Crabapple Trees at the Temple

The first fall we lived at the Temple many years ago, I noticed two medium sized trees covered with small round fruit that was red and looked like cherries. But when I cut one open, instead of the one large cherry-stone I was expecting, the white flesh held a number of smaller seeds. When I took a small nibble, it was bitter.

But throughout the fall and winter these two trees were a congregating place for birds who clearly had a different opinion of the culinary merits of the hard little fruit. Often it was just a bird or two flitting from branch to branch occasionally reaching out to snack on one of the red fruit. But sometimes a whole flock would spend the morning hopping from branch to branch eating voraciously. I suppose these were the long distance travelers, stopping at the filling station to eat as many crabapples as their little stomachs could hold.

I eventually learned that these two rather ordinary looking trees are crabapple trees. My fingers slipped as I typed their name and it first appeared as carb-apple – which I suppose they are for the birds. Nutrition for the long winter ahead. Sustenance for the long journey.

One winter we lost a big chunk of one of the trees to an ice storm. I still remember climbing up a ladder with a bow saw a few days later in the bitter cold that came after the storm. A friend held the ladder steady on the icy ground while I balanced at the top pulling the saw back and forth to free the hanging branch of the main trunk. It looks so easy when someone else does it, but it took forever for us. We took turns as our arm strength gave out, but eventually we cut through and the top third of the tree crashed to the ground.

Later that season, we called the arborist to look at the damage and see what could be done. He said both crab apple trees were old and should probably be cut down and replaced. I thanked him for his advice and sent him on his way. What he didn’t seem to appreciate was what happens every spring.

In the spring, these two unassuming trees with the unappetizing name, put on a show of filigree and delight that always catches me by surprise. The trees live right outside the third floor window of my office here at the Temple. The tallest of the branches, which have grown to lushly fill in where the main trunk was trimmed by me and the ice storm, are even with my eyes as I look out. Behind these two treasured crabapples are the larger trees of the garden—the maple and oak that are now flushing the bright golden green of early spring.

The crabapple trees, old and endangered as they are, are blossoming once again. Not just one or two or even a few hundred. But thousands of delicate white and pink blossoms covering both trees. The one on the far side of the brick path is ahead again this year. It’s blossoms are already fully open. It’s like it has snowed popcorn and the bushy branches of this particular tree have caught the popped kernels before they hit the ground.

How do they do this? The exuberance of the thousands of petals and stamen and pistols, each perfectly made. Each one offering itself to the blue sky and the bees and to me. It will only be a week or two. The peak will come and I won’t know it until the day after, so I try to appreciate each day’s showing.

A blue jay flies by as the morning sun begins its descends from the tops of the trees behind. The clock on my desk ticks and ticks.

Personal Practice: Look around you and notice what sign of spring catches your eye. Give yourself the luxury of really looking at it. What are the textures, shapes and colors? Take some time to wonder about how this could possibly have came into being. Take a moment to thank this plant-being and the unimaginable source from which this delicate being arose. A miracle right here.

Touching What is Already Here

One of the gifts of having been a life and leadership coach for almost twenty years now has been to witness the amazing creativity and wholeness of human beings. Now that I think about it, I actually began coaching when two sisters were born when I was five and six years old. Suddenly I was a big brother. I was very proud of my two young friends. They taught me how to listen and how to let them learn at their own pace. How to be playful, but not too much. They taught me how to appreciate the joys and accomplishments of others. To this day, I am endlessly grateful to them both.

One of the basic tenants of coaching as I learned it formally in ‘co-active coaching’ aligns with the teachings of Zen: each human being already has everything they need. My job as coach is not to diagnose, solve people’s problems or give good advice. My job is to appreciate this person and to remember that they are already creative, resourceful and whole. They may or may not feel this way or even be behaving this way in their life. But my job is to help them connect to the wisdom and passion that is already within them.

It is the same in the practice of Zen. We are taught to turn our attention toward what is already here. Zen is not a self-improvement project. We’re not trying to be ‘Zen’ or to escape from our ordinary lives (though sometimes I must admit…..), but rather we are learning to be who we already are. This is a paradoxical enterprise since we are already fully who we are. It’s just that we suffer so much from the delusion that we are separate and that we should be something or someone else.

But repeating the platitudes of sufficiency is not enough. Both in coaching and in Zen, the encouragement is to find out for yourself. It’s all experiential learning. My job as a coach and Zen teacher is not to share my wisdom with the people I work with. My job is to help them touch what is always present. This begins, as the great Zen master Dogen wrote, by ‘turning the light of your awareness within’—beginning to listen to your deeper self.

To listen to our deeper selves, we have to somehow get through the thicket of gremlin voices that live in our head. These internal voices have endless opinions of how and who we should be. Often we are afraid to even acknowledge our own dreams and deep wishes for our lives. Who are we to want something more? We have so much, we should just be content and stop complaining.

The questions I often begin a coaching relationship with are simple and challenging. What is your dream? I often ask this question in various aspects of your life: career, finances, friends and family, personal growth, intimate relationship, recreation and location. Often we’re so busy coping with the challenges of the moment that we don’t give ourselves time or permission to dream.

Personal Practice: Take ten minutes today to dream. Sit down in your favorite chair or go for a short walk or lock yourself in the bathroom—whatever it takes to create some psychic space around you. Then think of a particular aspect of your life and imagine what it would be like if it were really great. Not just pretty good, but really amazing. You don’t have to be realistic, but be as specific as possible. Where would you be? Who and what would be around you? What would it feel like?

Allow yourself to dream. You don’t have to do anything else. Know that, for whatever reason, this is your dream. You don’t have to tell anyone, but sometimes just becoming conscious of the dream can bring an energy and aliveness to our lives that we had forgotten.

Waking Up Worried

I wake up worried this morning.

It takes me a while to realize this. At first I think I’m just thinking. But then I notice that all my thoughts are about difficulties and problems. Nothing terrible—I’m worried that my cosmos seedlings have grown too big and won’t survive indoors long enough for the weather to warm up. I wonder about the new programs for the Temple that have occurred to me and how quickly and directly I should act on my ideas. Then I cross over to the decade long koan of the relationship of Boundless Way Temple (the Temple) to Boundless Way Zen (the larger organization that the Temple is a part of) and wonder what I can do going forward to help everything move forward. Everywhere I look there is some problem that needs to be resolved.

I begin to notice that I am going on and on. Images in my mind—fragments of conversations I have had and perhaps should have. Thoughts of what needs to be done. I am in a state of general unease. I have a sense of heaviness and dull responsibility. My thoughts jump from one topic to the next and I am looking for a way out. It’s like I’m in a forest at dusk. There are no paths and I’m trying to find my way out. I’m not terrified, but I really don’t want to spend the night in this particular forest. I want to find my way into the clearing.

Now I begin to put some things together.

I have the great insight that this is a familiar place. Now this is not a small thing to realize this. So many mind-states appear so often and are so familiar that we take them to be ‘reality.’ In this worried place this morning, I first imagine that I am just considering reality. This mildly worried, first-thing-in-the-morning mind-state appears to me as simply a measured consideration of the troubled state of my life. I am unaware of my part in creating this trouble for myself. I unconsciously accept the premise beneath all these thoughts—that the world is a troublesome place and my only way out is to think harder.

It’s as if my mind has created something for itself to do. Perhaps my left-brain was feeling left out by all the right-brain dreaming through the night. This rational figuring out part of my brain was simply wanting some business—wanting to come on line and join in the action. (I have noticed that if I am having trouble waking up in the morning, all I have to do is call to mind something upsetting and I get a shot of energy – like the warning siren comes on and all systems run to their battle stations. I don’t do this too often, because though its effective, it’s a little unpleasant.)

It’s now 4:45 and I’m still lying in bed in the dark room. I realize that there is this similar quality to all my thoughts. Wherever I ‘look’ I see some kind of difficulty that feels heavy and slightly difficult. This is the tip off for me. I’m not really thinking and problem solving. I’m in the realm of worry. I know I can’t think my way out of this realm, it is perfectly self-contained with the seeming capacity to go on forever.

So I try to stop worrying.

This doesn’t help. I remember that I haven’t yet made the call to my friend to see if I can get a small piece of his huge hosta that I admire every summer and claim the next spring I will stop by and take a few shoots for the Temple garden. But where would I put it? And so it goes. And so it goes.

My mind, this morning wants to worry. Resistance, this morning, is futile. So I stretch a little then sit up and swing my feet to the floor. I turn on the grow light at the foot of my bed, put on my slippers and down vest and go down to the kitchen with my worrisome mind. It’s not the best company. I’d like to be someone more cheerful, but I’m all I’ve got, so I make the best of it.

Writing about it helps. At least I can be interested in this difficult self. Turning towards it, examining it makes it feel a little less personal. This is just the weather of the morning. I’m still a little worried, but it’s loosening its grip. My body remembers that this particular state, like everything else, comes and goes on its own.

Personal Practice: The next time you are in a difficult mind-state, see if you can be aware that you are in a difficult mind-state. The familiar ones are hardest to notice. Can you notice what it is like? What is the quality of feeling for you here? What are the patterns or rhythms of this place? Can you think your way out of this place? If so, please do. If not, can you allow yourself to simply be like this for a while? Notice what happens.

Planning Ahead

Several months ago I read a series of books about Franklin D. Roosevelt in his role as leader during World War II. The author, Nigel Hamilton, tells a compelling story (over three volumes!) of FDR’s skill as a leader and his remarkable courage in the face of a world nearly consumed with violence and aggression. One of the main surprises of the book for me was how much thought FDR gave throughout the war to the shape of the world after the war. Even in the darkest days of the early forties when the final outcome of the war was anything but certain, FDR and others were already thinking and planning about what would come after.

This possibility to imagine the future is one of the unique gifts and challenges of being human. We can all torment ourselves with fearful scenarios but we can also create visions of life that can energize us to accomplish great things. FDR consistently spoke of what the war was for—thus reminding people of the importance of their collective effort and sacrifices. Having a vision of the future is part of what can bring us together and give meaning to our actions in the present. Imagining and planning a future scenario, however abstract, also help us make choices about what we do and don’t do right now.

Most of us are still under lockdown and plans of re-opening in the US are just beginning to emerge. Very few timelines have been offered and the ones that have seem wildly unreliable. The truth is, we don’t know when we’ll begin to go back to ‘normal’ and we don’t even know what ‘normal’ will look like when we do. So much is uncertain. Even when the social distancing rules are relaxed, will businesses be able to open? Will enough people go back to support the ones that do open? Will the jobs that have vanished reappear? And are we talking three months? Six months? Two years? So much is unknown.

But even within this uncertainty, we have the capacity to begin dreaming about the future a personal level. While this pandemic has brought horrific suffering and loss to so many, it has also shaken us out of some of the unavoidable mindless forward momentum of our lives. Many of us have had time at home, seemingly too much time at home, to consider some things that we took for granted.

Perhaps it is time to consider what we have learned during this time about ourselves and our lives. What is it about our current personal reality that we might want to keep as we transition, at some point, back to more physical connection and responsibility? And are there things we used to do and ways we used to be that we would rather not do and be when things resume?

These are questions to hold and ponder. While the pace full re-engagement with each other seems glacial now, it will come sooner than we suspect. ‘Normal’ will come back, both through the change our physical routines and through our natural human adjustments to the conditions in which we find ourselves. Newness and disruption are inevitably subsumed into just the way things are.

But right now, in the middle of it all and without knowing what exactly will happen, what is the vision for your future that calls to you? As you re-engage, how do you want to be? Are there parts of your life that you would just as soon not re-enter? Are there qualities or insights that are present now that you want to make sure to bring with you?

Personal Practice: Take some time to reflect over these past two months. What has become clearer to you about your life? What are you enjoying now that you might not have noticed or had time for before? What have you stopped doing that you’re happy about?

Now consider what it might look like to re-engage with others AND bring some of these new learnings, new ways of being along too.

Final question: what can you do today to practice turning toward these things that are most important to you? It’s actually our behavior today that has the biggest impact on the future we move into.

The Good Old Days

I’m out on the porch to write in the open air for the first time this year. Fifty degrees is my cut off point, below that, even bundled up, it’s not worth it. Now it’s almost sixty and I’m quietly giddy out here with my tea and my laptop. The birds call to each other and to me with great vigor as the morning darkness begins to give way to the twilight of another day.

I love this time—before the schedules and the responsibilities begin. Just me and the birds. The trees in the Temple garden are now the fuzzy electric green that comes as they once again release their tiny green leaves—tender and miraculous solar collectors coming online for a new summer of sun. A few cars whoosh by on the street in front of the Temple.

Though the governor of Massachusetts has just mandated that we all wear masks in public (beginning Wednesday) and there is no date for ‘opening’ the state, the number of cars on Pleasant Street, where the Temple lives, has gradually increased over the past couple weeks. It’s like we can’t help ourselves, we have to be in our cars. We have to be moving. It’s too scary to stay at home.

Already I kind of miss that ghost town feeling of our first weeks of the pandemic when we were all staying at home. It was possible to walk down this major artery into the city of Worcester and see no cars at all. No need for cross-walks. Those were the days.

My teacher used to tell a wonderful story about his teacher Zen Master Seung Sahn, the founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen. Kwan Um is now a world-wide organization and one of the major sects of Zen in the west. But this story happened in the early seventies, at the very beginnings of the school, when it was just a hardy band of young Zen enthusiasts.

One weekend a month, they would have sesshin—a traditional Zen meditation retreat that would last for three days. As this story goes, George and Seung Sahn were sitting side-by-side on the front stoop of the run down tenement that was their home and meditation hall. It was nearly time to begin the retreat and not a single person had yet showed up for the sesshin. They sat in the formal robes they had just received from Korea. Through some mistake in the ordering, the only robes that arrived were winter weight. It was late August and they were both sweating profusely.

Seung Sahn turned to George and said: “These are the good old days, Georgie. These are the good old days.”

So it is that the present relentlessly becomes the past. The fears and anxieties, the joys and aspirations, however vivid, are all folded into the dream we carry of ‘how it used to be.’ We may imagine that it really was like we remember it to be, but our memory, like ourexperience of the world, is selective and creative.

But there is this morning. The bird sounds and car sounds come easily to my ears. The coolness of the slight breeze is gentle on my cheek. The hosta in the large pot at the corner of the porch is now a small army of green lances poking through the crusty soil. The light of another day softly seeps into everything.

I have a slight headache and my tea is now lukewarm.

Ah, these are the good old days.

Daily Practice: Sometimes a word or a phrase can be a useful tool to focus your attention and allow you to enter more deeply into your life. If it sparks your interest, try using ‘These are the good old days.’ as a training phrase today.

Try it right now if you want. Repeat ‘These are the good old days.’ silently to yourself, then look around at the particular circumstances of this moment. Everything here is fleeting. You’ll be on to something else soon enough. Can you stop right here for a moment and appreciate the exact quality of this? The way the light falls on the floor? The warmth or coolness of the air. The sounds? The smells? The precise quality of whatever mind-state you happen to inhabit?

This passing moment is your life. These are the good old days. Enjoy.

On Choosing

As our collective staying-at-home practice has dragged on, most of us have gone through many different mind-states. At first, perhaps, our new lives of sheltering-in-place were exciting and unusual. Then many of us began to find our way into new rhythms and patterns of living, our new normal. Now the news is reporting on ‘isolation fatigue’ and we are wondering how long we will be able to go on without having the freedom to move around, buy things in person and hug each other again.

One of my friends spoke recently of the freedom of time she felt during the first weeks at home. Most everything on her calendar had been cancelled and she felt a sense of openness and ease. Each day felt spacious. Moment after moment she got to choose what to do next. Now she’s back to a familiar sense of being busy – scheduled zoom meetings and new versions of commitments have re-filled her schedule and her mind.

I’ve been feeling this as well. Last week, I wrote about my relationship with my past self, the one who creates the schedule that I have to deal with when I wake up each morning. Sometimes, I can’t imagine what he was thinking as he scheduled multiple conversations back to back to back—or when he imagined this old body could go on one long walk with a friend in the morning, then another with another friend in the afternoon. I mean, really!

The shifts in perspective we have all been living through are actually a wonderful opportunity to look more deeply at some of the patterns and beliefs that keep us stuck in less than fulfilling lives. Looking more closely at our sense of ‘busyness’ can be a doorway to a life of greater freedom and ease.

Busyness is the addiction of our culture. We are obsessed with how much we do and how much we produce. Being busy is a signal to ourselves and to the world around us that we are a person of importance. We are doing as much as we can so we’re not really responsible for the things we can’t get to. We complain and commiserate but we can’t find our way out of the maze. We have forgotten our basic power and responsibility.

We are always choosing. Yes, there are consequences to our choices, but we are always the one who is choosing. We can blame our past selves or our boss or the circumstances of our lives, but in the end, we are each free to choose and we are responsible for our choices.

As humans, we often fall into a sense of ‘obligation.’ ‘I don’t want to do the dishes, but I have.’ ‘I don’t want to make that phone call, but I have to because I said I would.’ Through these internal conversations, we live large parts of our lives as if we were not free. We (and I include myself in this) waste our energy in resentment and we lose ourselves in the dark tangle of wishing things were otherwise.

How do we find our freedom in the middle of complicated lives and multiple responsibilities? One way is to notice when you are feeling constricted, obligated and unfree. When are you thinking ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this’? When does the complaint arise ‘I don’t want to be doing this’? Without noticing when we are feeling caught, we can’t find our way to some other way of living.

So today, is it possible to notice how you move between feeling of ease and pressure? Feelings of lightness and heaviness? Feelings of freedom and of obligation? Don’t try to make it different, just notice what it’s like right where you are. What does it feel like? What story are you telling yourself about what you’re doing in the moment?             (More on freedom tomorrow.)