Ongoing Trouble

The election is next week and COVID-19 numbers are surging again. Our current President continues to broadcast lies and to do everything in his power to undermine the sense of legitimacy in the vote that it appears he will lose. (I am hopeful but not confident.) The third wave of the pandemic is upon us and still rising even as Trump blames it on the media and assures his followers that we have turned a corner. (Stephen Colbert has pointed out that ‘wave’ might not be the best term since the ‘trough’ between waves two and three was the same height as the peak of the first wave. Perhaps ‘episodic with ever increasing peaks’ would be a better, though less catchy, description.)

Many of us have no memory of living in times as uncertain and momentous as these. I hope our fear about the future of our republic turns out to be overblown. I hope the Republicans in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, will, if necessary, stand for our way of government over the interest of a political strong-man who wants to stay endlessly in power. But given their past actions, I am not hopeful. Even now I am considering how I might need to stand up over the coming weeks to protect our—to protect what? our way of life? our democratic institutions? my cozy life as a well-educated and reasonably well-off white man?

William James once said that our actions are our vote for the kind of world we want to live in.

I have sent a few letters to anonymous people in Pennsylvania. I was given names and a form letter that I personalized to encourage them to get out and vote. I sent them out on October 18th. The postmark will clearly be from Massachusetts, but the return address will be from Pennsylvania. Hand-addressed, I suspect they may be opened out of curiosity. Will a letter from a stranger have any impact? Even a small impact may make a difference.

I will try to vote this weekend in advance of the election when a local college gymnasium hosts early voting. If that doesn’t work out, I will vote on election day—as carefully as I can. Even a small impact may make a difference. I am hoping the vote is overwhelmingly for Biden and the Democrats.

Jill LaPore’s powerful book THESE TRUTHS makes it clear that the American history that we have carefully scrubbed and polished to support our current perspective covers over a degree of instability and uncertainty that is chilling to read about. Our current situation is not as unprecedented as we like to think. Politics has always been a wild struggle and the forces of greed, anger and ignorance are continually part of the equation. Sensible men (and it has been mostly men) have made morally terrible decisions while patting themselves on the back for their fairness and sagacity. The grand language of democracy has been used to obscure and justify blatantly self-serving actions of systemic cruelty and avarice.

Whatever happens next Tuesday and beyond, the struggle will continue. Trump really does represent the feelings and fears of a significant part of our country. Even if Biden wins and Trump eventually steps down, the work will only be beginning. The damage of the lies and disinformation has only compounded the real challenges of a changing pluralistic society where the traditional hegemony of whites in general and white men in particular is no longer tenable.

Many of us are motivated to join in the struggle – for black and brown lives, for a country where women are treated under the law and in real life as full citizens, to shift our country’s rampant and irresponsible destruction of the environment and to hold corporations to standards of decency and reciprocity that take our grandchildren and their grandchildren into account. For human rights and for the natural rights of this precious and sacred world in which we live.

We must play the long game. It has never been easy or clear or certain. Gains and losses are the peaks and valleys of real life. But there is the accumulation of small actions that can build to a wave of possibility. Please join in however you can to stand for what you believe in – to nudge or push or edge the world toward decency and a greater awareness of the interdependence of all.

Seven Factors of Awakening

Last night I gave a Zen talk on the Seven Factors of Awakening. Melissa and I are in the middle of leading a week-long home-practice retreat in Portugal (Zoom is a wonderful thing!) focusing on these teachings as the theme, so it made sense to continue the exploration. And, subconsciously, I wanted to give us all a respite from the fever pitch of hope, fear and endless speculation that is here this week before the Presidential election.

Since Buddhism was an oral tradition for several hundred years before any of the teachings were written down, many of the core teachings are numerical—the Three Refuges, the Four Boddhisattva Vows, the Six Paramitas, the Four Marks of Existence, etc. There is a whole sutra, the Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, that organizes the teachings by the ones, then the twos, then the threes, etc.

Like all things, it is endlessly complex. There are hundreds and thousands of sutras in the Buddhist tradition. Sutra is a Sanskrit word that means to stitch together and refers both to specific teachings and the various collections of these teachings. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, there is no agreed upon root text. Each teaching itself contains the whole tradition and is, at the same time, only a tiny part of a vast and dynamic web of insight. As teachers we attempt to present the core meanings and we elaborate the living meaning that appears in on our own experience.

The Zen tradition holds that all the sutras are superseded and contained in this moment. All the sutras, all the teachings are just pointing us to the mystery and wisdom that is already abundantly here—that is who we already are. The point of Buddhist teachings is not to memorize or study a list of theories or propositions, (which makes my head hurt just to think about it) but to wake us up to the infinite and ungraspable aliveness that is present right here.

The Buddha did not intend his teachings to be believed or not believed. He said that his followers should not hold a position for or against any proposition. He offered his teachings, not as doctrine but as pointers. Reporting from his deep experience of being human he points us to our own. In Zen, we approach the traditional teachings as ways to understand and explore the many states that we encounter in our meditation practice and on our journey of awakening.

The Seven Factors of Awakening are wonderful teachings that point us to the many qualities that arise naturally as we look deeply into the nature of being human. Here is the list with the original Pali word second and some explanatory words following:

1. Mindfulness – sati – remembering what is most important, paying attention
2. Investigating the moment – dhammavicaya – curiosity, perceiving what is actually here
3.  Energy – virya – effort, diligence, determination
4.  Joy – piti – happiness, rapture
5.  Ease – passaddhi – tranquility, spaciousness
6.  Absorption – Samadhi – calm abiding, concentration
7.  Equanimity – upekkha – awake to reactivity, graciously accepting what is here

In the Nikaya Sutra, one of the sutras where the Seven Factors appears, it comes in a dialogue between the Buddha and one of his beloved disciples, Kassapa, who is ill. A bit of the conversation goes like this:

“Well, Kassapa, how is it with you? Are you bearing up: are you enduring? Do your pains lessen or increase? Are there signs of your pains lessening and not increasing?”

“No, Lord, I am not bearing up, I am not enduring. The pain is very great. There is a sign not of pains lessening but of their increasing.”

After this interchange, the Buddha offers him the teachings of the Seven Factors of Awakening and, according to the story, Kassapa makes an immediate and full recovery.

So now I pass these teachings on to you and to all of us in this fearful time of political and social discord. Take some time to consider how these teachings might be part of the medicine you need as you move through this coming week and into the many weeks that will be coming after.

Making Friends With Wildness

The other night I watched My Octopus Teacher, a new Netflix movie starring Craig Foster as a slightly romanticized version of himself. The film records a year he spent with a wild common octopus in the chilly waters off the tip of South Africa. Foster narrates the film as a love story that bridges, however tentatively, the divide between a human being and this small, strange and marvelous creature. Like all works of art, it’s not just what it purports to be, but its intention is admirable, the underwater photography is stunning and it does invite the viewer into a new relationship with ‘the wild’.

The wild is a central theme in the story we Americans tell about ourselves. The wild was the wilderness which the first European settlers fought against to carve out a place for God’s new kingdom on earth. The Pilgrims who landed on beaches not too distant from where I now write these words, left the land of their persecution with the intention of creating a new world order and awaiting the imminent return of Jesus. For them, the native civilizations already here were, at best, an inconvenient barrier and at worst, an incarnation of darkness and evil.

Likewise, the wildness and the fecundity of the land they encountered was something to be subdued. The forces of darkness were to be tamed and violence was necessary and even valorized in the subjugation of what seemed irredeemably other. The wisdom of native cultures’ deep appreciation of the reciprocal relationship with the land, plants and animals was mostly invisible—as was their humanity and right of residence. The physical landscape, the world the Pilgrims sailed to was merely the stage set for them to enact their holy and solipsistic drama.

The film records the year Foster spent free-diving every day in the kelp forests of the shore of South Africa. Over the time, coming back to the same small area again and again, he made ‘friends’ with one particular octopus and came to appreciate the vast wisdom and interconnected life of ‘the wild’. Foster, in his narration, makes a persuasive case for the time it takes to find our way into a world that does not play by human rules. Only over time, by showing up and looking and looking does he begin to make a new relationship with the wild and strange underwater world he encounters.

Watching the film will hopefully encourage many to work for the protection of wild places and promote the slow shifting of our delusional sense of human primacy over the natural world. We are not separate and in control. Since we are part of and totally dependent on the world around us, there is no possibility of subjugation or dominance. The catastrophic consequences of our limited and human-centric views are becoming impossible to ignore as fires rage and vast storms come at levels unknown in our brief human history.

In the ending parts of the film, Foster emphasizes that it was only by going back to the same small place over and over was he slowly, over time able to see what was really there. The richness and beauty that resides in every detail only revealed themselves to him over time.

While it is important to pay attention to the wondrous and wild world outside of us, I would suggest that an equally important and challenging wildness is to be found inside each one of us. Usually we are too busy to notice the functioning of our own perception and awareness. Most of us operate little awareness or appreciation of the mind’s central role in co-creating the world that appears so objectively separate from us.

How do you meet and get to know the strange and wondrous octopus that we call you ‘self’? While I may say that I am just ‘me’, this ‘me’ is actually a strange and elusive creature. If you try to find the one who is reading these words, you may be surprised how difficult it is. Our language ‘I am reading the words on my computer screen.’ hides a world of vast subtlety and interdependence. To begin to get a glimpse of this functioning that really is our life, take the same commitment and dedication that Foster demonstrated in the film.

Only by showing up to some daily practice of meditation, contemplation or prayer can we begin to get a glimmer of the wild and miraculous world that is who we are. We are not separate from the beauty and interdependence of all things, we have merely forgotten. Remembering requires diving daily in the cold and dangerous waters of the self. It’s hard work, but as Foster says, you come to crave the cold water and you can learn to love what you cannot fully understand.

On Writing a Book

On Friday, I spent most of the morning reading through my blog entries for July. I have this notion that I should write another book. I am quite suspect of my multiple motives for wanting to publish another book, but pushing ahead anyway. I wonder how much of the book dream is about self-promotion and how much is the genuine desire to offer what I have learned (and am learning) in service of others?

I remember being confronted by this same dilemma when Melissa and I were beginning to gather a larger community of Zen students around us and to do more teaching in different contexts. I told my teacher that I was concerned that this larger public visibility was, in some part, driven by ego. He laughed and said, Of course it is. He pointed out that the demands of ego are present whether we step forward or step back. If I had decided that I was not willing to be more visible and not willing to take on the myriad projections of being a public teacher (my own as well as those of the people around me), that decision would be made in the context of ego desires as well.

I must admit to longing to be pure and blameless. I should hold back and not engage. I should live somewhere in the secluded forest and be free from the desire to be known. But this fantasy is equally riddled with subtle self-promotion—wanting to be (and be seen) as beyond the vicissitudes and complexities of being human. The poet and semi-recluse David Budbill has a wonderful poem he entitled ‘Dilemma’ that sets out the problem:

I want to be
famous
so I can be
humble
about being
famous.
What good is my
humility
when I am
stuck
in this
obscurity?

Me too. I have the ego dream of being humbly famous. Or is it famously humble? It was a great disappointment to me in my early twenties when I realized that if I was really humble (which always seemed like an important virtue to me) that I couldn’t really know that I was humble. The dream of being appreciated for not needing to be appreciated.

I take great comfort in my teacher’s words that there is no escape. Since ego fantasies and desires are always going to be involved, follow what calls to your deepest heart. Proceed with care and don’t imagine you will ever be free from the desires and blindness of your little self. Don’t worry too much the ego, it is always there—a necessary, if occasionally devious, companion.

Being free (mostly) from the fantasy of purity, I can live my life and create things of beauty and purpose as best I can. I can follow what intrigues and delights me. The key word here is following. But as I follow this impulse to write another book, I am often confused and occasionally quite discouraged. I have a sense that these short essays I have been writing since the pandemic began in mid-March are the book. Or the book is hidden somewhere in here, but I haven’t yet found it.

I feel like a film-maker who has shot hours and hours of footage and now has to find the movie that is buried inside it all. What is the central thread of my book? How do I select which entries to include? And what is the organizing principle of their sequence? My first book was ordered through the seasons and the year of moving into the Temple. What could it be now? Should I just pick the ‘best’ ones and put them together like a book of poetry? Maybe there is no underlying narrative, just a collection of little glimpses of life?

I have committed to myself to go back and read over everything and see what I can discern. The challenge is to hold the spirit of improvisation and trust as I do this next level of work. On Friday morning, I read over the 28 or so essays from July. I liked them a lot. Each one was a self-contained piece with a beginning, middle and end. All seemed equally about the larger life of the self in the context of the particular. But I found no grounds of inclusion or exclusion—no narrative story.

I only worked for two or three hours, but I concentrated so hard that my head hurt and I got a stomach ache in the afternoon. Being the mindful person that I am, I am beginning to suspect that my physical distress may be an indicator that I need to approach this task from a new perspective. Maybe bearing down and trying really hard is not the best approach to this part of the writing process.

This week, I’ll read over August and see if I can find a softer (and more fun) way of following. I suppose that is the commitment that is the most important—to work in a way that honors the spirit of what I am trying to practice. A published book may or may not be the outcome of my efforts, but at least I can live in the spirit of uncovering and following, which is, as I remember now, what brings me alive and what the book must be about.

Morning Ramble

We walked through the local woods yesterday, my friend and I, on the most gorgeous morning of the fall. Here in New England, after the weather has dipped near freezing and the leaves have begun to fall in earnest we have these days of reprieve. I was delighted to have escaped the many things I should have been doing to be wandering through the woods in good company. Ten minutes into our walk I tied my long-sleeved shirt around my waist and felt like a school-boy walking home in the warm afternoon with the whole rest of the day free for bike riding and play.

Several times over the past few weeks, I have turned to my wife and said ‘This is peak.’ I say it half jokingly and half seriously. The joke is two-fold, first that the certainty of pronouncements often comes in inverse relationship to their accuracy and reliability. Saying something with great conviction is not the same thing as speaking the truth. But it’s a thing up here in New England – this notion that there is a ‘peak’ time for the fall colors. I suppose it’s accurate to say there is a stretch of several weeks when colors are brightest—when the gorgeous yellows and bright oranges and deep reds transform the usual green canopy into a tapestry of wonder. (My toddler grandson, in his innocence and clear perception, treats the colorful leaves as flowers – he dutifully goes over, bends down and sniffs. I join him in his homage. Though I catch no fragrance, the gesture seem appropriate.)

There must be some way to scientifically calculate the precise moment of peak color—taking into consideration all the trees at all the altitudes and latitudes of the area and averaging them exactly. Perhaps we could establish a area-wide scientific investigation. We’d ask every person of every age to go out every day to observe and count the leaves on evry tree. It would be a wonderful enterprise of grand scale and great seriousness. Of course we would all wear masks and keep our distance. We’d be safe in the outdoors and we’d all be grateful for the diversion. We’d all look and look while we counted and exactly measured the color of each leaf. After reporting our numbers, a beautiful map would appear, a colorful map indicating the precise rise and fall from peak color. Beauty seekers would travel from around the world and wander the area with the day’s exactly accurate map in hand. But maybe this is just a pipe-dream and we’ll have to settle for wandering on our own and our daily Covid hot-spot maps of more somber hues of yellow, orange and red.

When I was in college beginning to study sociology, I was fascinated with the concept of appropriate measurement scale. My professor illustrated this theory by saying ‘You don’t need a micrometer to cook a hotdog. You just put it on the grill and try to eat it after it’s hot and before it burns.’ The second hand on my wristwatch (am I giving myself away as hopelessly old-fashioned?) is not necessary for planning to get together with a friend.

I have to admit that I’m a ballpark kind of guy. I don’t really care whether it is 62 or 63 degrees. ‘Low sixties’ is close enough for me. Poking my head out the door and waving my arm around is usually enough to give me a sense of what clothing is appropriate for my next outdoor activity. Though I must confess to checking my phone each morning when I get up to see the weather forecast for the day. I don’t need the hour by hour, the predicted high and low and the precipitation forecast is enough.

The second part of the joke, and I suppose it’s not such a good joke if I have to take so long to explain it, is that I’ve said ‘This is peak.’ before, several times. In theory, there can be only one peak moment for the season. But I suppose, now that I think about it more clearly, there could be one peak moment for each location and even for each tree. The sugar maple near the entrance to the garden has clearly passed peak. The flaming reds and oranges have given way to an increasingly visible lattice of dark branches set off against the blue sky.

The serious part of my repeated pronouncements of peak is two-fold as well. First is the acknowledgment that you can never know the apex of any event, the maximum altitude of the thing, until after the fact. The peak can be certainly identified only after the descent begins. The fullness is appreciated in the midst of diminishment.

My second serious intent is a subtle stand taken for the immeasurable. I suppose this is where I have been headed with the whole joke—why I find it funny again and again.

Life is immeasurable. Life is not a thing that can be plotted on a graph. Of course there are many different amplitudes of our lives. Sometimes we succeed at what we set out to do, sometimes we miss the mark. Sometimes others praise us for our determination and courage, other times we are criticized for our stubbornness and lack of willingness to alter our course.

There are, however, peak moments when we are fully present and appreciative of exactly where we are. They seem to come and with a grace of their own. Yesterday morning was such a moment – walking a trail through the local forest. Yellow leaves fell from the blue sky as we walked into the pleasant morning. An old stonewall followed beside us for a while, its mossy green stones reminding us of the many others who have walked and worked these hills long before our morning ramble.