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?

Hide and Seek

Autumn leaves these days drop into the Temple pond. The skimmer catches them, but then catches too many and clogs. The circulation pump strains. Where is the pond monk who should be watching carefully and cleaning regularly?

I am the pond monk. Sometimes I’d rather be the pond. Sometimes I’d rather be the pond monk playing hooky.

I know the Abbot thinks I’m lazy, but what did those people ever know about me? Or about the pond? Once in a while is fine. Every day is boring. Too much to have to think about. And why should it be my job? Why am I the one who always has to take care of things? I’m going beyond hooky. I’m going on strike.

I’m striking for fewer hours, higher wages and early retirement. I want to work only on odd Wednesdays and days when the number of the day adds up to seven. Today is Tuesday and only sixth so I’m free to ignore the slight sound of the straining pump I hear coming in from the dark window. I’m sure it’s something else.

Today I’ll disappear into the woods. I’ll play hide and seek with my self. First I’ll hide, then I’ll see if I can find where I am. At first I’ll walk around confidently pretending to know. When that becomes obviously untrue, I’ll start calling my name. Playfully, then with more urgency. Finally I’ll plaintively entreat myself to come out. Please come out. I can’t find you anywhere and I’m getting worried about all of us.

I’ll hear the fear in the voice of the one who is seeking and I’ll say, Do you give up? Do you really give up? Then I’ll know where I am by the sound of my voice and I’ll find me immediately. Right where I was all along—in plain sight but too close to see. In that moment of finding we’ll find everything else too. All the animals and insects, The trees and mushrooms. The stones and lichen. The sky, earth and water. The wind. We’ll all be found together.

In our delight, we’ll laugh and laugh. We’ll laugh so hard our laughing will turn to crying. Then the crying will become a wild wailing. What a howl it will be! The whole world will cry out with us. All the pain and confusion will funnel through us and release itself into the night sky. A new twinkling star of pure energy will be born. Astronomers from around the world will be astonished.

Then I’ll wander home as if nothing has been disturbed. In the sweet quiet of the early morning I’ll take a flashlight out into the darkness. I’ll walk down to the pond and see for myself. Even if it’s not absolutely necessary, I’ll clean out the skimmer like I should have been doing all along. Then I’ll have a cup of coffee before giving a morning Dharma talk on The Harmony of Relative and Absolute.

Shitou Xiqian will harrumph and adjust position in his ancient resting place and all will be well.

Smugness and Karma

Saturday Night Live’s opening sketch was a lampoon of last Tuesday’s first Presidential debate—an easy target for humor after some of the frustration and anger passed. Jim Carrey played Joe Biden to Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump. Toward the end of the sketch, Biden (Carrey) says that he believes in science and karma—a clear jab at the President’s current condition as having COVID-19—which the President may or may not have had at the time of the debate, but clearly did have by the time the sketch was written. It was all quite funny. And also satisfying in a disturbing way.

Ever since I learned of Trump’s illness on Friday, I have had many different emotions. Yesterday, someone asked me if, from the Zen perspective, it was OK to feel smug. I said ‘No.’ Of course we all feel and think many different things in response to any event. But when we actively take pleasure in the suffering of others who ‘deserve it’, we put ourselves on shaky ground.

The blindness of us human beings appears endless. I can think of many times I have been filled with righteous clarity only to later become aware how partial my view and my actions were. Again and again, I need to ask for forgiveness from myself and from others. And that’s just on the personal level. When I look in a larger frame, I can see that though my intentions may be good, I am enmeshed in systems that have done and continue to do horrific things to people who are just like me. The color of their skin and their circumstances may be different, but their hearts beat like mine and they love their children and grandchildren just like me.

‘The Zen perspective’ does not actually divide the world into good and bad. While the ten precepts of the Zen tradition sound very similar to the Judeo-Christian ten commandments, they function in a very different way. Rather than moral requirements, the precepts are teachings on how to align our lives more closely with what we love. Buddhism does not hold that there is some external being who is sitting in judgment on us and our actions. But the teachings of karma say that there are innumerable consequences to our thoughts, words and actions. Karma is not something you have to ‘believe in.’ Rather, like all Zen teachings, it is a description of what others have found as they have looked closely into what it means to be a human being.

One of the precepts is about speaking truthfully. This is not something that any of us ‘have’ to do, but most of us find out that when we do not speak truthfully, there are consequences that lessen the fullness of our lives. When we don’t speak truthfully, those around us may get angry or withdraw or become less reliable in their actions toward us. Or a host of other responses, both external and internal—most all of which will diminish our lives in some way. The teaching of karma is simply an observation of the surprising power of what we think, what we say and what we do.

President Trump is a pathological liar. He sows distrust and escalates fear wherever he goes. His actions have greatly divided and diminished our country both internally and internationally. I think he is unfit to be President and I am actively working to ensure that Joe Biden becomes our next President.

AND, I too am incapable of always speaking the truth. I too am blind. My actions (and inactions) are the cause of suffering that I cannot even imagine from my comfortable warm room this dark October morning.

Wishing harm to someone else, harms me. Of course it is natural and understandable – a mind-state that arises out of our frustration, anger and fear. Martin Luther King Jr., however, was clear in his great struggle against injustice that if we become like our enemies, if we fall into hating them as they seem to hate us, then they have won.

So let us all continue to work with renewed energy toward a brighter future where the President of this country sees their job as serving and works to unite ALL people in confronting the complex and dangerous issues we face.

Terrible and Wonderful

The work of racial reckoning, of fundamentally changing our relationship to the environment to try to prevent catastrophe, and of recreating our social/political world so that every child grows up with adequate food, shelter, medical attention and opportunity is daunting, to say the least. But as I see all three of these issues and think what might be done, the most proximal and meaningful work to be done seems to be to elect a new President and create a new Democratic majority in the Senate.

Our current President denies the existence of institutional racism while using ancient fears and hatreds to mobilize his supporters, supports continued exploitation of our natural resources for the benefit of the few and has demonstrated his incompetent meanness in his essential disregard of the terrible virus that has killed over 200,000 Americans during the past seven months. Not to mention his constant lying that has destabilized our country more than any foreign interference could. And then there are the Republicans in Congress who have stood by as he has blatantly used the office of President to enrich himself and tear at the very fabric of our communal life and structures of government.

I hope that everyone who reads this will actively contribute in some way to this effort to defend our country and help move us toward beginning to deal with the challenges we face. Working together, we can make a difference. Two possible actions to take today are: 1) Give a donation (even very small) to Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and or Democratic Senate candidates that are in close races or 2) Write letters to encourage people to get out and vote (Vote Forward has organized a hugely successful campaign that has reached one million potential voters and is now hoping to reach 500,000 more before late October.)

But most important is to make a plan to vote. Even if the outcome in your state is already decided, the ultimate number of voters who express their wish for a new President will be important in the chaos that Trump will create after the election.  I have also heard that voting in person may be an important way to make the will of the people more visible in the first days after the election as the mail-in ballots are being counted.

Meanwhile it’s Sunday morning. The cooler fall weather is here and the sugar maple by the entrance to the Temple garden is in full color. The last flowers of the season, these New England trees are coming into full blossom here in central Massachusetts. My grandson, whom I have taught to stoop down and stick his nose close to flowers and breathe huffily in and out has extended this practice to colorful leaves. He hasn’t quite understood that scent and smell are part of this ritual. Recently, he’s been insisting that I ‘smell’ the changing leaves along with him. So far there is no scent, but I suppose bowing down and breathing close to organic objects of beauty is as good a practice as any.

My advice for us all today is to not get lost in any one world. Or maybe better to allow yourself to lost in each world you encounter. When you take your shower, be fully naked and slippery and warm. When you read the paper or listen to the news, be outraged and angered at the injustice that appears. When you step outside, breathe in and out huffily and appreciate the coolness of the air that holds calm beauty of each falling leaf.

On the Importance of Wanting

A friend recently made a distinction for me between the two questions: What do I want? and What do I really want? These are both interesting and important questions—questions that have the power to help us align our lives and actions with what is most deeply true for us.

What do I want? is a question that turns our attention inward. Many of us were taught that our focus should be on the needs and wants of the people around us. Focusing on ourselves is egotistical and selfish. Being a good person means helping the people around us happy so that we can be happy. Or we learned to be aware of what others want so we can act strategically to move toward our desired outcome. Either way (and these two approaches are more similar than they appear on the surface), the focus is on the actions and feelings of others.

What do I want? turns the focus to the one person who is often ignored—me. Byron Katie writes about three kinds of business: my business, your business and God’s business. My business is everything I feel, think and do. Your business is everything you think, feel and do. God’s business is everything else. Katie points out that we make ourselves unhappy when we spend time in anything other than our own business. When I focus on what I think you should do or say, or how others should behave, I am setting myself up for disappointment. And when I spend time in your business or God’s business, I get lonely because I’ve abandoned myself.

What do I want? brings me back into the equation. It contradicts the common gremlin that we should not think about ourselves or our own needs. Not being aware of our needs and desires in any situation leaves us in the position of dependence. We outsource our self-care others then get upset when they don’t give us what we want and need. This dependence on other’s mind-reading is a set-up for frustration, resentment and unhappiness.

However, being aware of our immediate needs and wants is only part of any given situation. What do I really want? is a question that has the potential to bring us to another level of awareness. As humans, our wants and needs are endless. I want a cup of coffee. I want a new plant for the garden. I want to write another book. I want to be a famous author. Fulfilling our proximal needs may lead to an immediate sense of relief and accomplishment, but the initial thrill quickly passes and we’re back to desiring the next thing.

I’m reminded of a friend who had his heart set on getting a house on the coast of Maine. I asked him what a house on the coast would give him. He said it would give him a great view of the ocean in its changing seasons. Being a life-coach, I asked him again what that would give him. He paused for a moment, then said that would give him a sense of the beauty of the world. When I repeated my question a third time, he got really quiet and said ‘a sense of inner serenity.’ I pointed out that many people have wonderful houses on the coast of Maine and do not, as far as I can tell, have a sense of inner serenity.

What my friend really wanted was inner serenity. Asking the question What do I really want? can be a way to take us beyond our desires and demands of the moment into a deeper realm of true intention. As long as we’re acting without awareness of what it is we really want, any fulfillment we encounter will be fleeting.

It’s not that personal dreams and goals are bad, but rather that when we know what we really want, we can focus on that even as we take steps toward specific and concrete objectives. Going back to my friend, if what he really wants is inner serenity, then he can practice that wherever he is – whether he is still in Ohio or looking at real estate in Maine.

The things we want most are rarely contingent upon external circumstances. What is it that you really want? What would it be like to hold this question with you as you move through your day today?

Present Memories

My memories of growing up are a mixture of feeling supported and feeling alone. It was clear that my parents loved me but I was haunted, from as early as I can remember, by a terrible sense of loneliness. Terrible is too strong a word, for there were (and are) many times I remember of feeling connected and safe with my family of origin.

I fondly recall riding in the car on long trips. In my memories, there are always six of us: me, my older brother, my two younger sisters, my Mom and my Dad. There were endless negotiations about who got to sit where. The space in between Mom and Dad was most coveted one, especially late at night because sometimes you got to sleep with you head in Mom’s lap and your feet in Dad’s lap.

I loved being so close. These people were my world and I lived with an unspoken fear that one or more of them would go away—or was it more the fear that I would be exiled, thrown out of the garden for some unknowable reason?   Either way, the car held us together. Long trips meant that we were going somewhere special like Grandmother and Granddad’s house or, even better, to our slightly ramshackle cottage on the Lake in Vermont where Dad wouldn’t go off to work and we would be together for weeks at a time. And even if my father was angry when we finally pulled out of the driveway because it had taken so long to pack up and get on the road, I knew he would eventually calm down and would start singing.

When my Dad sang in the car, we all joined in. Thinking back, I’m sure that singing in the car with his beloved family was a place of safety and connection for him as well. The world and its incessant demands and confusions passed away and we were just all together, breathing the same air and gratefully eating whatever my mother had packed to sustain us on the trip. My father’s repertoire was a mish-mash of Broadway tunes like My Favorite Things, hits from the forties and fifties like Ragtime Cowboy Joe and church camp songs like Michael Row the Boat Ashore. It didn’t matter much what we sang, my father sang with an enthusiasm and commitment that was contagious.

Many years later, on his deathbed, the four of us children (and his final family but not his middle family) were gathered around and sang to him as the nurse removed his breathing mask. He startled and struggled for a moment, then slowly passed away. I used to think ‘passing away’ was a euphemism that avoided the harsh reality of death. But that day, it wasn’t a harsh reality, it was more of a relief and an astonishment. Something unbelievably sad and sacred was going on. Saying ‘he died’ misses so much. Though he certainly did die—he stopped breathing and became awe-fully still. He was clearly not with us anymore, but where he went and how he did it after hours and days and months of struggle was (and is) a complete mystery.

But those long hours in the car driving and the songs of my childhood are still with me to this day. And they all intermingle with the songs of his death and the ancient and vast feelings of separation. The immeasurable past life that is fully present in this very moment. No separation.

Language is so inadequate to describe how much happens all together. Were you lonely or were you part of a close family unit? Language pushes us to blanket generalizations that miss so much the mish mash of our actual experience. In reality, so much more is happening simultaneously than we could ever describe. Language highlights one explores some dimensions of this richness while it dismisses other equally important realities.

So this morning I remember the importance of telling many stories about whatever is happening and whatever happened. Whatever you think this is is only a partial description that can shift and change and allow even more to be revealed. And maybe sometimes, or maybe many times, we can allow the stories to drop away and allow the activity of the moment to be fully enough to hold us.

God’s Acre

I walked to God’s Acre with a friend yesterday. Of course, in one light you could say we are always walking to or walking on God’s acre, but this was different. We began on a small path at the edge of a community ball field (empty but well-maintained) about a half-mile from the Boundless Way Temple where I live.

It was a lovely afternoon for a walk in the woods. The morning rain and clouds were dispersing and the air temperature perfectly in the low 70’s. The trees here in central Massachusetts are just starting their annual display of fall colors. The first reds and oranges are appearing in the mostly green landscape. Yellow leaves are already dropping to guild the sidewalks and paths around town.

God’s Acre is a parcel of over 300 acres of wooded land that is currently being managed for recreational use by the Greater Worcester Land Trust. This particular site gets its name from the ten acres it contains that were owned in the mid-eighteenth century by a local mystic named Solomon Parsons who believed the world was going to end in 1843.

Apparently, things were not going so smoothly in that time either. The mid-nineteenth century gave rise to numerous utopian and millennial cults. The urge to escape the confines of traditional culture that led to the countercultural movement of the 60’s and 70’s that I was on the fringe of, was a well-worn tradition in America.

My friend and I walked for thirty or forty minutes – appreciating the gift of the autumn woods and the company of each other. I’ve known this friend for almost thirty years and in the last few we’ve developed the practice of deep conversation and occasional long walks. Any topic is fair game—from updates on the grandchildren to reflections on our increasingly evident mortality to reports our latest efforts to decipher our ongoing the struggles and triumphs.

Yesterday, it was the usual rambling conversation, accompanied by some heavy breathing as we followed the winding and hilly trail. Eventually the narrow path widened out to what had clearly been a road. Along this grassy way were a couple of square holes, clearly where houses had stood many decades ago, now filled with trees like the rest of the area.

Just after catching our first sight of some current-day houses to our left, we went through a gate and came to a jumble of rocks—the large post-glacial type that can be ten or fifteen feet high and lie in apparently random places among the trees. Glacial erratics, I think they are called.

By now the sun was shining through the trees, illuminating the fallen leaves and the perfectly strewn boulders. My friend wandered around a little and finally found it–the rock on which Solomon had paid a local artisan $125 to inscribe a legal document deeding this land to God. It’s now known as deed rock and apparently the inscribed words were the basis of an extended court case over who this land belonged to. I’m told that God eventually lost the case because he had neglected to sign his name to the document so the land passed into other hand—temporarily.

I was touched to see this wet rock bearing the marks of holy intention from a fellow local spiritualist from 180 years ago. Maybe I should begin work carving some new agreement with the Universe on one of the rocks behind our Zen Temple? I think Solomon would approve.

On Not Watching the Debate

It turns out that drinking espresso in the late afternoon, actively not watching the first Presidential debate and reading a disturbing novel in bed are not a great recipe for a restful nights sleep. Who could have guessed?

I did, however, get to hear the wind kick up and blow the trees around. I got to imagine the leaves falling fast and furiously into the Temple koi pond and wonder if the skimmer would clog and prevent the water from reaching the pump and eventually cause the motor to burn out. I also got to begin counting backwards from fifty (to switch on my para-sympathetic nervous system (whatever that is)) a number of times. Even with beginning again somewhere near I stopped, I still didn’t get past 22 and whatever sleep inducing benefits that were supposed to come from that were lost on me.

I lay what seemed to be long hours on my uncomfortable comfortable bed. Finally I began simply to notice the breath going in and out of my body. I wondered if I will be so distressed when I am lying in my bed and truly unable to get up. At some point, morning will not be the release, but rather simply the time when I lie in bed in the light rather than the dark. How will I be with myself then?

Last night, however, I was not distressed, just worried. I remembered any number of times when people and organizations and I have been in turmoil and how it all seems to have a life of its own in my head during the dark hours. Part of me wants to release and relax, but part of me won’t or can’t let go. Some inner necessity decides that active worry is required and I am helpless to decide otherwise.

It’s a wonderful example of the elephant that Jonathan Haidt writes of in The Righteous Mind. He says our thinking processes are like an elephant and a rider. Most of what we think occurs below the level of our conscious awareness—the elephant. Our conscious mind is the rider—the little person sitting atop the elephant that is supposed to be making the decisions. I suppose that with a skilled rider and a well-trained elephant, things could go quite well. But, apparently, my elephant and rider mind could use some remedial work.

That’s why I meditate. It doesn’t save me from my life, but at least I get to see some of the dynamics up close. In Zen meditation, our vow as we sit still and upright is to cultivate a basic friendliness toward ourselves and our actual experience of the moment. We’re not trying to cultivate special states of mind but rather to be present with our minds, hearts and bodies as they actually are. What I and millennia of Zen meditators have discovered from this practice is that the mind is constantly active, that everything that arises passes away and that disturbance is unavoidable.

And last night I was disturbed by the debate I didn’t watch earlier between Joe Biden and Donald Trump – two men who have thrust themselves into a realm of power and intrigue that is playing out in front of our eyes. I chose not to watch because I knew it would be too upsetting to me. My nervous system is on high alert already, without having to watching Trump perform his mesmeric and terrible combination of lies and mean-spirited attacks of everyone who disagrees with him.

I hope that Biden held his own—that he remembered to use the time to talk about his vision for America—that he conveyed a sense of decency and embodied some kind of hope for reconciliation. Reconciliation requires acknowledgment of truth. Something that Trump appears incapable of.

I thought of getting up to read reports of how it went. But my rider had the good sense to realize that that would not be good for the elephant if we wanted any sleep.   So we stayed in bed. Me and my unruly elephant. Though he’s rather wrinkly and occasionally misbehaved, I do love and trust his unspoken wisdom. Sometimes he’s much wiser than me and sometimes he needs me to remind him of the simplest things. Like that the breath is precious and that even this place of disturbed resting is just the momentary scenery of my ever-changing life.

The rain eventually came. Then I opened my eyes in the dark and it was morning. I don’t know how or when I got to sleep, but am grateful for the release that always finds me at some point. I can never tell whether I have done something that has led to my good fortune or if it’s just the random and wondrous correlations of the universe.

On Vacation

Just back from three days on Cape Cod. I meant to take my computer but somehow, I forgot. (What would Freud say?) I then meant to use my phone post a pithy notice of my absence on my blog. But the sand and the family got the best of me. Besides playing with my grandson, a deep walk-and-talk with my daughter and a final afternoon beach walk on the tidal flats with my wife, the highlight of my time was sunrise over the Atlantic. Once behind the clouds and once in full view of the scattering of viewers along the seemingly endless beach.

The first morning I went to watch, it took me it took me a while to find my way from the parking lot to the beach. I had woken in the dark with no computer to write on. I thought ‘Oh, I’ll just relax and sleep in.’ But being only five minutes from watching the sun rise over the Atlantic, I couldn’t resist. So I got up in the dark and drove the empty roads to Coast Guard Beach.

I’ve been to that particular beach a number of times over the past three years. We’ve made a tradition of going to the Cape in the late summer—after high tourist season—with our daughter and her family. We’ve always stayed in places in the Eastham area—right above the elbow of the Cape. Access to the geographic, retail and cultural delight of Provincetown as well as the dramatic beaches of the Atlantic shore and the quiet beaches of the Bay side make it the perfect place for us. (Not to mention its easy access to ‘Buddha Bobs’ our favorite Asian themed jumble of jewelry, statues and artifacts.)

Beach access from the small parking lot at Coast Guard beach goes by the outdoor showers and down through the dunes to the water. But when I followed the signs and went by the showers, I saw the usual entrance had been blocked off. Obeying the new signs, I went back to the road, down a few hundred yards and to another entrance through the dunes. After I walked back south along the beach, I saw the problem. Erosion from storms and water rise had been so much that the original path from the parking lot ended in a five-foot drop. I was surprised and slightly disturbed.

The whole of Cape Cod is a shifting piece of real estate. While all houses by the sea are now endangered, Cape Cod is a large deposit of sand that is in constant motion. The Atlantic side beaches are in slow but inexorable retreat from the storms and waves that batter the sometimes high dunes. The light house up the coast from where I was has been moved time and time again. What seems safe and reasonable now will be precarious and impossible in just a few years.

But maybe because of all this, The Atlantic coast of the upper Cape is a wonderful, wild and dramatic place to walk. The public seashore goes on for mile and miles. I used to love to swim in the big waves. But between the sharks that are now occasional but very real visitors and my slowly eroding body, I’m happy to be an early morning walker.

Walking south toward the entrance of the Great Salt Pond, I was overtaken scores of times by seals swimming past. Their dark snouts are unmistakable as they swim in the shallow water close to shore—at ease with the waves and in no fear of us beach walkers. A couple years ago I walked all the way down to the entrance to the Great Salt Pond itself. There I saw scores of seals hauled up on convenient sand islands sunning themselves. Protected from the waves and the sharks, they too were enjoying Cape life.

But this year, I just walked for twenty minutes as the sun rose. I stopped as the sun poked up over the horizon to do some Qi Gong and take some photos. Then I walked back to the car and drove back to the protections, delights and challenges of family. I started the oatmeal cooking (late) and greeted my grandson who had decided, for the moment, that only his mother’s arms would suffice in that tender morning moment when the world was just beginning to reconstitute itself once more.