Complaining

Thinking this morning about complaining – how easy it is to fall into this attitude – regardless of one’s situation. This morning I’m feeling grumpy about the number of emails sitting in my inbox which are asking me to find time for this and that. I want to say yes to all of them, to please others and to get stuff done. But I have grown quite irritated by my tendency to schedule so many meetings that I am exhausted and resentful by the end of the day. I feel overwhelmed and feel a strong urge just to avoid my email altogether. (I have been practicing this strategy for the last day and a half and it doesn’t seem to have improved the situation so I may have to come up with a different tactic soon.)

As I write, I’m sitting out on the porch of the Temple in the humid summer morning. Looking down through the balustrades, I see the new waterfall and pond we have installed. Some koi swim lazily around the edge. The soft hushing sound of the waterfall fills the space between the louder rushing of the cars while the birds add their melodic callings.

It’s been eight and a half years that I’ve lived here at Boundless Way Zen Temple – eight and half years since we created this place. At first it was just a name. A friend complained: ‘How can you call it a Temple? It’s just a big house.’ I suppose that was true until we had our first meditation period here – the morning after we moved in. I woke before anyone else to find a small tree had fallen against the house overnight—and so it began.

How many mornings have I sat out here with my laptop – delving into the mysteries of this arising moment? How many words have I typed? How many thoughts have appeared? And I still don’t know where they come from, or why some seem to have some energy and aliveness that others don’t. Most of what I write is never seen – wanderings in the universe of the self – the universe that is the arising of me and the world together. For me, the writing is a way of paying attention to my experience – the experience that arises as seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling and thinking. I don’t know where it comes from or how it organizes itself. But the contact point itself is the fullness of life.

The fish like the edges of the pond – like the spaces under the rocks where there is shelter. Me too, these edges of the day, before the fullness begins allow some kind of appreciating that vanishes in the fullness of life itself.

But back to complaining – I got distracted by the immediacy of things – forgot I was trying to present complaining – to look into complaining as an arising – to understand the arising of it and perhaps the gift of it – or at least some way through it.

But I got distracted and have already moved on.