The scarf wasn’t enough to cover up David’s hollowed cheek line. It merely reminded him of what he used to prize. Sarah touched her thumb along the tip of each of her fingers when she decided to speak.
“I’m not…” she sighed. “No. That’s not it”
David, alarmed by Sarah’s stammering, faltered. The beauty, hers, his, waned. “It’s better to be a chair,” he said in an attempt to convince her. Sarah grimaced. “Are you kidding me? You’re doing it again!” she said accusing him of his blockheadedness.
He choked before he answered. “I know. I know. You don’t like it when I say the obvious.”
“First it’s NOT obvious. And secondly, if you knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Sarah sunk her teeth into a piece of dead skin along her thumb and tore it off.
David, with his hands in his pockets moved towards Sarah to deliver more of the same. “Say what you will. It’s true. It is better to be a chair. Like that one, the one we paid big bucks for…or the couch, or the Oriental rug.”
Sarah shook her head as she mocked wiping something away in-between them. “You’ll never change. Everyone…”
David interrupted. “Everyone? Really? Everyone? If you didn’t blow things out of proportion and listen for a change, I wouldn’t have to say shit like it’s better to be a chair.” He’d drawn his hands out of his pockets as though he touched something in the space between them. When he turned away to the side he let his head slump towards one shoulder then whispered.
“And no matter what you say, I know I am right.”
Sarah sighs. She tries again to speak what she came to tell him.
“I’m not…” she stammers.
He turned round and looked at her.
Sarah took in a deep breath and shrugged. Shaking her head from side to side she began again.
“Ok. OK. I’ll bite. Why…Just tell me why you think it is better to be a chair.”
“Not until you tell me who told you I’ll never change?”
THE MASTER Ikkyu showed his wisdom even as a child. Once he broke
the precious heirloom teacup of his teacher, and was greatly
upset. While he was wondering what to do, he heard his teacher
coming. Quickly he hid the pieces of the cup under his robe.
“Master,” he said, “why do things die?”
“It is perfectly natural for things to die and for the matter
gathered in them to separate and disintegrate,” said the teacher.
“When its time has come every person and every thing must go.
“Master,” said little Ikkyu, showing the pieces, “it was time for
your cup to go. Collection of Stone and Sand #85
Vanishing Bluebird by Zhong Fen li Bao yu Di
Comments on Practice: Vanishing Bluebird
When I look at images, paintings, photos, I immediately want to reach a conclusion, to know something. I am practicing to let go of that reaction and that desire and instead rest in not knowing. However, my desire to know repeatedly reasserts itself, especially when I write about what I am seeing. As I said, these days I am constantly practicing to both let go of wanting to know and believing that I can know.
That said, let me offer comment on the bluebird photos. The bluebird died this spring trying to nest in my chimney. This is a common occurrence on the prairie. I took the photo, I think, because I wished to hold onto its great beauty. Reflecting on it, I see my delusion. When the bluebird was alive, flying about, perching on tall grass, or nesting in a nearby box, I admired it greatly, wishing to see him again and again…..wanting more. When he was made lifeless, I still thought I could have more of him and his beauty, even possess him by preserving him. Much gratitude to whatever carried him off. The second photo captures a cold slap that I needed.
Vanished by Zhong Fen li Bao yu Di
The bluebird vanished, but he did not become nothing. I am sure that I could make a list of what he may have become. But neither can I know nor do I need to know any specifics. It is quite enough to know that he continues to move and change.
Another point that I shall contemplate….who is the “I” that desires and seeks to know? Is it the “I” that wants to hold onto his own beauty, his vitality to, try to possess himself?
I recall something Sister Wendy Beckett said, ” I don’t think we are all that important. We are only important to God, not to ourselves.”
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.
Rejoicing in everyday things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow every day good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warriors world. Pema Chodron
Our relationship, Emmy’s and mine, is like a 12-inch long, one inch in diameter pretzel. That’s how relationships can be . . . one long salted pretzel that looks like a cigar.
Of course there are many kinds of relationships just as there are many kinds and shapes of pretzels but these are other people’s affairs, not mine.
This situation – our connection – has been too long. . . seven years. The winds of change blow, the flowing stream slows and muddies.
“We have excitement but never enthusiasm.” Emmy said that, early on.
We are talked out and have (at this point) little in common. I became lazy and seethed with boredom. I guess the label couch potato fits.
Usually, after work on my way back to the apartment, I have to stop in at Bernie’s Bar for a glass — four fingers — of scotch . . .sometimes two glasses . . . just to endure.
We live on the Upper Easts Side of Manhattan. I guess you might say I feel that perhaps I need to atone for something that is nagging at me. There is an intrinsic uneasiness. I am seeing a therapist.
Yes, it’s true, I had used the word engaged a number of times but no ring was given, so you might say, I didn’t seal the deal with that sort of commitment. If a ring was not presented in seven years, I think my intentions were obvious.
This linkage with Emmy is not about love, marriage and a baby carriage. I was dumbfounded when one night during what she called “Pillow Talk” she asked if I thought that we were soul mates.
I wanted to say, we are roommates and sex mates but instead I groaned and pretended to sleep. What the hell is a soul mate?
Human beings never stay at a plateau for long . . .we either move up . . . or down. In this case, the movement is clearly down. And, when a relationship brings me down it is time to move on.
Out of kindness, I wanted to wait until after the holidays. As always she had signed our Christmas cards: Hank and Emmy which made me wince but I knew that breaking up, would not be easy.
She would be hurt and annoyed and I hoped that she wouldn’t cry or whine – that she would be adult about it.
It was delicious when it was fresh and new but everything is transitory. . . relationships are changing things. They go stale.
As a chemist I had long ago learned that the visual could make things clear whereas when using words only – the message can be ambiguous. I wanted to do this once…make a clean, sharp cut with nothing holding us. No guilt, no blame.
I had called her from Kennedy when my plane landed and suggested that we go to what used to be our favorite restaurant– Mario’s — and have a few glasses of wine together with fine aged cheese or maybe warm Brie.
I wanted to do this correctly, end with kindness and class. At this point, she knew nothing of my decision. She was not perceptive which, was part of our problem.
I had been in Atlanta lecturing at Emory for more than a week. That’s another thing, I am a research chemist and I found communication about my work difficult. I had to talk to her as I would talk to a three year old. She had come to the table with a beautiful face and perfect body but it wasn’t enough. Well, it was at first but fires burn out.
She was excited about going to Mario’s and said she wanted to sit in our favorite booth tucked away in a private corner. That was perfect for what I had to do.
We split a bottle of Ménage a’ Trois and were both feeling mellow. That’s when I pulled the pretzel out of my pocket. I had it wrapped in plastic wrap.
After I took the plastic off, I held the pretzel in my hand. It looked like a long finger in the candlelight.
She started to laugh and asked me what I was doing. I held it up over my head. Up…then down almost touching the tabletop. She laughed. I moved it up and down two more times. She laughed again. I moved it slowly to the right and then slowly to the left, like a priest holding up a cross, or a Buddhist holding up smoking incense.
I kept moving it…up and down and back and forth, this time as a Rabbi holds the Torah. And, then, I kissed it.
With pressure from both my hands I broke it in half. Snap! Crack! Done. It was neat and clean.
I gave Emmy half of the pretzel and put my half back in my pocket. I told her that this was the way to end a relationship. Snap! Crack!
Only, it did not work that way. Crying and screaming and accusations came with catastrophic hurricane suddenness and, she forced me to reveal, that yes, there was another woman.
I reminded her I did not vow to love her till death do we part nor to forsake all others or to be there for better or worse. I did not promise to cherish.
I wanted out.
Later, I walked down by the Hudson and threw my half of the pretzel bit by bit into the water. It was like the Jewish practice of throwing bread into the water during the High Holy Days.
It was getting rid of the things in my life I no longer wanted. This was going to be a new beginning for me, a new year, a new town, a new woman.
A senior teacher at Shasta Abbey, whose website I often visit for Zen teaching, provided a key to the Wheel of Suffering when he noted that if you find yourself caught in a place of suffering, you are ignorant of something. The key is to discover how ignorance is keeping you in a place of misery and craving. As I make my way through the many images and facets of The Wheel of Suffering, I come upon my ignorance over and over again. Being surrounded, as I now am, with my own take on some of the Wheel images, I often find myself using the cards as clues to discover where the truth is hidden under the flotsam and jetsam of ignorance.
As my sangha slowly, deliberately contemplated the original Wheel, my creative attention moved from the outer rim of the Wheel to its innermost circle. In the Wheel mandala, greed hate and delusion live at the hub. These “Three Poisons” are at the center of Buddhist thought as well, the reasons for suffering boiled down to their purest essence.
Just as the hubs of our bike and car wheels hold the spin of those wheels together, so the three primary human emotional drives of delusion (a pig), greed (a cock) and hate (a snake) bind our suffering with such force that everything on the Wheel, moving out from the middle, is held together by their power.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016 Delusion….Greed……and Hate in the card game of life
In my re-working of the Wheel mandala, these three poisons are the orange card suit, hence, each of the playing cards have the color orange featured in its design. They are the “bullseye,” the core of the teachings, and not unlike the card of Ignorance at the top outermost edge of the Wheel, seeing that one is caught up in the 3 Poisons is to see everything. It is an arrow to the heart of the beast called suffering.
Greed and hate are strong words. They don’t mess around in describing the lengths to which we humans will go to manipulate the world so that we may realize our self-centered dreams.
These are toxic, poisonous impulses in human beings. These twin drives reach far back into evolutionary time, and allowed our oldest ancestors to know instantly whether to move towards, or away from, sensate experiences. They were, and are, survival drives, and our success as a species reflects in part the success of greed and hate at showing us how to navigate challenges in our environment. And yet, unedited survival responses have gotten the world, and each of us, into a mess of trouble. They are the craving of the second Noble Truth: the cause of all suffering.
Greed
Contemplating my own manifestation of the basic human drive to want more, better, different, I began to notice a tendency in my eyes, in my posture and also in my mind to reach. My eyes reach into my visual environment, looking for problems to be solved. My mind too is relentlessly seeking, driving, re-working the past hour or day, cleaning things up, dreaming of the next minute or hour or day’s work to be done. And my torso urges me forward, always forward. As I settle into a period of sitting meditation, often the settling comes as a relaxation of my torso from urging myself forward to resting back into the center of my pelvis. It always feels like coming home, a great relief. I began to recognize that the reaching habit has greed at its core.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
The Greed card illustrates this reaching as the deep imbalance it is. The sitting figure reaches for a piece of unripe fruit (the future is never ripe enough for picking, yet we can’t seem to stop reaching for it anyway), and/or for a pile of dry bones, those aspects of our lives that have already been lived, are gone forever, but which we, with our re-hashing, try in vain to keep alive and malleable.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
When the sitting figure on the greed playing card can organize not around the reach but around the gathering of all experience into the here and now, then her true center, binding her to heaven and to earth, becomes manifest.
I make use of this image frequently to help me let go of the reaching mind, and settle into my own centered stillness, especially while I meditate. The “clunk” of body and mind and spirit into that pure quality of presence is dear to me. It is worth practicing to find. Grounded down, lifted upwards, fully here, wanting nothing, feeling my own connection to everything above and below through my own mind, heart and gut.
Meditation is a strong antidote to greed, for the simple though profound act of sitting still sends instant signals to the wanting mind that there will be no going after anything for the duration of the meditation period. This can make the mind frantic with desire, as we all know. But to be physically still in the face of a greedy mind lays a foundation for deep practice.
Next time, while in meditation, when you find yourself overwhelmed with the unrelenting desires of the mind, try bringing your attention to the stillness of your body. Make your eyes still. Let the frantic mind run its course as you hold your ground with your sitting posture. Accept that this stillness you have achieved, so foreign in our culture, so contrary to the workings of the grasping ego and our survival instinct, is understandably difficult for your mind to surrender to. Honor your body’s capacity to lead the way for the mind.
HATE: THE FLIP SIDE OF GREED
We like to soft-pedal hate. We call it anger, frustration, dislike, irritation. Do you know that all these words have hate at their core? Do you know your own hate? I was not very familiar with my hatred as I began working with this playing card. I was much more in touch with anxiety, fear, dread. My teacher said to me over and over again, “Underneath fear is hate.” It took me a long time to realize the truth of her words, but eventually I saw that my anxiety is built on self-hatred and self-condemnation. Somebody inside me hates who I am and what I do.
The hate playing card shows a fearful woman with missiles trained at her. Two hate-filled male figures, squeezed into the bottom of the frame, fuel the spark that can ignite the missiles. The hatred, buried and held back, also burns like a slow fire, licking up the left side of the image, and eventually releasing fiery venom from a very pretty, though lethal, snake. Image by Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
Which is more dominant in your internal world, hate or fear? Do you know of the connection between fear and hate from your own experience?
My deeply hidden anger first manifested as left side body pain. Eventually, with study, contemplation and meditation, the physical pain transformed into long-held emotional memory.
When anger or fear show up, whether sparked by the present or the past, the key is to recognize their fundamental emptiness. Do not believe that what you feel is true. Do not identify with it. Let this strong energy come, up through your still body and mind, then let it go. This capacity, to be present to strong emotions with acceptance yet without letting them define you, comes with practice and the good guidance of a teacher.
As my angry memories emerged, I could see how attached I was, and am, to having things go my way. My teacher’s words echo in me, “What are you going after?” Ask this of yourself. Whatever it is we are driven to have, aversion and its many guises can be kindled when our cherished aspirations fall apart.
Fear and hate drive us towards fighting against, or running from, that which we perceive as a threat, while greed propels us to reach for, in order to grasp, that which we perceive as insuring our wellbeing. Whether we are caught in like or dislike, we create what feels like a solid state made up of running from, pushing against, and reaching toward. This sense of solidity is a delusion. A house of cards!
DELUSION
Delusion is the third and final drive at the hub of the Wheel. Delusions are the stories we tell ourselves that help us to know the world and how to operate in it. These stories are delusions because they arise out of the likes and dislikes that condition our understanding. They are created by, and they also feed the creation of, greed and hate, the pushing away of experiences and people and the reaching for more, different, better.
Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
The false sense of being a solid somebody is illustrated in the Delusion playing card with a New Yorker cartoon that assigns names and personalities to two waves rising up in the ocean. We can see the hilarity in this……yet we are deeply attached to our own identities, easily forgetting just how fleeting and fluid our self-ness really is, and how completely interpenetrated with everything else this thing called “me” actually is.
The second cartoon depicts my personal favorite, the delusion that lives at the core of my belief system. Here, at the heart of my conditioning, stunning is an imperative. I MUST be stunning, be perceived as stunning, strive relentlessly to be stunning. It is a deep drive. My very survival seems at stake. Stunning, and the striving required of it, are imbedded in my personality. Despite many attempts to slow down, relax, let go of my ambition and perfectionism, I remained caught and in pain because of this drive until I committed to a Buddhist practice. I still find myself striving towards an ideal all the time. It remains a pervasive influence on me. But I have tools now that have helped me to stay present to this impulse long enough to know how exactly it is false.
One such practice tool is represented by a “trap door,” on the Delusion playing card, an opening through which to escape the falseness of the world that delusion creates. Opening this door, we find a mirror, showing us a reflection of…….what? The way to freedom from the ignorance of our delusions lies in opening to what may be outside this self-contained reality, staying in the question, “what is really here?”
Image by Getsu San Ku Shin 2016
But even before we can bring mindfulness to our suffering, we need to see where we are. We have to wake up to the truth that we are caught in a false sense of self. The original Wheel mandala illustrates the Three Poisons as three beasts eating each other’s tails, showing us that these drives co-exist, are co-created. If you can identify one, the other two are INEVITABLY running also. I have found this such a valuable tool. Now I know that whenever I am angry, greed and delusion are somewhere close at hand. I know that whenever my perfectionism is driving me, that it is greed and hate I am giving birth to. Here is an example from own experience:
When, through my Buddhist practice, I encountered a tight knot of anger within a chronically painful left hip and neck, I was brought face to face with the whole trio of drives. The rage inflaming my hip and neck arose from a time in my life when I helped to create and manage a business that, in my mind, represented the pinnacle of stunning-ness. It was everything I had ever dreamed of. In order to get it and keep it, I worked harder than I had ever worked, denying myself sleep, time with family, self-care…..in other words, the greed-filled reaching was manifest. Eventually, the pressures of managing a successful business took their toll, and the business relationships began to fall apart. It was not pretty. When I finally walked away from the whole enterprise, it was with a deep sense of failure, my dream of stunning shattered. Depression ensued, remedied only by my eventually plunging into new projects.
It was not until I had enough skill as a meditator, as well as a mentor to guide me, that I discovered the rage I had suppressed, and that my body still carried. I saw that my hatred was sustained by my belief that the business was the only thing that would ever truly complete me. A decade or more later, I continued to crave being the stunning owner of a stunning enterprise. Because it fell apart, I was furious with both myself and my business partner for how things had actually unfolded.
Staying still within the experience of the hatred, I began to remember that I did not really enjoy the process of running a business. I did not like being in charge. I did not really want to show up in that way. It didn’t actually suit me. It was, if I was honest with myself, a relief to walk away, to get a rest from the effort it took to be stunning. The impulses for less busy-ness, for less notoriety, for a more solitary life, had been completely ignored and denied by my drive toward fame and power. The solid sense of myself I thought I had was indeed a delusion built of desire and culminating in aversion. Seeing this clearly, I could step out of ignorance.
The anger fell away. It was painful to realize how little I had actually known of my true nature, but I also felt joy at having discovered a world within, beyond the delusion of stunning. I was grateful that the partnership had fallen apart and freed me to have a different kind of life.
The example above illustrates the poison that can manifest when we don’t get what we want. But it also speaks to what can happen when we DO get what we want. It took me years to realize it, but having this business, for which I had fought and reached mightily, was not a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Now that I had it, I had to keep it…..which made me more anxious, more stressed. I found I was fighting all the time to keep what I wanted, to control its outcomes, to make it a continuing success. I truly felt mostly aversion for the project, though this was paved over with my habitual determination to succeed. Looking back, I can see that typically when I get the thing I strive for, it is nothing like the pleasure and nourishment I expected. Fool’s gold.
Greed hate and delusion do not represent our true nature. Who we really are remains hidden until we can see through our habits, and stop believing them. My Buddhist practice, and the wisdom tradition so beautifully illuminated on the Wheel of Suffering, are the tools I am using to lead me inward and homeward.
COMING AROUND
The soul just wants to be left alone
in the car with the moon-roof open
and the seat rolled all the way back.
She locks the doors and squints through
space at quiet stars and winking planes.
She is dropping out of pulse, that hard
pentameter. She turns her unlined face
from drying bones and skin. Asleep
at the wheeling starry sky, she looses
her lips like an opening rose. The soul
lets her eyes roll to a darker side, tunes
the radio to no sound at all. A rose is red
in her hair: a flare, a tropic. She warms
to this climate, slips away. The rose
opens to hold her dreams. Then lets them
go. The soul wakes with a chill, closes
the roof, shifts into time and place.
Shakes a clot of petals from her lap.
Imagine, if you will, a Mistress Master with such strength and weight that she is able to stand on creation itself. She is potent. Her potency is felt in the work Ming Zhen Shakya declared to me in a rather subtle voice; ‘Writing’ shesaid, “is your master and the devotional path for you towards the transcendent.” It was, and still is, a bit surprising but I have come to accept it. My acceptance comes in the form of experience, not in the form of an idea or concept regarding the act of writing. Although I must admit that I began with a head full of ideas when it came to this new, potent Master and practice.
Before I begin to explain let me first exclaim my true master is writing and ‘Writing is not an easy master; it tends to use a gut hooking approach.‘
I suspect, however, whenever we meet our true master it is never easy. I suppose it’s the nature of masters. After all, their job is to show us that we need to burn up our old seeds of stupidity. The difficulty seems to always arise because we (and I speak from experience) are attached to our stupidity. Also, as far as I am able to tell a Master is looking to club us with some provocative reality in order to stop us from yet again making another fabrication from one of those terribly, unwholesome seeds that gets us into trouble. It’s been my experience that this is so.
”Gratitude follows when you surrender to the master.‘
For anyone who has not met a master who is willing to point out the necessity to burn up the seeds of karma this article may be of little interest; except it might light up a need within to search for someone or something that masters you in such a way as to burn up those ugly seeds (greed seeds, hate seeds, delusion seeds). All I might do is suggest that finding a master might be a consideration, especially for those who are searching for God.
If you have found a master, then you know what I mean.
It may seem I have strayed from the title of this piece but I felt as though I needed to explain where I am otherwise it might be more difficult to get a grasp of what a fish out of water…is a dead fish means for a spiritual aspirant.
Working with a Master is a spiritual experience unlike any relationship I have ever known. It is a constant awareness of the devotional demand of the Master. Writing is the form my master takes which means I am forever drawn upon to devote my life right where I am to writing. I say this in order to suggest that you might want to look at the form your spiritual mastertakes.
Wait! I am sorry but I must add another comment. Masters in the form of human beings are vulnerable to error, but masters that are ideals are not.
This above comment is important. Oftentimes we meet up with a teacher and think they are our master. It might even go along pretty smoothly for awhile but because this human master is fallible we might give up, get disgusted, disappointed rather than see the obvious flaw in our choice of a master. To be very clear…a human master is not such a good choice, but a human master who points to a true, ideal master is an excellent choice.
Master Ming Zhen Shakya is my human master who diligently with great resilience pointed me towards the ideal master of writing. Master Ming Zhen Shakya holds no positional power in the material world as a master, but she is the sine que non master of pointing to the true ideal, to the true master for me.
I am very lucky. I wish every person such luck.
But do not think your master comes to console, comfort or make everything sweet. Writing from my experience is agony; mostly agony with brief moments of joy. I am speaking of writing as an inner devotion. Writing, the actual task of writing, is not easy. But when I write from this inner shift to a devotion to writing I am in quite a different place. There is no ambition, no desire for a result, no prospects or pursuits of any kind. I am tending to my master.
Yet, it still makes me nuts, sometimes.
Being nuts arises when I think. Yep. That’s it. When I think about how I am devoting my life to my master. When I measure my devotion. And all the other ego-obstacles that I fabricate. Then I am nuts.
Since I have made the commitment (I want to whisper that commitment since I get shaky thinking God hears this commitment and will hold my feet to the fire)…nonetheless, I have made the commitment and the commitment as a vow sparks something that goes beyond my ego. MAking a commitment is lighting candles all around the altar of my master.
This next part is important.
The True Master always goes beyond the ego. When I realize this truth and see it, then I feel stronger in my commitment. It only makes sense. The ego is a burden that weighs down my efforts. But when I slay the ego, my commitment is stronger. It comes from slaying the ego.
The way this Master works is that it is constantly making an effort to get my attention and to use what shows up in my life as an offering and devotion to/of God (God being the true master in the disguise of a writing master.1)
Here’s the example in the form of experience.
When I am beset by misgivings about writing I get stalled and fall prey to the legions of Mara (those devilish demons of self-centered interest). My moods begin to shift and for some time I thought that I could NOT devote my time to writing when in such and such a mood because (this is important) I had an IDEA of what writing is. I had an idea of what writing should be! I had ideas of how I should write! All these ideas were in league with Mara. They blocked my attention to use whatever shows up as the devotion to writing in the moment. When in a mood, write! This means I stay in the water and move in it to the end. I stick with whatever shows up.
To close I’d like to tie together the title in a more precise, clear way.
A fish out of water…is a dead fish refers to the Zen teaching of a fish (you and me) needing to be in our element (our life) to the end (which means fully experiencing our situation and place) before we can begin practice. When we distract ourselves, when we get distracted we fall prey to losing the Way and fall into all sorts of delusions.
That’s a mouthful!!! Let me repeat it differently.
If I do not live this life right here where I am, I am not able to practice. Practice requires we give up our wishes, dreams, desires for things to be otherwise; to go off somewhere to get away from what is happening right where we are.
As long as we have those sorts of wishes, we can’t begin to practice with a master.
In other words, I am dead in the water, much like a fish out of water. I am dead to being alive in the elements of life right in front of me. I need to be fully attending to what’s showing up before I am able to offer devotion to my master, to my true master who is disguised in the robes of a writing master.
We all know a fish out of water…is a dead fish, but somehow we fail to see that it refers to us, to our spiritual efforts, our spiritual experiences, right where we are. When we are in pursuit, when we are on the hunt, when we are in the minefield of concepts, when we are becoming somebody we are a fish out of water; more dead than alive.
We may own things, we may do things — without suffering as long as we do not rely on the profane world as real. It’s like a fun house. Made of crazy mirrors showing distorted shapes.
During a recent retreat, I asked my teacher for help in understanding what emptiness is. She requested that I write about it, which I did. Then she sent me this.
” The experience of emptiness is enlightenment..to want nothing..to know nothing..have nothing. Completely empty even words cannot express. All hindrances are gone.”
I wrote back that I did not understand, but would reflect upon her words. I stopped trying to understand the words. Instead, I tried to “feel” my response to them. In doing so, I recalled vacationing in the Outer Banks as a young man…the feeling of swimming in the ocean…being on the edge of rip tides…of swimming in very deep waters. Her words about emptiness brought back many feelings associated with those experiences. I then wrote this poem.
