This morning I am sitting here with the word "aftermath". In a minute I need to stop and go look this word up. First, though, I want to sit with this word, and with this pen on this paper and watch what happens.

What is the "after" I am after here?

I am sitting here in the aftermath of all the worry of last week. All the disaster scenario planning. All the ways something would go horribly wrong, and I would be found out for the fraud I am.

And then - one by one - each domino failed to fall.

The car failed to break down on the way to the airport.
The plane ride failed to be difficult and problematic. (In fact it turned out to be quite enjoyable.)
The shuttle failed to drop me off at the hotel last (in fact I was first), and the clerk at the front desk failed to tell me that I was two hours early, and that there was no room available.
My debit card failed to be declined, even with all the other charges on it. (It seemed that my automatic deposit failed not to show up in my account just before I checked in.)
My listening training workshop failed to be a failure.

Of course then there was the meeting with my client on Friday afternoon that I was dreading, and then turned out to be a valuable and important time for him. Another disaster that failed to materialize.

And now I am sitting in the aftermath of the koan seminar at PZI.
It is funny to me now when I think of that first dharma talk I went to and was so frantic about coming in late. This time I was driving up The Silverado Trail - taking time to pay attention to all the beauty in the vineyards around me - I knew that I would arrive at the meditation hall room late. Only this time I would not be coming in as a stranger would, all awkward and catawampus.

When I arrived, the group was already sitting in meditation. There was a chair right there in the back waiting for me. Actually the chair was just there. And then so was I. John saw me and smiled. I can remember even now the feeling of belonging in that moment.

The koan, like each one that John presents, felt as if it had been cooked up especially for me.

Such a remarkable moment when I heard him say that while I was settling into what was now my chair. So much of my attention of late has been on my hands. The impact that this beginning to take care of my hands has on the rest of me. This newfound, deeper awareness of choice all around me - even in the smallest detail. Allowing my nails to grow without biting them, the shifting awareness of my relationships, the way I am living my life. It is all the same.

At one point John asked: How do we live with the gaps between ourselves an everything else? Until he asked that question it never quite occurred to me that this gap is something we could live with. Then of course it occurred to me that I have been living with and in this gap my whole life - sometimes quiet happily.

So now I have just looked up this word I've been sitting with, my companion on this morning's journey that is this entry - this word, aftermath. The word is fairly old (1523), and originally meant a second crop of grass grown after the first crop had been harvested. The -math comes from an ancient word, mÆd´, which means mowing.
Without my conscious awareness it would appear that this word was guiding me all along as I went about mowing the grass a second time. This is a wonderful reminder that harvests are not just single, stand-alone events. There is the aftermath, the second harvest.

In this moment I am aware of how grateful I am for both harvests - the harvesting that I have done this weekend, and now the aftermath. It is all good.

Buddha's Little Instruction Book by Jack Kornfield

And this found on WhiskeyRiver blog

Recently, I have taken to listening to dharma talks via podcasts. [In fact I am listening to one right now, as I write this. OK, I stopped now...] To a large extent this is due to my inability to spend as much time at PZI as I would like participating in talks given there by John Tarrant. Hopefully, PZI will soon post some of his talks, and I'll be able to listen to them on iTunes, but until then...

One more aside, and I promise that I'll get to the buckets. More often these days I seem to be paying attention to those "Oracles of Everyday Living" that my listening teacher, Dr Mark Brady, spoke about during the Deep Listening training at UC Santa Cruz way back when. These are the gems of wisdom - both large and small ¬- that seem to come out of the blue. They are the snippets of overheard conversation you might hear in a café, or an ad you might see that speaks to something deeper than the consumer message on its surface, or even a dharma talk podcast.

So, this one evening a few weeks ago I found myself at one of those choice points that I seem to come upon several times a day: Do I choose to look at my present condition [whatever it happens to be in this moment] from a perspective of scarcity or abundance? I've long ago put aside any effort to understand why it is so easy for me to notice scarcity. It just is. As I was thinking about all this abundance/scarcity business, I happened upon a talk that spoke to me in that way of oracles.

The dharma teacher was referencing another old Japanese master, who may have been one of her teachers. He told of the first steamship that traveled to the Amazon region. A very long way from home, these sailors began to run out of drinking water. Their situation was dire when a British steamship happened upon them as it was heading downriver. The Japanese ship signaled the other asking them for help, telling them of their urgent need for drinking water. The response they got dumbfounded them. The response from the British ship was "Put down your buckets". They thought this was either some kind of code or a problem wit language. They sent the same message, and again the same response - essentially "Drop your buckets!"

Then one of the Japanese sailors had an epiphany. He dropped a bucket into the river and pulled it up. He tasted the water and found that it was in fact fresh water more than suitable for drinking.

In Japan all the rivers are very narrow and not at all like the mighty Amazon. The Japanese assumed that any body of water that large must be comprised of seawater. They just could not imagine so much fresh water in such abundance.

Hearing this story stopped me dead in my tracks. What caught my attention most was not the lesson about unseen abundance clouded by an illusion of scarcity. There are many such tales in our collective folk memory. Rather, I was particularly moved by the realization that they were in (or on) the very abundance they were seeking. The water was not "over there" on the British ship.

Also, this story spoke to me about the power of "effortless effort" that has been on my mind of late. In this situation the empty buckets were much heavier than ones full of water. How many times have I - with considerable effort - dragged my empty bucket around with the certainty that the reason I could not fill it was that I was not trying hard enough. That sailor showed me another way. When I am paying attention to the true nature of abundance, and not to the illusion that abundance is just a lot of stuff (or more stuff than I need), then the simplest act can shift an entire universe of presuppositions, and self-fulfilling prophesies.

How strange it is to me in this moment that I find the story to be about the river, and not about the sailors on the ship, or even the buckets. Before encountering this wonderful story about the river, I suspect that I thought of abundance as an oddly fixed amount. Perhaps I held "abundance" to be one more whatever than I needed. Or maybe it was/is way more whatevers than I need. Would a small lottery jackpot suffice, or would I need one of those megazillion ones before I experienced abundance? In any event I realize now that I held abundance as some static "thing", some fixed amount - a good harvest safely tucked into the storage bins, be they the storage bins in the refrigerator, or the ones in the bank vault.

The story now serves to remind me that abundance is a constantly flowing current, and that I am in this current, and I am of this current. The challenge for me is to pay attention, to stay awake to those moments when I am so thirsty that I think I am never going to taste clean, freshwater again, or so lonely that I am never going to feel the soothing touch of another again, or so frightened...

It is at just such moments that I need to be aware of others who are even more thirsty, or lonely, or frightened. At least I can be with them, if even for a moment, and let them see my own empty bucket, and encourage them to drop their buckets alongside mine.

What act can be more simple than putting down a bucket into a flowing river?

Podcast from the Windhorse Zen Community.
Here is a piece John wrote, The Gift of Giving, that I found recently on the Internets.

The koan - The god of fire seeks fire - that John offered last night at PZI proved a difficult one for me to stay focused on. I don't know if that means that I should work harder at focusing on it, or if it means that it just was not sticky enough right now for me to stay present with it.

One learning that is coming to me slowly, but steadily, is a budding awareness of a capacity to sit without judgment, and just notice my own steady stream of thoughts, images, memories and fantasies. It is all about noticing, nothing more, nothing less. Noticing how quickly thoughts appear - literally out of nowhere - and return just as quickly into that netherworld between memory and forgetfulness.

John began his talk with a description of the nature of meditation. He seems to be doing that quite often. Perhaps he is working on an article, or book, about meditation. I hope so. It would be wonderful to read what he might have to say in a similarly deep and generous way as he has with his other books (and here).

He said, Most of us come to meditation through some sort of dissatisfaction, or disappointment. That sure resonated with me! He spoke for a bit about these disappointments and sorrows using a very elegant phrase - he called them "a gathering of sorrows". That also resonated with my experience of sorrows. They do seem to gather together, huddled in some dark, murky, yet somehow fertile place.

Then he said something very intriguing. He said, "Koans are ways for us to be unfaithful to our sorrows." What an intriguing possibility. Being unfaithful to our/my sorrows, betraying them, what might that do to my relationship with my own disappointments - both large and small?

After that he began to focus on consciousness remarking that consciousness also creates possibilities for errors. I thought of this sort of as corrupted code in a way. Then he used a lovely little example. He described it as: A moment when we might come across a snake on a path in front of us, and then we see that it is just a stick. Yet, we still avoid that path for the rest of the summer.

That last part was the sticky bit for me - the idea that, even though I "know" there was no snake, I am still not sure that I know. And I keep looping back to the snake. It is the looping back, a kind of skip in the record, that seems so familiar to me.

[This morning - Tuesday - on the way to the airport the driver of the BART train at one point called out the wrong destination for our train he said, "Pittsburg/Bay Point Train". Nothing so odd about that. The interesting thing is that he did it again a few stops later. He said it exactly the same way... but then he laughed. That moment reminded of John's snake example. These "errors in consciousness" tend to be repeated, like the train operator. Once he laughed, though, it was as if he had this mini-meditation, and reset his awareness to zero. The rest of the trip he got the destination right, by the way☺.]

Back to last night. So, the important point for me about all this snake and stick business is that John asserted that with meditation we can reset our consciousness in some ways that may be impossible to articulate. It is as if consciousness were some organic system that doesn't need repairing as it would if I were holding an image of consciousness as a machine. But in his experience it can be "reset", or cleared out in some way. I believe I have had that experience now and again. Not very often, but as John said: If it can happen in one moment, it is possible that it could happen in another and another; so then it is possible that you could become free.

Later in the talk John asked a rather provocative question. He asked: Who is the most important person in the world to you right now? Of course, I immediately thought of my son, Matt. (Who did you just think of, gentle reader? ☺) Then he answered his own question. He suggested that, It is not your partner, not your son or daughter (even though his daughter was in the dojo). Instead he said, "The most important person to you right now is the one you are talking to. There is no one else in this moment. There is nothing else but this moment."

Toward the end of his talk John returned to a theme he has visited before, but it is a theme that I cannot revisit enough - I guess it is my god of fire seeking fire. That theme is about resting in uncertainty. About how the mind seeks certainty where none exists.

As an example of this uncertainty he spoke of the idea of substituting positive thoughts for negative ones. He does not know if that is a good thing or not, but I gather he has the sense that pushing these "negative thoughts" away would only serve to feed them somehow. Then he said that, If we can go deeper, beyond positive and negative thoughts, for just one moment to no thought...

Again I thought of his assertion that, since this moment is all there is, each moment holds within itself the possibility for freedom.

And maybe I had a small glimpse of that during the meditation. There was a moment there when I was not seeking, when I was not judging: Is this a good thought? Why am I thinking this thought when I drove all the way up here with Roger? I should be thinking better thoughts than these...

There was that moment when I was not seeking, not judging, not feeling either ashamed or proud, when maybe for a moment I was free.

Time to rest in some uncertainty.

Après après zen (Wednesday): When I finally did sit with this koan for more than half a second, it occurred to me that the god of fire in Greek mythology is Hephaestus, or Vulcan to the Romans. He is also called the lame god because he was born crippled. He is the patron of craftsmen, especially metalworkers and blacksmiths.

Something about his being lame and crippled that caught my attention. Also, the thought of the blacksmith's arms and hands being so strong. An interesting connection to the "No Hands" koan.

In some deep archetypal way I am also paying attention to the story of how Hephaestus fashioned the first woman, Pandora, out of clay. In some stories it is Pandora ("the one who received all gifts from the gods") who unleashed evil on the world. In other, perhaps older stories, it was Pandora who actually closed the box (or jar) in time to capture hope for mankind.

In any event this god of fire - whether he (or she) be Indian, or Greek, or Christian - is a complex figure. And this koan is a wonderful invitation to enter into the mystery of fire seeking fire.

Last night during the meditation session at PZI John presented a koan about work. The koan goes more or less like this:

(Two teachers are speaking, as I recall)
Work, work, work. All day long all you do is work.
Why do you do it?
I do it for another.
Why doesn’t he do it for himself?
Because he has no hands.

Of course John mixed the genders nicely. I believe, though, that when I first heard this koan, the "another" in my mind was female, or at least feminine in some archetypal way. I wonder what meaning to make of that. Is it about the feminine in me “having no hands”, unable to do for herself? Too easy, too tidy an explanation, I suspect.

Anyway, all the usual associations about hands began to emerge during the meditation. All the grasping and handling. I even thought of the “all hands” meetings in Silicon Valley. At some point in the meditation Roger’s hands came into my awareness. I seemed to reconnect for a moment with the feeling of his hands cupped behind my head, supporting my head and neck during The Ordeal. That feeling of completion, as if those cupped hands could have held water poured into them without any dripping through his fingers, as if his hands had been fused into a bowl.

The healing that comes from without when I have no hands within.

Another odd coincidence occurred that day. Earlier, I was speaking with a friend about the nature of work. We spoke of how the less effort we put into it sometimes, the more we can get done. How I/we hold stories about “hard” work, and so forth. At one point in the conversation she talked about work as play. In this moment – the day after – I find myself noticing that the koan doesn’t speak of “hard work”, just continual work.

Now I notice that I am substituting the word play for work in the koan:

Play, play, play. All day long all you do is play. Why do you do it?
I do it for another.
Why doesn’t she play herself?
Because she has no hands.

John also spent a fair amount of time talking about meditation itself, and the nature of consciousness that can emerge from meditation. As he has done before, John spoke of kindness embedded deeply in consciousness. I took from that how, when we strip away all the extraneous baggage that seems to hang on our awareness – like too many coats piled on a coat rack, that when they all fall away, what is left is kindness.

I may have experienced a small glimmer of that during the meditation. For a brief moment, when I was in touch with my handlessness, my helplessness, I felt shame cover me like a dark, cold shroud. And then miraculously (or so it seemed) a thought bubble appeared. It said, The shame is a sham. I almost laughed out loud. A lightness seemed to be sitting quietly inside that shroud. Then an image appeared – an image of dark, jagged shards of rock falling from two sides of a great precipice. As if a gold motherlode lay beneath it. And then for just a moment I felt settled and safe.

On the ride back from the zendo Roger and I spoke for a while about work and art, continuing in a way the conversation we had on the way up to Santa Rosa. Now, though, there was a shift for me. There was something that Roger said that came as a gift. At some point he used the phrase “God-given talent”. When he used that phrase, for some reason I thought of the word “grace”. In a religious sense, Grace is the unearnable gift of God’s love. We spoke of “gracefulness” for a while, and there was a feeling of grace, of some unearnable kindness, present in the car as we drove over the coastal mountains into the inland valley.

Now, I have a new koan to turn this way and that in my mind:

Love, love, love. All day long all you do is …
Why do you do it?
I do it for another…

Sitting last night was a bit easier than usual. Not sure what to make of that. Probably not much. But I did notice that I needed to expend less effort just sitting with the koan John offered. The koan went something like this:

10,000 feet below the ocean there is a stone.
Try to lift it without wetting your hands.

I immediately found myself in touch with my stone-ness in some surprising way. Perhaps it was the sense of isolation that allowed me to create some connections to the stone. I also found myself enjoying the "sinking feeling" of dropping down to the ocean floor. Actually, John mentioned something about dropping down in his talk afterwards, but I forget what it was.

In his brief talk John spoke quite a bit about meditation. He said, Meditation is about being human in the deepest way. I am not at all sure what he meant by that. Why is meditation the "deepest way"? I wonder why any mindful action couldn't also be the deepest way.

Later John said something else that caught my attention. He was speaking about the power of using koans in meditation, saying because of them, we don't have to use our own effort. Maybe that was why I experienced such a relative lack of effort this go around. Maybe I was letting the koan do the heavy lifting for a change.

Toward the end of his talk, John then said something else that also caught my attention. He said, The vastness of meditation allows us to be at ease with whatever we are experiencing. Without judgment. This informed me that I still have a ways to go on the blissful enlightenment path! I have not gotten to the point in my meditations where I experience them as "vast". Not all that constricting to be sure, but not vast either.

Finally, I want to capture here an image that came to me during the mediation. At some point well into the meditation session I began to see the koan in terms of a relationship between the ocean and the stone. The sense I had was what I can only term as some sort of loving indifference. It was loving in that neither one was doing any harm - in fact I might say that they were informing each other. The ocean is everywhere that the stone is not. And the stone exists as an absence of ocean-ness on its own floor. I guess more to the point I had the sense that each was touching the other in some sort of "loving" way. Odd thought, but there it is. Yet, at the same time I was completely aware of how indifferent one is to the other. Neither focusing on outcome, nor attempting to control the other. Letting each other be, I guess is one way to look at it.

The dry hands in the koan was mostly a distraction in the moment, so I paid little attention to that part of it. Except that I did notice that the roundedness of the stone made it just as impossible for me to get a "handle" on it, as it would be to dip my hands into the ocean and keep them dry. What other parts of my life am I trying to "get a handle on"? Where am I judging these parts, and so not allowing them to show me a way to hold them without handling them?

Well that is it for now. Hope you keep your hands dry.

Last night at the zendo in Santa Rosa turned out to be an important one, even if the sitting was at times difficult. I did notice, though, that I was far less judgmental and self-critical about it all. There actually were a few moments when I found myself sinking into myself, into my body. And I believe that the phrase “found myself” is an apt one here. It wasn’t an action. No doing. I wasn’t even looking for myself. So, there wasn’t that momentary elation as happens when I “find” my glasses, or my car keys. Finding on this deeper level occurs when I stop seeking. And it is when I stop seeking that I begin noticing.

After the meditation, while we were all getting tea, I was speaking with another fellow traveler. We had finished our conversation and I was just about to return to my seat when John came over to greet me by name. (He usually does this, but each time I am surprised that he remembers it for some reason.) He put his arm around my shoulder and said how good it was to see me again. And then he did something that was extraordinary in its simplicity – he leaned his head over so that the side of his forehead touched the side of mine. A simple gesture. Yet to me in that moment it felt probably the way devout Catholics feel about a papal blessing. In that moment I did feel blessed, but not by John, rather with John. A big difference, I suspect.

The koan he introduced into the meditation was a timely one:

Every day is a good day.

As I sat with myself (during those few moments when I found myself sinking into myself), I noticed two experiences almost simultaneously. One is that I am of this day, that this day is inseparable from me and my comprehension of the day. At the same time I noticed how independent the day is from my judgments and reviews about it.

The koan doesn’t say, “Make this a great day!” the way some motivational speakers might exhort me to do. Nor does the koan suggest that I “have a good day”. The koan is descriptive, rather than proscriptive. This day, every day, is a good day because that is the essential nature of a day.

Of course in his talk, John was able to expand on this beyond the terrain I traversed during the meditation. (Even as I wrote that sentence, I noticed a lack of judgment that is refreshing. His insights were not “better”, and maybe not even clearer. They were just more expansive.) The question he settled on – the one that it evoked for him was: How do we find freedom?

John then used the upcoming holidays as a way to ground the question in everyday experience. He offered the possibility that we could each approach, or enter into, the holidays without expectations. He said, “… the prison of expectations brings unhappiness… [but] enjoyment is a choice.” After that he asked another practical, yet profound, question: Can I be free –have a good day – without controlling others?

This urge to control others as a way to manage expectations is one that he has spoken of before, but for some reason – maybe all the looming family gatherings where we each bring our mortars and pestles along to grind each other into smaller, more manageable bits – brought this urge to control others into higher relief.

Finally, John spoke about memory. He spoke of it in the context of family stories and how we can be hooked into them. For me, though, his words about memory struck a deeper chord. He said simply, “Memory can be a kind of shrine… When we are free, memory becomes another felt experience.”

That phrase, memory can be a kind of shrine, felt like a sharp knife cutting through a veil. For a moment I could see beyond the shrine, beyond some of my delusions. For the briefest moment I realized that all this time he was speaking about something he mentioned in passing at the beginning of his talk – the nature of joy.

It seems that, like finding ourselves, I/we also find freedom and joy when we stop seeking them out, by letting them just be.

The very act of noticing is worth noticing. As I was sitting last night in the meditation session, I found myself working at not working, and that wasn’t working. I noticed frustration as I tried not to try to think about whatever. The koan:

The teaching is upside down

And then there were a few moments, just a few, when I noticed that my mind was wondering and wandering toward various images and memories, thoughts about relationships that are, that aren’t, that might become, that probably won’t become… and I was able to let go of them for a moment. In those rare instances I experienced some of that spaciousness that John speaks of. There was an inkling of freedom. It felt a bit like times when clouds part for a second and the blue sky emerges. At such times I often have the sense that the blue sky wasn’t there all along. As if the filters are somehow more real than what they are filtering. When the filter evaporates, or the frame loosens a bit, then I feel free until, of course, I put a new filter on the lens, or tighten the frame joints again.

John’s talk, as it turned out, mirrored parts of the conversation I had with Roger on the way to the dojo. We spoke of such things as how we keep from feeling the emotions of others, how uncertainty informs our lives, you know, the usual premeditative blather that I treasure.

At one point early in his talk John made mention of the fact that we humans not only have thoughts, but we have thoughts about thoughts. He called them reviews of our thoughts – judgments we make about the thoughts we experience. And he framed it fairly precisely. Rather than speaking as if we “have” thoughts, he asked this question: Who owns these thoughts of ours? And then he said something that really impacted me – anyone could think the thoughts I think. What a way to smash through the illusion of specialness. I was reminded of my first philosophy class in college when I encountered some thoughts that I thought were uniquely mine only to find out that these same thoughts were thought thousands of years ago by much clearer thinkers than me.

Then John used the metaphor of a thought as a coat that I can take off (or not), that I can let go of (or not). He even suggested that I do not have to hold on to the thought of who I am. That even that thought of who I am is an illusion – it is merely a thought of who I was. John also made a suggestion about how we can sit with these thoughts as they arrive in our consciousness. He said, “Whatever comes is something you can walk through.” Again, he reminded me of the spaciousness that comes with possibility, with experimenting with being different. Another way of saying how restful it can be to sit with not knowing.

Finally, he talked about the non-linearity of thoughts. How it is possible that when these chains just break, we are then free.

The morning after: I did a google search to find the origin of the koan John introduced. I couldn’t find it. Oddly enough, though, during my search I almost immediately came across this piece in a Christian publication entitled, Running to Prison.

Updated link:12.29.06

Take a step from a one hundred foot pole, and show your whole body in every direction.

The value of the “One Hundred-foot Pole” koan for me right now is that it permits the possibility for difference, for change, to occur in my life. This koan speaks to the little deaths that happen with each steep I take. How each “me” in the moment dies with every step. It also speaks to how this “me” – the one who has stepped off the pole, but has not yet tumbled into the abyss of lapsed time yet – can choose to be different (or not).

The koan also uncovers another delusion I hold – the one of loss. Why do I have such an urge to hold on to that me that is about to fall into the oblivion of the past? Why in that moment do I feel I will lose everything? Why do I feel that I will lose anything? What is (was) so special about that me tumbling down into the abyss?

These questions lead me back to this idea of special ness. In that act of stepping off the pole there is also the suggestions that I show myself in every direction. If I were to do that, then I suspect that I would know something about freedom.

Have there been moments when I have done both – stepped off the pole and showed my whole body? This me writing this entry says yes. My work involving ‘The Ordeal” were such One Hundred-foot moments.

What I remember most about that time of reexperiencing the trauma was how unspecial, how ordinary, I felt. When those memories of the abuse reemerged, I was painfully aware that I was merely one of many such boys. At the same time I found myself keenly aware of how much of myself was exposed, how much of my whole body I was showing in every direction.

So, I was not special. Yet, almost paradoxically, I was deeply aware of my uniqueness. And I was aware of how profoundly freeing it is to let go of the delusion of special ness that the pole somehow sustains for me.

This word, special, comes to us from the Latin word, species, meaning “individual” or “particular”. And delving a bit deeper I learned that species means “in kind”. Taking another step off the pole, I found that kind comes to us from the Old English, cynd, which means “kin”.

Digging in this particular word garden has been fruitful today. From here I see that I am most special when I am most like others, most like my kind. And in a mysterious way, I am also most myself when I am in kind, when I am most like my kin. And my kin are all those who also step off one hundred-foot poles. That is what my species, my kin, does.

For some reason it feels notable that “kind” entered into this conversation. Maybe that is what this whole entry is really about. Maybe this has been a meditation on kindness all along. When I do grasp my own uniqueness by letting go of my special ness, then I can really begin to see others “of my kind” struggling to do the same. And when I am in touch with this uniqueness I find that I can be kind because I am aware that each of us is “of us”.

Being kind is a loving act that expresses the underlying truth embedded in all our narratives – that lovingkindness is all around us. All we need do is choose to see ourselves falling, and catching each other and being caught, all in a marvelous loving freefall we call life.

The meditation last evening developed into the theme of faith and faithlessness for me. I was surprised that this theme emerged, but surprise or not, it is what occurred. John introduced this koan:

Take a step from a one hundred foot pole, and show your whole body in every direction.

And in that moment I realized that I was completely without faith. I did not believe that there would be anything or anyone to catch my fall. As this moment of faithlessness became clearer, I found myself becoming sad. I thought of the faithful boy I was as a child. "Ardent" is the word that comes to mind. (I just looked up "ardent". It comes from the Latin, ardor, ardere - meaning "to burn". I need to spend some time with this word, but not here.)

So, I was thinking about the "self" as it was when it was a young boy. Was that self someone who would have eagerly stepped off the top of that pole? I daresay he was. God, the angels - something or someone - would have caught him. Sitting there, the obvious came to mind - the me who was in the moment was not the same me that was back there well in the past. And that young boy is as unknowable now as it was unknown then. But the sadness was there. It was relentless. Sitting there without faith, I was left with the second part of the koan - ... show your whole body in every direction.

What occurred next was a bit astonishing. My face began to twitch as it did during last September's "Ordeal". The right side of my face, just as it did then. But the truly astonishing part was that in this case I just let to happen. In that moment the spasms were my body showing itself in every direction.

Earlier in the meditation, John said something that turned out to be one of those valuable gold nuggets I come upon from time to time - the ones I put in my little travel pouch because I am sure to need the currency to pay some ferryman's toll along the way. He said: Meditation is an opportunity to experiment with being someone other than you usually are.

So, when my face began to contort, I just let it be. My face was just my face right then. As I let go of how "I usually am", as I let go of the fool's errand of trying to look just so, I looked just so. The spasms slowly dissipated and then stopped, and for just a moment, I was at peace.

There I was still on top of the pole, but now I felt perched the way a bird sits before taking flight. I was not longer clinging to the pole. I was resting.

Later in the talk that followed the meditation, John spoke about how we are always stepping off that pole. The pole I was on a moment ago is gone. I stepped off of it into this moment. He spoke of this stepping off as an invitation in a way. He said: The worst thing that life can do is to ask you to be who you want to be. And I thought, of course, this is the best thing the world might do as well.

The morning after:
This morning I looked up John's koan and could not find it the way he presented it. In one place I found it phrased this way: This moment doesn't care that we stepped of a one hundred foot pole yesterday. Another phrased it as a question: How do you step from the top of a one hundred foot pole?
I prefer John's koan because it also invited me to experiment with being different, with showing my body in every direction.

Last night John was the pinch-hitter for his fellow teacher, Rachael. Initially, I was mildly disappointed because I wanted to get a sense of what she was like, but that disappeared quickly.

As the meditation session began, John repeated the same Peach Blossom koan that he introduced last week. I realized that he did that before with the Master and Are You Awake? koan. He may not even recall that he repeated them, and for the life of me I don’t know why it could possibly matter. What does matter here was my reaction – I was pleased to revisit this koan and see how it had changed in the course of a week. Turned out to be quite a different koan!

Sitting with my breathing for a bit, I listened as John spoke of thoughts being transparent, and how – if we pay attention – we can see right through them. In a way see past them. In that moment I realized how apt those “thought bubbles” are in cartoon comic strips. I imagined my thoughts to be bubbles – popping and disappearing almost as quickly as they appear.

I noticed in those moments how much surprise there is with these bubbles. Surprise not only with the content, with the images, phrases, whatever, but also with how rapidly they disappear and reappear with brand new content bursting again almost as soon as they are formed.

From this I took some solace. There is something about the impermanence of these thoughts that allowed me to realize again that suffering is also impermanent. A “this too shall pass” sort of thing. Paying attention to the transparency of thoughts, as John suggested, was very helpful.

And then I found myself sitting with that word “intimacy” that John introduced last week as another term for enlightenment in the old days. Slowly, without any effort on my part I found myself sitting with images of every lover I had been intimate with. I noticed how ratcheted down, how concrete “intimate” became in that moment, but I let go of judging, and just went along for the ride. One by one these women’s faces came into my awareness. Not so many lo these thirty-five years or so, I also noted as they were emerging one at a time. And each face became a peach blossom. It was quite lovely actually. It was very sweet, and had a healing quality to it.

As each face slowly, effortlessly transformed into a blossom, I noticed that each face and each blossom was also transparent. Was it a “real” face, I found myself asking. Then I realized that the answer was, yes, it is as real a face as any face. “Face” is just a thought too. And I noticed that my face is a thought, that I am a thought just as transparent. I appear and disappear. I am seen and not seen. I am remembered and forgotten.

I could feel myself moving in behind these thoughts, behind these faces. What was at first easy and very much without effort became a bit more daunting.

Suddenly, a shadowy figure of a face - almost an outline – of the face of the priest who assaulted me when I was a child came into my awareness. And I felt a strange kind of choice point. Could he become a peach blossom as well? A thought bubble that emerged said that my encounters with him were the polarity of intimacy, the deepest most shameful, most secretive shadow of intimacy. And then I realized that this shadowy form of a face was no more and no less just a thought. Like all the other faces. His face, already fairly transparent to begin with, became a peach blossom as well. It became even more transparent, and then seemed to merely dissolve.

Finally, I was left sitting with just a peach blossom. As I did, I noticed that this too was transparent; this too was just a thought. I tried to look past it. I had the sense of being taken back into peach blossom time. Before it was a blossom, it was a bud. Then in that moment I held secrets differently. I thought of a secret as nothing more than the possibility, and then the inevitability of a blossom emerging.

Afterward:

And now sitting here the morning after I am holding peach blossom time a little differently. I am holding the thought of the blossom flowering and slowly becoming a peach. I am aware of the peach ripening, of becoming sweeter and sweeter, until it falls from the tree and returns to its roots.

Last night while meditating at PZI, John offered a koan about peach blossoms and enlightenment. The story is about a pilgrim walking along a path and comes upon the sight of peach trees in early bloom across the valley. The poem went something like this:

For thirty years I’ve been looking for a swordsman
How many times have the leaves fallen
And branches grown anew?
After once having seen the peach blossoms
I never have doubts anymore.

Before the talk, though, I found myself meditating and focusing on the swordsman more than the blossoms. I chose not to make too much of that, and just notice it, and let whatever was happening just happen.

And what happened was both wonderful and mildly disturbing at the same time.

It was almost as if I could feel someone cutting my arms and legs. As if an incredibly sharp sword, or knife, was at work making lines in my skin, cuts, wounds - perfectly straight cuts one equidistant from the other. There was no swordsman, only the blade cutting me. And then I noticed the blood. It wasn’t gushing or anything like that. The blood was rising to the surface, slowly, as if it were coming from a deep place, like groundwater rising in the soil. As this was occurring, I felt my face begin to twitch a bit. I chose to just notice this, and not try to stop it, or to manage it. Gradually, as the blood seemed to flow, the twitching seem to recede, until I felt a kind to peacefulness, a feeling “settled” in a way that felt new and familiar at the same time.

From these images I noticed how I hold suffering and pain – my own suffering – as a way to cut through delusion. I noticed the deep-seated belief I hold about the liberating parts, the opening up, that seems to come as a result of suffering. Then I noticed a feeling of profound regret. The phrase “thirty years” began to resonate for me. About the amount of time I spent in the Bay Area either looking for the swordsman, or wielding my own sword.

I sat there with those cuts not knowing what to do. Not having anything to do. I sat there with the sensations of my own suffering, and allowed that to be whatever it was. I allowed myself, maybe for the first time, to begin to see how many wounds I carry are self-inflicted. Oddly enough, this permission to see the wounds as they are allowed me also to see that not all of them are self-inflicted. I realized that I do make up the world in each moment, but I also realized that the world makes me up too.

That right there would have been enough. I’d have gotten my money’s worth had the evening ended at that point. It didn’t, though.

John then suggested that we begin to let go of rational thought and just keep company with the peach blossoms, and notice what occurs. So, I did.

In a way that is difficult to describe my arms and legs became like branches of a tree. They still retained all the usual qualities one associates with human limbs, except on these limbs where the cuts were, blossoms began to emerge. At first the petals were white. A red spot was at the center of each. (Is this how peach blossoms look in the natural world?) Then very slowly the petals began to absorb the blood rising out of the wounds. They became like natural bandages, and began to turn almost crimson. As each blossom turned completely red, a new one appeared and absorbed more of the blood. Eventually, it began to feel as if my arms and legs were completely covered with these blossoms.

And then and even stranger feeling, sensation, image – I’m not sure what – came to me. The last blossoms to appear retained their original, white color. It was as if the other blossoms sopped up all the suffering, like the way good Italian bread takes up all the spaghetti sauce on a plate.

Later, during the talk, John spoke about the word “enlightenment”, and how in the ancient languages it had the meaning of intimacy. I began to have an inkling of what that might mean. He also said that some of the old ones would speak of enlightenment as being robbed. I immediately went to the concrete and tried to make meaning of all that stuff that has been stolen from me of late. But today, now, the day after, I am feeling a little lighter, feeling that the peach blossoms have robbed me of some of my memories and my forgetfulness, robbed me of some of my wounds.

Being robbed is a peach blossom. So is intimacy. And so is suffering.