The Night Wind

All night the wind
convulses frozen trees
in a wild howling.
I sleep fitfully.

Just before midnight,
the doorbell rings
and digital clocks
begin flashing.

After noisy hours,
creeping light returns
and the wind drops.
We all stand still
for a moment

before great gusts
rise up to push again
against the walls of my room.

The acerbic sun
illuminates the bare
branches responding
with fresh spasms of delight.

Snowdrop Delight

My Love Note from February 25

When will you come
my nodding friends
alabaster snowdrops?

was answered on February 26! The flowers are still budded and not yet nodding, but that is perfectly fine with me.

I thought to look for them the day after I wrote, but was genuinely surprised to find them. There are a few secret places I know to look, where they come up every year. Usually I forget and they catch me by surprise, when spring is far from my mind with cold melting snow all around. I’ll be on a backyard excursion to check for something else and they’ll catch my eye by the path, in a patch of frozen ground. I wrote another love poem on March 18 in 2019 about snowdrops, the first flowers of the year in the Temple garden:

As the snow retreats
they surprise me every year
in the same place.

But, as I said, this year I remembered to look even while the snow blanketed 90% of the garden and grounds.  And there they were by the lower entrance to the Temple. It’s not a particularly fertile part of the garden—nearly fully shaded by a spectacular crimson rhododendron that has risen beyond all reasonable rhododendron expectations and dominates the area. I have a couple painted ferns that seem to be happy underneath along with some ornamental ginger, but not much else seems to tolerate the shade and soil…except the hardy few snowdrops that return year after year.

After ten springs walking in this Temple garden, the larger patterns are just beginning to reveal themselves to me. This is the joy of gardening, to discover and work with the natural flow of things. The garden here has been a patient teacher. Though I am a slow learner, my stubborn enthusiasm keeps me around long enough to take in some small portion of the beauty and brilliance that surrounds me. The way things happen grows only slowly on and in me.

I am a great believer in the randomness of events. As we used to say in sociology, correlation is not causation—just because two events happen one after the other does not mean that one caused the other. I am a great believer in the staggering number of variables that lead to the occurrence of any single event. Freud called this overdetermination—there are a number of reasons why any particular things happens—each one is, perhaps, sufficient explanation, but not a full explanation.

Over the season and over the years things happen in a garden. Some plants flourish, some survive and many die. As a gardener, you are always working with failure and death. The plant that looked so healthy and lush at the garden center or in its glossy photo in the catalogue, looses its mojo when placed in what should be the perfect spot. Or it does well for a season or two, then mysteriously withers.

But in the middle of all the coming and going, a lot of things flourish—most of them not due to my care. I suppose that’s one of the criteria for succeeding in the Temple garden, to survive without a lot of fussing necessary. Now fussy plants are beautiful and we could also call them high relationship plants. Fussy is just the word of a lazy gardener who isn’t fully committed to the relationship.

We had a Zen student who had a thing with orchids. She would take our supermarket orchids after they had bloomed and before we took them to the compost pile. They would return several months later covered again with gorgeous blossoms. The orchids clearly delighted in her careful attention and she in theirs. The rescued plants would grace the Temple for weeks on end.

For me, however, I like the rough and tumble plants that, having found the right location, flourish with the proud neglect of a gardener who doesn’t like to work too hard—who just wants to appreciate the natural processes as they reveal themselves.

So the wild snowdrops have done quite well in the Temple garden and have finally taught me to look for them before I am even thinking about spring. I went down to the lower entrance on Friday afternoon, just on a whim because the snow was pretty much everywhere.  (It was the day after writing my poem of longing for them, but usually I’m so busy longing that I forget to look for what is already here.) There, in the small neglected area near the lower door was a small patch of ground not covered in snow. And there, to my delight and surprise, were the three first snowdrops of the year—each one just two or three inches tall, snuggled amongst the round wild ginger—holding aloft their white buds, almost ready for nodding.

Transitioning

This morning. I wake up in the dark with a sinus headache. It’s not terrible, but it’s not pleasant and I notice that I’m unconsciously clenched against the sensation. I feel not only the sinus ache underneath my eyes, but also a tightness in the whole area of nose, cheeks and eyes that feels like it extends to my brain. Now a little more awake in the dark, I turn toward this amorphous arising. It seems possible to release some of the generalized contraction around the ache itself. This reduces the unpleasantness and all I’m left with a dull sensation that’s surprisingly subtle and hard to describe.

Now, the urge to pee becomes strong enough to overcome the inertia of the beddrag* that entices me to stay under the covers. In a previously unpredictable moment, I uncover my formerly sleeping self, swing myself upright and make my way to the bathroom to pee, to the kitchen to make tea and finally to the living room to write.

Having turned up the thermostat when I started the tea, the heat now begins to come to the radiators. Here, in the front room, it comes with a pleasing hissing sound that reminds me of other houses and other cozy winter mornings snuggled reading or writing in a warm chair. But from the back of the house, a familiar hammering sound begins. It’s only when the heat comes on, and it lasts for just a few minutes, but it’s like the carpenters are back and doing a small bit of noisy remodeling in the very early morning. Or like we have a ghost carpenter who got lost on the job and wakes up every morning for just a short time to complain and rail against his lot. He’s a water ghost and is trapped in the pipes of the heating system.

I imagine it’s not a bad life—no deadlines or responsibilities. He gets to do a lot of local traveling around the house and he’s constantly changing states from water to steam and back to water again. My theory is that he only minds the first transition of the day. When the early morning blast of steam comes to rouse him from his dark slumbers, he’s shocked and disturbed. In panic, he hammers frantically on the pipe to get out, but realizes, after a short time, that it’s more fun to be the dancing energy of steam than to complain. So, after a short tantrum, he sets his hammer down and abandons himself to the flow of what is happening.

But really, I know it’s ‘water hammer’ and has something to do with water that has not properly drained back to the furnace encountering the fresh steam from the furnace. The incoming steam ‘rapidly condense over a puddle of water causing the water to snap violently up into the partial vacuum left by the condensed steam.’ I can’t quite picture this alleged ‘violent snapping’, but I can certainly hear it.

Later this morning, I promise myself that I will go and do my best imitation of a handy-man and see if I can notice anything off about the pitch of the radiator or the pipe that serves both as the conduit for the steam to the radiator and the path for the cooler water on its return journey. Mostly, on these handy-man adventures, I see little and give up quickly, but you never know.

Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to surrender to the thousand transformations of state required through the day. From sitting to standing, from inside to outside, from confused to clear and back again. Of course, a little complaining and clenching is to be expected, so I’ll try to include that too and see what I can learn.

• beddrag – the feeling of reluctance to exit the warm comfort of the horizontal life of dreaming and enter into the vertical exertions of daily life. See February 20 ‘Discovering New States of Being’

On Writing A Book

About a year and a half ago, for some unknown reason, I decided I wanted to write another book. I spent several months wondering and dreaming what it should be about. What do I have to say that might be both valuable to others and be attractive enough to a publisher to want to put it into print? I did a bunch of writing and reflecting but nothing emerged clearly enough to find a way forward.

Then the pandemic came last March and we were all forced to shelter in place. Part of my immediate response was to begin to write these daily reflections. I think I wanted both to clarify my myriad feelings and perceptions as we moved into this unprecedented territory and to offer support to others meeting the same challenges.

I had begun this style of daily writing about fifteen years ago when I began to take writing seriously. At first it was just for me, then I began posting occasionally on a blog. These posts led to a few magazine articles and eventually to a book proposal that was accepted by Wisdom Publications in 2009.

The book was supposed to be about Zen and Life Coaching – about their paradoxical overlap as seen through the three-step process of attention, intention and action. (Notice where you are, remember your purpose and take the next step.) I had a detailed outline that followed logically through the three areas and had even chosen anecdotes to illustrate various aspects. I took a three-month sabbatical from my coaching practice to write the book with very little to show for it. For more than a year, I continued to do my best to write the book I had promised. I wrote countless drafts and revisions of chapters, but it never came to life and it always felt like hard work to me.

Meanwhile, I was writing these daily, more personal and poetic (I hope) reflections of the various real experiences of my life and how the teachings of Zen and coaching are applicable in real time. I eventually realized that this smaller format that begins with my actual experience rather than some generalized theory felt much more alive and useful to me. I eventually convinced Wisdom to publish a collection of these pieces as THIS TRUTH NEVER FAILS: A ZEN MEMOIR IN FOUR SEASONS.

I still have many inspiring theories and wonderful schema to explain how life works, but when I elaborate them too far, they all fall flat. A friend of mine used to talk about the ‘shelf-life’ of inspiration. You’ll read a fantastic quote or find a new rhythm of exercise or a new diet and for several day or weeks everything will be clear and bright. But eventually, every new program or perspective wears out and becomes just another technique.

Life is much more complicated than a simple three-step or twelve-step or even 108-step process. Not that these frameworks aren’t helpful and necessary for navigating the territory of being human, it’s just that they can easily hide the wildness and unpredictability that is at the heart of our human experience.

Most non-fiction, self-help, spiritual-inspiration books I read have enough content for about twenty pages. Successful authors keep it simple and repeat their main point over and over. I am congenitally unable to write (or read the entirety) of a book like that. I want more surprise and variation. I want play and different perspectives. I want something that doesn’t claim or attempt to be complete.

Life is not sequential, reasonable or ultimately workable. We can grow in love and understanding, but we cannot outgrow our limited and mortal nature. Our vision will always be partial and our solutions only temporary. The good news is that this is not a problem, but rather simply the invitation into the provisional ongoing dance of life.

So I am realizing again, that my new book has to come from these shorter bits of reflection/life. I’m a little overwhelmed by how much I have generated over the past year, but am recommitting to finding/creating a new book from the richness of all that has come through me.

This morning, I feel a special gratitude to my regular and occasional readers who have been my appreciative audience this past year. Likes on Facebook and short messages of gratitude and acknowledgement have been crucial to my capacity to sustain this exploration and sharing.

A deep bow to so many.

Cow Paths

Breathing in and breathing out. Trying to be still enough to find the beginning of the path this morning.

I’m sitting on the familiar brown couch some friends gave us when they moved to California. It’s awkwardly proportioned and for years we have intended to replace it, but I’m growing used to it and with every passing day, the likelihood of its escaping its present circumstance diminishes.

There is an inertia to the way things are. I remember from school: a body in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Is it also true that the longer a thing is in one place, the more likely it is to stay in that one place? Or the more often a particular thing happens, the more likely it is to happen again?

Apparently, the likelihood of repetition is indeed the true for our brains. Every time a particular neural circuit (emotion, thought or action) happens in the brain, the more likely it is to occur again. In Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, they used to talk about these repeated paths of the mind as cow paths. The (apocryphal?) image is that of cows that tend to take the same way back to the barn every day. And every day their feet wear down the path a little more until the path becomes visible; slightly, then eventually significantly, below the level of the rest of the field.

The path starts in the habit minds of the cows, then appears in the world as a response to their repeated actions. It’s almost as if the world and their minds are not separate things, but each one responds to and shapes the other. This is the Buddhist teaching of the mutual causality between the self and the world. This perspective of mutuality is increasingly supported by the burgeoning field of neurology. We create and are created by everything that surrounds, supports and challenges us. Each of us is an ongoing interplay between what appears within and what arises without.

But back to the neurology of our minds. The more often we participate in any thought, feeling or action, the more likely we are to do it again. The neural path becomes a groove that the feet of our thoughts naturally fall into.

It’s interesting to think of thoughts as having little feet and having some choice of paths. This image may actually reflect some truth of the choices we constantly make as we interpret the sensations and signals we receive from the world.

What just happened? How should I react to what that person just said? Were they being hostile or just distracted? Do I need to defend myself, set them straight, or thank them for their honesty? Was it a big deal that I need to figure out or was it just my stomach rumbling to tell me that breakfast is coming soon?

The story we tell about what is going on is a choice that impacts the quality of our lives and creates part of the world we live in. Each story is a kind of hypothesis about what is going on in the world around us. We create our stories from scattered bits of input we take in from the world which we then mix with a big dollop of our experiences and stories from the past. From this invisible recipe, we internally create the ‘reality’ which we experience as external to us. Mostly, we are happily (or unhappily) unaware of our part in the construction business.

So I sit here on the brown still couch. (It is both remains brown and is continually unmoving.) The inertia of my intention to write and share has once again led to this small creation. I found a trailhead, followed/created some winding path, then found my way back to the end/beginning to make a clean getaway.

I am not really sure of my purpose or the further shape of these musings. What is this life that comes through me? I follow, elaborate and play as directly as I can–appreciating and performing the cow paths, highways and open fields of life.