zoom-Zen retreat included participants from around the world. We easily and clearly joined together to practice the Zen meditation that first arose in medieval China. And staying up-to-date with the developments in this time of turmoil is important. But the digital world is one of the culprits in the current crisis in our democracy—the very one it is purporting to help us with. The amount of disinformation that has funneled us all into our competing tribes also maintains the animosity that is tearing at the fabric of our society. Animosity and outrage are bad for us (personally and socially) but wonderful for getting people to spend more time in front of their screens.

Having not received word otherwise from the outside world, I’m assuming there have been no seismic shifts in the national and international landscape. Republicans are pushing through their nominee to swing the court and Democrats are still sputtering with the unfairness of it all. (My blood temperature rises a few degrees just thinking of this.) Trump is still tweeting outrageous lies and half-truths to rally his diminishing forces and to undermine the coming election in any way he can.

I will go to our morning Zoom meditation, then click open my digital newspaper while I eat breakfast later. Regardless of what I read, I plan to continue actively writing letters, talking and giving money to support Joe Biden and Democratic candidates for the Senate. We should all do whatever we can to remove our current aspiring autocrat and the Republicans that have empowered him. Our democracy has always been imperfect and fragile. It now needs our full participation to ensure its continuation.

No Comes Before Yes

Yesterday I ended my writing with a list of questions from Peter Block’s book The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters. This is another one of those books that has the power to change your life. Block writes in detail about the possibility of living a life based on a deep alignment with our hearts. We enter into a life of freedom when we commit to that which is most important. This commitment does not come after we have figured out how to do it or know what the outcome will be.

The decision to act on what matters comes out of considering the questions Block lists under the heading YES IS THE RIGHT QUESTION.

What refusal have I been postponing?
What commitment am I willing to make?
What is the price I am willing to pay?
What is my contribution to the problem I am concerned with?
What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?
What is the question that, if I had the answer, would set me free?

First of all I have to say that I love this as a heading for a list. It is grammatically and reasonably incorrect. ‘Yes’ is not a question. How could it be the ‘right question?’ YES IS THE RIGHT QUESTION, causes both a sense of confusion and a sense of possibility within me. It takes me out of careful reasoning and invites me into another realm of thinking and being.

This heading comes after his previous list of questions: HOW IS THE WRONG QUESTION. Perhaps these two headings and the title of the book are enough to convey his essential encouragement—to live a life of meaning and action. Block points us toward a life that is oriented beyond figuring things out and working hard—a life that springs not from calculation and planning but from deep dreaming and creative engagement. It is not a life of pleasing other people and making sure we have everything under control. Acting on what matters requires much and guarantees little.

As Block discusses the first question ‘What refusal have I been postponing?’ he refers to the great psychologist Carl Jung who ‘stated that all consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.’ I love that he begins his invitation to act on what matters with refusals and disobedience.

My grandson, who is a little over a year and a half old, is now practicing this kind of creative disobedience. His favorite word is ‘No.’ And, unless you happen to be his parent and have to deal with it all the time, it is incredibly cute. He is beginning to realize he has an inner life. He does not want more banana and does want more cheese. Sometimes his seeming pleasure in saying ‘no’ is so great that he says it even when he actually wants more. To their credit, his parents are encouraging him to notice and express himself. Of course, when it’s time to stop rolling the recycling bin around the driveway and come in for dinner, even his granddad will not be swayed by his plaintive ‘no’s’ and he will not get his way.

This little person is learning to chart his own inner world and also learning that he is not ruler of the universe. I suppose this is our life-long lesson as adults. It’s easy to forget either side of this equation. When I’m feeling helpless and stuck, I’m tempted to shut down and ignore awareness of my inner world. ‘Since I’m not ruler of the universe, why should I care about anything? No one cares how I feel, so why bother?’ It sounds silly when I write it, but we are all tempted to shut down and cut ourselves off from the richness and urgency of our inner lives when we don’t get our way or when things feel overwhelming.

This shutting down take many forms. One of the most insidious (and socially acceptable) forms of shutting down to what is most important is busyness. When we are busy with they myriad things of our lives, we avoid our responsibility to notice and align our lives with what is most important. Hence Block’s first question: What refusal have I been postponing?

When everything is equal, we lose ourselves in the endless storm of external demands. In the busyness and turmoil of it all we rush from one thing to the next and there is no time to think (or feel) what it is we truly want. So one way into the process of acting on what matters is to begin to say ‘no.’ Until we claim our power to say ‘no’, we cannot say ‘yes.’

Personal Practice: Find some way today to practice disobedience to the rules you have made up for yourself in order to allow yourself the space for something that is wanting to be known.  What is one thing you could say ‘no’ to today that would give you more space to do something you have been wanting to do? It doesn’t have to be a big ‘no’, any old ‘no’ will do. This is just practice.

Searching For Clues

About a year ago, for some reason, I decided that I should write another book. I spent a number of months just mulling over the idea and considering what it might be about and feeling slightly guilty about not starting. Then the pandemic hit and I began writing these daily reflections. I now suspect that the book is hidden somewhere within what I’ve already written.

Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking) once said in a radio interview: ‘I’m always watching what I do to see what I believe.’ We can believe whatever we want and we can say whatever we want; but our actions reveal some deeper allegiance that is often unknown to our conscious minds.

One of the main directions of my life is to be fully present—to close the gap between myself and myself. I want to live an undivided life. When I trim my finger nails I want to be at one with myself. The temptation and the ancient pattern is to split so that there is one doing the trimming and one observing and commenting on the one who is doing the trimming. This habitual gap between ourselves and ourselves, is a painful one–often filled with judgments, opinions, self-consciousness and other less than pleasant experiences. These troublesome thoughts pose as helpers to make sure we do a good job, but mostly make it harder for us by distracting us from the task at hand. With their help, trimming my nails becomes an exercise in making sure I am good enough rather than a practice of self-care.

Sister Helen is not talking about this kind of watching. She’s talking about stepping back and being curious about larger patterns. It’s not about being good enough, it’s about noticing what is true. Do my actions align with my words? The Martian test is another way to approach this same endeavor. It goes like this: A Martian lands on the earth today and has to learn about you without understanding a word of what you say. He can only watch you go about your day. What would she learn from watching how you spend your time?

The point of this exercise is not to find out that we should exercise more, spend less time in front of screens, and eat better. Most of us already know this and it does little to help us—it just creates an invisible drag of guilt that is one more thing we carry around as we move through our day.

In order to learn something useful, we must look with genuine curiosity and kindness. While some of us can fairly easily muster this interest and compassion for others, it can be more challenging when we turn towards ourselves. Judgments and feelings of inadequacy so easily overwhelm our attempts at knowing more about ourselves.

The Martian perspective can help. She watches without judgment or prejudice. He observes just to see what is so. How do you spend your energy and time? Over the course of the day, what do you give your attention to? What do the patterns of your daily life say about the deeper values that animate you? What would the Martian learn about you from just watching?

So I’ve gone back and read through what I’ve written to see if I can find the book. I’ve gotten through March, April and May and I’m mostly pleased with what I read. Having written the pieces so long ago, it’s as if they were written by someone else. I’m reading for themes and to sense what kind of organization might hold some of these writings together in a book that would interest a reader (someone who would want to put this book on their bedside table) and a publisher (who would think there might be a market for another book by an obscure Zen teacher).

There’s a wonderful love of the garden and the natural world. Internal observations about the movement of my mind weave in with comments about the pandemic and politics. I like the shorter length of the pieces. They don’t really follow one from the next, so I don’t have to remember or follow any larger developing argument. I often smile at what I’ve written. Even in reading so many at a time, I feel invited into a slower and more intimate world. This seems important.

I try not to get overwhelmed by my doubts and judgments so that I can allow the deeper patterns to reveal themselves. Can I let the material organize itself as I try to do with each of these reflections I offer? Can I practice the kind of trust in the unfolding of the moment that I often write about?

I’m reminded of Peter Block’s wonderful book with the wonderful title: The Answer to How is Yes. Let me close with a list of questions he puts under the heading YES IS THE RIGHT QUESTION:

What refusal have I been postponing?
What commitment am I willing to make?
What is the price I am willing to pay?
What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?
What is the question that, if I had the answer, would set me free?