September 20, 2010

True Person of No Rank

20 September 2010
Philadelphia, PA
(At Broad Street Ministry)

Perhaps it was the way the man entered the back of the sanctuary about half way through the liturgy. I'm not sure what it was about him that caught my eye. On the surface he seemed like many of our guests who frequent the streets of the city. The man could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five. (I learned a while ago how difficult it is to gauge how old - or young - some of our homeless guests are.) His clothes were soiled and torn in several places. His trousers were especially tattered.

Or then again, it could have been the way the man slowly walked over to an empty space by the north wall of the church, and slowly sank into the floor in a kind of lotus position. His two fists propped against his grizzled chin, the man stared blankly at the floor before him. I'm also not sure why I felt compelled to go over and greet him. Yet, I did.
Crouching down I asked in a low tone, "Are you OK?"
The man looked directly into my eyes and said a bit haltingly, "I... need... pants..."
His voice trailed off, and he was silent for a few seconds. Then, his eyes welling up, the man said, "I am so embarrassed".
I told him that I would check the Clothing Closet, but I also said, "I'm pretty certain that we don't have any pants, but I'll check."
"Thank you", replied the man before slipping back into that far off look I have seen so often.
Not wanting to return empty-handed, I came from the closet a few minutes later with some tissues. I said, "I'm sorry. There weren't any pants in the closet."
He took the tissues and dried his eyes, but didn't say anything.
Then, as an afterthought - again I'm not sure why - I asked him what size he wore.
The man said, "Size thirty-six."

Now here's a bit of a weird turn to the story: just the day before I was going through my own closet, and I came upon a pair of brand new trousers - size thirty-six. I guess when I bought them a couple of years ago, I thought that my new training and diet regimen would actually work. Never mind that I have not been that size since the Carter Administration. I recalled putting them aside thinking that I should bring them to Broad Street this week. Had those pants made it into my car instead of onto the chair in my bedroom this tale may have unfolded differently.

In the Zen Buddhist tradition, there is a saying that monks and lay practitioners have been meditating on for many centuries. It goes something like this: There is a true person of no rank who is constantly coming and going from the portals of your face. Who is that true person of no rank?

That day I met one of the most revered persons from that tradition - a true person of no rank. A true person is constantly coming and going from the portals of my face. Such persons show up every time they are just being and doing themselves. When they are between strivings, neither hopeful nor despairing, when they forget to compare, measure and assess. This true person is of course me, you, all of us - when we are just being and doing ourselves.

That evening a true person of no rank arrived needing pants.

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February 7, 2009

Suffering Indulged


1 February 2009
Philadelphia, PA

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 such rare moments of wakefulness 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 other day I went to a funeral. They are all sad affairs, but this one was particularly so. The husband of a woman I once worked with died of a massive heart attack and other complications. His wife had to make the decision to end the life support in the hospital. She had to choose to let go of what she most desired, most craved - another moment with her beloved. The whole catastrophe of living and loving was right there in the room. Sic transit gloria mundi, so go the things of the world.

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 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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January 14, 2009

Nothing Happened

14 January 2009
Philadelphia, PA

Yesterday morning I went through the back gate onto Pastorius Street, a narrow lane actually, on my way to the train station. As I was walking, I saw a young man crouched down next to his dog.

Suddenly, the dog lurched away - teeth bared - and began sprinting toward me.

Now then. A bit about the dog. He (I think it was a he) had the build of a large bulldog, brown in color. He didn't have that typical bulldog snout. I guess he is a mix of some sort. As he was running toward me, I noticed how wide he was. Odd thought, but there you have it.

Back to the lurching away and sprinting toward me part of the story. The dog moved surprisingly quickly and was clearly headed right toward me. As he got closer, he lept also surprisingly high for someone built so close to the ground.

Here is where the story takes a strange turn for me - literally and figuratively. All I did was make a sort of pivot, like opening a gate. When I did that, the dog just flew right past me landing a few feet behind me and sliding along the asphalt on the road. As he flew past, I felt his paw touch my leg and his shoulder lightly graze my arm. But that was it.

By then the young man had come running past me to regain control of his dog. The young man was very upset and began chastising his pet peppering him with "Bad dog. Bad dog." Then he apologized to me saying, "He is usually quite gentle, but sometimes you just never know..."

I continued walking down the lane as if nothing happened. The young man then called out to me asking if I was OK, and if my clothing were torn. I said, "No, I'm OK. I'm fine."

Then I noticed something strange - there was no adreneline rush; no rapid heart beat. No trauma. No images racing trough my head about "what might have happened". In that moment I came to the realization: Nothing happened.

There was a dog being dog. One aspect of being dog is a sudden, unpredictable need to lurch and lunge. And there was this self encountering this dog. In that moment I somehow felt, somehow knew, what "dog being dog" means. And so along with that awareness in some way there was an awareness that this self was also a kind of no-self.

I recall now moving in a way that might have been an aikido move. I don't know for sure because I never studied aikido. What I do know is that the move took almost no effort. It was as if this self/no-self, who somehow knew what dog being dog meant, also knew the absolute minimal effort that was needed to move out of the way. And the little street seemed wider, a bit more spacious.

When I called back to the young man that I was fine, I really meant it. I was just as fine as when I walked through the back gate just a few minutes before, and I was just fine as I continued on to the train station. The exact same fine - no more and no less.

The only echo I took away from the whole encounter was from the young man who said, "... sometimes you just never know."

So, that's the story, or no story, about nothing happening to no one.
X

* * *
X
Later in the day (and I am just now making a connection the morning after) I met with a client - a social worker in oncology at a large teaching hospital in Philadelphia. Her patients all have head and neck cancer, so the pain and suffering she encounters is profound. Anyway, she is pretty burned-out, and is dealing with the after-effects of one of her client's suicide. She is more anxious now. More hypervigalent and compulsive. She is determined to not have that ever happen again.

There has been no one she could talk to about all that she is carrying. No way to release it. I sat with her as she teared-up, and I said that she could talk to me about it all, and that it would not be a burden. And I knew in that moment what she does not yet know - she is fine, just fine.

Sometimes you just never know.

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July 25, 2008

Not Knowing and Not Owing

Two snippets from two of my teachers. The first is by John Tarrant, who is a (my?) zen meditation teacher in Santa Rosa at the Pacific Zen Institute. He is a master healer, who gave me the wonderful gift of a koan that became a raft keeping me afloat for a time. It was a time not so very long ago now when I was dangerously close to drowning in an ocean of fear and indifference. The second snippet is a poem by Hafiz, the great Sufi master who is reemerging in the west from the shadow of Rumi. If John supplied the raft, perhaps Hafiz gave me a paddle.


A Snippet on Not Knowing
(from Bring Me the Rhinoceros, by John Tarrant, pp 31-32)


The old teachers thought that not to know is to step into life without repeating yourself. It is to forget the prejudices and comparisons that say, "I'm better than you, I'm worse than you, I'm good at this, I'm bad at that." If you practice "don't know" mind for long enough, perhaps you can learn how to be good at anything.

While emptiness is what is left when you take away the thoughts and beliefs that you have constructed around an event, not knowing is a way to move in the absence of such thoughts. It's a creative possibility. Not knowing who you are calls you to meet an event without pretending it is something else - something that happened before. Then you might experience just what is happening: something unpredictable, delightful, dangerous and safe - eating a taco or walking down the street.


A Snippet on Not Owing

(from The Gift, Poems by Hafiz trans. Daniel Ladinsky)

THE SUN NEVER SAYS
Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe
Me."
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

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July 2, 2008

The Invitation of Trees

30 June 2008
Philadelphia, PA

This morning something extraordinary occurred. It actually took me more than an hour to let it sink in before I could capture a bit of it here.

I was sitting with my breathing - inbreath Clear Mind, outbreath Don't Know. Gradually, I noticed how comfortable I was in my body. No urge to move. No itches or facial ticks. None of the twitching that has continued of late. I was just sitting with my breathing and watching my thoughts pass through me. From nowhere to nowhere.

Then I began to notice the sounds around me. The patterns of the birds chirping. Wonderful staccato rhythms. And then more melodious ones. I had an unusual sense that I was somehow expanding to incorporate these sounds. As if I were somehow reaching out beyond this small self. As if all that I was hearing was inside a larger self. Not at all like listening to the sounds. More like listening into them. Into this larger container that was me, yet more than me.

Then I began to notice more sounds. The painter sanding the windows of the big house across the commons. At least that is what it sounded like, although I "saw" no one like that inside the container. I heard a woman talking on her cell phone on the commons as well - a neighbor, although I didn't know who it was. I didn't hear the content, only the happiness in her voice. Since her happiness was now within this container, I was now happy. I felt more and more expansive. In touch with all that was around me, even though there was no longer any around to be around me.

Then I noticed the trees in the commons. I felt a connection to their roots and their ancient rootedness. I felt in touch with their breathing through the very ground itself. In that moment there was no difference between me and "them". Their roots were inside this container as well.

All of a sudden I felt a shudder go through me. It began in my feet and legs, and then moved up into my chest and shoulders. There was no mind. No meaning. No trauma. No joy. Or sadness. No reflection and no echo. Just a shudder that moved through me followed by a profound stillness. I lost touch with parts of my body, and yet didn't mind. I recall thinking that I still must have a thumb on my right hand, even though I couldn't feel it. The same with my feet. Not sensing. Not knowing.

Yet, it all seemed fine by then. The shudder had moved through and had a completeness to it such that even the memory of it now has so little hold on me. It occurred and then it was over.

At some point in there - I cannot recall how long after the shudder - I heard the sound of something crashing down. A really loud cracking sound. It seems odd to me now that I did not open my eyes to see what was happening "out there". It was a loud crack and then it was over. The woman on the phone was still chirping and so were the birds.

It was only later - after I had finished sitting - that I saw the arborist outside working on one of the large trees on the commons. What I had thought was the sound of the housepainter sanding the windows was actually the arborist sawing off the limb of that great, incredibly old tree.

I realized then that the shudder I felt was my experience of tree consciousness within the container. There was no mind, so there was no pain. And since there was no story and no preference, there was no suffering. There was only the shudder, which was like the reflection of the geese flying over the smooth surface of the lake.*

The tree was not trying to teach me anything. It just became my teacher by allowing me to feel its own consciousness. And even that thought is creating a layer of meaning that was not there at the time. The tree did not invite me to experience this deep awareness of no awareness. The tree just is an invitation. Just as the lake is. And the wild geese. Just as the river of diamond water where the coin got lost** - the river I am so afraid to go into.

Invitations all.

*The koan is:
The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection,
The water has no mind to receive their image.

** This koan is:
The coin that is lost in the river is retrieved from the river.
(You can read more about about all this koan business here.)


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June 21, 2008

Margins

Philadelphia, PA
21 June 2008

This morning I was sitting with this word margin. It may have been in response to an e-mail I received from a dear friend this morning. Among other things she wrote about her relationship with her son and daughter-in-law. She wrote:

...I am trying to matter as well as create a world I want to live in...some combination of being in the third act, feeling the curtain going down, and coming to terms with the fact that I do not matter to my son and his wife the way I had hoped I might...

I guess this whole piece about "mattering" got me to thinking once again about being in (or on) the margins. At first I noticed a kind of almost contentment, as I thought about being on the margin. I even visualized this line:

Words words.More meaningful words.Profound words.Impactful words.Then ME

Right there at the end of the line with all that space next to me. All that luxurious space. Just for me. But I didn't trust that feeling, and of course it didn't last very long. Soon it was replaced by a feeling of sadness and loss. As if I had lost my place, which I suppose is right there in the middle of the page. The one that used to look like this:
PeopleWhoMatter...memememememememememememe...PeopleWhoMatter
But now looks like:
mememePeopleWhoMatterPeopleWhoReallyMatterPeopleWhoMattermememe
That feeling of sadness didn't last long either.

Soon enough I found myself thinking about times when I have felt invisible...and angry. Like the several times when I've been on the train to Center City and the conductor walked by without collecting money for a ticket. The first time this occurred I remember saying something to him to get his attention. When it happened again, though, I said nothing. I silently fumed as a reaction to feeling invisible. And it has happened at least four or five times over the past two years or so. And each time I found myself less angry. Maybe I am becoming resigned to that feeling of invisibility - horrifying thought!

Strange, now that I think about it, how most times when this has happened I've given the uncollected money to a homeless person. I told myself that it was my way of feeling that I had not stolen something. Now, I realize - actually it came to me while meditating - that it was my way to attempt to be seen. I recall how careful I was to be sure that the person saw that it was a five and not a one-dollar bill I was putting into the cup. And I made sure they looked directly at me.

There was a time when I would have felt ashamed to admit this simple truth, this need to be seen even by someone who can barely see. Now it is just so.

The sadness is true. So is the anger and resignation. And so is the need to be seen. And so is this creeping sense of my own, my own what? Desubstanciation, or dematerializing, maybe are the apt words. A kind of slow unmattering.

This may be what the three acts are all about.

We strive so hard to become solid and substantial when we are young. Daddy, Mommy, look at me! Look at me! How many times did we say that in so many ways as children? How many times did we hear that as parents?
Act 1: Water becoming earth.

And then we "become somebody". We have substance. We have standing in the world. We become, as a friend says, human doings, rather than human beings. Someone once said that good parenting is love in continual action. We are vibrant; full of purpose. Striving to create meaning.
Act 2: Earth becoming fire.

I guess as we age we do begin to dematerialize in some ways. Maybe we just don't matter as much in this act, or in the same way, because we are not made of the same matter as we once were. And yet, I do have those moments when, just like in Act 1, I feel like screaming, Look at me! Look at me! Who am I screaming to? My parents? My son? The world? Myself? I have no idea.
Act 3: Fire becoming air.

What's the fourth act I now wonder. Does air become water again? That nice, tidy cycle that allows me to go to sleep in the face of pain and suffering. Pain and suffering on the revolving installment plan. No, there are no acts, I suspect. Only transformations. What is left is to let go of the struggle - the struggle to stay, or leave, the center of the page.

And the struggle to stay out of the margins.


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June 3, 2008

Root Canal Dharma

3 June 2008
Tuesday

To be humble is not to make comparisons.
Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse,
bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe.
It is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.
Dag Hammarksjöld, Markings


Yesterday I found myself in a dentist's chair undergoing a root canal "procedure". It did not go well. The specialist working on me spoke of "tortuous canals", and an "unusual anatomy". Then there was the "calcification" he had to contend with. That did not sound pretty. Not the sort of thing I wanted to hear about my canals, and my anatomy - especially from a man in a mask with a drill in one hand and a sharp pointy thing in the other. Oh, and there was another thing I didn't want to hear. After more than an hour into the ordeal he said, "Well, I've managed to get two of the nerve roots, but the third one is really very difficult to get to."

I recalled the Buddhist proverb: On a journey through three roots and three canals, count two as half way...or something like that.

Forty-five minutes later it was over. Two hours and fifteen minutes all told, but who's counting?

The procedure lasted twice as long as both I and the dentist had expected. While I was not in physical pain (that came later...as in now), it was emotionally grueling, and to some extent, given my own personal history, somewhat traumatizing. Yet, it was bearable because I was not alone. Yes, there was a skilled dentist doing his best to minimize my torment. And there was a very nice assistant with kind eyes, and a welcomed efficiency to her every motion. They were there, but not in the way that a boy from Uganda, Stephen Batte, was there with me through it all.

As it happened, just prior to the procedure I was reading an article about this boy, Stephen. He is nine. He spends his days breaking rocks in a quarry near Kampala. All day long he breaks small rocks into smaller rocks. Like the convicts in the old movies, he has been sentenced to a life at hard labor. Only no court has passed judgment on him. Rather, he is the collateral damage from a civil war. For five years now - more than half his life - he has been working on this rock pile. Perhaps no diamond cutter, yet he does tap his homemade hammer just so onto a larger rock splitting it into smaller bits. A five-gallon bucket full of newly minted gravel garners him the princely sum of six cents. He fills three buckets during each twelve-hour day. Stephen's mother died not long ago in an accident at the quarry, and after that his stepfather abandoned him. So, he is alone now.

A few minutes after seeing the image in the paper of this boy sitting on the small pile of rocks, his stick hammer poised for another strike, he came into my mind again while sitting in the dental chair waiting for the next quick injection of novocaine. At first it was a ...well, if he can sit in the hot sun all day and break rocks without complaining, I can sit through this... kind of thought. I quickly realized how that sort of objectification was terribly self-serving, and not at all useful.

As the procedure proceeded, though, the image of this boy returned again and again. Finally, I began to feel myself in the presence of an enormous wave of compassion. It wasn't that I was being compassionate. Instead, I felt that somehow we were both enfolded in a larger mantle of compassion. That his suffering and my torment lived in the spaces well beyond, and also in between, the tapping and the drilling - in the empty spaces where we are all connected.

When I was able for a moment to let go of comparing one suffering against another, my pile of rocks compared with his, I was able sit quietly in those folds and hold him in my mind as another being in the world, another co-conspirator in this illusion of our distinctness and our differences. I found myself with tears in my eyes when I thought of the comment he made to the reporter, "Life has always been hard here..." Just so.

It's just that in that moment the here was there. And now here is here again. And I notice that the opening, that space between spaces, is still here, still open. I may not be able to do anything today about that rock pile in Uganda, but perhaps I will come upon another child today, or another being of any age for that matter, with a rock pile of their own that I might help diminish. And who knows, perhaps my own pile will diminish as well.

We can make meaning of our lives only when we open ourselves to all the joys and sufferings of the world - our own and those of others we will never know.

What I do know now is that a root canal is just a procedure, just dharma.

Update: On the way home from the office this afternoon a boy turned to me at the bus stop, and said, "Aren't you Mr. Edd, the man who traveled all over?" I looked quizzical for a second, and then I recognized him. (His name escaped me - still a little foggy from the medication. Oh, I think it is Saleem.) We had met several months ago at this same spot. Back then he had asked me if I had ever traveled outside the country. I said that I had, and then we talked about my travels in the past and his dreams for the future. This afternoon we picked up that conversation about his dreams for the future. My rock pile was smaller by the time he got off at his stop.

That's dharma, too. Another opportunity to stay awake for a moment.

Here is a link to the newspaper article. And here is another one.

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