Already Here

When
will the world open up again?

—

Never
will it be as it was.

—

Don’t wait
for the imagined
mending of future days.

Your true home
is already here.

—

Sitting still
at home,
the Temple
wholeheartedly
finds you.

Sesshin Begins

Retreat began last night yet the Temple is empty this morning. It’s never been like this before.

Forty-one of us gathering on Zoom from around the northeast and with a few brave souls from the UK and Europe for whom the retreat began at 1 a.m.

Coming together to practice—to look into the great matter of life-and-death—to support each other as we swim upstream toward the source world. Not a small intention. Not an easy task.

I wake up conscious of my breath. In and out. In and out. On retreat again. This new retreat. This new moment. The ‘home practice assignment’ was to be conscious of the preciousness of being human. To be alert in the middle of the familiar. This is not what you think it is. Everything you encounter is your life.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

The window is slightly open. The birds began singing an hour ago—in the deepest dark they greet the day that has already come.

Now a unfamiliar song joins the chorus. A sustained trilling sound arises, then falls back into the joyous cacophony of hooting and calling. And again it rises. I listen eagerly and dream of frogs gracing the Temple pond.

In Praise of Being Stuck

The sky is gray and the leaves are wet from last night’s rain. I sit on the Temple porch, well wrapped against the coolness of the morning, but happy to be out here with the birds enjoying the soft leaves of the early spring.

It’s been over two months since I took up this practice of daily writing and this is my second morning of plein air writing. Yesterday a friend was kidding me about my dogged persistence and the pressure I have created for myself.

In her poem ‘Corners’, former United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan begins:

All but saints
and hermits
mean to paint
themselves
toward an exit

leaving a
pleasant ocean
of azure or jonquil
ending neatly
at the doorsill.

But sometimes
something happens:

Though I am neither a saint nor a hermit, I have aspirations toward both and this daily writing practice has been a means to paint myself into a corner in order to discover something new.

Many years ago, I took a workshop with a well-know potter from Minnesota, Linda Christiansen. In her introductory remarks, as she was sitting in front of us effortlessly throwing a few mugs on the potter’s wheel to warm up, she asked us each to say a little about ourselves and our work in clay. But her request was very specific: “I’m not interested in what’s going well in your work, I’m interested in where you’re stuck.”

She went on to explain that these places where we are stuck, where we have run out of options, are the places where we have an opportunity to move into new territory, where we can go beyond the well-worn paths of habit and history.   The problem itself is the entry point into worlds of creativity and beauty.

In her poem, Kay Ryan cleverly speaks only of intention. ‘All but saints / and hermits / mean to paint themselves / toward an exit’. Of course, whatever our intention, we all find ourselves stuck. We may have had a good plan—for the project, for the day, for our lives—but it rarely goes the way we intended. We find ourselves again and again stuck. Beyond our careful intention to paint toward the doorsill, we find ourselves stuck in another corner.

From our small self-interested perspective, this is a problem. ‘I’m not getting what I want.’ ‘This isn’t what I signed up for.’ But we are all saints and hermits now, regardless of our intention. We are all stuck in this world of social distancing and collapsing economies. We are, each one, stuck in our houses or apartments without our usual escape routes. We are stuck in the middle of this pandemic with no clear doorsill to step back to ‘normal’—whatever that was.

So I’m writing again this morning. It’s always different and I’m learning to work with whatever arises. Even nothing arising turns out to be a trustworthy place to start.

Just this. Here is the doorway to the world of fullness.

Rumi also sings of this doorsill between worlds. He too invites us to wake up and enter right where we are.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
 

Personal Practice: Turn your attention toward an area of your current life in which your feel stuck. Describe it to yourself in detail. What is the situation? Who is involved? What is going on? What is the worst part of it? Notice what thoughts, images and feelings arise as you explore this intractable situation.

What if this isn’t a problem? What if this situation is a doorway inviting you to step beyond your ancient histories and old patterns into some new world? You don’t have to believe anything. Just wonder for a while. Notice what happens.

The Next Shock

The California State University system and Magill University in Montreal have decided that their students will not return to the classroom this fall. All classes will be online. This is a catastrophic decision for these institutions and I am certain that many more will follow. While I have no special connection to either of these great institutions, when I read the news, I almost cried. I had hoped residential schools would find a way to re-open in the fall. Some still may, but many won’t.

The decision to only have online classes is an admission by the leadership teams of these highly respected institutions, that there will be no way to safely bring large groups of people back into dormitories until a vaccine is developed and widely available. Given the disastrous financial and institutional costs, and assuming the intelligence and creativity of these leaders, we can assume that they felt there was no option. No work-around. No radical change in behavior or policy that would have made it safe for them to gather and house their students anytime in the fall.

All institutions of learning are facing this same issue. September is three months away. The President is saying we must get back to business. Many health experts and other leaders are warning of dire consequences if we move back too quickly.

The pandemic has not overwhelmed us yet, but we are caught in an ongoing crisis that is neither yielding to our optimistic projections nor playing out our nightmare scenarios. Things are really bad. More people are out of work than the Great Depression. Whole sectors of the economy are nearly completely shut down with no reasonable expectation of when they will reopen. We’re wearing (or supposed to be wearing) masks every time we leave our houses. We still can’t worship in our churches, go out to eat or hug the people we love.

It could be much worse. We have indeed, for now, flattened the curve of infection. Here in Massachusetts, all the indicators, number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths are slowly declining. We have avoided the collapse of our health care systems. Through creative and extraordinary efforts, our hospitals and health systems have geared up enough emergency response capacity and the social distancing measures seem to have had a significant impact. This is all good.

But we now find ourselves in an ongoing state of crisis with no easy answers. The leaders I trust are saying that restarting the economy can only happen safely if the indicators continue to decline AND we have widespread testing AND contact tracing capacity to deal with the inevitable new infections that will arise.

This virus is not going away on its own. Social distancing is our new way of life until a vaccine is developed and widely available. People who know about these things say this is possible within a year or two.

A year or two of this! How will we manage? How do we go on as human beings without the balm of the physical proximity we are so reliant on? How do we live with a future that does not include some of the things we value most?

I pose these questions to myself then sit here in my corner chair without knowing how to answer. The cheap plastic analogue clock on the desk next to me ticks away, oblivious to my quandary. The desk itself easily holds my usual clutter of papers, folders, plants and mugs half-filled with undrunk tea. I stare at the screen of my laptop and notice my breath.  Sunlight illumines the leaves of the katsura trees outside my window.

For some reason, Walt Whitman’s words come to my mind:

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

For today, they will have to suffice.

Personal Practice: What if there were no future. What if today, this very day, were the last one of your life? It’s a silly exercise, but it might be true and indeed some day it will be true. (I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s joke complaining about the restaurant: The food was terrible….and the portions were so small.) All of this will end and wise teachers have counseled us for millennia that this very life with all its troubles and insoluble problems is precious beyond compare. Don’t miss a moment.