Definitely Coming

Patches of snow still cover the shady areas and a hill of frozen snow, plowed in February from the parking lot, blocks the front entrance to the Temple garden. But a familiar, small yellow flower whose name I can never remember is poking up near the pond and the first burgundy hellebore blossoms behind the gazebo—joining the dozen or so white snowdrops who are nodding in contentment despite their proximity to the still frozen ground.

Spring is definitely coming.

Nothing can hold it back now – not the pandemic, not systemic injustice, not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the additional snow and ice that will surely come. The overall trajectory is clear and my inner self begins to feel safe enough to take off her clenched coat of protection and allow the sun’s nourishment and warmth to penetrate deep into my over-wintered heart.

Working On a Poor Tax Attitude

I spent an unpleasant morning yesterday working on my 2020 taxes. I make a point of trying to adjust my attitude to appreciate whatever it is I choose to do, but the collision of my relatively casual bookkeeping and my inner urge to make sure everything is right (especially when the IRS is watching) proved to be too much. So I spent the morning on my laptop feeling resentful, judgmental, and anxious.

As I reflect on this, I remember Byron Katie’s four questions that I first encountered in her book LOVING WHAT IS. Katie emphasizes the fact that our suffering is almost always due to our thinking. Many things happen in the world, but it is only when we expect reality to be different from what it is that we suffer. Posing these four questions and moving to the turn-around is her way to shift our thinking and perhaps even end our ongoing quarrel with reality.

Here is what I remember of Byron Katie’s process:
Write down the judgment or complaint.
1) Is it true?
2) Is it really true?
3) How do you feel when you think that thought?
4) Who would you be if you could never think that thought again?
TURN IT AROUND and compare.

(Stated this way, it’s clearly a 6 or 7 step process, but 4 is close to 6 or 7 and perhaps easier to remember. I wonder if the IRS would mind if I used this kind of rounding on my taxes?)

So, let me work the process with my lingering resentment from yesterday.

The complaint: ‘I’m resentful that I had to spend the morning keeping track of things I don’t really care about.’

Is this true? Yes, clearly!

Is this really true? No. On a deeper level, I really do care about being a good steward of what I have been given. These patterns of numbers appearing on my computer screen are a large part of what allows me to live in a warm house and pick random things off the shelf in the grocery store to take home to eat—not to mention buy books to delight me, seeds to grow in my garden and expensive craft beer to delight my palate and support the local economy. I also chose to spend the morning doing this task which means I had both the luxury of an open morning and that I still have the capacity to think and calculate well enough to attempt this cultural ritual one more time. It won’t always be so.

When I say ‘I had to spend the morning keeping track of things I don’t really care about?’, how do I feel? I feel resentful and agitated—irritated and slightly sorry for myself. I scowl and feel put upon.

If I could never have this thought again, who would I be? I would live a fine life. I might sometimes choose to work on my taxes, but I could be interested in finding the balance between being accurate and being exact. I could do as much as I was able to do that day and leave the rest for another day.

TURN IT AROUND   I am fortunate to have chosen to spend the morning keeping track of things I truly care about.

Is this as true or perhaps even more true than my original statement? It’s at least as true and probably more true! I am glad I still have enough sources of income that my taxes are still a little complicated. I am blessed to have so much money coming in that I don’t have to worry about it all the time, that I can have the luxury of just thinking about it seriously on occasion. I am blessed with such a wealth of choices. People give me money that allows me to do what I love. I have such freedoms and luxuries. Preparing an accurate summary of my financial year gives me a chance to look at the big picture and to be amazed at how much I have to be grateful for.

And…my preliminary calculations indicate that I will also have the opportunity to give some of the money which has been given to me, to the United States government. I am happy that just this week that same government is passing legislation to send money to individuals, small businesses, schools, and local governments to support a full and widespread recovery from the pandemic. I get to be part of the generosity and support extended to so many.

This is good. This is what is. I am lucky to be alive.

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

More Instructions to Self

The first challenge is finding a place to start. The second is trusting that starting place enough to take the first step. From there on, it’s just a matter of following through.

Easier said than done.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE—perhaps that’s the title of my new book. One teacher said that these teaching on how to wake up are so simple that an eight-year-old child can say them but so difficult that even an eighty-year-old person can’t live them.

We’re all trying to close the gap between what we know and what we live—between what we love and what we do. The first step in this approach is, as they say on the London Tube, to Mind the Gap. Becoming aware of the distance between our intentions and our actions is full of possibility and potential—a good place to begin.

I am lost and discouraged much more than I would like to admit. As many times as I include my daily struggles and investigations in what I write and talk about, there is another level that remains hidden. I write about a particular morning and in the writing, I am committed to finding a way through. The writing is true and, at the same time, a fabrication—a story based on a true story Perhaps a true story can never be told, for in the telling it separates from the thing it was and becomes something new. Perhaps something in the story resonates with the experiences of others, but the thing itself, the thing that is being written about never happened before the writing.

Bodhidharma didn’t come from India to China, didn’t meet with the Emperor and tell him the essential teaching of Buddhism is ‘Vast emptiness with nothing holy’ and wasn’t the first ancestor in the Zen school in a lineage that has descended unbroken through my teacher to me.

But easier said than done is also another story. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not true. Sometimes just walking down the street with a very young friend in the late winter and noticing the buds on the trees swelling and explaining to him about spring and warmth and green leaves is fully enough and there is no difficulty to be found anywhere. Sometimes we catch a current of energy and are saved from our endless struggle. Or is it more accurate to say we are caught by a current of energy?

I’m reminded of my brief career as a trapeze artist. It lasted all of one afternoon and it was again in Costa Rica, at a resort where my wife was teaching and I was playing consort for the week—just invited along for entertainment and distraction. (Note to self: look into this as potential next career.) It was just an afternoon lesson but it was on the high trapeze. I still vividly remember climbing the tiny rope ladder up and up and how much smaller and higher the platform appeared from standing on it than from the ground.

It was a simple trick they were teaching us: to be caught. All you had to do was step off the tiny platform high in the air. Holding (tightly) onto a metal bar, you swung down and down, then finally began to swing up. At the top of the out-swing ‘all you had to do’ is to put your knees where your head was, bring them under the bar, then back through over the bar to catch the bar with the back of your knees as you released your hands and swung back toward where you started—upside down.

And if you had managed to do all this, the next part was to swing backward and upside-down through space holding on with your knees with your arms and hands extended. When you reached the apex of the second out-swing, the muscular and good-looking young man (who actually did this for a living), would ‘catch you’—would grab your forearms with his hands as you grabbed his forearms with your hands. You released your knees and flew through the air, held in his grasp.

And what I really remember are the instructions I was given as I stepped off the little platform. ‘Don’t try to find the hands that will catch you. LET YOURSELF BE CAUGHT.’ Let yourself be caught. Flying backward, upside down through the air, extend your arms and hands and let yourself be caught. I did reach out into the vast moving space and I was caught and for a small moment, was caught and swung free. It was truly astonishing.

So…putting this mornings lesson all together we’re left with:
1) Easier Said Than Done – remember that this life of being human requires a life of learning,
2) Mind the Gap – it’s actually in paying attention to where we fall short that is where the true journey begins, and
3) Let Yourself Be Caught – maybe God is a handsome young man (or woman or non-binary person) who is swinging upside down like you and is ready to catch you if only you will reach out and allow yourself to be caught.

Maybe enough instruction for one morning.

Good News!

The ambitious American Rescue Plan to support people and stimulate the economy as we move through the rest of the coronavirus recession passed the Senate yesterday on a party-line vote of 50 to 49. We should celebrate. This is a historic moment, indicating that the Democrats, under Joe Biden’s leadership and with their slim majority in the House and their non-majority edge in the Senate, are willing to lead the country. This economic relief package has the support of over 70% of Americans but not one Republican Senator. As Heather Richardson points out in her March 6 ‘Letters from an American’, this bill indicates ‘a return to the principles of the so-called liberal consensus that members of both parties embraced under the presidents from Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, to Jimmy Carter, who left the White House in 1981.’ Richardson points out it was Reagan, who defeated Carter who ‘told Americans in his Inaugural Address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’

Roosevelt led a dramatic shift in our country that was partially responsible for our recovery from the Great Depression. He vigorously used the levers of government to balance and restrain the power and greed of the most wealthy. His patrician colleagues felt betrayed and predicted the end of America as we know it. In fact, just the opposite happened. Republicans since Reagan have been espousing smaller government with the notion that the free market is just and will protect everyone worth protecting. The dramatic expansion of the gap between the most wealthy and the poorest as well as the erosion of the middle class over the past forty years show the pernicious impact of unregulated capitalism.

As summarized by the New York Times, the American Rescue Package includes:
• Another round of one-time direct payments of up to $1,400 for millions of Americans; an extension of the $300 weekly unemployment benefits through Labor Day; and a benefit of $300 per child for those age 5 and younger — and $250 per child ages 6 to 17.
• $45 billion in rental, utility and mortgage assistance; $30 billion for transit agencies; and billions more for small businesses and live venues.
• $350 billion for state, local and tribal governments; $130 billion to primary and secondary schools; $14 billion for the distribution of vaccines; and $12 billion to nutrition assistance.
By one account, the package just passed will reduce childhood poverty in America by 50%. The passage in the Senate yesterday moves the bill back to the House where the amendments are expected to be accepted and the bill will become law.

Though Republicans are claiming this amount of spending, $1.9 trillion, is too much and will have the opposite impact on the economy, these are just the arguments Roosevelt encountered when he fashioned his New Deal legislation. It’s also worth remembering, as Professor Richardson reminds us, that the 2017 tax cut under Trump cost at least $1.5 trillion and benefitted the already wealthy individuals and corporations without having a significant impact on the economy for the rest of us.

The American Rescue Package shows that the Democrats are willing to take the mantle of leadership given to them by the people of this country and take strong and principled action to protect the most vulnerable and support the working class as the path to strengthening our society. Biden has also made this position clear in his support for the unionization efforts of the workers at the Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama.

In a video recorded on February 28, Biden said: ‘America wasn’t built by Wall Street, it was built by the middle class, and unions built the middle class. Unions put power in the hands of workers. They level the playing field. They give you a stronger voice for your health, your safety, higher wages, protections from racial discrimination and sexual harassment. Unions lift up workers, both union and non-union, and especially Black and Brown workers.’

Meanwhile, the Republican party has re-coalesced around Trump. His lies about a stolen election and his stoking fears of a changing society seem to lead the Republican party toward an endless cultural war, thereby avoiding altogether the need for policies and conversations to address the enormous challenges of environmental crisis, economic stratification, systemic racial violence, and COVID recovery.

But today, we should be happy. We have a functioning government and a President who is willing to use his power to take principled stands and to take action for the good of all. We must continue to reach across the polarizing divides of party-line ideology, but we must also move forward on the urgent issues of equality and justice that are at the heart of our dream of democracy.

Nearly a Year

I’m nearing the twelve-month mark in this phase of my writing. Friday, March 13, 2020 was my first daily post: COVID-19, Boundless Way Zen Temple and Blogging. The night before, the Temple Leadership Council (TLC) had met and decided that we would not have any more in-person meditation sessions ‘for at least two weeks’ after our meditation the next morning. We were scrambling to put together an on-line meditation for that Sunday. We thought we were exercising an excess of caution—two weeks seemed like a long time. But looking back, we were incredibly naïve.

I suppose we are always naïve about the future. Our assumption is that the future will be an extension of the past—that what comes tomorrow will be a development of what is here today. We spend our time evaluating what has happened and making plans based on some version of that repeating itself. This examination and reflection of the past can be useful and is often helpful making plans and carrying out projects. But large asteroids, new viruses, and other unexpected occurrences are also a part of what happens. We go for a routine visit to the doctor and find out we have a major illness. We get a cough and fever and our COVID test comes back positive. We slip on the ice and twist our knee and can’t walk for months.

Life is both somewhat predictable and wildly contingent. The web of mutuality that supports us also ties us to each other and to everything in mutual dependence. We cannot be fully prepared for what is to come. We may be captain of our own ship but the wind and the weather, the icebergs and the other ships on the sea (both friends and pirates) are all beyond our control.

‘Unprecedented’ is the word that was thrown around a lot in March and April. Eventually we began to refer to the ‘new normal’ or the ‘new abnormal.’ What was unthinkable slowly became our daily life. Now, as the vaccine roll-out continues at a vigorous pace, we are all beginning to think what life will look like when we can get beyond this phase.

Much has been lost. Over five hundred thousand lives just in the United States alone. Countless businesses and millions of jobs are gone and will not return. Old habits of gathering and socializing have been interrupted. Which will return? How will we be different? What will be familiar? We can’t know.

Our best bet is flexibility and clear intention. As our nation slowly moves back to some semblance of normalcy, how do we not fall into reckless eagerness while avoiding unnecessary caution? Even now some states have removed COVID related restrictions. Will the people in those states be responsive to the information of viral spread and adjust their behavior accordingly or will resuming ‘normal interaction’ too fast lead to another wave of infections?

Politics and culture wars still rage on, severely impacting our capacity to work together in meeting this ongoing health crisis. Our inability to talk with each other across the political divide is an ongoing crises too. How will we reweave our country? Perhaps the whole notion of ‘reweaving’ is incorrect. Our nation has always contained sharp and violently defended divides of privilege based on geographies and birth and skin color. Perhaps this current polarization is the necessary step to address the lies of white supremacy and the only way to move toward a more just and truly inclusive society.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Biden administration for leading by both example and coordinating efforts in rolling out the vaccine. Now the challenge is to continue with clear intention to move toward opening up while remaining sensitive to the permutations and unexpected events that will surely arise.