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.

Trackless

frozen flat

lake white

snow walking

nowhere footprints

only lead here

Without Justification (v.2)

Rather than diagnosing
this morning and
heartfully prescribing
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 weary
in steadfast pursuit
of their fickle approval—
as if freedom could happen
at some other time.

Every action creates
the life I lead—
a continued quest
for self-earned grace or
some wilder enterprise
of unknown provenance.

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

Looking For The Truth

The impeachment trial of our former President is going in the Senate chamber of the Capital building. A little over a month ago, these same halls were filled with angry insurrectionist doing their best to prevent Congress from carrying out its democratic duty. Mike Pence was being hurried down back stairs while armed individuals were calling for his death by hanging just a few hundred yards away. Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress were hiding in fear before they too were ushered to safety just before the doors to the chamber were breached. Now the Senate is deliberating to determine whether the former President should be convicted of inciting this insurrection.

Given the past unwillingness of the Republican Senators to challenge Trump, the final outcome of the trial will most likely be acquittal. But history is being written through the exposure of email and video footage of the events leading up to and including the armed assault on the Capital building. We, as a people, are trying to get to the truth of what happened.

The Senate is being asked to look at the events that happened from several different perspectives. The Democratic House Managers of the impeachment are presenting many perspectives showing Trump in the worst possible light. Then his lawyers will have the opportunity to present the same evidence in the best possible light.

This is a time-honored practice in societies that value truth and justice. It sounds like it should be simple and that after looking at all the evidence from a variety of angles, the ‘truth’ should be obvious. But ‘reality’ is not as straightforward as it seems. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and many a trial ends with doubt and continuing differences of opinion.

Polls are showing that most Democrats think Trump is guilty of the charges and that most Republicans think that he was just exercising his right to be inflammatory and politically incorrect. But lives were lost and the government of the United States was directly attacked, with nearly catastrophic outcomes. This is not a small matter and the issues of how much was planned and who was involved in that planning are of central importance.

One of the key issues of this impeachment trial is the degree to which someone, in this case a sitting President, can be held accountable for their words. While our country takes great pride in our ‘so-called’ freedom of speech, in fact, we have always recognized that some speech should not and cannot be allowed. You can be sent to prison for being involved in plotting a crime. You can be fined thousands or millions of dollars for willfully telling lies that damage another person’s reputation or income.

News outlets and public figures have always been liable for the impact of false words they may speak. Part of the way out of our current state of polarization may be to begin to hold virtual platforms accountable to some modicum of truthfulness as well. The righteous anger of the insurrectionists was clearly fueled by lies that were told and repeated leading up to January 6. That you can be held accountable for the truthfulness of your statements and for inciting others to violence seems a fairly reasonable position.

The stories we tell about how we got where we are are part of how we create the future we move into. I hope that the Senate proceedings may allow us all to see more clearly into the events leading to the storming of the Capital and might allow us to recognize the value of a shared truth and the power of our words.

Soft Distractions

Snow fell through the day
in the smallest possible flakes
as if there was an inexhaustible
endowment of beauty available.

I accomplished little but
did manage to notice how
the evening’s meager accumulation
required the falling of a whole day.

In the end, I quickly pushed
it all aside to keep steps clear
and paths free for the necessary
busyness known as daily life.

Dreaming of Lucky Shots

I dreamt I was playing golf in the snow at a friend’s wedding. We were in the rugged mountains of north Wales with piles of bare rock instead of sand traps. I realized these were unusual conditions and asked my friend to take a picture of me making a put. I felt bad asking him to take a photo of me since it was his wedding, but he was happy to oblige. But when he took the photo, he took it looking back at the lodge where the reception was being held rather than against the picturesque rocks. I decided not to say anything.

My first shot was quite poor but my second shot was superb and landed me near what appeared to be the hole. I asked my friends where the hole was. They didn’t know either but said that I should since I was the one making up this game of snow golf. We decided it must be the small furrow nearby. For some reason, I got to pick my ball up and drop it wherever I wanted. It seemed unfair to put it too close to the cup, but I put it close enough that I had a reasonable shot through the uneven snow.

My friends were amazed at how skillful I was in my playing of snow=golf. I explained to them that I was sometimes very, very lucky, but that the luck came and went with such frequency that I never made bets on my playing.

Once, in real life, I was invited to participate in a rodeo in Costa Rica. Really. I mean, I was already there at a resort and it was after the real cowboys had put on the real show, but still, I was invited. The resort was in the rain forest and had been a cattle ranch in a previous incarnation. I was there with a mindfulness program while there the other group was practicing some wild kind of horseback riding and sensuality. I never quite figured out what they were doing, but they loved to ride horses fast and I got into the action to ride with them a few times.

When I asked their leader (a self-styled sensualist who never seemed to wear a shirt) how to ride, he said to feel my energy sinking down through the horse’s hoof’s into the ground and to call on the body-wisdom of my ancestors who rode bareback across the great plains—to trust that the horse and I were part of the same knowing. With that one riding lesson, I began galloping across open fields and even taking small jumps with the others. And, sometimes indeed, I did feel the energy of the horse and the earth and the wind as part of me.

At the end of the week, the local cowboys put on a small rodeo for the forty of us at the resort. These guys grew up on horses and were as comfortable riding as I am sitting on the couch writing these words. One of the contests at the end was to gallop across the arena at full speed and spear a small brass ring (about size of a quarter) from where it was clipped to a wire running across the ring. They tried it several times to no avail and then asked if any audience members wanted to try.

My enthusiasm got the better of my judgment and I went down into the ring with a few other guests. I waited while a couple others mounted up tried unsuccessfully to get the ring. Then it was my turn. The horses, by this time, were quite excited. All the racing around and the excitement of the riders was absorbed by these amazing creatures who love to run. The horse was practically prancing as I mounted. It was willing to wait for only a moment and then took off across the dirt ring.

I remember thinking ‘I hope I don’t fall off’ – mostly because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of everyone, but thinking back, serious injury would have been much worse. I held my small stick up in the general direction of the ring so as not to appear as fearful or out of my league as I really was. When the horse stopped on the other side of the arena, I found, to my amazement, the ring was on the small stick in my hand. Everyone cheered and hooted at my demonstration of skill. I proudly took it over to the owner of the resort and he gave me a couple bills that he was handing out to the cowboys for their antics.

At breakfast the next day, several people were quite impressed and attributed my success to a combination of horsemanship and Zen. I maintained, and still do, that it was all luck.

Choosing Obligation

A joke that circulated among some progressive educators I knew in the day ran like this: The little boy comes to school on Monday and says: ‘Do we have to do what we want again today?’ This is funny because progressive education is about allowing children to be active participants in shaping their education. The most radical experiments, like Summerhill School in the UK in the 70’s and the Grassroots Free School in Tallahassee allow the children to pretty much decide how they want to use their time. Adults are there to keep them reasonably safe and to support the natural process of learning.

For a number of years, my Zen teacher and I led week-long silent retreats in a small house that abutted the school property. The school was struggling to find enough families were willing to trust the natural curiosity of their children beyond the first five years. There were only about ten or so young people who would roam the fields and gardens during the mornings and the afternoons while we sat still in the living room on our black cushions.

What I remember most from the intimate mornings of meditative silence is how long these young people could scream and shriek together in joy and excitement. The delight and wildness of their social freedom was not lost on these young practitioners of progressive education.

But the joke, ‘Do we have to do what we want again today?’, is also funny because it’s actually challenging to have nothing to do.

Also in the 70’s, I took a solo backpacking trip in the Beartooth Mountains in Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park. With my trusty orange backpack and tent, I hiked several miles in to a pristine lake up above the tree line. Crystal clear glacier melt water nestled below fields of mountain flowers—just like the Sierra Club calendar photos. I figured I’d stay there for several days and just ‘peace out.’ (It was the 70’s after all.)

After several hours of taking in the beauty, with no books to read and no projects to do and no drugs to take (I had already passed through that phase of the 70’s) I got astonishingly bored. My mind’s daydreams got weirder and weirder. I suddenly understood what a gift responsibility and even busyness is. Without the usual pressures of work or school or social expectations, I was utterly adrift—and not in a pleasant way.

I had enough sense about me to get out my map and make up something to do. I planned and then started out on an adventure through the mountains. Up and over, around and through. Making up a destination and walking, it turned out, was enough activity to keep my mind tethered to consensual reality and allow me to appreciate the gorgeous scenery.

But remembering the gift of having things we have to do can create new possibilities of appreciation in our lives. While it’s lovely, as I wrote yesterday, to follow some sweet aliveness that calls to us, it can also be lovely to feel like we have no choice.

But it’s not really true. Obligation is a social construct. Indeed you never have to do anything. You may choose to do things because you don’t like the potential consequences of the alternatives, but choice is the reality of our lives.

The freedom we speak of in Zen is not the freedom of sitting by the pristine lake in the mountains, though that is nice too in small doses, but the freedom to engage with what is right before us. The freedom to shovel the snow, to wash the dishes, to make sure the children are logged into school and not the video game with their friends.

So whether your day is the responsibility of choosing what you want to do or the freedom of meeting the responsibilities you have chosen, can we all appreciate whatever invitation the moment offers us?

Taking a Chance

Discipline is the courage to follow what we love.

I first heard this empowering definition many years ago and immediately adopted it. The words made intuitive sense and offered a whole new to approach discipline.   Instead of a necessary moral work that I should do, discipline might be about following an unfolding path or moving toward some mysterious aliveness that beacons.

Over the years, I have found this definition to be more complicated than it appears on the surface. The first problem is ‘What do I love?’   I love my partner, my daughter, my friends, my garden. I love connecting with people, being of use, sharing what I know, going for walks, sitting in meditation, being in nature, going on canoe trips with my sisters, playing trains with my grandson. I love watching TV in the evening with my partner, drinking a delicious craft beer, eating blue cheese, learning some new skill, using my body, making sculptures out of random rocks, finding the right words and rhythms as I’m writing, being surprised, talking to my mother on the phone, accomplishing things with other people, improvising.

So what does all this, and more, have to do with discipline? Discipline is the courage to follow what you love, sounds like some great romantic adventure toward a lofty goal. I imagine the music I might have played if I had practiced my alto saxophone in high school and beyond with discipline and intention. What gorgeous jazz I might have been a part of? What compositions and recordings might have emerged? What adventures would I have been part of?

But perhaps following what we love is easier and less heroic. Or maybe easier and still, in some way, heroic. What if the small things count? The little things that catch our attention and tickle our fancy? What if there is not some great love that we have to uncover and follow like the knight in a fairytale? What if we don’t have to be artistic geniuses or find our one true love? What if a full life has a thousand loves and each one is true?

Then where does the courage come in? How much courage does it take to do the little things that bring you alive? How much courage does it take to notice the little things that bring you joy and give yourself to them? In my experience—plenty. Though once we give ourselves permission and step over the line, the thing itself flows with its own rhythm, it is the stepping over the line that takes the courage.

We are the only ones who can allowing ourselves to love what we love, to be drawn to what we are drawn to and to move in that direction, if only for a few moments. It is not about waiting for someone else’s permission. Following even these little streams of life, even for short intervals of time requires us to trust our inner lives. To plant a few seeds inside in a pot of damp earth while the snow is still on the ground. To make a pot of tea and sit down with a magazine for twenty minutes in the middle of it all. To spend an hour arranging the objects on your mantle until they are just right. To call a friend to talk without any special need or purpose.

These are all acts of following—acts of courage. It’s not about the outcome but about the following. The point is not what happens next, the point is what’s happening now. When we head in this direction, toward what brings us alive, it’s not about the outcome. Of course we may hope that our seeds sprout and grow strong and end up in this summers garden. Or that Jill Lapore has written another article in this week’s New Yorker. Or that we find the perfect arrangement (for the moment) or that our friend is there when we call. But the real point is the following and in the following no measurement is possible.

So maybe discipline doesn’t have to involve a grand love and a huge amount of courage. But maybe it matters a whole lot just the same. So my prayer for today is to be awake to the many streams of life that call to me. May I practice saying yes, even briefly, to the love that touches me in a thousand ways.

Starting Nowhere

I sit down to write this morning and nothing comes. I try going in a couple different directions, but all the paths peter out. So how to enter into life from nowhere? For this is the point of my writing—to try to find some way to touch the aliveness of the moment—to enter into and appreciate the particular form in which life is appearing now—and in doing so to invite you, the reader, to do the same. I’m always trying to demonstrate and practice that which I’m trying to say.

While wise and true words may flow easily onto the page, they are indeed hard to live. Of course, this moment of no inspiration is equally part of life as every other moment. But some moments we would rather just pass over. ‘I’ll wait for this to pass so that I can live my real life.’ But we only ever live at this moment and it seems we might as well try to make the best of wherever we are—though going numb or avoiding or fixing are always options.

I suppose a reasonable person would just not write when nothing comes to write about. But I continue to refuse to be a reasonable person.

Which reminds me of the new wonderful book I’m reading at my daughter’s suggestion: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. (And so a gust of wind fills my sails and the boat which was dead in the water begins to creep forward.) Barrett is a down-to-earth writer who reports on contemporary research (including hers) showing that emotions are not ‘things’ that are triggered, but ephemeral events arising from the ongoing and complex substrate of neural activity that we call life.

The model of the triune brain with the thinking section (neocortex) sitting safely on top of the feeling (limbic) section and presiding over the survival (reptilian) base, though reassuring, is not accurate. Feeling is involved in everything we think, say and do—and usually this engagement happens beneath the level of our awareness. So we are free to imagine that we are perfectly reasonable people making perfectly reasonable decisions based on the facts of the world we encounter.

But, it turns out, we human beings are not reasonable creatures. (Given the last four years, this should not be news to any of us.) Current brain research aligns with the teachings of the Buddha 2,600 years ago—that we are constantly experiencing some ‘feeling tone’ of like dislike or neutral (2^nd foundation of mindfulness) and that ‘reality’ is a participatory phenomena. Barrett puts it this way:

“you might think about your environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that’s a myth. You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment—your reality—by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects…”

She reports that it’s not just the selection of sensory input, but how we make meaning of the input that constructs the world we experience as ‘out there.’ It turns out that our sense perception involves much more input from what we remember and know from the past than what we are receiving from the outside at any moment. So our brains construct the world and then react to the world we construct as if it were real. In the actual brain, there is no inside or out, just the constant darkness within the skull that is illuminated by a constant wash of billions of neural circuits firing in an emerging web of dynamic complexity.

So, this morning, this constant wash of dynamic complexity first appeared as little energy and no inspiration. In claiming my intention (to participate and play in and with whatever is here) and refusing to be reasonable, space was created for something else to appear and be known.

This is what I believe in and want to stake my life on. Life is always happening here and that life is big enough to encompass everything: something and nothing, inspiration and dullness, excitement and discouragement. And the only way in is to hang around long enough, to pay enough attention, to be unreasonable enough to join in.