FilmOnDeepWater

1 February 2009
Philadelphia, PA
(Cross posted in Meditation)

Hours do become days, and days do become weeks and... Like many clichés, there is a deep, uncrackable truth to that awareness. I am also noticing just how much, and how easily I can become self-absorbed, as well as an awareness that (counterintuitive though it seem at first blush) the more I meditate, the less self-absorbed I become.

This strikes me as one of the more important insights I have had in a while.

My cravings have a self-indulgent quality to them that I need to pay attention to here. For a moment I slipped into an all too familiar posture of self-judgement and recrimination that I also need to pay attention to - another, more subtle form of self-absorption, no doubt.

Once again a word, in this case "indulge", threw me a rope and brought me safely back to shore. Indulge means "to allow space and time for". And in its other form, indulgens, this word means "to be kind, yield". At its core is the ancient European word dlegh, which means "to engage oneself". This old word with such deep roots is related to another astonishingly old English word, play.

So, being self-indulgent suddenly takes on a new meaning. What if I can sit for a moment with a craving, with whatever it is I am clinging to? Whatever it is - sex, drugs, rock and roll - no matter. And what if in that next moment I indulge that craving, or some compulsion? Does that matter? Well, the thought that occurs to me right now is: both yes and no.

It matters because in that very act of feeding the craving I am creating the conditions for my own continuing suffering. So, in that moment I am also creating the need to alleviate that suffering in the future. This is so because the one thing that I know to be true is that feeding those cravings increases my hunger, which leads to more cravings. Attachment leading to more attachment - an old story.

At the same time it does not matter if, after a moment of deepening awareness, I "indulge" in those cravings. In that moment of awareness I must take in all possibilities, and not just the positive or "enlightened" ones (that I also so often crave). If I were to magically reach some state where I "knew" that I would not feed those cravings, then I would have done nothing more than attain a higher and more refined state of delusion. It is in this very awareness that I could, or might, or perhaps likely will, succumb to any particular craving or compulsion, that the possibility to be free from these cravings exists.

The more I move away from the idea of "enlightenment" as my life's purpose, the more I find myself drawn toward freedom and liberation as a way to live. Alleviating suffering in the world must begin with me.

As I sit here writing this, again it is clear to me that the only way out of our/my suffering is the way in. It is to sit with that suffering, permit it to enter every cell of my body. To acknowledge that clinging to something, or someone - even when such clinging is also an act of love - is to be human. To allow space and time to, that is, to indulge in the suffering that is both heartbreakingly unavoidable and a fundamental choice of the human condition.

The tone of the funeral was one that I was familiar with from my childhood. The casket was open sitting as it was in the front of a small chapel. After viewing the body I went over to embrace the widow to tell her (as my grandmother taught me): I am sorry for your troubles.

The suffering she was enduring flowed from her body like sweat from an athlete. In that moment she was suffering embodied. Suffering incarnate. She was Mary's suffering body holding her dead son in her lap. She was suffering indulged.

A few moments later they began the ritual of closing the casket. The funeral director slowly cranked the gears that lowered the body deeper into the casket. The widow wailed, saying I love you, over and over. Then they covered the body with a blanket, and put a white handkerchief over the face.

Another gate closing between the two of them.

And oh how she suffered. How she craved having another minute with him. Another minute to say I love you. Or perhaps a minute to argue about taking out the trash. Another minute seems like such a small thing to crave. And how she keened for her husband as that minute never occurred.

Then they closed the casket. Yet another gate closing.

At the graveyard after the end of the closing prayers two workmen came over to lower the flower-covered casket into the ground. There was no sound from the clutch of mourners gathered all around the cold, barren gravesite. No sound save for the thick straps that were holding the casket, groaning now as they rubbed against each other when the workmen slowly, with a reverence and piety beyond their station, lowered the body deep inside the grave.

It was as if the hard ground itself were softening, yielding, to receive him. As if the earth herself, were taking in, creating space and time for, indulging all the suffering that was pouring out from the living, as we walked so carefully back down the frozen path, and back into our lives.

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[Resurrected from my old blog...the original with comments, if it is still there, is...err...here.]

7 February 2006
Napa, CA

On Friday last week my friend, Roger, and I went up to Occidental, a small town in Northern California, to sit with a group from the Pacific Zen Institute. This was their last full day of a seven or eight day retreat. The retreat was in a lovely area in a dense stand of redwoods. The air was cool and quiet; the soil moist and musky. All in all a perfect place to sit in meditation for few hours, and then hear a talk about meditating.

The sitting part was fine for me. There was a sort of break every twenty-five minutes or so. Someone rang a bell, and whoever wanted to would then join the group in a walking meditation for a little while. Or, if you wanted to, it was fine to just stay put and sit with whatever was occurring in that moment. Very zenny.

Time, for me anyway, moved as it often does when I am sitting like that. I notice that sometimes the moments fly by, and I find myself quite still and at home with myself. Then moments emerge that seem to drag on forever, and I feel like a great ship dragging her anchor across the seafloor. I can almost hear the chains moaning under the strain. And I feel myself wanting to break the chains freeing myself from that anchor and allowing myself to drift off into unconsciousness - the way I can when I daydream.

And the time moved along in those ways that time moved until it was dinnertime.

Right from the moment of our arrival that afternoon we were welcomed. Michelle, who I guess became the unofficial greeter, made sure that we were comfortable. No doubt she would have invited us to join them for dinner. As it happened, Roger had brought along a fabulous chicken salad for the ride up, so we weren't hungry. We decided to take a walk while the group went on to dinner. We arrived back at the main building in time to sit for a half hour or so before the talk and before my excruciating tussle with patience would begin.

The talk (I guess because it was the finale for the week) turned out to be a two-fer. John, the meditation teacher I wrote about before, was joined by his colleague, David. They had decided to do a talk in which each one would add some comments to the other's. Perhaps there was a coin toss in the foyer, I don't know. Anyway David went first, and he began to speak about patience...

Early on in his talk David introduced a story as an analogy to the meditative process. It was a story about patience, and waiting, and it was meant (I think) to highlight a kind of posture of waiting needed for meditation.

It was a really stupid story about a dog left behind by a Japanese guy at a big train station in Tokyo and the guy died at work and because he happened to be dead at the time he didn't come back to the station that night and the dog ended up waiting every day at the station looking expectantly at each passenger for about ten years until he died too and the Japanese people erected a statue of the dog commemorating such loyalty and devotion and patience.

Did I mention how stupid I thought the story was?

Oh, and did I mention how impatient I was becoming as I listened to this stupid story?

Christ, I thought, why didn't someone take the poor dog home? Maybe he could have found some kids to play with, or some cats to chase? And the statue, what's up with that? It seems that people in Japan really like suffering and the idea of this longing. As I said to Roger later, the Japanese seemed to have put the "d" into delayed gratification...

Once I was able to let go of this one trait shared by many people in Japan that I find rather unappealing, the rest of the talk was OK. I got used to being irritated with David's story, and even took home another koan from John that seemed useful. At one point he introduced a koan that says something like this: The coin lost in the river is found in the river. That got my attention as I began to think about how often I have lost a coin in the river and then went off to look for it under the broccoli dish, or (in my less irrational and more concrete moments) under the cushions in the couch. And I thought about how impatient I was becoming, and how much I was irritated thinking about all the coins, all the important facets in my life, that I have lost in the river, that do not ever show up under the broccoli dish or behind the couch cushions.

But mostly I was irritated by that stupid Japanese shaggy dog story.

And then somehow Friday became Saturday, and finally I became curious about why I had such a reaction to that story, why I carried it with me all the way back to Berkeley, and slept with it that night, and woke with it, and then carried it all through the day until I found myself sitting with it in a coffee place in Berkeley waiting for my Verger* friend, Rachel, to come and meet me for a quick dinner before she went off for the evening.

And gradually, the story became less stupid.

As it happens from time to time in the Bay Area on a Saturday evening, traffic sucked. Actually, as it happens every Saturday in the Bay Area, traffic sucks. This particular Saturday evening it just sucked more than usual. Since I wasn't coming down from Napa like Rachel was, I could take surface streets and merely become impatient with the stupid traffic barriers that the proletariat in Berkeley had their commissars in the city council erect in order to make it impossible to get from Point A to Pont B in Berkeley without having to touch base with at least six other points in a zigzag pattern that is almost as irritating as that story. Even with all those impediments, though, I was able to get to the coffee place before the time we had set to meet. Rachel on the other hand, was on I80 somewhere north of Berkley. She did not share my good fortune.

And so there I was sitting in strategic spot at a busy intersection in Berkeley watching all the hustle and bustle of a Saturday evening, and I began to think about that little dog.

What must it have been like for him? I could almost see him with his tongue hanging out, and his tail wagging, straining to see each passenger. The eager look when he would see someone who resembled his master, who wore a similar coat, who had similar hair. And then that moment of disappointment, when he realized that this man in the coat was not the one he was waiting for. And then that awful moment when there were no more passengers that day, when the crowd had thinned. Did he go home, or did he find a place to sleep near the station?

Certainly, I have had such experiences in my life - literally. There is a time I will never forget waiting in old Terminal 1 (that pier is closed now) at the San Francisco Airport, waiting for the woman I loved to come up the jetway at Gate 14 in those days when you could wait at the gate for arriving passengers. How I scanned everyone looking for her, and how after some number of passengers had deplaned, I worried that maybe she missed the flight, and how then I saw her, and all the waiting - patiently and impatiently - and all the longing for her arrival just evaporated like the tule fog when the sun comes up.

Those kinds of waiting are full of expectancy. Always there waiting with me at the edges of my awareness - in those kinds of waiting times - is the possibility of disappointment. Somehow, though, in this particular waiting time, sitting at this particular table outside this coffee place, watching people all around me come and go in the early evening, I noticed that I was neither patient nor impatient. I noticed the couple at the next table pouring over a newspapaer looking up the time of the movie they wanted to see. Her hand resting on his knee. His arm across her shoulder. This affection for each other was so clear that it was almost transparent, almost invisible. Then I noticed the old man walking so carefully so as not to spill his coffee that he had filled too close to the brim. And then two girls came walking by arm in arm smiling and talking at the same time. Everything was just as it was.

Then I thought about Rachel, and how she must be a bit frantic by now and worried about keeping me waiting. And since I was not frantic, and not disappointed, and not expectant, and neither patient nor impatient, I was able to get in touch with the compassion I had for her in that moment. I was also aware that I was powerless to change anything. If I called her to tell her not to be frantic, she might only become more impatient and stressed. So I just waited. I was looking forward to seeing her without being concerned with how much time we would have together. Fifteen minutes. An hour. It was all the same.

What became clear to me then was how different this kind of waiting is. How little this kind of waiting has to do with patience. When I am able to sit without expectation, without the fear of disappointment, without all the usual chatter in my head, then I am able to experience a compassionate mind - at least for a moment or two.

So what of this word patience that you have been waiting patiently to know about? As it happens, it has an origin that is quite telling. Patience comes from the Middle English pacient, from Middle French, from Latin patient-, patiens, from present participle of pati "to suffer"; perhaps akin to Greek pEma suffering.

It is a good thing not to suffer once in a while.

* Verger refers to On the Verge, a group of emerging young leaders in the Bay Area working in non-profit organizations.

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1 June 2008
Philadelphia, PA

Contingency is different from uncertainty and ambiguity... even if at times it may feel so similar as to be almost indistinguishable.

This morning as I was sitting trying to meditate, making an effort to have it all be effortless, working at not working, I could feel the doubts and fears reemerge. What if I don't find that new job before the money runs out? What if my age really is a factor? What if those old stories of feeling trapped and frozen in a cold, dark room grip me once again, and replace the sense of spaciousness that John Tarrant speaks of, or the "breathing room" that Thich Nhat Hahn talks about? What if...?

And then suddenly I was not working so hard, and the fears subsided for a time.

The difference now, though, seems to be my awareness of just how ephemeral these contingent thoughts and feelings are. Just how ephemeral this small "self" is. Noticing how quickly they morph into other thoughts was as powerful as noticing how tightly they can grip me in any moment when I am asleep (which happens to be most of the time!).

Contingent is an apt word here. From tangere, which means "to touch". These thoughts and feelings are contingent on a (little) self, which is contingent on a (Big:-) Self, that is contingent on a Soul or Spirit, that is contingent upon... But if I say: These thoughts and feelings touch the Self for a moment, and the Self touches the Soul, and on and on, then each one seems to exist for, or in, only the moment when the touching occurs.

Even this word, touch, calls me deeper into the question of contingency. It is an old Middle English word, toche. There is a lovely artifact to this word from the Old French - toucher, which means "to set fire". There is an igniting quality to a touch, an instantaneous combustion not easily extinguished once it happens.

So, carrying this further and deeper, I can now hold the possibility that thoughts and feelings ignite the self, and the self sets fire to the Self, which sets the Soul ablaze... It is as if each moment, when I am awake to any extent anyway, is a kind of funeral pyre comprised either of humble flickering embers, or dramatic engulfing flames. And out of that fire, in the way that the Giant Redwoods are born, a new little self and Big Self, Soul and Spirit are reborn along with the entire entourage of thoughts, feelings and sensations that seem so real, so permanent.

That seem so devoid of contingency.

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Philadelphia, PA

Last night in a conversation with a friend, I encountered a very common phrase - turning a page. This got me to thinking about this phrase, and this word, turn. What is it in the nature of pages that they be turned? And maybe it is not in their nature, but in ours. I can just as easily say "flip a page" or "thumb through the pages". So, how is turning different?

As usual the answer for me - no, that's not exactly correct - my guide (now that's better) is the word itself. The Old English word was: tyrnan, and later it morphed into: turne and terne. And even earlier there was the Latin word, tornus, and earlier still the Greek word, tornos. All of them originally meant pretty much the same: lathe.

Turning itself, then, at its deepest roots is still the circular motion of a lathe.

As I hold this transformative image of a lathe, I imagine how it "turns" a block of wood into a beautiful rounded cylinder. How a lathe rounds off the sharp edges and reveals a new beauty to the wood, a new way to see the world.

Thinking more about this rotational lathe-like motion to turning, this phrase "turning a page" becomes a profound one. There is less linearity to it. It's as if the spine of the book is the lathe that will reveal what is yet to be seen, known and experienced.

We turn pages because the books that we hold only seem rectangular with their square corners and sharp edges. They only seem so to me because I fail to notice the center of the book that acts as a turnstile - a gateway inviting me to explore what is becoming ¬ all the while allowing me to rest on this page, or to revisit pages already turned.

So, now the pages in my life seem less sequential in this moment. I notice that I feel a little freer. Free to sit with this page in my life. Free to turn a few pages back to make more sense of that time in my life. And free to slide my finger beyond the edge of this page, this moment, and see what the next moment, the next now, has to offer.

And of course in the turning I notice - when I take the time to notice what is truly important, that is - that this page is a spacious one. In that moment of noticing I have the room to ask my two questions, the ones I ask from time to time before filling these empty pages with my scribblings: What is true for me now? How do I feel about that truth? It is in the turning of these two questions that I allow the lathe, the wheel that cuts away all that is not now true, to do its transformative work.

What can be easier than turning a page? I do it all the time.

The more I get myself entangled in this word, turn, the more joy I find. I notice how I begin to create images of children laughing as they twirl round and round. How they take such sheer pleasure in the turning. And then the images of the Whirling Dervishes come to mind. How their turning becomes a gateway for them to feel the ecstasy that comes with their experience of God. They, like those twirling children, actually become the lathe, revealing the world perhaps the way it really is - a world without sharp edges, a world of stunning beauty.

Funny how in this moment I am thinking of a phrase from several generations ago: "a well turned ankle". What could possibly be more beautiful than that?

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2 January 2008

Making resolutions this time of year seems to serve two purposes - it heightens our awareness of our weaknesses without in any way acknowledging our strengths. Perhaps that is why so many of them fail to survive into spring. Rather than resolving to change, maybe it would serve me better to create more possibilities for change to occur.

This word resolution comes from resolve, which comes from resolute. That seems straightforward enough, but with enough digging a few new nuggets emerged.

This word, resolute, has an old - now obsolete - meaning: determinate. In the Middle Ages it also had the meaning dissolution. The word's meaning then seemed to morph over time into "decision" and "determination". Chaucer used the word resolve, so it is quite old. And an odd thing is that one meaning way back then was "soften" and "slacken". And a final odd notation: another obsolete meaning (from the 16th Century) is "assure".

Sitting with these words now, along with all the genealogy, it is a bit clearer why resolutions are so problematic. Embedded in them is a kind of brittleness and rigidity. They hold the self-detonating devices necessary that make sure that they are unsustainable, and destined to join all the others in the trash heap of forgotten resolutions.

Resolute has the quality of "soldiering on" - sometimes in spite of what is ahead. The word has a kind of artificial masculinity to it. A word on steroids. Once the initial rush passes, that moment when a resolution is "made", the artifice wears off. The first strong wind that comes, the first moment of weakness, and the resolution dissolves into a vague memory.

Rather than resolute, I prefer in this moment to sit with the word "steadfast". Stead is a place, a position. It is an old word, and Old Norse and Old Germanic word. Yet it is also related to the Latin word statio, station, and statim, meaning immediately - as in Now.
The fast part of steadfast has another old meaning beyond the common one we use nowadays. It means "firm". It also means "deep", and "sound", as in fast asleep.

There is something remarkably powerful about the phrase "holding fast", rather than being resolute. The sense of holding to a position - like a direction on a compass - or taking a stand, a stand that also speak of a deep rootedness in the ground, or a deep sounding in the sea.

Steadfast seems to speak, or point to, this depth much more than resolute does.

Again this journey takes me back to a place I have visited before - to affirmations and declarations, instead of resolutions. The root of affirmation is firmus, meaning simply "firm", as in to assent strongly. And declaration's root is clare, "to make clear". There is also another, obsolete meaning for declare that is valuable to recall here - manifest. The root for manifest is manus, "hand". This speaks to me of crafting what is so. It is then in the very crafting, in the action of declaring something to be so that we literally make it clear. This act of declaring allows us to reveal some deeper truth about ourselves to the world.

Perhaps then it is all about some lovely interplay between holding steadfast to this deeper truth, and making this truth clear and explicit, that creates the possibility for change.

The place where I have now landed, this way station that allows me to rest for a moment, speaks to me of New Year's Declarations, rather than Resolutions. And such a declaration, to stay true to the languages of the ancestors, is crafted over time. Such a declaration reveals itself slowly each day a little more, like the form secreted in stone that the stonecutter reveals with each tap of his hammer.

Such declarations then are invitations for me to continue to craft myself - one word at a time.

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What actually occurs when I “face” a day? What does it mean to “face” anything, or any one? What is a face anyway in this larger context? What are the deeper connections, the undercurrents of meaning that flow from all the facets, all the faces of this remarkably complex word?

This word face does seem to have many faces. Strange irony. And it seems to have survived with most if its features intact since that time many centuries ago when it was formed in Latin as facies. Yet, as I looked through the word’s history, I came across this related word fax (and its earlier incarnation facés) meaning “torch”. And this particular face caught my attention on this particular day I am facing.

Maybe the ancestors were just more concrete than we often are, but I am continually amazed at how these words form and reform from such simple sources. The way so few primary and secondary colors can morph into millions of colors that even go beyond my capacity to see them. It is the same I guess with words – how they morph and reshape themselves into words both comprehensible and incomprehensible to me.

Back to this word “face”. When I take even a moment to think about what it means to face the day, the obvious again becomes clear to me. Whatever, or whoever, I am facing, I am also “lighting”, as if I am lighting a torch in the dark. It is as if my world is an enormously complex light board – no it is as if what I call my world is an artifact of the lights I choose when I illuminate the stage that bounds my awareness or attention.

“My world” is this moment. It is an artifact, a kind of visual echo, of where I am choosing to thrust my torch out into the darkness. It is as simple as that. And perhaps because it is so simple, it often seems so mystifying to me. Can that be all there is to the world? Can it all just be a matter of perception?

Even when I was forming those questions, an answer emerged effortlessly. No, it is not just a matter of perception. It is a matter of attention. Why, then I wonder, is it that there are so many troublesome idioms about faces. Just now I searched for the origins of the phrase “to face the music”. Why does that phrase have such a charge to it? Seems like it is a fairly recent one to arrive on the scene. Evidently, most scholars attribute it to the British military where the person being court-marshaled literally faced the band, and while the charges were read drummers would tap out a beat.

There seems to be so many opportunities for shame and shaming connected to the “face phrase”. Face the consequences. Two-faced. Fall flat on your face. In your face. And not just shame, but anger and retribution as well.

At the same time I have had those wonderful experiences of seeing someone whose face is “beaming” with love and happiness. It literally appears as if some divine spark is lighting their faces. In those moments I really do experience them, or their face anyway, as a kind of torch. As a brightly lit flame.

So now, what of this word “torch”? The origin of this word turns out also to be oddly useful in this meditation on perception and attention. As it happens, the root of this word is torca, which in Catalan means “wisp of straw”, and from the Spanish tuenca meaning “a screw”.

There is a wonderful juxtaposition here that is somehow related to time, duration and light. An ancient torch probably was made of wisps of straw that would burn out quickly, unless that is, they were twisted into a screw, and then the torch would burn slowly.

A face, my face, when it is not screwed up into a “face”, or when I am not “making a face”, is much like that straw. Just wisps of attending energy that can illuminate only for a moment, and then it is gone. But the momentary light is enough. In fact once again the obvious comes to me like a blinding light from the darkness – I cannot actually face a day because this moment that I am facing right now is really all there is.

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Commitments are like boats of various sizes carrying passengers of various numbers all floating in a sea of obligation. At least that is my experience of commitment when I am paying attention. In that sense commitment displaces obligation in a life of mindful choices.

When I make a commitment I freely choose to limit my choices. That may seem paradoxical until I attend to the tyranny of unlimited choice. A life devoid of commitment has the quality of an individual flailing about in that same sea, but naming it “freedom”. The swimmer takes in great gulps of this seawater, which only adds to his thirst for more water. Just as the salt displaces the water in his system, notions of limitlessness displace true freedom in our lives.

Obligations are ropes and strings, perhaps even thick cables – all of which serve to bind us to another. They have a transactional quality to them in which power is not shared, in which one is bound to another. Obligations are the stuff of strangers, handcuffed to each other unable to free themselves because the obligation is stronger than any other aspect of their interactions.

As usual, the origins of these words have much to say about their distinctions. Oblige is related to the English word ligature. It is from the Latin word obligare, which means to bind to, from the root ligare, to bind. Commit on the other hand comes from the Latin committere, which means to connect, to entrust. Its root is com+mittere, to send.

And obligation, then, is a tether that binds us to the past. One transaction binds us to the next. An obligation, of course, is not without importance. In fact we speak of “honoring our obligations” just as we honor our commitments. Yet, even here we often make a distinction. Once we honor an obligation, it ceases to exist. When we honor a commitment, it is sustained, perhaps even strengthened. And, when we fail to honor an obligation, often we can renegotiate, and so continue to be obliged. Finally, as a counterpoint, failing to honor a commitment ends its existence completely. We can in some cases, where sufficient compassion and forgiveness is present, make a new commitment, but we can never renegotiate a broken one.

And that may well be the most powerful distinction. The binds of obligation can be severed and retied. But the faith and trust that is at the core of commitment, once torn apart, cannot be retied so easily. New commitments, though, can be woven from the tattered fragments, and in time may prove stronger and more resilient than the original.

Returning to our initial watery simile, we might look upon an obligation as an anchor and a commitment as a sail. When we choose to weigh anchor and free ourselves from the binds of the seabed below, we can then freely choose which directions we will sail. We are more trusting of the wind to guide us, and more deeply aware of the connection we have with our companions committed to the same journey.

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