A Small Diversion
- At April 03, 2020
- By drynick
- In Reflections
0
Since March first, I have planted over a hundred flower seeds for the Temple garden. My bedroom, an improvised plant nursery where the grow lights are hung, is beginning to have the wonderful fragrance of damp soil and growing things.
The smell reminds me of being a young boy and getting to spend time with a friend of the family, ‘Uncle’ Eddy. His pants were always dirty (most adults I knew wore clean pants) and he chewed a burned out cigar all day. Uncle Eddy ran a greenhouse business and he let me come and ‘help’ one week each summer. Among many things, he taught me to use lukewarm water to water small plants. When I asked him why, he asked if I would rather be sprayed with ice-cold water or with warm water. When I said I preferred warm water, he just smiled at me.
But back to the seeds themselves. They came in a variety of unpromising shapes and sizes. Distinctly unflowerlike. The purple petunias, flamboyantly pictured on the flower package, were like round bits of tan tapioca. The Cherokee black eyed Susans were more like little bits of grit swept up off the floor—so small one sneeze would have dispersed the whole lot of them.
Now, most all of the carefully buried seeds have sprouted. The Queen Sophia marigolds are the most recent additions. The mature and bushy plants will prettily surround the spent iris in late June in the garden to the Buddha’s left. Many gardeners turn their noses at the common marigold, but I am quite fond of them. They bloom throughout the summer and don’t mind the heat and occasional dry spell.
The Queen Sophia variety, aside from having a wondrous name, has a handsome blend of deep orange and reds in its compact flower head. But the seeds themselves are like splinters of wood with a bristle of blond hairs protruding from one end. Weird, but big enough to individually place in six-packs this past Monday afternoon. Now, merely four days later, they are quarter inch green miracles—the babies of the nursery, but headed for great and bushy things.
The lacey leaved cosmos are the rulers of the nursery. They now soar a lordly six inches on green and red straight stems topped by deeply branched abundant leaves. They look like prehistoric trees over as the sit under the grow lights next to the bitty marigolds.
As I write this in the dark morning, outside it’s raining and just above freezing. It’s been a cold week and I worry about my timing. Part of the art of growing seeds indoors is knowing when to start so they’ll be ready when the weather gets warmer. Start too soon and the plants will turn ‘leggy’ and malnourished. But if you wait too long to start, the flower won’t mature and bloom on schedule and you won’t have the fun of spending March and April in a bedroom with green growing things.
Balancing Fear and Denial
- At April 02, 2020
- By drynick
- In Reflections
- 0
We’re now told, here in Massachusetts, that we can expect the rates of Covid-19 infection to peak within the next two weeks. The National Guard has begun building a field hospital for corona virus patients in the downtown Worcester community civic center where the local minor league hockey team used to play. Social distancing does seem to be having some impact, but the drumbeat of death tolls both actual and predicted fills the media. The stock market dropped another 4.4% yesterday. These are dark and uncertain times.
How do we find a way to go on living our lives in middle of it all? How do we find a middle way to live between panic and denial? How careful should I be? Should I stay inside all the time? Should I even go to the grocery store? How much is too much? Strangers, friends and families disagree. One of the Buddha’s first teachings after his awakening might be a helpful guide as we navigate these uncharted waters.
It is said that after the Buddha’s awakening, he came upon the small group of religious ascetics who had been his former colleagues on the path. He offered them what has become known as the teaching of the Middle Way.
Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people, unworthy, and unprofitable; and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable.
The path to awakening, the path to the fullness of life, avoids both extremes: the indulgence of sense pleasures and the addiction to self-mortification. The extreme of the anything goes—live for the moment and the opposite of a life of rigid self-denial. We are encouraged to find our way between an aimless life with no center and a fear-based life of inflexible adherence to a set of rules.
Our minds seem to like to break the world in two. White and Black. Right and Wrong. We want to make sure we are making the right decision, not the wrong one. The teaching of the Middle Way encourages us to see the world, and ourselves, as more fluid and dynamic than this simple bifurcation. While there are actions that are more or less helpful, our lives are not a series of morally fraught choices.
The teaching of the Middle Way encourages us to bring our whole selves to the moment we are encountering – our intellect, our emotions, our hopes, our fears all get included. The Middle Way is not a dull compromise but rather a fresh response to life – one that honors as much of any given situation as we are able.
Each choice we make is a creative expression of our life. We allow ourselves to be present with what is here and we sense our way into the future that is shaped by each one of our actions. We act, as best we can, in response to the conditions of the moment and in light of what we value most.
So may we live in these times. To proceed with care and appreciation—to live fully in this always unprecedented moment.
Paradoxical Comfort
- At April 01, 2020
- By drynick
- In Reflections
- 0
Yesterday, I ended my reflection with the following question: “What is it that we might touch, that we might remember that will sustain us even as we walk though the valley of these days?” There are a thousand answers to that question. Or perhaps just a thousand forms of the one ungraspable answer.
A Zen colleague recently sent me the following paradoxical answer: a rendition of the beginning of the book of Ecclesiastes by Rabbi Rami Shapiro from his book THE WAY OF SOLOMON.
Emptiness! Emptiness upon emptiness!
The world is fleeting of form,
empty of permanence,
void of surety,
without certainty.
Like a breath breathed once and gone,
all things rise and fall.
Understand emptiness, and tranquility replaces anxiety.
Understand emptiness, and compassion replaces jealousy.
Understand emptiness, and you will cease to excuse suffering
and begin to alleviate it.
I first came upon the harsh and comforting book of Ecclesiastes when I was a sophomore in college. It was a difficult year for me as I struggled to make the transition from youth to adulthood and to chart some path that had meaning for me. In the midst of confusion and pain that spring, I met with one of my religion professors and poured my heart out to him. He listened without saying too much then he went to his bookshelf and pulled out his well worn bible. He began reading about a time for planting and a time for reaping; a time for living and a time for dying; a time for rejoicing and a time for sorrow. I was strangely comforted.
In Rabbi Shapiro’s rendition, King Solomon’s words become even wilder. Encouraging us to find our grounding not in the permanence of things, but to rest in the inconvenient yet inescapable fact that nothing is permanent. What is this emptiness that he sings of? Empty of permanence / void of surety / without certainty. From one perspective this leaves us tumbling through an ever shifting space with no point of orientation.
Yet when we look closely, we ourselves realize this truth that the Buddha expressed in his final words: ‘Everything falls apart. Proceed with love.’
We spend much of our time trying to hold things together—trying to fix thing—trying to make sure things come out our way. You may have noticed that this is ultimately a futile exercise. We cannot hold onto the people or circumstances we love. Children grow up and move away. All of us, if we’re lucky, grow old and die.
When we see that everything is arising and passing away, we can begin to get out of the control business and make our home right in the middle of this beautiful and impermanent world. Understand emptiness, and tranquility replaces anxiety.
May we today realize the truth of coming and going, the truth of no permanence and no certainty. That we might be free to appreciate each moment as this mysterious life as it constantly appears—now in the form of this, now in the form of that.
When will this be over?
- At March 31, 2020
- By drynick
- In Reflections
- 0
Already we’ve come to the end of March and there’s no end in sight. Easter services have already been canceled. Here at Boundless Way Zen Temple, we’re in the third week of suspending all in-person gatherings. Originally we thought two weeks of physical distancing would probably be sufficient. Now it’s uncertain whether two months will be long enough.
Welcome to the new normal. Wash your hands. Stay six feet away from others when you go out. Be careful. This is no vacation, but an endurance contest. How long can we survive, isolated in these small houses and apartments?
And the mind, seemingly on its own, runs on ahead – wondering about the future. What will things be like when this is over? Will my work still be working? What about my carefully crafted financial plans? Will I ever be able to go out to eat again? How long will this take? Will my parents be safe? How will I manage?
Even as I write these questions, I feel my heart beating slightly faster and a my stomach turns uneasily with the subtle sensations of fear.
Gregory Bateson, the great anthropologist, thinker, and occasional Zen student once said: “The mind creates the world then says ‘I didn’t do it’” We our lives within the many worlds of our creation. This creative participation is mostly hidden from our awareness. But just in reading the words above, as the mind shifts its attention and we can see how this operates. Though the world has not essentially changed in the last five minutes, my experience of the world changes radically. Worlds of ease. Worlds of fear.
What are the resources and the skills we have to manage in this new normal where danger is real in some new way? Where we can no longer pretend that life will obligingly go on according to our predictive illusions?
‘Even though I walk through the valley and the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ The words of the 23rd Psalm come to me—arising from some forgotten corner of my mind. I am surprised how comforting they are to me. Is it remembering that human beings have always faced danger and fear? Is it the courageous recognition of this land of the ‘shadow of death’ and the assertion of not being overcome with fear?
What is it that we might touch, that we might remember that will sustain us even as we walk though the valley of these days? Time to unearth and turn toward something more trustworthy than our own competence and cleverness.
Days Like Lightening
- At March 30, 2020
- By drynick
- In Reflections
- 0
Last night, in our Zoom Zen meditation gathering, we read a short passage from our 13th century Korean ancestor Chinul. Chinul is credited as being the founder of the Jogye school of Korean Son (Zen). My teacher’s teacher, Seung Sahn, founder of the Kwan Um Zen school, was his 78th successor. So through my teacher, George Bowman, I am Chinul’s 80th successor. Yikes!
I suppose we are all the successors of so many geniuses and ruffians. If you could count back 80 generations, I wonder what you would encounter? What lineages we could all claim—women and men of great courage and faith as well as people of questionable ethics and behavior. Those who lived in times of prosperity and those, like us, who lived in times of crisis.
But sometime around 1200, somewhere on the Korean peninsula, Chinul wrote this reminder for us all: ‘The days and months go by like lightening; we should value the time. We pass from life to death in the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out; it’s hard to guarantee even a morning and an evening.’ I have read this passage for many years and each time it brings me up short. But in this time of uncertainty, even familiar words seem to contain some new import.
Days and months do go by like lightening. I am constantly amazed to find myself an old man of sixty-seven, when I remember so clearly being a young man. ‘Just the other day’….can now mean last week, last month or several years ago. My grandson, now nearly fourteen months old, was born just the other day. How quickly our lives pass and how surprisingly easy to miss this wild evanescence in the pressure of our daily responsibilities.
Life, as Chinul says, is not guaranteed. Our usual sense of the solidity and stability of life is a delusion that, while necessary and comforting, is ultimately not true. We all have many different reactions when we remember or when we are forced to confront the ephemeral quality of life. Chinul, I believe, is not trying to scare us, but to turn us to wake up to the preciousness of our lives in this moment.
Reminders of our shared mortality and fragility are now woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Walking down the street, I move to the other side of the sidewalk when I pass someone. I am afraid that I might either contract or spread this novel corona virus. But these reminders work both ways. Now complete strangers walking by the Temple will sometimes stop and smile and ask about my health as I work in the gardens. We smile at each other, remembering that we are connected.
So as we live into the full extent of the pandemic, whatever that may be, let us remember to value the time. Remembering the momentary miracle of breathing in and breathing out, let us take delight in the people and the fullness of life that surrounds as is us.
Follow David!