dewdrop_moon

Eido-san's teisho last night was incredible. This summarizes her theme as well as anything else:
A final poem from Rumi:

Don't worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn't matter.

 

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

 

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world's harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

 

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

 

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

 

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

 

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can't see.

 

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the center of your chest,

no more words tonight.  i am quite behind, but not by any means too much so. 

i now have a sketch of settings, and a new determination.  tomorrow will bring solitude for writing.

& the usual 6:15 call to zazen. 

... except one, though I don't know anything about her yet.

My only hope is that she & I can get along... we'll be spending a lot of time together over the next 30 days.

1712 & counting. 

To bed early on Halloween night, and determined not to dwell in this heavy feeling.

I have done well, this week.  Drawn myself out and felt a stillness swell.

not for a second has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed

This week, I rested on all of those supports which are still there, still there

There was Catherine Place, three times.  The gift of a session of healing touch.

Lunch with Maggie and a growing friendship. Rejected a job I didn't want, applied for one I might. 

Woke in time for Saturday breakfast at the zendo, woke for zazen daily (even if I did  warmly

wrap my blanket and fall asleep on the cushion).  The best day was Wednesday:

Acupuncture, talking with Krista, lunch with Mike, then zazen and a teisho that wove together the threads of each.

I asked, and they were there!

How can so much continue to flow toward me, still? 

I play this living music for the host.  Everything today is for the host. 



Even if I do not know where they will lead.
Especially because I do not know where any of this will lead.
Everything today is for the host. 

For sixty years I have been forgetful, every minute,
but not for a second
has this flowing toward me
  stopped or slowed.
I deserve nothing. 
Today I recognize
that I am the guest
   the mystics talk about.
I play this living music for my host.
Everything today is for the host.

   -Rumi

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.

The door there
is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,
they're given wings.

-Rumi


"GOING TO WALDEN
It isn't very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!
Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are."
— Mary Oliver

These spiritual window-shoppers, who idly ask,
"How much is that?" Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
Shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping,
But these walk into a shop,
And their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
In that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much?"

Even if you don't know what you want,
Buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a large, foolish project,
Like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
What people think of you.

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. -Abraham Lincoln

From Eido-san's blog. This resonated. I must not allow myself to get thrown off by doubts, anxiety, even possibility. In any moment, I can "dig deeply into spiritual maturity to be a wise caretaker" of this precious life.

October 1st - For the Time Being

Words from Eido Frances Carney, Teacher, Priest and Abbot of Olympia Zen Center

"Almost everyone I know is in a time of transition. A seeming midway point between one thing and another. Or so it seems. Actually, we've been in transition from the moment we entered being-life, since nothing remains the same from one moment to the next. We've all had some plateaus when we thought things were settled and we didn't have to worry about anything. We know however, if we look around, that this is an illusion. Anything can happen at any moment and nothing is actually fixed. We just have the feeling that things are settled. It's a mercy that we get such moments so that we are not challenged by the idea of turmoil all the time. While I was speaking of this in the Zendo last night, we experienced a non-damaging earthquake.


Transitions require particular maturity on our part to remain equanimous while things appear topsy turvy, when there is the pressure to pick, to choose, to decide something that will have enormous effect on our future and those we love. Katagiri Roshi recommends to us that we "root ourselves firmly in Emptiness." If we do this we can go about our lives with confidence in our being, with confidence that the steps we take will rise out of the clearest point of wisdom. When we say that we can't rely on anything, that everything is continuously changing, we don't mean that we are abandoned to the wind and rain and that we are helpless. We mean that in each moment all potential is there for us and when we don't panic, when we don't try to grip our lives with fear and anxiety, we allow for wisdom and understanding to be manifested in our activities and our choices. In this, our lives are large, there is room to breathe well, we can manifest the aspects of ourselves that most long to be expressed.


Being is time and time is being. Everything is for the time being, for awhile, as Dogen Zenji says in "Uji" SHOBOGENZO. What moves through time resides in all of existence yet is for the time being. We cannot avoid time. The challenge is to fully enter time as an embracement of being. When we collapse into circumstance we begin to lose being and we set up obstructions for ourselves that reduce our possibilities. Obstructions are things or thoughts or patterns that cause us to be blind to potential.


In times when transitions are strong we can be tempted to be thrown into turmoil and to allow obstructions to cloud the way. So, we must dig deeply into spiritual maturity to be wise caretakers of our lives. This is not because of fear of making a mistake, but because caring well for life is itself being-time, is itself the manifestation of Buddha Nature. Living in this way we can live with confidence in the most difficult storms of change and transition which even the Buddha, Dogen Zenji, Ryokan san, all people meet along the Way"

In my next employment, I will journal daily to remind myself to see the expression of my privilege in any given moment, the first step and one which it is all to easy to forget.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow "them" to be more like "us."

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack Peggy McIntosh