Love Note

When will you come
my nodding friends
alabaster snowdrops?

Claiming Authority

A friend sent me an article on Dogen that will soon be appearing in some prestigious academic journal. It was fifty pages long and led deep into the thickets of commentaries on commentaries—ancient and fierce arguments over Dogen’s true meanings and intentions. Reading of the polemic point and counterpoints I was reminded that the literary and artistic treasures handed down to us have a long provenance and our current view is influenced by arguments we will never know.

Alan Cole, in his irreverent and closely argued book FATHERING YOUR FATHER, claims that history is the donkey we dress with bells and whistles to pull the cart of the present in the desired direction. The commentaries on Dogen through the centuries since his death certainly bear this out. Each one interprets Dogen to support their own position which is sometimes directly contradicting a previous interpretation. Everybody uses the text to justify and bolster their position, all the while claiming the authenticity of their position through pointing to the text.

Cole elaborates the surprising degree to which the history of one-to-one transmission of Chan (Zen) was consciously created to bolster the fortunes and fame of those looking back. It was Chan teachers in Song dynasty who were vying with each other for imperial patronage and support among the intellectual literati that ‘fathered’ or created their own lineage—arranging historical stories in such a way to place themselves and the pinnacle.

I suppose we all must claim and thereby create our fathers. The identity of our biological fathers is usually pretty well set, but the process of telling and retelling the story of who they are and were is one of ongoing creation. Any individual is a universe of thoughts, feelings and actions. Understanding our fathers (and mothers) is part of coming to terms with the gifts and the curses we have to live with. Cole’s gift to this enterprise is the demand that we accept responsibility for the role that imagination and invention invariably play in the stories we tell about what came before us.

Then there are the fathers and mothers we claim. The heroes, teachers, and mentors we find along our journey that teach and guide us. Some we meet and learn from in person while some touch us through their words or creations from centuries ago. Whenever I read Thoreau and Emerson, I sense how the roots of my words, thoughts and perspectives draw nourishment from the soil of wonder and direct experience which they cultivated. I am a product of their words and thoughts, but I only understand their words through the lens of my own experience. When I quote Emerson (or Dogen), I am selecting only a small portion of his writing—that small portion that supports and authenticates whatever point I am making. I claim him as my source in order to bolster my authority.

Cole’s cynicism about our uses of history and tradition points to important truths, but misses the creative and necessary possibility of something more. While we can only understand something new based on our experiences of the past, we also have the capacity to receive new perspectives and make new connections. Hearing a Dharma talk or reading a book or sitting in meditation, we can hear words and phrases that turn our mind—that point us to something we have never noticed before.

Perhaps the take-away from all this is to cultivate a conscious openness to what we encounter. Rather than just looking for points of agreement and disagreement, can we watch for what is new and unexpected? Can we appreciate resonance and dissonance at the same time we maintain a heart that is open to what has not yet been known?

Refusing To Go Numb

Yesterday, on February 22, 2021 at around five o’clock, America passed the 500,000 mark in the tally of COVID-related deaths. Church bells tolled at the National Cathedral and about an hour later, our President and Vice-President, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and their respective spouses appeared on national TV to mark this grim milestone and to offer words of consolation and support.

Biden expressed his sympathy with those who have lost loved ones, referring to the personal tragedies of his own life:

“I know all too well,” he said. “I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens. I know what it’s like when you are there holding their hands; there’s a look in their eye and they slip away. That black hole in your chest — you feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivors remorse, the anger, the questions of faith in your soul.”

He also mentioned that half a million lost lives is more than the number of American deaths in both World Wars and the Vietnam war combined. And more than any other nation on earth. More people have died in America, one of the most advanced and affluent countries on earth, than in any other country on the face of the planet. This is a terrible tragedy that did not have to happen.

Aside from Republican and Democrat, aside from any animus at the antics of our most recent former President, we need to take a deep look at the failures of our system of government that allowed this disaster to unfold. Even as the current administration, leaders and health professionals across the country work to distribute the vaccine and even as numbers of deaths and hospitalizations are dramatically decreasing, we need to begin to uncover the individual and systemic failures that led to this devastation.

In his brief remarks, Biden also urged us all to ‘resist becoming numb to the sorrow’. He demonstrated this when he pulled out a small card from his jacket pocket on which is updated each day with the number of those infected with the virus and the number who have died. It’s a small gesture and it’s easy to dismiss whatever politicians do in their hyper-self-conscious world of power, but somehow with Joe Biden, I believe his sincerity and am touched.

The New York Times article from which I got most of the information for this post used the word ‘emotional’ several times in describing the brief ceremony. I have not yet witnessed the event itself, but I did see Biden and Harris at a brief ceremony honoring the COVID-related deaths just prior to the inauguration. It was emotional and brief. It was just a photo=op for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but was a demonstration of them using the power of their position to direct the attention of the nation in a certain direction. I got the sense that yesterday’s ceremony was the same.

Biden appears to be setting the new standard for emotional intelligence for politicians. President Clinton was often referred to as mourner in chief. He showed up after a number of national disasters, including a warehouse fire here in Worcester in 1999 that claimed the lives of six firemen, and led us all in mourning. Clinton had the capacity to exude sympathy, but it never seemed fully connected to him as a person. Biden’s personal tragedies and his long career of civil service give his gestures and words a sense of lived reality that is quite different.

So let us heed Joe Biden’s example and encouragement. Let us not become numb to the numbers of people who have suffered and died with this virus. Let us not forget the daily struggles of blacks and people of color who live in a society that does not treat them as the full citizens they are. Let us not turn away from the pain of physical and emotional violence directed against women and children on a daily basis. Let us also remember the daily degradation of our planet in the service of profit and comfort that puts all of human life at risk.

This is not a small thing in a world that encourages us to be happy and seek the quick fix. This is an intentional reorientation of our hearts to honor the mutual interconnection that is the true fabric of our lives. Let us turn toward the suffering around us and the suffering in our own hearts in order to continually rededicate our lives to making a difference. Let us all vow to use whatever resources of position and power—of heart, mind and wealth we have to push the world toward connection, consideration and safety for all.

Magical Thinking

In another year, the date will be 2 22 22. Will something special happen on the day when the 2’s all come up together? Will something special happen on this day when we are only one digit off from full numeric alignment? Let’s imagine Yes.

Let’s imagine that today something special will happen but that it might not occur in any recognizable form. Like the small event that happens early in the novel, the significance of which is only revealed toward the end. And only later do you get to look back over what has happened and say ‘Oh, now I get it, that was the turning point.’

It’s kind of a lovely feeling, when the brain rearranges the furniture of the mind and a new room, a new life is created. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and all that. These maps of the mind that masquerade as the world we live within. This life that is invisibly co-created in each moment.

Our understanding is only ever partial. Our small conscious minds alive in the middle of the vast cosmos. The vast cosmos alive in the middle of our small conscious minds. Outside only appears because of inside. Inside appears only because of outside.

My Zen teacher used to say ‘Subject needs object. Object needs subject.’ There is no self, no perceiver without something to perceive. I know myself only when I meet something that is not myself. The thing perceived, the object, is a mutual creation arising spontaneously in my neural circuitry as I receive bits of information from the world around and within me.

In Buddhist philosophy this mutual creation is called dependent arising (pratitya samutpada). It’s a fancy word for the natural and subtle process of awareness. (One that has been supported by current brain research – see once again Lisa Barrett’s How Emotions are Made)

But back to the notion that we might imagine that something special will happen today because we are only one digit off from all 2’s in the numeric writing of today’s date. Of course, this is a silly notion based on superstition and magical thinking. Why would all 2’s be any different from any other random combination of digits?

We could also say that any numerical (or other) representation of the date of today is magical thinking. Days don’t really contain numbers. The first day of the year is just another rising of the sun, albeit usually a cold one for those of us in the northern hemisphere. February is just eight letters strung together that we have agreed, here in the English speaking world, that refers to a series of days that come after January.

When we look closely at time and language and the myriad social agreements that we take for granted, it all gets pretty squishy. The whole world, it turns out, is pretty much a magical and jointly agreed upon construction. So why not appreciate and play along with this ongoing impossibly and constantly constructed universe?

For my part, I will set reason just a little to the side today and keep my eyes open and my senses alert for something really special—some intimation of radical change coming, some sense of a hitherto unrecognized gift or talent, some precious aspect of life which I never noticed before.

And I suspect the looking (not even the finding) will take me through the wardrobe to Narnia once again.

Asking For Help

I woke up this morning wondering what kind of help I need.

This is a harder question than it seems, especially for those of us who were trained in the value of independence. As a child, I looked forward to being an adult so that I would no longer need to ask for help. Being dependent always felt like something I needed to fix. The message I heard from grown-ups in my life was ‘Take care of yourself and don’t be needy. Be a big boy.’

Well, I’m as big as I’m going to get and find myself still dependent on the people around me. Of course, I appreciate this dependence more than I used to. Needing others, asking for help, giving help are part of what it means to be alive. Marshall Rosenberg, creator of ‘Nonviolent Communication’ claimed that our needs are our gifts to each other. We are, he wrote, hard-wired to receive great satisfaction from helping each other.

This doesn’t make sense to me when I think about my own needs which often feel like they must be an imposition on others. But when I think about times I’ve been able to make a real difference in someone else’s life, I feel a sense of fulfillment and gratefulness that I was allowed to give something of value. We all want to be able to give something of value to people we care about and to the world we live in. Few things are as satisfying as making a difference. While parenting young children (and older children too) is incredibly demanding, it is also incredibly satisfying. To be able to support and protect and guide another human being is a deep privilege.

The traditional model of giver being the powerful one and the receiver being the weaker one who is in debt relies on a kind of common-sense theoretical thinking that is not really true. There are different roles and different levels of capabilities and influence, but beneath these differences is a web of interconnection where all the roles are necessary and equally valuable.

But many of us are more comfortable being the helper rather than the helpee. We’d rather be the one being thanked than the one expressing gratitude. We’d rather not be beholden to anyone for their kindness. But the truth is that we’re all dependent on each other’s consideration. Blanche DuBois said it memorably in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.

So if we all need each other and depend on each other, can we give up our need to appear to be grown-up and independent? Let’s be grown-up and interdependent. And maybe, if we get really advanced on the path, we can even be grown-up and needy. But that is probably a higher level of development than most of us can aspire to.

What is the help I need? How can I clarify and ask for what I really want? It’s precarious business, to be self-aware of our incompleteness, our longing, our dreams. What do I really want? What do I really need?

When I was writing my first book, I asked for help from someone who worked with aspiring writers to support them in clarifying their ideas and intentions. She coached me to ask two different groups of friends and colleagues to come together to help me understand more deeply what it was that I was trying to say. It was a little awkward to make the calls, but every person I asked was happy to help out by being part of the process. And the two sessions I convened gave me information about myself that I could not have received any other way and were critical to my discovery of the book that it turned out I had already written.

Part of the trick of asking for help is really meaning it. That’s part of the danger as well. Asking for help when the stakes are low (‘I could really take care of this myself.’) is quite different from asking when you really mean it.

So the question with me this morning is ‘What is it I could ask for that would make the biggest difference in my life?’ Or, perhaps starting a little less grandiose, ‘What is one next step on my path and what is the help I need to take it?’

Discovering New States of Being

1. It snowed all day yesterday. Not in a serious kind of way, but more as if point were atmospheric rather than accumulative. Maybe three or four inches of the fluffiest crystals landed around the Temple. Not a lot by Worcester standards. Still it was pretty and enough to have to do something about. The gasoline driven environmental polluter snow blowers which have saved my back and given me hours to sit inside instead of shoveling endlessly came out occasionally, but a couple quick passes with a snow shovel worked as well for most of the clean-up.

As this morning dawns, trees are laden and streets are white. It’s a lovely sight, this monochrome coating. As if some child was charged with whitewashing the world but only managed to get the topsides of things before she lost interest and moved onto something else. Vertical surfaces, tree trunks and sides of houses are their natural color while roofs and branch tops and sidewalks are all fluffy white.

2. I woke early this morning without much feeling. I always check, first thing, when I’m just beginning to know I am me, to see how I am doing. ‘What is the state of the Dave?’ as a friend of mine likes to inquire. I begin with bodily sensations, then go on to emotions and thoughts. It’s a fuzzy process as there is no specific moment when I’m asleep and then suddenly become awake. Some hazy process lies in between—a place where the snow of sleep is not deep or restricting but is still everywhere to be muddled and waded through before arriving definitively in the land of consensual reality.

3. The in-between places, the boundary places, the liminal places are the most interesting. And since nothing is really fixed or permanent, life is, essentially, only and always in-between. Though the words I use imply clear (and useful) distinctions, my actual experience is much more fluid, borderless and inclusive.

Awake is a state. Asleep is a state. Then there is the vast expanse of waking up and falling asleep. Even within awake and asleep, there are infinite variations. A friend has a watch that charts her sleep. She can read out the story of her night on her computer screen the next morning as a line of peaks and valleys with some plateaus along the way. I would suspect any measure of ‘awake’ would also have to include the sluggishness of the late afternoon and the arousals of various events and times of the day.

4. In the book HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE, Lisa Feldman Barrett makes a compelling case for emotions as complex constructions rather than fixed responses in regions of the brain that are triggered by outside events. Things don’t happen and ‘make us’ feel a certain way. We experience emotions based on the concepts and words we have learned. We interpret the signals we are receiving from the various parts of our body and make creative guesses about what it is and how we should respond. In order to appreciate the subtlety and variation of our emotions lives, Ms. Barrett encourages expanding our awareness of the particularity of our moment-to-moment experience, learning new words that describe specific emotional states, and even making up words that describe specific new states.

5. This morning, as I lay awake in my warm bed on a cold winter morning, I wasn’t particularly tired nor particularly anything at all as far as I could tell. I was just slightly reluctant to get out of bed even though I was looking forward to a quiet morning of writing, sipping tea and looking out the window at the new fallen snow.

I have decided that this feeling of slight to moderate disinclination to get out of bed should be called an instance of beddrag. (Pronounced as a combination of bed and drag with the emphasis on the first syllable.) Beddrag is the feeling of reluctance to exit the warm comfort of the horizontal life of dreaming and enter into the vertical exertions of daily life. It doesn’t refer to the dread of facing life again or the exhaustion that sometimes accompanies morning, but just that almost sweet disinclination to change state. Perhaps one might even experience some beddrag after reading a good book in a comfortable chair and then having to get up to get on with life.

Exploring with this new concept, we might even begin to distinguish different versions of beddrag based on the temperature in the room, whether one is sleeping in flannel or regular sheets, whether one sleeps alone or with a four-legged or two-legged partner(s). A whole new universe opens up with one word.

6. The morning light has fully arrived. Snow and icicles decorate the neighborhood. It’s quiet and cozy here on the couch looking out through the windows. I’ll just enjoy a few more moments of beddrag before I get up to go out to clear the front steps.

Waiting in Line

My partner and I are now waiting in line with millions of other Massachusetts residents aged 65 to 75 to get an appointment for the vaccination shots now ‘available’ to protect us from COVID-19. Our official eligibility began yesterday. I dutifully switched on my computer at five a.m. when I first got up, naively thinking I might be ahead of the rush. The web site crashed several times over the first two minutes I was on. Apparently I was not the only baby boomer up early to catch the worm.

We baby-boomers are a fairly entitled generation. Born between 1946 and 1956, we grew up in America’s post-war boom of jobs, houses and optimism but also remember hiding under our desks in elementary school to ‘practice’ for the looming nuclear war. We came into adulthood with soaring rates of college attendance, the Vietnam war, Woodstock, and LSD. Some of us thought we were going to change the world from the sordid commercially driven oppressive social structure it was to a utopia of peace and love. The adults of our country had made a mess of things and we were sure we were just the ones to correct the wrongs and live into the dawning age of peace and love.

Many of my friends in college had long hair and we were suspicious of anyone who was over 30 or wore a tie. We were arrogant, innocent and incredibly hopeful. But, after often circuitous routes, most of us became lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, teachers, insurance agents, artists and members of the professional class of power and privilege. I too eventually got a full-time job and wore a tie and joined the local Rotary Club.

A close friend, just a year older than me, became (along with millions others) a Trump supporter, perhaps seeing in his anti-establishment authoritarian message a new hope for what we had dreamed of fifty years ago. The age of Aquarius has certainly slipped through of our grasp. Though we have all done the best we could, the crises of environmental degradation, economic oppression, and institutional racial injustice seem worse than when we came into adulthood.

But however my generation has failed or succeeded, I still wanted to get a vaccine. On and off yesterday, I dutifully went to the web site to find an appointment. The site mostly crashed, though occasionally I got messages that some appointments were available in scattered locations across the state. For twenty tantalizing minutes there were three spaces available at a site down the street at Worcester State College for Saturday afternoon. They eventually disappeared. My efforts were slightly frustrating and ultimately fruitless. But not unexpected.

So I’m thinking this morning about the spiritual virtue of patience, the third of the six paramitas of Mahayana Buddhism. One writer describes the paramitas as the ‘bases of training’ for those of us wanting to wake up to the fullness of life. (The other paramitas are: generosity, discipline, effort, meditation, and wisdom.)

I suspect, if I am disciplined in my effort, I will eventually get an appointment. In the meantime, I’d rather not disturb myself by feeling righteously entitled, anxious, left out, or angry. All those are possible and perhaps inevitable, but this might also be an excellent time to practice ksanti: tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance and patience.

I’ll be interested to see how well my plan works out.

Profession of Love

Maybe he was inspired by Valentine’s Day. Maybe because I hadn’t seen him for a while, I’ll never know. But he finally said it to me. I know he’s felt it for a long time, but until yesterday he hadn’t managed to say the words. It’s funny what a difference it can make when someone finally finds the words. You may know they care about you, you may know you’re in a serious relationship, but until the words ‘I love you’ are spoken, something is missing.

We were just hanging out. It was the late afternoon and we were sitting across from each other drawing on the large white board that covered the whole surface of the small table between us. We were so focused on our lines and colors, so physically engaged by our co-creation that sometimes our heads would nearly touch as we leaned in to fill the white space. He was into large and quickly repeated purple circles. I was focusing more on smaller orange and red highlights. We would draw with our erasable crayons for a while, then he would decide it was time to clean the board. I let him take the lead.

He began to notice that the color trails left by the crayons on the board would actually color the damp paper towel that he used for erasing. I suspected, as he vigorously wiped away lines and images, that he was investigating the transitory nature of life as well as the surprising possibilities of the conservation of matter. I myself was pondering the de Kooning drawing that Rauschenberg erased in 1953 and is still on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We kept our thoughts to ourselves and I wondered if our erased white board was perhaps the best display of the ocean of feelings between the two of us. But I digress.

I was singing softly as I drew. Sometimes I would stop and he would happily demonstrate his knowledge by filling in a word or two. For some reason, I was inspired to render a very slow version of that perennial classic ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ Other people were in the living room with us, but they were reading or computing or doing something. ‘Up above the world so high.’ In my mind, our simple activity filled the universe, drawing and singing and being together. ‘Like a diamond in the sky.’ Of course we are not special, thousands and millions of humans are enacting this ancient drama of care and creation at each moment, yet the mystery and preciousness of it all. ‘How I wonder what you are.’

I finished and paused and looked at my grandson—a small miracle of universal proportions. In the silence, he looked up at me and said ‘I love you.’ Softly. And I said, ‘I love you too.’ Softy.

Having spoken our truths and exposed our deepest feelings, we went back to drawing and erasing and singing as if nothing had happened—as if we had not both been forever changed by this one passing and indelible moment.

Three Essential Skills     

Life is essentially unworkable. Impossible stuff happens. No matter how smart or how wise or how lucky you are, things will not always go your way. Failure, loss and suffering are inevitable. Clarity of purpose will come and go. Confusion, anxiety and despair will be occasional or frequent companions. Important things like relationships, plans and your body are guaranteed to break down.

None of this is a problem that can be solved, it’s just how life is.   Like my friend, an Episcopal priest, once said: sin (missing the mark/imperfection/forgetting) is not an issue to be fixed, it’s just a condition to work with. So how do we meet this life (and ourselves) that cannot be fully fixed?  What skills are helpful in the face of the full catastrophe of life? Here are three fairly durable skills that I have found useful in the face of it all:

#1 Staying – In difficult situations, most of us want to fix, ignore or get away from whatever it is. None of us like to be uncomfortable for very long. When things and situations can be fixed or straightened out or clarified, I’m all for it. Fix it if you can and move on. Likewise, ignoring difficulty is a terrific skill to have. Sometimes avoidance is simply the best option available—at least for a time. And there are some situations that are so toxic, or violent, or dangerous that leaving is the appropriate, compassionate and wise thing to do.

But when none of these three strategies work—when it’s important not to leave and you can’t fix it and can’t ignore it—STAYING is a powerful strategy. Staying means choosing to remain in the middle of the impossibility of the situation without a plan. This is not the same as physically remaining present while you escape to distant regions in your mind. Staying is the practice of choosing to be present even after all your good plans and strategies have crumbled to the ground. Staying means being alive to your own feelings, thoughts and sensations as well as to the presence, thoughts and words of the others who are there with you (either in person or in your heart).

#2 Doing Nothing – This is a subset of Staying. Doing nothing is a good option only after you have tried everything else. Many daily problems can be resolved by improved communication, working together and being reasonable. But the big ones that appear in our lives often don’t yield to these common-sense strategies. The only way to know what kind of a problem you are dealing with is to do your best to work it out using the rational skills at your disposal. When these don’t work (and I guarantee there will be times when they don’t) your next best option is to Stay and Do Nothing.

This doing nothing is not the same as spacing out and is not to be confused with not caring. Doing Nothing is an active intention to be present without manipulation. Not running away, not fixing. Being alive and aware, but giving up the delusion that it’s all up to you. You become an interested and intimate participant in something that is happening through you and everyone involved in the situation. You give up your pretense of control and stay to learn and be transformed.

#3 Following – Following is a shift from trying to lead a situation in the direction you think it should go, to a willingness to stay with what is unfolding moment by moment. True following usually is only possible when we have given up our delusion that our perspective and our solution are the best way. True following comes only after the failure of all our usual success strategies—after we have been as wise and clear and strong and direct as we can and it has not worked.

Following then means to turn our attention to the unworkable situation itself, not to fix it or even to move it forward, but rather to notice and be present with what is already going on. Following means being curious about what is here in this impossible place. We begin to listen for what we have not yet heard and look for what we have not yet seen. Then we practice going along with whatever is arising.

These three seemingly simple skills can be useful reminders in almost any situation. If you’re interested, you might want to try practicing these skills today. In the next even slightly uncomfortable situation you notice, see what happens is you simply stay, do nothing and follow what is unfolding. It might be quite interesting.

Frozen In Place

A light winter rain falls from the night sky as a thin sheet of ice ominously thickens here below. Not flat like a lake, but ice shaped to every sidewalk and tree and leaf. Perfectly encasing every fence, car and house. Life sheathed in ice.

We once sat a Zen retreat through an ice storm. The rain fell through the night as we sat. We lost power and sat in the dark with candles and blankets. The next morning the temperature dropped and a brilliant sun sparkled on the nearby forest of thickly iced trees. Our quiet meditation that winter morning was punctuated by an occasional ferocious crashing. Huge branches and whole trees gave way under the terrible weight of their transparent burdens. Tree limbs and ice gave way together, shattering our silence momentarily and then quickly finding their new tangled and broken rest.

There was nothing we could do. We kept on sitting. I still remember.

Now I wonder at how each of us can become encased in the transparent shell of our selves. The accretion of who we are and what we do, under certain circumstances, grows so thick we strain to move under the weight and restriction of it all. Frozen in familiar positions of defensive complaint, we may suddenly discover nothing else is possible. Suddenly immobile when the temperature drops, we await our still fate. Will we break before the warmth comes back? Some fall around us, broken by the weight of life or suffocated still in place. Will we loose limbs and survive disfigured or fall entirely? Or nothing at all?

The cold rain falls darkly and the clock ticks for all of us. Sometimes it is like this, these trials, these frozen sentences. Without choice, we hold still and await the outcome. No one is to blame. Sometimes it is just like this.