Merely Observe Flowers

One of the ancillary benefits of Zoom is that you get a tiny glimpse into other people’s lives through what is behind them as they show up on your screen. While some of us zoomers choose fancy artificial backgrounds and others carefully curate a neutral background, most of us are content to display some small sections of our lives without worrying too much about it.

One of the participants (from Belgium) of our Boundless Way Temple Zoom meditation sessions had a lovely calligraphy scroll on the wall behind her the other day that some of us noticed and commented on. While she herself didn’t know what the characters meant, she sent a photo and one of our other members (from Pittsburgh) tracked down the meaning through a Reddit group. It’s the second line of a two-line poem by Liang Xianzhi, a Chinese poet from the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912).

Do not try to understand human affairs, merely observe flowers

As an aging gardener in the middle of a global pandemic, I take this as confirmation of what appears more and more evident to me. Human beings are endlessly difficult and confounding. I give myself a headache when I read or listen or watch too much news. The political maneuverings and power plays—the incessant blaming and vilifying of others—the sheer complexity of human affairs often feels overwhelming to me.

The garden and the flowers are a healing balm—an antidote to the fears and disturbances that so often pervade human interaction. The flowers are perfect teachers. They don’t give lectures or tests and you don’t have to take notes. The flowers don’t even demand that you pay attention. It’s all up to you. They simply show the way through their presence.

The flowers teach beauty and generosity. Each one, however large or small, expresses the essence of life.  The daffodils have been lecturing incessantly for the past five weeks–bright yellows, oranges and creams in various sizes and shapes. Their subtle fragrances and filigree belies their robust constitution. They survive the snow and sway easily with wind.

In their honor, I’ve decided to modify the meaning of the verb ‘to garden.’ Usually ‘to garden’ means ‘to cultivate or work in a garden.’ I’d like to take the work out it to expand the meaning to include ‘the act of walking through or sitting in a garden.’ This will now allow me to say, ‘I’m going out to garden’ and all I have to do is hang out in the garden.

‘Merely observe flowers’ is an invitation to turn our attention—to move from worried preoccupation to appreciative observation. We can choose to open our eyes and our hearts to receive the teachings of the flowers and the world around us. One worthy Zen teacher offered this pointer:

“Don’t seek transcendent enlightenment, just observe and observe—suddenly you’ll laugh out loud. Beyond this, there is nothing that can be said.’

Playing in the Dirt

These past weeks of social distancing have been a great time to garden. Without the distraction of being able to go out to restaurants and get together with others in person, there has been more time than usual to play in the dirt.

I have recently begun to suspect that there may be a genetic urge to dig in the soil as my grandson, at fourteen months old, can easily spend ten or fifteen minutes sitting down digging with his hands in the dirt. He clearly has his own wordless purposes and fascination with his activity. But from the outside, it looks like he is just picking up dirt from one place and letting it drop somewhere else. Already a gardener!

Though the weather of the past few weeks has been quite variable, I have been outside in the gardens of Boundless Way Temple most days. When the weather is good, I’ll spend an hour or two relocating various perennials or clearing out the winter debris or tending the various paths and beds. When the rain (or snow!) comes, I may just take a quick inspection tour to see what’s new and emerging. There’s always something to see and something to do.

I have a dear friend who is a ‘completest’, she gets great satisfaction from a kind of thoroughness and being able to check things off his list. I, on the other hand, tend to be an 80% kind of guy. I like to get most of the task done and then I’m on to the next project. I don’t have real ‘todo’ lists as much as I have lists of projects I want to work on. Her style can drive me nuts, but I like to do projects with her because things really get done. But my style works well in a large garden where the tasks are endless.

I suppose that’s one of the great appeals to me of caring for a garden. There’s always something that needs to be done—there’s always some way to be useful. Caring for the garden helps me feel like I am part of something greater than me. As long as I don’t think I’m ever going to finish, it gives me a ongoing purpose and sense of connecting to life itself.

In the garden, I am intimately engaged with the forces of growth and decay that have their own unstoppable momentum. In recent years, I have been more appreciative of the generative necessity of decay as part of the cycle of life/death that is the garden. Decomposition is what turns last year’s dead plant matter into useable form for these year’s plants to use for their renewed purposes.

Decay is an integral part of life. The microbes and fungi and tiny bugs and worms that break down the old branches and leaves and flowers are part what makes life possible. Without these lively beings who happily go about their own silent purposes, there would be no room for new life and nothing to nourish the next generation.

Even as I look from my morning chair to the miracle of my trays of sprouted seeds eagerly awaiting their time to be out in the real sun, I appreciate the liveliness of the garden as it already is. And I’m looking forward to going out in today’s rain to check up on the rising and the falling of the cool green life I call the Temple Garden in spring.

Without Justification

This morning,
rather than diagnosing
and recommending,
in pragmatic prose,
a way through
the current crisis,
I sip tea and
practice being
irresponsible.

The dark masters
gather and grumble
at my indolence,
but I courageously
resist their muttered
insults and seductions.

I have grown old
and weary in steadfast
pursuit of their fickle
approval; as if
freedom could happen
at some other time.

Every action chooses
dungeon or delight:
the futile quest for
self-earned grace or
some rougher sweet
enterprise depending
only on what has already
been freely given.

This morning
again I practice
resistance to
the ancient gods
of Self accomplishment
and vow to disappear
into just this
one life without justification.

Weather I Don’t Like

I know better than to complain about the weather but yesterday felt like winter and I didn’t like it one bit. The cold and the wind were too much for me. In fact, the temperatures and the weather patterns this whole spring are not what I would like them to be at all. I long for the gentle warmth and soft sunshine—for my little seedlings that are trapped indoors, huddling under grow lights and by southern windows—and for me.

I love April when it is warm with just a touch of cool. Those days before the heat of the summer when I can go outside and feel the earth releasing herself to the coming warmth. My body unclenches in places I didn’t know were clenched. The ground softens under my feet. With each step I sink in just a fraction and am viscerally reminded that I too belong here. I too, like the plants and the trees, like the bugs and the squirrels, I too am once again coming back to life. Even the moist air of a cool spring morning seems to nourish me with each breath.

Needless to say, it was not like that yesterday. The wind was harsh and the temperatures were positively wintery. My eyes watered each time I went out. I was cold even with my winter jacket on. I was cold all day, even inside.

Most everything that happened seemed wrong or out of kilter. I was reminded of a long Saturday afternoon many decades ago when I was in my early twenties and by myself. I felt left out and alone; like something good was going on somewhere else. I distinctly remember going to several different places to try to feel differently. And everywhere I went, I felt as if I was missing out on something else. I finally had the realization that I was just feeling left out and that there appeared, that day, to be nothing I could do about it. I was relieved to go home and stop trying to make it different.

While there’s not much return on complaining about the weather, that doesn’t stop me from sometimes getting lost in complaining about the weather. Spending time in the land of complaint is its own kind of internal weather. I learned long ago, and have to relearn again from time to time, that sometimes, there’s nothing to be done but to make your home where you are.

So today, my encouragement for us all is to notice the weather (both external and internal) and, whatever it is, to let it be. Complaining is just complaining. Ease is just ease. Life is simply expressing itself first in this form, then it that form. Can this be enough? Can we appreciate the preciousness of brevity of life in exactly the form that is appearing now? And when we can’t, can we appreciate that too?

Cycles of Sheltering In Place

Early spring is the perfect time to move many of the perennials in the Temple Garden.   In garden-speak, a perennial is a relative term that describes any plant that survives the winter where it happens to be. The trees and woody shrubs are perennials that shelter in place. With the autumn freezes, they carefully drop their leaves and their bare branches hold tightly bound buds through the winter cold. Even more amazing are the plants that fully die back each year. In autumn, the leaves fully fall away. The plant gives up any intention of gathering light and retreats to the safety of subterranean dark and cold. Walking through a winter garden, these perennials are perfectly invisible.

I suppose we humans enact this cycle of dying back and rising every day. Each night we fall unconsciousness and lie mostly motionless, only to wake and rise when the light comes back. It’s like we too are dependent on the messages of light. We’re all energizer bunnies that run out of our charge when the sun goes down. We all stop and collapse, only to rise in the morning as if nothing had happened. The plants, who don’t make such a big fuss about this daily alternation of light and dark, must wonder about our frailty. Do my houseplants worry about my daily periods of lifeless behavior—afraid there will be no one to water them? Are they relieved each morning to sense me stirring and eventually walking again?

But yesterday morning, before the torrential rains of the afternoon, I moved some hay-scented fern from beside the walkway to the big pile of dirt and sticks which is my entry into the non-existent sculpture show ‘Buddhas Over Worcester.’ (More about this at another time.) Hay-scented fern is a wonderful perennial in New England that spreads by its roots. Ten years ago, I brought a few plants from our old house and planted them between the brick pathway and the western perimeter fence.

I imagined one day they would spread into a carpet of tender ferns along the pathway. Most of what I imagine for the garden does not come to pass or if it does, it is significantly different from my original plan. But, over the years, these dependable ferns have spread just as I had hoped. By June, they will be a blanket of finely cut leaves that move in the slights breeze, beautifying twenty or thirty feet along the walkway into the garden.

But right now, the ferns are small bent green wires just beginning to poke out of the ground—of no particular notice unless you remember their magic act from previous seasons. They have been sheltering in the frozen ground all winter and are have just received the message of warmth and light that signals them to re-emerge.

All of us too are waiting. We too may be feeling a little green and a little wired from so much time in our houses and apartments. We’ve been sheltering in place now for over a month.   We’re told that the virus infection rate is plateauing here in Massachusetts, but yesterday we learned that public schools will not reopen again before next fall. It’s too early to come out of our protective bubbles. But when will it be safe again? Can we continue our subterranean lives long enough for the danger to pass and the proverbial spring to appear?

Perhaps tuning into the multitude of cycles of rising and falling around and within us will give us confidence that, in time, this too shall pass.

On Being Disturbed

I woke at 3:30 this morning mulling over what Coronovirus might mean for the Boundless Way Temple going forward. Residential retreats have been at the heart of our Zen practice community since we bought this building ten years ago. We certainly won’t be having any of them in the next few months, and a conversation with a retreat organizer overseas yesterday brought home to me the reality that we may not have any residential retreats through the end of the year…and perhaps beyond.

We won’t be going back to normal—it’s gradually sinking in now. While we are beginning to see signs of the infection rate slowing, this ongoing experience of fear of viral infection will change our social and physical interactions forever. Restaurants will, of course, reopen at some point. But the small places that used to feel cozy and charming may now feel too dangerous to venture in. Will we eat out with Plexiglas dividers between us? Or with tables carefully arranged six to twelve feet apart? We don’t know what the new world will look like, but we won’t be going back to the way it was.

One model for thinking about how organizations (and organisms) change is called ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ Rather than understanding growth as a neat upward moving line, this theory says times of relative stability are interrupted by periods of significant structural change. This makes sense to me as I look back at my life history and at the experience of organizations I have been associated with. Things move along fairly predictably, until something happens that causes disruption to the comfortable and formerly functional patterns of behavior, then we have to find new ways of being—new assumptions and new ways of doing things.

These places of disruption are hard for human beings to bear. Almost all of us like predictability and stability. We like to know what will be happening tomorrow and next week and next year. We get anxious when we lose faith in our capacity to know what is coming. Our minds get us into all kinds of trouble as we imagine scenarios that cause us to lose sleep and live in a state of worry and fear.

Looking back, we can see that each one of us has weathered all of those places of danger and significant change. The many times when we could not see our way forward, when our carefully made plans were abruptly derailed by factors beyond our control. They all turned out OK. We might not have gotten what we wanted, but we are all still here and life is still fully going on.

Significant and unexpected change disorganizes us and leads us to places we had never considered going. We leave our old world behind (sometimes moaning and complaining) to enter into a new world with new possibilities and new challenges. These many worlds of our lives come and go like a dream. Once I lived in a dorm and went to college. Once I was the father of a young daughter. Once I went out to dinner at restaurants as a treat when I didn’t feel like cooking at home.

What seems solid one moment, soon is just a memory. Even the troubles that wake us up in the middle of the night and won’t let us sleep fade into a hazy memory.   What is so urgent at one moment, I can hardly remember a few days or weeks or years later.

This brings me back to the issue a faith that my friend brought up a few days ago. Where does it come from and what if it doesn’t have to do with a old man with a beard sitting on a cloud in the sky?

What if I had faith that everything would somehow be OK? ‘OK’ clearly doesn’t mean that I get things to be the way I think they should be, but perhaps that’s not the point of life. Perhaps there is a deeper ‘OK’ that I can learn, little by little, to trust?

I’m reminded of a native American song I came across when I was twenty and in the middle of a period of great turmoil and transition in my life:

Why do I go about pitying myself,
when all the time
I am being carried
on great winds across the sky?

Precious Resources

Part of our pandemic routine is driving to Waltham two days a week to take care of our 14-month-old grandson so his parents can continue to do their grown-up jobs. Both are now working from home and, like so many other parents, are trying to figure out how to work and parent and stay together (personally and as a twosome and as a threesome) during this time of forced isolation.

Mostly it’s been a delight. Our grandson Isa is, as the poet Paul Hostovsky says, a ‘little ball of interest.’ To be in his presence is to experience the world with a vividness that is life-giving. From the dust motes caught in the late afternoon sun to the dirt in the flower beds to the cars going by on the street, he is amazed by it all. He looks and looks. He wants to touch and hold and get a sense of what it is and how it does. To be a regular part of his world is a deep blessing.

But yesterday, we had the first real injury on our watch. Actually, it was on my watch. Melissa had just gone into the other room. We are very careful these days to be clear about who is on primary duty. Isa is toddling around and his boundless curiosity gives clear confirmation to the old saw about what curiosity did to the cat—I won’t repeat it, but it wasn’t a happy ending. So we make sure, when he is ranging free, which seems to be a good and important thing for his development, that we designate a personal spotter—who is ‘on duty’.

For example, Isa is quite proudly accomplished at climbing stairs. I would give him about a 90% rating in this activity. But with climbing stairs and other physical activities that involve a large downside, 10% falling rate is not good enough to do it on your own. So when he climbs the stairs, one of the adults trails closely behind…just in case.

So Melissa had just gone to the other room and Isa and I were in the kitchen. He opened one of the low drawers, took out a small plastic container then walked out of the kitchen and around the corner. This is one of his favorite activities these days, moving things from one place to another. He’ll make piles of puzzle pieces in a particular place, then move the pile back to where it was before. Just like the Zen student who is ordered by the Zen Master to move the pile of rocks from one place to another, then instructed to move them back again. But Isa’s orders come from some desire to know and understand. He seems absolutely engaged in the necessity of his actions and doesn’t mind the work at all.

But shortly after he got around the corner, I heard a blood-curdling scream. I quickly raced to where he was and Melissa was already picking him up. He had fallen and hit something on the edge of the coffee table. Now falling is not an unusual occurrence for Isa. He’s gotten quite good at it and appears to be much more interested in where he is trying to go, than in whether he falls down or not. But clearly he had hit his head on a sharp edge and it really hurt and he was letting us know.

We looked for actual blood and, fortunately, found none. I felt his soft and vulnerable baby head for big bumps or bruises. Aside from the one on his forehead from his face plant of the day before, his head seemed fine. But he kept screaming. Now I’m used to his occasional crying and he can be pretty loud. But this was a whole other level.

In a few moments, his father, responding to the wild screams that were filling the house, came downstairs and we explained the situation. He held and comforted his son. He did his best not to be judgmental with us in the midst of his justifiable fear for his son, and I did my best not to feel like a guilty teenager caught in the act of doing something really bad. I sent a quick text message to reassure his mother who was having to listen helplessly to her baby’s shrieks of pain while doing her professional best to go on with her Zoom meeting in another part of the house.  After a short time in the arms of his father, Isa calmed down, his father went back to work, we gave him a bottle of milk and all went back to normal.

A little later I noticed Isa’s left ear was red. On closer examination I saw the painful looking bruise that must have been the cause of the commotion. It wasn’t life threatening, but it looked really painful and I felt bad that this precious and defenseless little being had been hurt while he was in my care.

Theoretically I know that I cannot protect him—that his developing life will involved scrapes and cuts, blood and tears. But the realization of our mutual vulnerability – me as the caretaker and he as the child – gave me a new sense of the worry of parenthood (and to a much slighter extent, of grandparenthood.) We do our best to foster our children’s growing capacities, but this means giving them the space to risk new things and to fail forward into their ever-expanding capacities. Too much protection is stifling. Too little could be life-threatening.

So my heart goes out this morning to all the mothers and fathers, and to all those who are taking care of children. We rightly are noticing and praising people ‘on the front lines’ – those first responders and grocery store workers and hospital personnel who are all putting their lives at risk for out safety and sustenance.

But, this morning, a shout out to all the parents and caretakers who are now living twenty-four seven in close quarters with our most precious social resource, our children. May you remember the importance and immeasurability of your endless efforts. And may you find a place to occasionally rest in the middle of it all, knowing that your primary job is to be present to the natural connection and mutual learning that is called parenting.