It was November 6Th, 1996. Around 2.00 pm. I leaned over the railing outside my Masters house watching the golden leaves fall from the Lindon Tree in the garden at Shasta Abbey. I was commenting to the monk beside me that I felt no sadness. There was a sort of joy, almost elation in the air. How could this be? My Master had just died. Breathed her last. He commented something to the effect that it was like another leaf falling from a tree. Then I went indoors and got on….
And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. There is that which endures, joyfully.
This morning I was sitting in on a tea and talk at one of our temples. It was a delight to be there and especially wonderful to meet a long-time and loyal reader. One of the questions on the table was about how to deal with the snow storm of distractions that come at you in life. At work for example. The Reverend launched into several great responses. All the while I was thinking, Snow storm, snow storm? – looking out the window at the leaves being blown around wildly in the high winds. – Snow storm/leaf storm. How does one behave in a snow storm? And just as I’d got my head straight on the question, and answer. The Reverend gave more or less the same answer! That’s the way it happens sometimes. Great minds think alike, or together at least.
I’ll not go into what I came up with on the matter because the answer is obvious when one think in terms of how one deals with an actual snow storm. Or leaf storm! Hum. The question of distractions generally is interesting tho’. Storms come and storms go. Snow melts and the leaves, lots of them at the moment, rot. Eventually.
Daily life practice is really very straight forward. We overly concern ourselves with being blasted off our perch in a gale, or what ever. When in actual fact we are moving with the wind. And, still there is sitting still.
Rev. Master Mugo’s recent postings about vision, landscape, and soundscape reminds me of one the first articles I read about Buddhism. It was entitled Come to Your Senses!. I don’t even remember the author. It appeared in a poorly printed sort of magazine of metaphysics of the 1950’s that my dad had laying around the house. The article suggested that by properly using the senses one could eventually achieve Enlightenment. This was not standard cultural fare at the time and it caught my attention.
I walked around the house wondering if I was “properly using my senses” and speculating on what being enlightened would feel like. I asked my dad how to use the senses correctly and remember him saying something along the lines of “pay attention to what you’re doing”. Since I was a kid who ran a lot of fantasies in his head most of the time, this wasn’t anything new for him to say to me, so I disregarded it as a parental correction to my normal absent-mindedness. But something germinated.
By the time I went to college, Eastern philosophy was catching on and I enrolled in a survey class. The class was so full that it was moved to an auditorium. There was an excited buzz in the room. The professor ambled out to the podium, adjusted the microphone, and in a quiet tone told us that he was disgusted with the popularity of the class. He preferred the small classes he used to have and, frankly, he didn’t think many of us would get it. He said that the entire course could be summed up like this and, despite his obviously arthritic hands, the professor slammed a fist down on the podium and said: “Don’t think about it!”
Of course I thought about not thinking about it for the rest of the semester and beyond. I studied hard. I learned a lot. I was especially excited about learning that the discriminatory mind was considered a sense. I could justify thinking about not thinking that way. But the professor’s fist striking the podium had a significance that sounded beyond all that thinking and beyond my earnest attempts to acquire understanding.
Over the years, and with the benefit of a Zen practice, I began to see that acquiring in general seemed to get in its own way. It just pushed what I was after further ahead of me, like those old vaudeville comedians who drop their hat and kick it further away when they step to pick it up. Eventually, however, studying Buddhism became less and less an issue of obtaining something and more and more of recognising signposts left by those who went before.
The same evolution has seemed to occur with my senses. Early on, it was natural to reach with my senses, particularly seeing, hearing, and thinking, but none were ignored. Over time, it has seemed better to let them be, to let them do their job, to not push them or cut them off. I’m finding, for example, that relaxed vision sees more, relaxed listening hears more. For me, this non-forced sensory opening up seems to encourage a general open-endedness in my perspective that is beneficial. Not just relaxing, or informative, or helpful, or assuring, but, well, more human. It reminds me that we are not just homo sapiens (those who know) but homo sapiens sapiens (those who know they know).
I don’t often think of being in the landscape however these past days I’ve had the opportunity to be just that. In the landscape, of the landscape.
To explain. Now and then there opens for me an opportunity to go off grid and spend time in a small retreat hut in the monastery grounds. So recovering, well by the way, from a cold and hearing the call to be less outwardly active I’ve carved out a few hours each day this week to hut dwell. A series of mini breaks, three or four hours here and there, to sit with nothing calling for attention.
As dawn comes to the valley, from dim glimmer through murky grey to misty glow, I’ve sat. And I’ve sat on the porch mid-day too, reciting a scripture. Intimate with the great sweep of the valley. An hour or two in the late afternoon, the sun first blazing in the window then dipping behind the hill. Evening, picking my way across the field in drizzle with headlamp batteries fading to nothing – and still finding my way. Deep blackness, inky black, with pin pricks of light. Are they near, or far? Is that one moving? It’s blinking. A plane? A satellite? A UFO?! With little or no illumination landscape takes off into a wholly other world of envisioning. After all sharp focus is only a very small part of our vision capacity.
So much of the time ones eyes are narrowed to sharp focus. On the screen, the phone book, notices on the notice board (bane of my life – where are my glasses!). Text and text and more text. So when there is not so much obvious need for sharp focus one can go wide screen. Be in the landscape. Allow corner-of-the-eye sight. Allow the eyes to roam wide and open, focused but not narrowed in on anything particular. Wholly in the landscape. Wholly the landscape.
With practice, even coming into a large room there can be an entering into a room-scape, rather than immediately narrowing ones beam, so to speak, to ones sitting or standing place. All rather interesting. But enough of this pondering. Take a look at these winning photographs from the Landscape photo of the year 2009 awards published on the BBC web site.
Thanks to Dave for the link – keep ’em coming Dave.
Nancy and I crunch our way down the gravel road on a late afternoon beach walk. A car rolls up, window down. Our neighbor Nancy, sister in name and mirth to my Nancy, tells us with a smile that her fourteen-year-old son, Jack, has given everything he has and everything he is to the devil. He’s made his pact with Lucifer and dies. It’s just a hard thing for a mother to witness even if it is a play. Neighbor Nancy is now in a hurry to bring Jack something to eat before he appears in the next Young Actor’s Guild’s performance of Dr. Faustus. Jack is Dr. Faustus. We really shouldn’t miss it.
As far as my Nancy and I are concerned, Jack is a local treasure. Actor, singer, raconteur, Jack is a member of a creative family that has brought laughter to the neighborhood. Jack has already helped us get reacquainted with Gilbert and Sullivan, so why not Christopher Marlowe?
Fast forward to the next evening: Nancy and I are sitting in the small theater of the Theater Arts building in the local university amidst the pre-show buzz and chatter. The man next to Nancy asks: Which child is yours? It’s a friendly crowd, here to witness and encourage.
Waiting to see Jack, I take in the stage setting. Angular, minimal, sharp contrasts between light and dark. As the play unfolds, a pattern of clever use of space and a smooth flow of complicated movements is established. Then there is Jack-as-Faustus: he acts with his whole body in a way that remains in harmony with his speech. And it’s a very physical part.
I also begin taking in the arc of the story. I came here because I appreciate Jack and Jack-as-Faustus, in turn, is bringing me back to the archetypal struggle between good and evil, right into the apparent separation between heaven and earth. That’s when I notice the scanner kicking in.
The scanner that I’m talking about here seems to lie below the surface of my self-awareness. I can’t describe it well, but it acts like a sort of software in my psyche that scans incoming data from all and any source. I can tell when it’s moved beyond an idle and is considering something more actively. This scanner seems to look for puzzle pieces, connections between things, perspectives that lead to wholeness; it has an inclination to look through to the Big Picture.
As Faustus begins his bargaining for fame and gain, my scanner highlights a phrase of what Faustus sees as one gain of making a deal with the devil: to be resolved of all ambiguities. Hmm-m-m, goes the scanner. And suddenly I become aware of an evolution in how I see ambiguity. It used to drive me crazy. It seems that this tension has fallen away for me somehow.
Hell, for me, is not an afterlife issue. I have a reputation with myself (and with Nancy and R.M. Mugo as well, I suppose) of moving in and out of hells on a regular basis. Hells of various depths and dimensions, from bristling to excruciating, come and go. And, likewise, heavens. I am trying, to the best of my ability in the moment, not to pursue or push away either. In that there is a contentment that reaches beyond both.
But there is a price, I find. Not a price that can be bargained for though, but a price that I have to live. Simply put: I must be willing to not know what is going to happen next. I’m not talking about paralysis here, this is not about fear. Well, it may, on occasion, require being with fear or insecurity but it’s not about being driven by fear or insecurity. Ambiguity has become for me an increase in possibility, a wider field of possible action. Life as one surprise after another, moment to moment to moment….
The scanner continues and notes a comment the servant demon Mephistopheles makes to Faustus: Hell has no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place…. All places shall be hell that is not heaven. Hmm-m-m, again. Sure feels that way when I’m mired in a hell realm. But there’s something else here: assuming the imperative to pick between heaven or hell as fundamentally real just might squeeze out any sensing of what is eternal in the present moment.
How can poor Faustus escape this split? Well, he doesn’t. And now I am back watching Jack-as-Faustus splayed on the ground in his death scene. He cries out to God for salvation and dies. A crowd of black-robed figures moves slowly toward him, the lead figure holding the contract Faustus has with the devil. The lights dim just as she reaches the body.
