Thoughts on Seeds.
By Chana R.

We planted native California wildflower seeds in the dirt patch behind our rental unit last Fall.  It was to be an El Niño year and sometimes the warmer waters of El Niño bring torrential downpours filling our aquifers ending our drought.  At least that is what we all hoped.  But this El Nino did not.  We did get more rain than the year before and that small amount of rain was just enough to get our seeds started. We also added some encouragement from the garden hose.

I would come home from work and stare at the ground looking for the ‘green beard’ that my partner said would come up in a week and it did.

The bag of seeds was a mixture of natives, we figured we would get California poppies which are a smile of delight with their yellow orange cups but we were not sure what else would come up.  The lady at the nursery where we bought the seeds gave us pamphlets on what types of flowers were expected but nothing was better than looking each day to see what shape of green was peeking above the dusty earth.

Then the green took shape into the heavy packages which were busting open with colors, yellows with fuzzy middles, stalks of downy pink and white, baby blue, magenta, and gold.  Everyday there was something new, bunches of flowers with names like tidy tips, owl clover, cambridge bells and baby blue eyes.

If you have never seen a lupine coat a dried field with its mini lavender ladder, it is a sight worth savoring.

I spend a lot of time on the freeway in traffic and coming up to that driveway after asphalt fatigue looking at that random garden mended me in ways I didn’t realize were broken. The garden went through phases, had a resident gopher who saladed her way through the tidy tips like a cartoon, provided cover and food for a plethora of birdlife including a very lonely male mockingbird who kept us up at 3am with his Romeo musical serenade.  For the rest of my life I will remember this time, this garden and the gracious sustenance I received from it.

I don’t really know if we would have attempted this garden if it wasn’t for the promise of rain. And I wonder if the promise of success or even what success might look like, is more about just being breathtakingly present to the seeds we planted ‘just in case’.

Perhaps, my life /
if taken carefully with open eyes/
is just like that warmer ocean weather system of chaos
that sometimes rains and sometimes doesn’t but always offers.

In the Zen tradition a priest sews his own robe along with what is called a zagu or bowing mat. The mat is opened and placed on the floor for the priest to bow down on.

It is a cloth to remind the priest as well as others who witness the bowing of two messages:

The first message is to remind the priest of the torn rags he used to sew the cloth. Nothing is useless.

The second is to remember the whole world bows on the cloth with him. No one is left out.

All one cloth. Nothing is useless. No one is left out.

 

Go with God

Go with non-attachment, this is enough.

Die in place.

No status.

Welcome the throng of saints.

Steady as you go.

Seek no glory.

Remember what you know.

When we yearn for something else we are in the confines of desire.  When we don’t get what we want, we suffer. We react. We feel miserable. We act against whatever we think prevents us from getting what we want. The world becomes an enemy to oppose.

We have mistaken the source of our discomfort.

We think and believe the source of our discomfort comes from external circumstances. We believe the myriad conditions of life are sovereign. We believe if we change our circumstances we will get what we want. Desire reigns

Desire rules the cycle of bitterness and misery. Samsara is the world of wandering through the various realms of desire that results in bitterness and misery.

Our yearning for something else tells us where we are. We are in the prison of desire. The confinement of desire overshadows our ability to see what is right in front of u

When we look forward we get excited by fear. When we look back we stumble into sorrow and regret. We believe our desire to escape is the truth. We begin to put an escape plan together along the route of desire for something else.  We yearn for things to be otherwise. We talk about it. We take action to get it, whatever it is. We limit our vision. We fumble.

We do it again.

We race forward in thoughts. We look back in thoughts. We react. We feel. We take action. We fail to see that it is our yearning to get what we want is ruling and we are subject to it.

Door Knobs and Beliefs © Yao Xiang Shakya, efh 2015

By Yao Xiang Shakya

In the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors Judah, the main character, struggles with his childish belief about God. As a child, Judah’s father taught him that God watches and knows his every move and furthermore this watchful God punishes wrongful behavior and rewards virtue. Judah, after having his mistress killed by an anonymous hit man finds that although he does experience a short period of guilt and fear, in the end his life is unscathed by his brutal act.

As I contemplate this story I include these ideas and acts in my mind as “I am” and “I am not.” What I mean by this is I literally contemplate that I am Judah, I am the hit man, I am the mistress, I am the killer, I am the killed followed by the contemplation of I am not Judah, I am not the hit man, I am not the mistress, I am not the killer, I am not the killed. In both contemplations, whether it is positive or negative swimming occurs. What I mean by swimming is movement in the experience of being I am. There is no landing, no ground not even the ground of a belief that God watches and knows every move I make and punishes and rewards accordingly. There is swimming. But it does not mean I conclude I am a swimmer, it is quickly followed by I am not a swimmer. There is swimming. There is not swimming. There is I am. And this I am is Judah, the hit man, the mistress, the killer, the killed, and not Judah, not the hit man, not the mistress, not the killer, and not the killed. And none of this lives in the realm of ideas but only in the realm of being.

And as far as the doorknob is concerned…well…I am the doorknob, I am the handle, I am turnable, I am part of a door and I am not the doorknob, I am not the handle, I am not turnable and I am not part of the door. This being is being.

I am not Jungian, Freudian, Adlerian…or any such thing…I applaud the Dane, not Hamlet, but Kierkegaard…both these Danes were thought to be mad because both of them lived with a broken heart. They remind me of Jesus and Shakyamuni…surely they went forth with a broken heart as they lived to find the truth of existence!  Three of them lived out the contemplations of devotion.

When I practiced as a clinical psychologist, clients would say, “All you seem to point out is that I am human!” That is of course true. Religion often fails to take that into consideration.  Zen shows that I am a human being that is able to transcend; the method is the contemplations of being devoted to being human and finding God in the middle of it.

What a marvel.

 

By Yao Xiang Shakya, efh

The things of the world keep us oriented in the world, focused on the world giving us a sense of protection. Physical protection, time orientation and spatial orientation are all of the things we tend to rely on. These things give us a sense of being invulnerable to harm, physical harm, impermanence and presence in a body somewhere.

 

A solid footing…

We begin to look tough, believe we are tough and act invulnerable.

 

 

Solid Footing © A Single Thread

To See

To see the Beloved we set aside these protections. Our desire to see the Beloved needs to be greater than our desire for our own physical protection, our own identity, our own sense of invulnerability. And we need to let go of our sense of measuring time.

Why do we need to measure time? We need to let reality appear as it is; the oppositions of light and dark merge; light in dark, dark in light without or with vanish, in and out are in balance.

The adders in the flowers no longer threaten us. In some ways it is to override our instinct to survive and fall overboard into the dark vastness.

Desire and ill-will no longer blind us and we begin to love without wanting anything in return. We simply stop trying to get something. We do without is known as the same as doing with.