Report from the Porch

Sunday morning. A line of thunderstorms yesterday afternoon broke through the heat and humidity to usher in a welcome front of cool crisp air. This morning I sit outside on the porch happily bundled in watch cap, down vest and blanket.

The highlight of our day yesterday was going to Trader Joe’s. It was around four after the storm went through and since we have tried to avoid shopping as much as possible we were increasingly low on frozen food, bread, vegetables, peanut butter and many of the other things we like to eat. I suggested we call TJ’s and head over if it wasn’t mobbed. The nice guy on the phone kindly informed me that the store is always fairly quiet due to occupancy limits, that there is pretty much always a line outside these days, but it was now a short line and moving quickly.

COVID-19 is taking a back seat these days. News media is now stacking stories of protests and racism and potential reform way ahead of the now familiar pandemic updates on confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Voices warn of the viral dangers of gathering in the streets en mass, but the continuing protests seem to be at the leading edge of a shift in how we think of justice, equality and safety in the country.

Or so I hope.

Discussions of de-funding police as part of a new safety and justice movement are gaining traction with some political leaders and seem to have strong support with many. George Floyd’s killing and the subsequent protests have raised awareness of the systematic brutality of the policing we had thought was here to protect us. I suppose the police have done a good job in protecting a number of us, but we’re beginning to see more clearly that ‘us’ has been limited by the color of our skin, our zip code and our socio-economic status.

I’m still angered by how Bob Kraft, the owner of our beloved Tom Brady-less Patriots, managed to avoid all consequences even after he was caught on video engaging in sex with a woman he then paid for her services. Apparently being very wealthy means you are exempted from the laws that are supposed to hold us all equally to standards of justice, fairness and protection. And this difference is nothing compared to difference between the protections afforded a well-educated and comfortably well-off white man and the constant danger to body and person facing people of color.

But the focus yesterday afternoon as the peaceful protests were continuing in Worcester and across the world, was our shopping list, masks and gloves. We waited ten minutes in the carefully demarcated six-foot distanced line, then went into the store with two shopping carts and a plan. Everyone was masked and most everyone followed the one-way signs for the aisles. We filled our two shopping carts with alacrity and were out within 20 minutes. Grateful for the bounty we gathered and grateful for the financial resources to afford such a large shopping.

We’re still not meeting in person here at the Temple. We’re being cautious and waiting to see how the next two weeks go. As we take the beginning steps toward re-entry (restaurants open in Massachusetts tomorrow for outdoor dining) and people gather so closely and chant so passionately, will we see another spike in COVID-19?

Sometimes it seems clear where we’re going, often it is not. But the direction of practicing being present in this moment is a reference point through it all. As we meet what we encounter both in the internal and in the external world, we vow to respond with as much compassion, courage and wisdom as we are able. And we have to trust and pray that this is enough for now.

Personal Practice – Today is the traditional sabbath day of the Christian tradition—a day originally set aside for rest and worship. Given the current circumstances of your life, what would rest and worship look like for you today? There may be old traditions you have forgotten that might be nourishing to enact in some new way. And there may be new practices – little or big – that you enjoy experimenting with on the clear and cool late spring day.

Seduction of the Peonies

1.
My great wish is to give
myself so fully
in each moment
that there is nothing
left to reckon with.

I long to disappear
quickly and slowly into
the stuff of life itself.

I have suffered
too long separate—
waiting and watching,
hoping and trying
for some thing else.

2.
I’m tired of being
so careful and working
so hard to survive
the pandemic.

The pandemic of coronavirus.
The pandemic of racism.
The pandemic of separation.
I want a sabbatical—
a sabbatical from
being human.

3.
I want to be like the peonies
that just bloomed
yesterday in the front garden.
Glorious and unselfconscious,
they proclaim themselves on
slender stems that
can hardly bear the
weight of their wonder.
Not a single thought is
wasted on their precarious
position in the cycle of seasons—
this sudden moment stands alone.

Their peony extravagance
and immodesty are
on fully display.
Not one blossom
holds back for fear
of outshining the others.
These bulbous bundles
of pink wonder fearlessly
proclaim their softness and scent—
delicate petals gathered
for just these few moments
of unrestrained flaring forth.

Each one, so much
more than necessary.

Is God just showing off
or does life somehow require
this kind of reckless spending?

3.
The deep thrumming
energy of life
courses through us all—
rocks, trees, flowers,
animals, bacteria,
insects, bats and even
us beleaguered and
wondrous humans.

Listen and listen again.
Look and look again.
Can you hear it?
Can you see it?

Nothing is hidden.
Nothing is held back.

You must learn to follow
the pulsing rhythms
of your true life.

Proceed Onward With Care

A tiny bit of rain fell a few hours ago. It’s been quite dry here the past three weeks so this is good. But the parking lot under the big trees is still dry, so I know the amount rain is not enough to make much of a difference. It wets the ground, then evaporates with the morning sun, leaving the soil and the roots as dry as before. The well-established perennials and trees are still safe, deeply nourished by the oodles of rain we had in the early spring. But the newly planted or moved plants still need careful tending—just as we ourselves do in times of sorrow and confusion such as these days.

The Buddha’s final words were: ‘All compound things fall apart. Proceed onward with care.’   The Pali word translated as care is appamada which literally means ‘without heedlessness’.   Buddhist scholar and author Stephen Bachelor wrote a wonderful article* many years ago in which he carefully explained that in Pali, the language the Buddha spoke, the prefix ‘a’ is not simply the negation of the word that follows it but rather implies the opposite of that word. He lists some of the previous translations of appamada: “vigilance, diligence, heedfulness and conscientiousness. One German translator, Ernst Steinkellner, translated it as wachsame Sorge. Wachsame means wakeful or watchful, and Sorga means something like care or concern. So watchful concern. Or watchful care.”

Another traditional translation of Buddha’s final words is ‘Work out your salvation with care.’ While I think this is good advice for us all, the original Pali word don’t contain any mention of salvation. The text says to ‘proceed onward’ or ‘strive onward’ with ‘appamada,’ with care. Toward the end of his article Bachelor says:

Appamāda is that intention which guides us and directs us and inspires us, that energizes us, that commits us to what it is we consider to be good. We can summarize that as wisdom, compassion, tolerance—all the virtues Buddhism encourages. But remember that appamāda is the frame that encloses them all.

Most of us are not usually as aware of this ‘falling apart’ as we have been these days. First with the pandemic of COVID-19 we have seen so many of the patterns of our lives and interaction fall apart. Then the brutal and public death of George Floyd. And now the subsequent anguish and the protests of the now-visible structural racism of our society that is another kind of pandemic. This second pandemic is a constant danger to the health and wellbeing of so many of our brothers and sisters who happen to be born with dark colored skin.

What are we to do?

‘Strive onward with care.’ Buddha’s exhortation was not about being careful or cautious. He did not say we should move in slow motion but rather that we need to move foward into our lives and into the world. We move forward guided by the principles and deep truth that inspires and energizes us.

Even when we are lost in confusion, despair or conflict, we can rely on some deeper knowing to hold and guide us. Can we trust wherever we are long enough to sense these deeper urges?

We must take care of ourselves so that we can truly be of use to the world. This taking care may mean finally getting out and joining in the public protest – to risk one pandemic to do something about another pandemic. It may mean listening to the cries of anguish and injustice in ways we have never allowed ourselves. It may mean allowing ourselves to feel the depth of our own grief at all we have shut out of our hearts.

Carefully water the soil that nourishes you. Be kind to yourself and others, even as you follow the wisdom that calls you to stand up for what is deepest in your heart.

Personal Practice – What is it you want to stand for in your life? What is the difference you would like to make in the world? Do something today, however small, to enact this intention. Don’t wait.

Trusting How You Do It

Now that I’ve planted all my seedlings I have to remember to water them regularly until they get established. While the ones in pots in sunny spots will need daily watering throughout the summer, the seedlings in the garden only need this until their roots reach deeply enough to sustain the variations they will naturally encounter over the summer. In past years, when I have had to go off on a teaching trip for three or four weeks, I have left detailed instructions for the brave souls who have volunteered (or been unable to say no to my request) to be Head Waterer.

While a garden this size requires more than one person to maintain, communicating is not always easy – especially when the Head Gardener (me) is more of an enthusiast than an expert. I hardly know what to do myself. I consider most of what I do in the garden to be an experiment.

This is true, but it’s also a story I tell myself.

Sometimes I only know how much I know when someone does something else – something that is clearly (to me) not the way to do things. Then Mr. Easygoing Head Gardener has to breathe deeply and explain more clearly what he knows (and expects) but had not yet communicated. I guess it’s a little like ordinary life. I’m more of an intuitive and tactile learner and I don’t often explain things as clearly as I might—even to myself.

I suppose that is why gardening and working with clay have always appealed to me.

When I first began teaching people to throw pots on the potter’s wheel, I was incredibly frustrated. I would explain the different steps required to center a ball of clay on the wheel and then watch as over and over as beginners would be wildly unsuccessful at bringing their lumpy ball of clay into a smooth and easy center. Demonstrating how to brace your hands and arms from your core as you lean in and push toward the center of the clay fared no better. The students were frustrated and I was frustrated.

I began to have success when I shifted strategy. First, I remembered that getting muddy and messy was part of the appeal of throwing pots. On this score, everyone was doing just fine right from the very beginning. Second, I learned to do all my explaining and demonstrating and then put my hands on top of the students’ hands to center the clay with their hands. This gave them the experience of the energy passing through their hands working with the spinning of the wheel to allow the clay to find its natural center. You have to learn to let the clay and the wheel do most of the work. Then the students learned to teach themselves. Of course it was slow and lumpy work, but that was part of the fun of it all.

It’s the same with the garden. If you want to be a gardener, reading books and talking to experts can be a good place to start, but your real learning has to come from the garden. The most important part of gardening is spending time in your garden looking and looking. The trick to growing things is learning to observe how things grow. They do it on their own. The most we can do is support the vast knowing already present in the seeds and plants themselves. (and in our lives?)

I do have gardening friends that are much more organized than me. Some take meticulous notes and have gardens that are much more carefully thought out than mine. This care is just right for them and is part of how they observe growing happening. For me, it’s more fun to work with the larger feeling of things—looking and sensing into some greater gestalt that is continually emerging.

I don’t think it matters how we garden, except that it’s helpful to find and trust the kind of gardener we are. Like individual plants, we each have our own natural ways of being and thinking and acting. When we appreciate and support the instinctive ways we interact with the world, we can be more at ease and more effective.

These days, however, I’m encountering one of the liabilities of my easygoing style. I am a little like a squirrel who has hidden his nuts for the winter and is now trying to remember where he put them. I have planted over a hundred seedlings at various spots around the Temple garden. Now every morning, I have to remember where they all are. It’s a little bit like the card game of concentration where you have to remember where the specific cards are so you can make a match with the face down cards.

But I don’t mind, I like wandering in the garden.

Personal Practice – What is your natural style? When you have a task to do – whether it is preparing breakfast or starting out on a big project, how do you approach it? What makes you feel comfortable as you work? What if your particular style was just right for you? What if you trusted your natural ways of doing things even more than you do? (The advanced practice today would be to also notice the difficulties inherent in your style and consider learning a new trick or two that would both honor how you do things and at the same time make things a little easier for you.)

Who Is Responsible?

The injustice and violence woven into our society has been starkly visible this past week. First with the murder of George Floyd, then with the heartfelt and sometimes violent reactions that have now gone on for days and days in cities across the country. It’s not that we didn’t know life was difficult for others, but the degree of suffering and rage at the ‘normal’ injustices is often hidden from many of us. Those of us who have the status and power and privilege to do so can choose the issues we pay attention to. But the privileges of life in America are not equally distributed. Being born into a family of color struggling to get by is different than being born into a white family of privilege.

Of course everyone struggles and every one of us participated in creating the reality we live in. But the truth on the ground is that the materials we have to work with are vastly different depending on our birth. Both environment and personal attributes work together to shape our lives. How can we account for the immense differences of birth and natural gifts that humans are born into? Why was I born into a family where it was just assumed that I would go to college and succeed and not a family caught up in a cycle of drug abuse and violence? Why was born in this country and not somewhere else? Why is one person born with physical or mental limitations and another with great capacities that lead to great accomplishments?

Traditional Buddhists explain this painful mystery through the teaching of karma and past lives. The teaching of reincarnation holds that we are each born multiple times and our current life circumstance—being born a beggar or a prince—is simply what we deserve from our actions in our past lives. The gift of this perspective is that it allows you to accept the inalterable conditions of your life and turn toward living fully where you are—whether that is in a situation of great difficulty or great ease—or somewhere in between.

The problem with the theory of reincarnation (aside from its unprovability) is that it easily leads toward a complacency when looking at the injustices and inequities of the world around us. If someone is poor and has had few options in their life, even if they suffer greatly at the hands of others, it’s really their fault—they must have behaved badly in a previous lifetime.

I do believe there are consequences to all our actions – even to our words and thoughts. But I can only understand and accept the teachings of karma on a much smaller scale. In this moment, everything I encounter is my karma—is what my life is. To complain that it should be otherwise or it is unfair may be natural, but it is not the direction I want to put my energy.

From this perspective, those of us with the privileges of whiteness and economic status have to take responsibility for the fires burning in the streets—for the rage and anguish of people who have been oppressed and targeted by the very system that supports our comfortable houses and nice gardens. This is our world. We are part of the injustice in ways that are mostly hidden from our awareness.

How can we open our hearts to the experience of others that is truly different than what we know? How can we, in these troubled days, listen to the cries of pain and anguish without turning away and without blaming someone else? How can we use the privileges and resources we have to change the very fabric of the world we live in?

Personal Practice – Notice, as you move through your day, how often you blame others for what arises in you and how often you complain about your circumstances. This may be very subtle and infrequent or it may be nearly constant. As blaming and complaining arise, notice the impact of these natural human forms of reactivity. Notice how we can so easily become lost in our images of how the world and others ‘should be.’ Once or twice, when these feeling and thoughts arise, consider what it might be like to meet your immediate situation without judgment. What if this isn’t anyone’s fault? Not mine. Not yours. Consider the perspective that this is just what is happening and you get to chose what to do next.