Category Archives: Overcome Difficulties

Overcome Difficulties, Teachings

Comfortably Uncomfortable

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Rikuko Taifu said to Nansen, “I have a piece of stone in my house. Sometimes it moves and has its being, sometimes it lies down. I would like to carve it into a Buddha, can it be done?” “It can, it can!” said Nansen. Rikuko asked, “It can be done; is that certain?” ” It can’t, it can’t!” said Nansen.
From Zen and Zen Classics (very old edition) The wording has been slightly changed.

Somebody recently sent me some writings about his feelings of inadequacy/insufficiency with regards to functioning generally. Thoughts about himself that had dogged him all his life. His feelings of inadequacy had coloured everything. What to do what to do? Then he extrapolated, in his writing, that this inadequacy coloured the deeper, could call it spiritual, levels of his inner life. Rather than being perceived as the joyous call of liberation, “going, going, going on beyond” (The Scripture of Great Wisdom) can at times sound rather relentless when one feels ill equipped.

Right at the very end of the ponderings on inadequacy came a really interesting insight. He saw that the feelings and thoughts of inadequacy had become a place known so intimately that there was a certain comfort and safety which he was loathed to leave. Who wants to leave a home lived in all of ones life, known so intimately? That’s even when one knows the roof is leaking, there is dry rot under the stairs and the doors and windows are hanging off their hinges. Who’s to convince one such as this (and that includes all of us to some extent).

This post is for the chap who this morning sat with something he usually avoids. In the intensity of what was there he found himself taking refuge in the Three Treasures, over and over again. (Yes, he just silently repeated the Three Refuges over and over in his mind.) And what was there, washed through. There is no formula for this.

See this post about self justification and confidence. And this one too.

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Daily Life, Overcome Difficulties, Teachings

Letting The Cats Out!

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I shared an enclosure with a friendly 20-lb. female bobcat named Little Feather, who enjoyed lap time with purring.

In this recent post, dedicated to a good friend and Dharma Sister I invite her to write about her stay at Big Cat Rescue. The following piece arrived as a comment attached to my earlier post. It’s promoted to the front page because…it’s a must read and not everybody trawls the comment section so it might missed. I hope you agree that would be a great pity.

Cats and Cats
Margaret

Thank you for the lovely post, Reverend. It happens that two recent mornings when the alarm rang, I was dreaming about cats. One, Brutus the Maine Coon; the other, Suzy the Brown Tabby who will always have a place in my heart.

About zoos, I understand Angie’s comment. My last visit to a zoo was in 1977, when the sight of the caged black leopard, pacing, was too much; but that’s not to say that zoos are bad.

Some years ago I visited the sanctuary called Big Cat Rescue near Tampa, Florida, home to around 200 cats coming from show business, circuses, folks who fancied pet puma, until puma began spraying…. Although enclosed, these cats have room to roam, trees to climb and scratch, excellent food, medical care, and open sky.

At that time they offered overnight rustic accommodation amongst the cats, in fact I shared an enclosure with a friendly 20-lb. female bobcat named Little Feather, who enjoyed lap time with purring. Paying guests were also invited to participate in feeding time by offering raw chicken drumsticks through the wire fences. The technique was to hold the leg and offer the thigh to the cat, who would take it from your hand and eat it (without hand, one trusted).

My group of 4 or 5 others was accompanied on the feeding round by a worker. All went smoothly until we reached a hungry puma (cougar/mountain lion — a type of cat with which I’d had a previous encounter but that’s another story). A fellow stepped up, chicken in hand, but backed away just as the cat was about to grab. Anyone who has ever fed cats knows that they aren’t terribly patient with chow at hand, this is serious business. The man (not a cat-person I could see) stepped up again, this time with the cat snarling, and not only backed away but dropped the food on the ground outside the fence where the cat could see it but not reach it.

Now, with kitty quite agitated, the gentleman bowed out and the worker asked if anyone else would like to try. Something wearing my body stepped forward! This was one mad cat, did I really want to stick my hand through the fence? Fear was there with me (although cats aren’t high on my fear index); right alongside of it was a stillness — in a flash kitty was devouring the food and the worker was saying, That’s the way to feed a cat!

It was a wonderful 24 hours — drifting off to sleep to the sound of lions, and tigers roaring their night-time tunes, visiting with a lovely lady lynx who jumped on my shoulders, seeing varieties of cats I never knew existed.

As for the feline in my bed, the season is turning away from summer and he’s once again curling up under the covers right under my chin, where he purrs loudly for 10-15 min. and then departs for outside, in the vicinity of the knees. At feeding time, he behaves in a manner very similar to that of the puma described above, and loudly.

Thank you again, Rev. Mugo, for letting the cats out.

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Daily Life, Overcome Difficulties, Teachings

Doubts About Pizza

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As a treat for ourselves, Sunday night is typically pizza and dvd night – anyone staying at the farm is invited to come and have pizza with us and watch a film. Sometimes we buy a takeaway pizza, more often we make our own.

On a recent Sunday I decided I wanted to make the pizzas. There were only three of us – an unusually small number for the summer. Anyway, it took me three and a half hours to make three pizzas and I have been wondering about this for some time since. Why did it take so long? well, I had to light the wood-burning stove and get it up to temperature; I milked the goats and made mozzarella cheese with the milk I got; I harvested, washed and prepared our home grown spinach, courgettes (zucchini) and tomatoes to go on the pizza along with the salad to accompany it; then I cooked the pizzas.

Now there are some people who visit us who think this degree of self sufficiency is idyllic, and there are others who think it is unnecessarily hard work and even downright pointless. For me it is a part of how I currently choose to live my life. And still there have often been doubts as to whether I could be doing something ‘more useful’.

These doubts frequently arise from the knowledge that some people who are really close to me think it is a waste of my talents to be spending large parts of my life in this way. This is something I have known for a long time and it has been a helpful challenge to my sense of what seems good for me to do; and yet it has until very recently been a continuing trigger of unease, insecurity and considerable self-doubt.

The reason this has been bugging me for a couple of weeks now, though, is something different. It is the difficult realisation that in our practice there is no possibility of justifying what we do. We can construct a rationalisation to justify a lifestyle if we want – but it doesn’t help. Sooner or later we have to let go of this deep need for self-justification, and for the seeking of approval of those close to us, and just do what seems good to do there and then – with no guarantees that it will still be the good thing to do next week, or even tomorrow. And sometimes there is a longing for an easier practice with a set of rules, or some authority figure that can say what is good and what isn’t – even if I know I couldn’t help but rebel at such authority. Reverend Master Jiyu described our practice as being one for spiritual adults; and sometimes we can still find ourselves craving not to have to be grown up.

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Curiosities, Overcome Difficulties

In This Mornings Light – Photographs

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Back in the nineteen seventies I’d be getting ready for work when Thought for the Day would come on the radio. The program is still running but I doubt if it starts with words In this morning light…. Back then I must have been ripe for a reflective moment because almost without fail I’d pop a few tears as the program began. It then went on to reflect on something topical from a religious perspective. Mostly a Christian perspective but not exclusively so. Perhaps we could have our own thought for the day here, or volunteer…for Thought For The Day. Just a thought.

This picture was taken this morning’s morning light. The sun glanced over the hill just as I was about to press the shutter. New to me is the concept of the Golden Hour, the first hour or so after the sun rises and before it sets in the evening when the light is soft, the edges less defined, the colours warmer in tone. (Thanks to Maria for that information)

1_Golden_Hour_Fungus.jpg
These are mature Shaggy Ink Caps. After a night of rain they are not at their best. Soggy Ink Caps I’d call ’em.
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…and at the other end of the day, the golden light of evening here at the monastery. Photograph by Maria – thanks so much.

More fungus later….

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Overcome Difficulties, Teachings

Scratch A Cynic

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The investigation of my personal cynicism peaked in the Watch Commander’s Office of a small police department here on the north coast of California.

I was on staff there and running various delinquency prevention programs and family services. On that day, I was working on a local School Violence Threat Assessment protocol based on FBI research. My head was spinning with strategies and tactics for sorting out and responding to school violence without making the situation worse. An Officer came in my office and asked me to meet him in the Watch Commander’s Office to evaluate a series of calls about high school girls being harassed by a new street person in town.

Four of us sat in the Sergeant’s office reviewing the circumstances, having added in a Detective known to be skilled in profiling sex offenders. After gathering together what little we knew, checking other local jurisdictions and finding no contacts, we sat for awhile drinking coffee and waiting for the State and Federal rap (report) sheets to arrive, quietly contemplating our suspicions. Finally, the dispatcher handed in the findings, saying there was nothing there, the guy had never been arrested. To a one, the Officer, the Sergeant, the Detective, and myself, all blurted out: Yet!. We all laughed.

As I walked down the hall to my office, I had that disquieting feeling that my heart/mind had closed a little bit more. Whether or not that street person was caught for sexual harassment, or worse sometime in the future, really didn’t matter; I had registered an interior constriction that somehow I felt was unnecessary and unhelpful.

Granted, I was working in an environment where the ‘c’ word was avoided. To care seemed to reveal a weakness and was best left to social workers and the like. In fact, many of the more hard-boiled personalities Officers dealt with would take advantage of a kindness, sometimes in a dangerous way. And yet I knew that staff well, I knew they came into police work because they wanted to be helpful (and, yes, for the excitement when they were young) and cared.

However, I couldn’t let myself off the hook. Simply put the practice of zazen and the Buddhist precepts, over time, just did not allow me to put up with adding constrictions of heart/mind. I was looking for true freedom, not safer defenses.

What to do? Well, actually nothing. I couldn’t come up with a strategy to defend myself from the cynicism around me, nor my own. Cynicism had become a mental habit that slowly accumulated like a light, yet continuous, snowfall. Worse, perhaps, was realizing that it also reinforced a severe sense of separation.

It took years for me to see that my mistake wasn’t really the cynicism, but in trying to come up with a strategy to defeat it. The more I sat with the cynicism, with the sense and fear of separation, with the notion that there isn’t anything that needs protecting, the more it melted. It was like dropping a clear jewel down an infinitely deep well of clear water. The movement of the jewel was enough to catch my attention and allow a loosening of the fear based body/mind habits.

Oh, the cynicism-habit is still there, though weaker. I just don’t invite it in for tea (much) anymore. And the jewel, well, it just seems to fall in every direction.

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