Powerful Questions

I wake up amid the usual swirl of thoughts and wonderings. Lying in bed, I scan the contents of my mind to see what was alive. What territory am I in this morning? Everything is gray and fuzzy. I wonder what I will write about? Nothing especially calls to me.   But regardless I circle my wrists and wave my arms in the dark as if I were trying to stir up the stagnant energy pressing down on my chest. With an internal sigh, I get out of bed, pee, put on some clothes and head for the porch.

Even though I have been writing and posting almost daily for five months, I still don’t know how I do it. I am grateful for this. If it was up to me, if I had to figure out what to write about each morning, I’d be in trouble. I suppose it’s a little like walking, if you had to ‘know’ how to walk, you wouldn’t be able to take a step.

The part I appear to be responsible for is to getting out of bed, sitting down with my laptop and starting. Just get one sentence written, then see where it goes. I’m reminded of an exercise I used to do when I taught life coaching. It was an exercise about curiosity and powerful questions.

Curiosity is one of the primary skills for coaches like me. Rather than trying to fix things or give good advice, the skill is to be curious about what is going on. (This is actually much more fun than trying to fix people.) So we’d talk about curiosity—what it is and how it functions. Often participants would bring up words like wonder, appreciation and not-knowing. The image of young children often surfaced as well. I often mentioned that Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, a former professor of education at Harvard once wrote that curiosity is one of the most sincere forms of respect. Rather than assuming that I know who you are and what you mean, I get curious.

In the workshops, we would then talk about different kinds of questions. There are informational questions, leading questions, rhetorical questions, ‘look at me’ questions and many more. There are also powerful questions. Powerful questions are short, open-ended and evocative. They invite the person you are asking into some deeper place.

We would explore powerful questions by me making a statement and them asking me several powerful questions related to what I just said. I would answer one of the questions, then pause to let them come up with more powerful questions, then answer that…and etc.

I might say: I have a practice of writing every morning.

Then someone would say: Why do you write every morning? And I would explain that why is rarely a helpful word because it takes people up into their head and invites a certain defensiveness. A more invitational way to ask this question is: What leads you to write every morning?   Someone would say How long have you been doing this? and I would say That’s an informational question. A more powerful question might be What led you to start this practice? Then other questions would come: What have you learned from your practice of writing? What is it like when you are writing?

And I might choose to answer the last question and say: It’s early morning, before the day starts. It’s quiet and I feel like a scribe trying to accurately present some aliveness of the moment of my experience.

They might go on: What’s it like for you before everything starts? What do you notice about being the scribe for aliveness? What do you enjoy most about the process? How does your writing process relate to the rest of your life?

Anyway, you see how one thing leads to another when you’re curious. I would then put them in pairs and have them practice powerful questions on each other. One person makes a simple statement and the other person asks a short, open-ended and evocative question. Person number one briefly responds, then pauses. Person number two asks another question. We go on for five minutes.

These conversations would invariably be wondrous both for the questioner and for the person being questioned. I came to realize there were three essential ingredients in this exercise. First is the agreement of both parties and a willingness to have a different kind of conversation. Powerful questions are intrusive and socially inappropriate without some kind of permission, tacit or otherwise, that is given. (e.g. do not try this on your partner without first getting their agreement)

Second, pausing is necessary. If the first person goes on too long, the second person doesn’t get to practice. Saying just a little bit, the first person stops and in that stopping there is a pivot point. Some juncture appears that allows curiosity to enter. The stream of what we already know is interrupted and unseen possibilities can appear.

Third, the asker needs to consciously touch a place of curiosity, of genuine interest. Powerful questions come when we let go of what we already know and begin to wonder about what we don’t know. We’re invited to constantly let go of our opinion and where we think things should be going to follow the aliveness of where they are actually going.

So curiosity is part of what allows something new and interesting to emerge. I have an aversion to writing about what I already know—even if it’s true, it’s kind of boring. So I continue to pursue what it is that I don’t yet know—continue to trust that if I pay attention and follow, the path will appear under my feet.

Considering the Heavens

I was sitting in the pool the other day with one of my buddies when he looked up and saw the sky – or at least that’s what I thought he saw. Being only 18 months old, he’s not very articulate, but he looked up with rapt attention into the clear blue and I’d swear he said ‘sky’ (or at least ‘ky’ which is 2/3rds of it and impossibly cute).

A grandparent’s hearing is generous. Anywhere near the target is a bull’s eye for me. Of course eventually he’ll need (and want) to learn to say the whole word and perhaps even use sentences, but for now anything that I can interpret through context as a real word gets full credit and enthusiastic repetition and praise. I’m always willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. My job is encouraging and appreciating. Leave the evaluation and correction to others.

But there’s so much to learn and sometimes I despair for him. Not that he won’t learn everything he needs to know—but that the world is in such a desperate place. Between the pandemic, our political melt-down, the reckoning of our inhumanity to our black, indigenous and ethnic brothers and sisters, and the planet that is sliding quickly into environmental catastrophe, it’s sometimes hard to know where to look for hope moving forward.

In the early eighties Melissa and I were considering having a child but were hesitant to bring a baby into the world that we saw was in crisis even then. (Not to mention our trepidation of the awesome responsibility of being parents.) Melissa went on a small retreat with a then relatively unknown Vietnamese Zen teacher named Thich Naht Hanh. At one point someone asked him about the morality of bringing children into a world on fire. He said you should only have children if you are willing to raise courageous warriors for love.

So when my little friend looked up in some kind of state of amazement—a relatively common state for him—I looked up too. And I repeated what I heard him say: ‘Sky. Sky.’ And we talked about the sky for a little. I explained to him how high and blue it is–how the white clouds float through it unobstructed. He added his occasional and trenchant observation of ‘Ky. Ky.’

Then, after we had discussed the heavenly situation thoroughly, we went back to filling plastic cups with water then dumping them with a splashy delight. Every now and then, however, he would stop and I would stop. Together we would look up at the vast blue ocean of air above our heads—pausing in wonder and in love.

American Breakdown

I suppose any organization or relationship or country contains within it enough contradictions to lead to its own demise. Though our great American country has been seen as the shining example of democracy, creativity and freedom, we now appear to be crumbling under the weight of our own incongruity. Our apparent success over the past 70 years has been partly due to our own PR machinations—we have never been shy about speaking of how brilliant and special we are—and partly due to world circumstances.

So much comes with material success—including the power to control the narrative—to tell the origin story of the world in which we live. There is no question that the US has been the greatest success story of consumer culture in the history of the world. After our tangible success in defeating some of the overt forms of fascism in World War II we kept the engines of production running. We nurtured a super-charged consumer culture based on inflaming desire and a single-minded focus on financial measurements.

But the cost of our actions to the natural environment, to those at the bottom of the economic pile, and to those African Americans and Native Americans whose labor and land were essential to this whole Ponzi scheme is only now coming into the full light.

Pete Seeger’s sang a wonderful song in the sixties, Seek and You Shall Find, that had an interlude in which he told the following story:

I got a story about two little maggots. You know, little worms. They were sitting on the handle of a shovel. The shovel was in a workshop, and early in the morning, a workman came, put the shovel on his shoulder, and started down the street to work.

Well, the two little maggots held on as long as they could, but finally they jiggled off, and one fell down into a crack in the sidewalk, and the next fell off onto the curb. And from the curb, he fell into a cat. A very dead cat.

Well the second maggot just started in eating. And he ate and he ate and he ate for three days. He couldn’t eat anymore. He finally said, “*Yawn* I think I’ll go hunt up my brother.”

And the second maggot humped himself up over the curb, humped along the sidewalk, came to the crack. He leaned and said, “Hello! You down there, brother?”

“Yes, I’m down here all right! I’ve been here for three days without a bite to eat or a drop to drink. I’m nearly starved to death! But you… you’re so sleek and fat. To what do you attribute your success?”

“Brains and personality brother, brains and personality.”

So we give ourselves credit for the fortunate circumstances we are born into. We imagine that our success is the result of our individual efforts—conveniently ignoring the vast array of people and circumstances that allowed our efforts to bear fruit.

Here in America, we are deeply mired in a necessary and painful self-reckoning. Our inept and disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic has cut through our national delusion of competence and ingenuity.   The gross inequalities and violence endemic to our way of life have become impossible to ignore.

I credit Trump with the speed of our growing self-awareness. He is the exemplar of so much that is broken about America. His focus on himself, his willful disregard of any facts that don’t support his narrative and his constant self-congratulations are a caricature of our country. He is the distorted mirror in which we can all see enough of ourselves to perhaps stop blaming others and look to ourselves.

I am scared for the very foundations of our country. It appears that this election will vote Trump out of office. But I am not confident. And already Trump is positioning his followers to not accept the legitimacy of any outcome that does not have him staying in the White House indefinitely. What chaos and discord will he sow if the results are against him?

We are in for a dark time.

Miraculous Findings

The hibiscus plant at the top of the waterfall is blooming again. Its deep red blossoms are feathery dinner plates—magically floating five feet off the ground through the careful grace of leaf and stem below. I can just see it through the morning darkness. Such an unlikely manifestation of life.

Last year, by this time, its leaves were shredded—lacy remains of insect feasting. A friend and I brushed off all the little bugs we could find, but we had few blossoms. I was worried the whole plant might not come back this year. But it did and after one morning of killing little worms that were beginning to eat the leaves in May, the hibiscus plant has been thriving. One never knows.

Most flowers seem impossible to me—the symmetrical and intricate shapes made out of the thinnest of living tissue—each one beyond the skill of the finest craftsman. And the vibrant hues that seem effortless in their richness and gradations. I could perhaps understand if one plant made one flower—like daffodils or tulips. But the abundance of most flowering plants is astonishing.

I’m always surprised. A seed. Some dirt, water and sun. A trick to amaze nursery school children. The sunflower seedlings I gave to some friends a few months ago are now ten feet tall with stems as thick as the handle of a baseball bat. The tops are covered with nodding round heads filled with scores and scores of more seeds.

How generous and robust is the energy of life that continually shapes itself. Always blooming and always falling away in a dance with no gaps. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is not held by everything else.

A green praying-mantis-type bug walks along the other side of the glider. A walking leaf – legs as thin as pieces of thread robustly carry the little fellow on his morning constitutional. I feel a strange kinship with him though he may be off to munch on one of my favorite plants. But perhaps he’s after the insects that ate last year’s hibiscus leaves. I wish him well and we make plans to check in again tomorrow morning.

Circumambulating the Self

The daily writing and posting project is wearing thin. Lying in bed this morning I wondered how many more mornings I will continue to write. Perhaps I have said what I needed to say? Perhaps I have offered up as much wisdom and perspective as I have? Perhaps it is time to go back and read it all over and see if there is a book in it all somewhere?

Of course things just get really interesting when we move beyond the end of what we had planned. So maybe I should just go on writing with an openness to whatever may arise? Or I could go back and pick random posts from other mornings to read and comment on. I could make a practice of debunking everything I have written—or at least give the other side—or I could elaborate on whatever I had said.

My intention has been to offer what I have to support and encourage others to pay attention to their own experience. This seems most essential to me, that we all find a way to follow the wisdom and difficulty that arises as we live. The truth is not ‘out there’, but rather in each of us. The most meaningful compliments I have ever received from readers is that they feel less alone and more at home in their own skin after reading something I have written—that what I have written reminds them of what they already know.

I suppose it’s my own loneliness that gives me the energy to write and share, to teach and practice Zen. One of the people I asked to write a blurb for my book said he thought I was slightly depressed and wrote about the same things again and again. He was right, I do sometimes struggle with feeling separate and I do go back to the same things over and over.

When I was in Kathmandu, Nepal seven years ago, I stayed in the guesthouse of a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery right next to Boudhanath Stupa—a holy pilgrimage site for many Buddhists. The faithful (and I suppose the not-so-faithful as well) come and express their reverence and their prayers by walking around and around this imposing structure. Without the crowds, it takes about ten minutes to make the loop—that is if you don’t stop to buy anything from the vendors selling religious trinkets, incense and tourist paraphernalia.

The more deeply faithful or expressive go around the stupa by bowing. Standing up straight, they bring their hands together in prayer, then extend themselves on the ground—fully flat with arms extended—then rise up. In this way, they move forward body length by body length. The more experienced of the bowers have pads on their knees and wooden boards on their hands so they can slide easily over the rough cobblestones as they prostrate themselves. These devout worshipers are appreciated by the walkers and are often given small donations of cash to support their endeavor.

But I meant to talk about the circumambulation of the stupa and how we are all going round and round the stupa of our self—trying to figure out who we are. We revisit the same issues again and again. We are all working out our salvation with fear and trembling as my Christian friends would say. We can only work with who we are, but we are told, again and again, that everything we need is already here.

What we need is here, but it’s not obvious. In fact, it is so hidden that it is often hard to believe that what we already have enough. Most of us are so sure that we are missing something. Indeed we are, but what we are missing is waiting patiently right where we are.

So we look again and again. We get up every morning and try to find our way into the truth of the moment. We move through another day and another day. Coming up against the familiar fears and worries, we move into new versions of our fears and worries. And sometimes, when the stars align and the grace of the universe descends on us, we wake up to the simple freedom of just what is here. Who we have always been turns out to be more than enough and we settle into where we have always been as our true home.