Instructions for Making a Small Outdoor* Sculpture

1. Wander around gently
2. Find a new place to sit down
3. Close your eyes and go dreamy for a few minutes
4. Receive whatever comes to your senses and your mind
5. Open your eyes and look easily around
6. Pick up the first seven things that catch your attention (and are pickup-able)
7. Place these seven on the ground near (or on top of) each other
8. Move them around until they come into an arrangement that pleases you in some way
9. Step back and take a picture of what you have created
10. Imagine that a dear friend has just sent this photo to you as a way of communicating something subtle
11. Consider what message or ‘tip’ from this image might be useful in your everyday life
12. Go about your business as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened

*may also be indoors as conditions warrant

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)

The Fruits of Determined Study

For the past two years, I have been supporting a friend who has been studying words, language and texts. His interest and attention in the subject are variable as he is quite the polymath who also has a keen interest in the physics of everyday objects, the interpersonal psychology of the nuclear family, as well as in the biomechanics and expressive possibilities of the human body. With a finely tuned intelligence and ferocious curiosity, there’s practically nothing that doesn’t catch his attention and doesn’t become an object of study for him.

He’s one of those people who you just want to be around because, in their proximity, the world is a little brighter and more vivid. In his company, you see familiar things in new ways and stumble upon fresh perspectives to what is right in front of your eyes. He naturally embodies Suzuki Roshi’s wonderful teaching: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Once we know what we are looking for, we miss most everything else. Once our opinion is settled, we cherry-pick the input of our senses—noticing only the evidence that supports our original supposition—and ignore the whole rest of the constantly emergent universe. This selective perception and confirmation bias is neither intentional nor a bad thing. Living in the world as we have come to know it from the past is a sign of a well-functioning human brain and is both normal and useful. Remembering where the bathroom is when you wake up in the morning is one of the under-appreciated miracles of most of our lives.

Wonder, on the other hand, is a very expensive human commodity. Wonder engages the whole brain in some new activity. Wonder inhibits the back channels of functional processing in order to allow information to be received and examined—not just unconsciously shuttled and sorted into the correct bin. Wonder holds what is perceived in a suspension of appreciation before allowing what has come before to fill in the contours and gaps.

My friend is an expert wonderer, but part of this wondering and exploring comes at the cost of everyday functioning. I don’t mean to put him down or cast aspersions on his character, but he is really not very good at taking care of even his most basic needs. Fortunately, he has two friends who are quite devoted to him and are willing to manage the practical details to give him the time and space to wonder about everything.

His progress on words, language, and texts has been both slow and astonishingly fast. There is one text he has been studying now for a little over two years. It’s a small mystical tome with brightly colored pictures accompanied by poetry. When we began studying it, he would look intently and listen carefully, but I was never sure what, if anything, he understood.

But just yesterday, when he woke up from his nap, we were once again investigating the text when he began saying the words himself—as if he could decipher the squiggled lines on the page. I began ‘Horn went beep / engine purred…’ and he, to my surprise, took over and completed the stanza: ‘prettiest sound / you ever heard.’

I turned to him, smiling in amazement. He smiled back at me with pride and delight—as if he knew this was a big deal. We then, together, followed the tense adventure of The Little Blue Truck and his friends through being stuck in the ‘muck and mire’ and beyond. I would say a line or a word, and he would complete the phrase. Magical.

This was the fruition of two years of study. I first read this book to him when he was just a few weeks old and I had to make sure his head wasn’t lolling off the side of my arm. I think we’re even on the second copy as the first one disintegrated with the gnawing on the edges and the repeated exuberant turning of the pages.

Yesterday was a milestone moment for me in understanding that he is beginning to crack the code. The narrative structure, the words, the meaning all are dancing between his two-year-old mind and my sixty-eight-year-old mind. Both of us continuing to delight in the words and images of life that arises between, within and around us all.

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)

Wondering About the Possibilities

April fourth. Easter Sunday, 2021. The heating pipes bang repeatedly as the steam rushes to the noisy radiator in the back of the house. About one minute of hammering, then it’s just the pleasant rumble of a gas boiler below and the hissing of steam up here. I’m layered up though it’s already almost sixty where I am in the front living room. A blanket over my legs, a down vest and my trusty winter watch cap and I’m quite cozy.

My wife and I are settling into our new home here while we shuttle back and forth the quarter-mile from our old home, the Temple. The preponderance of nights are now spent here which means that the geography of my morning writing has altered as well.

When we first looked at this small arts-and-crafts bungalow nearly six years ago, we were both struck by how unique and well laid out it was. A small house with wonderful windows and a feeling of space. A large fieldstone fireplace greets you as you come in off the front porch with its picturesque angular columns. This front room is the heart of the house—a spacious room that runs the width of the building. Large square windows take up most of the wall space on either side of the central front door, two windows look out to the west and French doors between bookcases open the eastern wall to a modest porch, lawn and garden.

It all smelled like smoke when we came with the real estate agent. As an enthusiastic camper, that was fine with me, but was almost a deal-breaker for my wife. But what I remember most from that first visit is sitting on a couch in this very spot where I am now writing (to the right as you face the fireplace) and having a clear waking dream of sitting here with my laptop writing and looking out the very window I’m looking out right now. In that dream, I was writing poetry every afternoon with the sun pouring gently through the western windows.

The sun is not quite up yet, and this is not really a poem, but it’s all close enough to entice me wonder again about the causality of things and who is doing what to whom. I mean, is this moment of writing a manifestation of my dream or am I a realization of the dream of the house itself? Are the energies of this building and of this spot of the earth expressing themselves through me? (I can certainly vouch for the fact that though ideas come into my awareness and I tap them into the laptop, I have no clue where these ideas come from nor why one arises and not another—this earth spot and this building are as likely a source as any.)

Does the gardener coax the reluctant seeds to life or do the seeds somehow entice the gardeners to be their hands and feet? Enlisting willing humans is a wonderfully ingenious strategy to spread one’s seeds to wide and gentle geographies that may likely be conducive to the flourishing of the next generation. I imagine the committee that came up with this strategy: ‘No more relying on the birds and the bees to spread our seed, we’ll persuade these two-legged singing creatures to carefully collect us, put us in packets with our seductive blossoms on the front to attract other gardeners, sending us around the country and even sometimes starting us indoors to give us a head start on the season.’ I imagine the delight of the planning committee as they came upon this idea and then realized the best part of the scheme was that the two-legged creatures would most likely think that they themselves had decided to do this. A brilliant reproduction strategy. Inert seeds able to take full advantage of humans—their hands and feet and their latest technology—to enhance the chances of survival of the next generation.

So is buying and eventually moving into this house and sitting here on the couch looking out the window as the radiator rattles and writing—is this me manifesting my dream? Or is my presence tapping out these words while occasionally glancing out the eastern French doors to a brave pot of petunias sitting on the railing of the porch, is my presence part of the dream of the house? Perhaps the fieldstone fireplace is an antenna receiving the angelic voices of the universe and making them available for me to express as I catch fragments of their celestial words and tunes.

Of course, I don’t really believe any of this. But on this day where some significant percentage of the world is celebrating that someone who was three days dead, twenty-one hundred years ago, rose up and walked again…I do wonder about the possibilities.

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)

Nothing Inspiring

Foggy brain morning. How to make my home here?

Nothing inspiring or unusual. Same old, same old. The cold weather has me discouraged again. Nothing here but a slight headache and the hum of the refrigerator and the insistent birdcall that comes through the windows.

It’s Saturday of Easter weekend. In the story, He’s still in the darkness of the tomb. Taken down lifeless from the brutal cross and laid out. The Christians are mourning, and the authorities are relieved. What a story to guide a civilization! A story of a peace that passes understanding followed by a senseless death at the hands of the authorities (I thirst.) And then, they say, and they’re already getting ready to celebrate, there is the rising up from the dead. On the third day. Really? Did any of this actually happen then? Or is this still, like all stories, about something that is happening now? (I can’t breathe.)

I read a lovely Ryokan poem in a Dharma talk the other night and a student responded by sharing a matching parable from the Bible about a man who discovered a pearl of great price buried in a field and went and sold everything he had to buy that field. No, no…he joyfully sold everything he had to buy that field.

Where is this field and what is the pearl that could cause such joyful generosity? (For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son…) The pearl of incomparable value is the essence of this life of ten thousand joys and sorrows. Where is it now? How could it be here even in this morning’s dull discouragement?

Hakuin Zenji says: ‘Why do people ignore the near and seek truth afar? Like someone in the midst of water crying out in thirst.’ And Jesus chimes in: ‘The Kingdom of God is within.’ (But it will cost you everything you own and you will joyfully pay.)

Wasn’t yesterday’s reflection something about hanging around long enough to appreciate what is already here? Might that apply to even this?

This quiet morning. The cold sun of early spring illuminates the eastern side of the leafless tree across the street. I slouch easily on the couch in mild discomfort. The street outside is empty. Everything waits here.

Instructions for Wanderers

The point is to try to hang around long enough
in any one particular place to sense what is actually happening.

(Unless we go beyond our opinion,
we cannot receive what is already here.

Without intention, our determined illusion of isolation
separates us from our true kinship with all things.)

Three hanging around skills to test out:
• slow down,
• have no useful purpose,
• be surprised with what you find.

But don’t worry—even without summoning some clear intention and before every employing clever tricks, you have never, not even for one second, been separated from the fulsome love of the universe that holds, sustains, and delights in you.

(Excerpted from forthcoming book Wandering Close to Home: A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries. September 1, 2024.)