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.

Love Note

When will you come
my nodding friends
alabaster snowdrops?

Claiming Authority

A friend sent me an article on Dogen that will soon be appearing in some prestigious academic journal. It was fifty pages long and led deep into the thickets of commentaries on commentaries—ancient and fierce arguments over Dogen’s true meanings and intentions. Reading of the polemic point and counterpoints I was reminded that the literary and artistic treasures handed down to us have a long provenance and our current view is influenced by arguments we will never know.

Alan Cole, in his irreverent and closely argued book FATHERING YOUR FATHER, claims that history is the donkey we dress with bells and whistles to pull the cart of the present in the desired direction. The commentaries on Dogen through the centuries since his death certainly bear this out. Each one interprets Dogen to support their own position which is sometimes directly contradicting a previous interpretation. Everybody uses the text to justify and bolster their position, all the while claiming the authenticity of their position through pointing to the text.

Cole elaborates the surprising degree to which the history of one-to-one transmission of Chan (Zen) was consciously created to bolster the fortunes and fame of those looking back. It was Chan teachers in Song dynasty who were vying with each other for imperial patronage and support among the intellectual literati that ‘fathered’ or created their own lineage—arranging historical stories in such a way to place themselves and the pinnacle.

I suppose we all must claim and thereby create our fathers. The identity of our biological fathers is usually pretty well set, but the process of telling and retelling the story of who they are and were is one of ongoing creation. Any individual is a universe of thoughts, feelings and actions. Understanding our fathers (and mothers) is part of coming to terms with the gifts and the curses we have to live with. Cole’s gift to this enterprise is the demand that we accept responsibility for the role that imagination and invention invariably play in the stories we tell about what came before us.

Then there are the fathers and mothers we claim. The heroes, teachers, and mentors we find along our journey that teach and guide us. Some we meet and learn from in person while some touch us through their words or creations from centuries ago. Whenever I read Thoreau and Emerson, I sense how the roots of my words, thoughts and perspectives draw nourishment from the soil of wonder and direct experience which they cultivated. I am a product of their words and thoughts, but I only understand their words through the lens of my own experience. When I quote Emerson (or Dogen), I am selecting only a small portion of his writing—that small portion that supports and authenticates whatever point I am making. I claim him as my source in order to bolster my authority.

Cole’s cynicism about our uses of history and tradition points to important truths, but misses the creative and necessary possibility of something more. While we can only understand something new based on our experiences of the past, we also have the capacity to receive new perspectives and make new connections. Hearing a Dharma talk or reading a book or sitting in meditation, we can hear words and phrases that turn our mind—that point us to something we have never noticed before.

Perhaps the take-away from all this is to cultivate a conscious openness to what we encounter. Rather than just looking for points of agreement and disagreement, can we watch for what is new and unexpected? Can we appreciate resonance and dissonance at the same time we maintain a heart that is open to what has not yet been known?

Refusing To Go Numb

Yesterday, on February 22, 2021 at around five o’clock, America passed the 500,000 mark in the tally of COVID-related deaths. Church bells tolled at the National Cathedral and about an hour later, our President and Vice-President, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and their respective spouses appeared on national TV to mark this grim milestone and to offer words of consolation and support.

Biden expressed his sympathy with those who have lost loved ones, referring to the personal tragedies of his own life:

“I know all too well,” he said. “I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens. I know what it’s like when you are there holding their hands; there’s a look in their eye and they slip away. That black hole in your chest — you feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivors remorse, the anger, the questions of faith in your soul.”

He also mentioned that half a million lost lives is more than the number of American deaths in both World Wars and the Vietnam war combined. And more than any other nation on earth. More people have died in America, one of the most advanced and affluent countries on earth, than in any other country on the face of the planet. This is a terrible tragedy that did not have to happen.

Aside from Republican and Democrat, aside from any animus at the antics of our most recent former President, we need to take a deep look at the failures of our system of government that allowed this disaster to unfold. Even as the current administration, leaders and health professionals across the country work to distribute the vaccine and even as numbers of deaths and hospitalizations are dramatically decreasing, we need to begin to uncover the individual and systemic failures that led to this devastation.

In his brief remarks, Biden also urged us all to ‘resist becoming numb to the sorrow’. He demonstrated this when he pulled out a small card from his jacket pocket on which is updated each day with the number of those infected with the virus and the number who have died. It’s a small gesture and it’s easy to dismiss whatever politicians do in their hyper-self-conscious world of power, but somehow with Joe Biden, I believe his sincerity and am touched.

The New York Times article from which I got most of the information for this post used the word ‘emotional’ several times in describing the brief ceremony. I have not yet witnessed the event itself, but I did see Biden and Harris at a brief ceremony honoring the COVID-related deaths just prior to the inauguration. It was emotional and brief. It was just a photo=op for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but was a demonstration of them using the power of their position to direct the attention of the nation in a certain direction. I got the sense that yesterday’s ceremony was the same.

Biden appears to be setting the new standard for emotional intelligence for politicians. President Clinton was often referred to as mourner in chief. He showed up after a number of national disasters, including a warehouse fire here in Worcester in 1999 that claimed the lives of six firemen, and led us all in mourning. Clinton had the capacity to exude sympathy, but it never seemed fully connected to him as a person. Biden’s personal tragedies and his long career of civil service give his gestures and words a sense of lived reality that is quite different.

So let us heed Joe Biden’s example and encouragement. Let us not become numb to the numbers of people who have suffered and died with this virus. Let us not forget the daily struggles of blacks and people of color who live in a society that does not treat them as the full citizens they are. Let us not turn away from the pain of physical and emotional violence directed against women and children on a daily basis. Let us also remember the daily degradation of our planet in the service of profit and comfort that puts all of human life at risk.

This is not a small thing in a world that encourages us to be happy and seek the quick fix. This is an intentional reorientation of our hearts to honor the mutual interconnection that is the true fabric of our lives. Let us turn toward the suffering around us and the suffering in our own hearts in order to continually rededicate our lives to making a difference. Let us all vow to use whatever resources of position and power—of heart, mind and wealth we have to push the world toward connection, consideration and safety for all.