Anxious Together

Amazingly, our President’s approval ratings are going up. The daily Covid-19 update press conferences that are supposed to keep us informed appear to be just another opportunity for him to tell us how well he is doing and to share his gut feelings—feelings that often are at odds with the realities expressed by his own top medical advisors. His incapacity to deal facts on the ground that are beyond his control seems to be preventing him from leading the country to unite to face this frightening time together.

Though I try to be empathetic and understand the many different ways human beings construct the world, I have a hard time understanding how people can still be supporting him. I can easily spiral down into anger and resentment about ‘those people’. And I assume that ‘those people’ see me the same way—in the mirror of blame and othering. From these entrenched positions, rational arguments and reasoned discussions have little hope of creating any common ground. How can we find even a sliver of ground to stand on together when the stakes are so high? It’s not a matter of just saying everything is relative, but of acknowledging the polarities that are a fact on the ground and finding some way forward.

Yesterday I realized that one thing almost all of us share, though we might speak of it differently, is our fear and anxiety in this time of the pandemic. People around us are getting sick and dying. Maybe even we have become sick with the virus. The economy is grinding to a halt. Many of us are out of work or our work is radically changed. None of us can do what we used to do. It’s not clear when we will be able to leave our houses and resume our ‘normal’ lives.

Of course we can argue about how long and how dangerous, but the partisan denial has mostly fallen away in the face of this frighteningly powerful reality. None of us can go on with the comfortable delusion that we are in charge of our lives. We are all entering a time when everything is different. (Of course this is true every moment of our lives, but sometimes it is so glaringly obvious that we can’t pretend otherwise.)

We all experience fear and anxiety in different ways and each one of us has many different ways to meet fear and anxiety. All these different ways have their own benefits and drawbacks. No one way is the truth. So I would advise us all to keep cycling through these many possibilities.

We can turn away. We can turn toward. We can distract ourselves. We can try to fix it. We can try to understand the root causes of our fear and work on them. We can turn to God and pray. We can feel overcome by emotions. We can meditate.  We can go into despair and darkness. We can be curious about these feelings. We can give up. We can accept. We can do nothing.

These are all fine and human ways to meet fear and anxiety. I would recommend that you try a wide range – perhaps even see if you can expand your repertoire of responses. And know that this uncomfortable experience is not what separates us, but what joins us with every human being in this country and around the world.

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Connected and Creative (part 3)

For the past two days, I’ve been considering the remarks of a friend about staying connected and creative. I’m reminded of the unexpected power of the words we say to each other. While my memory continues to gradually degrade as I live into my late sixties, there are still moments and actions and words that bring me up short and stay with me long after they pass.

I suppose the words that catch us are the ones that touch something inside us that is true but, till that moment, not fully expressed. ‘Connected and creative’ stirred a reservoir of experience and understanding that have been a thread of my life for almost as long as I can remember. In Zen we call these words and phrases ‘turning words’  They are words that go deep into our heart-mind and wake us up to what has always been present but never, until this moment, fully realized.

Yesterday, I wrote about the three directions of connection—connecting to yourself, connecting to what is right in front of you, and connecting to the whole. As we settle into these three awarenesses that are not separate, we move out of the world of our opinion and thought and into the ever-changing world life itself. This full engagement allows for the arising of actions and words and ways of being that are new. We call this creativity.

Creativity is our wholehearted participation in the circumstances of our lives. It is not about making something up or coming up with a new and clever idea. Creativity arises naturally when we are present with the conditions we encounter, internally and externally. We receive the many and changing aspects of what is here. We are in relationship to and moving with a world that is in constant flux. From this place of receiving and being present with what is here, we are able to make new choices. Creativity is not something we do, but rather a following of what is already present in the moment.

Creativity is life responding intimately to life.

Peter Hershock, in his wonderful history of Chinese Zen, CHAN BUDDHISM, uses the term ‘responsive virtuosity ’. He says over and over that this is what Zen masters cultivated and practiced.   What a wonderful way to describe the possibility of living creatively in each moment. This is not about making the world conform to our opinion, but rather an ongoing dance where our words and actions have the possibility to surprise us as much as anyone else.

In these times of sheltering where we live, so much is limited. Now, several weeks in, so many things are becoming repetitive – same old same old. Routines, partners, children, apartments all now quite familiar. My encouragement for today is to see if it is possible to meet your same situation in some new way. Allowing yourself to be present with what is here, can you discern and perhaps even follow some dimensions of this particular moment that you had never noticed before?

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Connected and Creative (part 2)

Yesterday’s written ramble concluded with the sage advice to us all to ‘stay connected and creative’. Of course, what this directive might really mean and how we might actually follow it is a whole other matter.

When I was in my twenties, I was a member of an improvisational dance company. We taught and performed around New England and even occasionally got paid, so we considered ourselves professional dancers. We never choreographed any dances, but were continually studying and practicing how to be present enough in the moment to allow something new to happen.

It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to be creative. The mind of yesterday is so powerful with its opinions and suggestions. We found that when our dances came from our ideas of what we should do or from other dances we had seen or thought our way into, the dances were uninspired. Not much fun to watch and actually boring to be a part of since we were just acting out what had already be thought. But when we stayed close enough to our experience of the moment itself, then we were able to follow something other than our thoughts and something new emerged. This newness made life more interesting for the dancers and the audience alike.

We slowly learned, and then we taught the three directions of awareness that are helpful in finding your way to the new and creative place—in dances and in life.

First: connect to yourself. Turn your attention inward and notice how it is for you right in this moment. Beyond any words of description or stories about what happened or will happen. What are the sensations and senses of this moment? Just notice what is already here. Be present and curious. We can even connect to feeling disconnected. We might call this your internal weather of the moment. Strong winds or no breeze. Light or dark. Wet or dry. Whatever is here is here.

Second: connect to what is right in front of you. The person, the dog, the plant, the object. When we turn our attention outward, we are always met by something. Can you notice right now what catches your attention, right where you are? Take a few moments just to be present with whatever that is – to allow yourself, in this focused way to be alive in relationship. What arises within you as you focus your attention on just this? (While this may seem easier to do with another human, the whole world around us, even indoors, may be available to us in ways we cannot rationally comprehend.)

Third: connect to the greater whole. This is soft focus awareness of the totality of the environment that surrounds you. 360 degrees awareness. Can you allow yourself to be present with what is in front of you as well as what is behind you. The whole gestalt of the room or space you are in. Every place has its own feel and resonance. Allow your awareness to be diffuse—to see and sense and feel. What can you can receive from the wholeness of the place in which you find yourself right now.

One way to think of how to be connected is to consciously practice these three directions of attention: self, other and the whole. I guarantee your actual experience won’t be as neat and sequential as it sounds, but, with practice, you can actually train your attention to be present in new ways.

And this is the foundation of creativity.

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Connected and Creative

Yesterday afternoon we had a Boundless Way Temple community meeting. The plan had been to have a spring garden work day before the meeting and share deserts and conversation after the meeting. But the virus revised our plans so we met on the Hollywood Squares of Zoom. The focus of the meeting was twofold: 1) organizational – to share with the community some of the legal (bylaws) and procedural process that we have all agreed to – and 2) relational – to be with and to listen to each other.

Our form of organizational structure here at Boundless Way Zen is deeply influenced by the American Congregational/Unitarian-Universalist model of organization. This model seeks to honor the authority of each member at the same time as empowering spiritual leaders to guide the community. At the Temple, as in Boundless Way at large, the final authority rests with the members. The members elect the Temple Leadership Council (TLC) and the TLC elects the Resident Teachers (me and Melissa). The Resident Teachers have sole authority for all spiritual matters of the community and collaborate with the TLC to lead the community. The TLC is legally responsible for the finances, the mission and the ‘actions’ of the Temple as a whole. The TLC and the Resident Teachers collaborate to fulfill the mission of the Temple ‘to support and sustain a place of vibrant Zen practice for ourselves, for those around us and for those who come after us.’

Having served for many years as the head of a private school and been involved in the non-profit and church worlds of leadership and governing boards (think TLC), I know how delicate the relations of power can be. Though many organizations have wonderful mission statements and good intentions, being able to live out what we believe is the work of a lifetime.

One teacher put it this way: ‘The teachings are so simple even an eight year old can understand them, but so difficult that even an eighty-year-old cannot practice them.’

While Sangha (community) is held up in Buddhism as one of the Three Refuges – one of the places we can find rest and connection – it requires work. The practice of community, religious or secular, is a fierce and rich practice of ongoing relationship.

The work of community requires energy and intention. As human beings, we don’t get along smoothly. One image of community is of rough stones rubbing up against each other to smooth each other out. As all of us who have been in any kind of relationship know, the rubbing against each other can range from mildly irritating to wildly painful.

AND – to be part of a group of humans heading in the same direction is a deep blessing. We humans are hard-wired to work together. To share a vision with others is to create the possibility of building something new in the world and the possibility of giving our life to something we love. We humans are like sled dogs, when we are in the harness of something that deeply resonates with us, we love to give our full energy to pulling the sled.

At the end of the Temple gathering yesterday, we were asked to briefly share our vision for the future of the Temple. Many wonderful answers emerged, but the one that caught me the most was ‘Stay connected and creative.’ What a wonderful vision for Boundless Way Temple and for each one of us in our daily lives.

Stay connected and creative.

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Settling In

It feels like this will go on forever. This sheltering-in-place and staying-at-home. This life of phone calls and zoom gatherings. Travel only for essential activities. Wash your hands. Don’t get too near anyone else.

They say early May is when restrictions will begin to be lifted. Based on the gross inaccuracy of all our previous time-lines, it seems unwise to put too much faith in any specific date. And even when restrictions begin to be lifted, what does that mean? Will we ever get back to ‘normal life’?

One way to go through this time is to focus on settling in right where we are. A minister friend of mine used the metaphor of ‘pitching your tent in the desert.’ We are all Israelites wandering through the desert on our way to some promised land that never seems to appear. As this ancient story shows, this feeling of wandering in the desert is not unique to the Corona virus pandemic—it is simply part of the human condition. We are always on our way to somewhere and the landscape around us often appears bleak and barren. The Jews wandered for forty years. For most of us here in the States, it’s only been three or four weeks.

So how do we settle in? How do we make our home right here when everything is so different? Many of us are already beginning to create new routines. The first week or two of utter newness, we were just trying to survive. (And if you are reading this, you have survived. Congratulations!) But now we’re beginning to learn what kinds of patterns of living will be most useful to our physical and emotional well-being and that of those around us.

For me, the new balance has included a few things. The first has been the nearly daily Zoom meditation gatherings of our Boundless Way Zen Temple community. One of the blessings of being one of the leaders of this community is that I don’t need to decide whether I want to get up and meditate or not. My vow is to show up, whatever shape I’m in.

Many others in our community, now wonderfully extended around the world, have made a similar vow. In this time of uncertainty many of us have a need to turn toward the deep longings of our hearts. In the disruption of our lives we have an opportunity to look into the big questions of life: Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? So how do we explore these questions? How do we turn toward the source of life? For some of us it’s prayer, for some it’s playing the piano. For others walking or sewing or gardening or writing or painting. Whatever it is for you, I encourage you to make regular time for the activity of deepening.

The other part of settling in and creating a new balance is being sensitive to the rhythms of our new lives. Without school and traveling to work, the weekdays blend in with the weekends. It gets hard to remember what day it is. Several people I know are starting to create new daily and weekly schedules. There’s more freedom now to actually tailor some of this to your preferences. Do I like to get up early?  To work later at night? A conscious plan and/or calendar can help you appreciate and live in alignment with your own personal rhythms as well as those of your family.

The final part of settling in to live fully in these times in which we find ourselves, is accepting how different things are and how weird it sometimes feels. Whatever you are feeling at any moment is fine. It makes sense these days if you are feeling more anxious or scared. It’s also fine to really be enjoying some new parts of your life. (Who knew it was possible to keep my pajama bottoms on all day?)

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A Small Diversion

Since March first, I have planted over a hundred flower seeds for the Temple garden. My bedroom, an improvised plant nursery where the grow lights are hung, is beginning to have the wonderful fragrance of damp soil and growing things.

The smell reminds me of being a young boy and getting to spend time with a friend of the family, ‘Uncle’ Eddy. His pants were always dirty (most adults I knew wore clean pants) and he chewed a burned out cigar all day. Uncle Eddy ran a greenhouse business and he let me come and ‘help’ one week each summer. Among many things, he taught me to use lukewarm water to water small plants. When I asked him why, he asked if I would rather be sprayed with ice-cold water or with warm water. When I said I preferred warm water, he just smiled at me.

But back to the seeds themselves. They came in a variety of unpromising shapes and sizes. Distinctly unflowerlike. The purple petunias, flamboyantly pictured on the flower package, were like round bits of tan tapioca. The Cherokee black eyed Susans were more like little bits of grit swept up off the floor—so small one sneeze would have dispersed the whole lot of them.

Now, most all of the carefully buried seeds have sprouted. The Queen Sophia marigolds are the most recent additions. The mature and bushy plants will prettily surround the spent iris in late June in the garden to the Buddha’s left. Many gardeners turn their noses at the common marigold, but I am quite fond of them. They bloom throughout the summer and don’t mind the heat and occasional dry spell.

The Queen Sophia variety, aside from having a wondrous name, has a handsome blend of deep orange and reds in its compact flower head. But the seeds themselves are like splinters of wood with a bristle of blond hairs protruding from one end. Weird, but big enough to individually place in six-packs this past Monday afternoon. Now, merely four days later, they are quarter inch green miracles—the babies of the nursery, but headed for great and bushy things.

The lacey leaved cosmos are the rulers of the nursery. They now soar a lordly six inches on green and red straight stems topped by deeply branched abundant leaves. They look like prehistoric trees over as the sit under the grow lights next to the bitty marigolds.

As I write this in the dark morning, outside it’s raining and just above freezing. It’s been a cold week and I worry about my timing. Part of the art of growing seeds indoors is knowing when to start so they’ll be ready when the weather gets warmer. Start too soon and the plants will turn ‘leggy’ and malnourished. But if you wait too long to start, the flower won’t mature and bloom on schedule and you won’t have the fun of spending March and April in a bedroom with green growing things.

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Balancing Fear and Denial

We’re now told, here in Massachusetts, that we can expect the rates of Covid-19 infection to peak within the next two weeks. The National Guard has begun building a field hospital for corona virus patients in the downtown Worcester community civic center where the local minor league hockey team used to play. Social distancing does seem to be having some impact, but the drumbeat of death tolls both actual and predicted fills the media. The stock market dropped another 4.4% yesterday. These are dark and uncertain times.

How do we find a way to go on living our lives in middle of it all? How do we find a middle way to live between panic and denial? How careful should I be? Should I stay inside all the time? Should I even go to the grocery store? How much is too much? Strangers, friends and families disagree. One of the Buddha’s first teachings after his awakening might be a helpful guide as we navigate these uncharted waters.

It is said that after the Buddha’s awakening, he came upon the small group of religious ascetics who had been his former colleagues on the path. He offered them what has become known as the teaching of the Middle Way.

Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.

The path to awakening, the path to the fullness of life, avoids both extremes: the indulgence of sense pleasures and the addiction to self-mortification. The extreme of the anything goes—live for the moment and the opposite of a life of rigid self-denial. We are encouraged to find our way between an aimless life with no center and a fear-based life of inflexible adherence to a set of rules.

Our minds seem to like to break the world in two. White and Black. Right and Wrong. We want to make sure we are making the right decision, not the wrong one. The teaching of the Middle Way encourages us to see the world, and ourselves, as more fluid and dynamic than this simple bifurcation. While there are actions that are more or less helpful, our lives are not a series of morally fraught choices.

The teaching of the Middle Way encourages us to bring our whole selves to the moment we are encountering – our intellect, our emotions, our hopes, our fears all get included. The Middle Way is not a dull compromise but rather a fresh response to life – one that honors as much of any given situation as we are able.

Each choice we make is a creative expression of our life. We allow ourselves to be present with what is here and we sense our way into the future that is shaped by each one of our actions. We act, as best we can, in response to the conditions of the moment and in light of what we value most.

So may we live in these times. To proceed with care and appreciation—to live fully in this always unprecedented moment.

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Paradoxical Comfort

Yesterday, I ended my reflection with the following question: “What is it that we might touch, that we might remember that will sustain us even as we walk though the valley of these days?” There are a thousand answers to that question. Or perhaps just a thousand forms of the one ungraspable answer.

A Zen colleague recently sent me the following paradoxical answer: a rendition of the beginning of the book of Ecclesiastes by Rabbi Rami Shapiro from his book THE WAY OF SOLOMON.

Emptiness! Emptiness upon emptiness!
The world is fleeting of form,
empty of permanence,
void of surety,
without certainty.
Like a breath breathed once and gone,
all things rise and fall.
Understand emptiness, and tranquility replaces anxiety.
Understand emptiness, and compassion replaces jealousy.
Understand emptiness, and you will cease to excuse suffering
and begin to alleviate it.

I first came upon the harsh and comforting book of Ecclesiastes when I was a sophomore in college. It was a difficult year for me as I struggled to make the transition from youth to adulthood and to chart some path that had meaning for me. In the midst of confusion and pain that spring, I met with one of my religion professors and poured my heart out to him. He listened without saying too much then he went to his bookshelf and pulled out his well worn bible. He began reading about a time for planting and a time for reaping; a time for living and a time for dying; a time for rejoicing and a time for sorrow. I was strangely comforted.

In Rabbi Shapiro’s rendition, King Solomon’s words become even wilder. Encouraging us to find our grounding not in the permanence of things, but to rest in the inconvenient yet inescapable fact that nothing is permanent. What is this emptiness that he sings of? Empty of permanence / void of surety / without certainty. From one perspective this leaves us tumbling through an ever shifting space with no point of orientation.

Yet when we look closely, we ourselves realize this truth that the Buddha expressed in his final words: ‘Everything falls apart. Proceed with love.’

We spend much of our time trying to hold things together—trying to fix thing—trying to make sure things come out our way. You may have noticed that this is ultimately a futile exercise. We cannot hold onto the people or circumstances we love. Children grow up and move away. All of us, if we’re lucky, grow old and die.

When we see that everything is arising and passing away, we can begin to get out of the control business and make our home right in the middle of this beautiful and impermanent world. Understand emptiness, and tranquility replaces anxiety.

May we today realize the truth of coming and going, the truth of no permanence and no certainty. That we might be free to appreciate each moment as this mysterious life as it constantly appears—now in the form of this, now in the form of that.

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When will this be over?

Already we’ve come to the end of March and there’s no end in sight. Easter services have already been canceled. Here at Boundless Way Zen Temple, we’re in the third week of suspending all in-person gatherings. Originally we thought two weeks of physical distancing would probably be sufficient. Now it’s uncertain whether two months will be long enough.

Welcome to the new normal. Wash your hands. Stay six feet away from others when you go out. Be careful. This is no vacation, but an endurance contest. How long can we survive, isolated in these small houses and apartments?

And the mind, seemingly on its own, runs on ahead – wondering about the future. What will things be like when this is over? Will my work still be working? What about my carefully crafted financial plans? Will I ever be able to go out to eat again? How long will this take? Will my parents be safe? How will I manage?

Even as I write these questions, I feel my heart beating slightly faster and a my stomach turns uneasily with the subtle sensations of fear.

Gregory Bateson, the great anthropologist, thinker, and occasional Zen student once said: “The mind creates the world then says ‘I didn’t do it’” We our lives within the many worlds of our creation. This creative participation is mostly hidden from our awareness. But just in reading the words above, as the mind shifts its attention and we can see how this operates. Though the world has not essentially changed in the last five minutes, my experience of the world changes radically. Worlds of ease. Worlds of fear.

What are the resources and the skills we have to manage in this new normal where danger is real in some new way? Where we can no longer pretend that life will obligingly go on according to our predictive illusions?

‘Even though I walk through the valley and the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ The words of the 23rd Psalm come to me—arising from some forgotten corner of my mind. I am surprised how comforting they are to me. Is it remembering that human beings have always faced danger and fear? Is it the courageous recognition of this land of the ‘shadow of death’ and the assertion of not being overcome with fear?

What is it that we might touch, that we might remember that will sustain us even as we walk though the valley of these days? Time to unearth and turn toward something more trustworthy than our own competence and cleverness.

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Days Like Lightening

Last night, in our Zoom Zen meditation gathering, we read a short passage from our 13th century Korean ancestor Chinul. Chinul is credited as being the founder of the Jogye school of Korean Son (Zen). My teacher’s teacher, Seung Sahn, founder of the Kwan Um Zen school, was his 78th successor. So through my teacher, George Bowman, I am Chinul’s 80th successor. Yikes!

I suppose we are all the successors of so many geniuses and ruffians. If you could count back 80 generations, I wonder what you would encounter? What lineages we could all claim—women and men of great courage and faith as well as people of questionable ethics and behavior. Those who lived in times of prosperity and those, like us, who lived in times of crisis.

But sometime around 1200, somewhere on the Korean peninsula, Chinul wrote this reminder for us all: ‘The days and months go by like lightening; we should value the time. We pass from life to death in the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out; it’s hard to guarantee even a morning and an evening.’ I have read this passage for many years and each time it brings me up short. But in this time of uncertainty, even familiar words seem to contain some new import.

Days and months do go by like lightening. I am constantly amazed to find myself an old man of sixty-seven, when I remember so clearly being a young man. ‘Just the other day’….can now mean last week, last month or several years ago. My grandson, now nearly fourteen months old, was born just the other day. How quickly our lives pass and how surprisingly easy to miss this wild evanescence in the pressure of our daily responsibilities.

Life, as Chinul says, is not guaranteed. Our usual sense of the solidity and stability of life is a delusion that, while necessary and comforting, is ultimately not true. We all have many different reactions when we remember or when we are forced to confront the ephemeral quality of life. Chinul, I believe, is not trying to scare us, but to turn us to wake up to the preciousness of our lives in this moment.

Reminders of our shared mortality and fragility are now woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Walking down the street, I move to the other side of the sidewalk when I pass someone. I am afraid that I might either contract or spread this novel corona virus. But these reminders work both ways. Now complete strangers walking by the Temple will sometimes stop and smile and ask about my health as I work in the gardens. We smile at each other, remembering that we are connected.

So as we live into the full extent of the pandemic, whatever that may be, let us remember to value the time. Remembering the momentary miracle of breathing in and breathing out, let us take delight in the people and the fullness of life that surrounds as is us.

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