Monthly Archives: February 2014

Of lineage

In my twenties, while trying to figure out the dance steps of relationship, how one navigates the moves of love, longing, lust and belonging, I was often lost.  Trying to understand what it was that got in the way of two people simply being able to meet each other face to face, I imagined it truly as a dance.   But while trying to manage the steps, I realized that we weren’t just two people on the dance floor.  Behind me was my father, whispering in my ear how to do the dance.  And behind him his father, and his father, the line leading back to the lost past, each passing down the steps and the rules and the ways to be.  And not only that, across from me was not my partner, but my mother.  Or rather, the reflection of my mother.  With my grandmother, and her mother, and that line stretching far into forgotten times too.  Multiply that by the fact my dance partner had her mother behind her and her father in front of her, and it’s no wonder the dance floor felt crowded.

And there was the fact too, that my father came from the generation of men who’d been whispered to by their forefathers for so long, “don’t be too happy, or too angry, and above all never sad.  Work hard, value what can be made over what can be shared between people.”  A prescription for loneliness and loss.

So that was my legacy and lineage.  Within that I tried to figure out what it was to be a man, and if it was possible even to change it, to find something new.   Thinking it could only go in one direction, from the past to the future.  In this work at that time, when you went to work on your blind spots and fears, often what was focused on was your childhood.  As Philip Larkin has it, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”  If you worked with a counselor, as I did, part of that process that was almost required was to write a letter to your parents, detailing all the ways they’d denied you, not shared of themselves, been less than they were and could be.  I wrote that letter to my father as I was encouraged to, and it was met with angry silence.  Something to the effect of “that’s your opinion.”  I think back now and wonder, how could I think anger would bring about anything besides more anger?

Perhaps the process worked, uncovering what was beneath the anger and resentment.  Or perhaps it was just that love and memory came forward. One memory started it, his quiet teaching, a night he covered the table with bottles and salt shakers, cups and plates, to feed my hunger for understanding of astronomy.  To explain to me how things worked.

I realized that I could not expect this chain of unspoken words and hidden feelings to be broken if I didn’t do myself what it was I wanted to be done.  So I wrote a letter thanking him for all he’d done for me… And I still treasure the letter I got back, thanking me and saying, “I’m proud of the man you’ve become.”

I watch my son with his boys, and hope I did enough to pass on the best of our lineage.  And to let what was less than useful stop with me.  He sends me a message: “I’m reading at A.’s class today.  And I remember having the coolest dad on the block come to read to my first grade class.”  Tears fill my eyes, and I answer, “Now you’re the coolest dad on the block.  And I’m so proud of you.”  Continuing the lineage, weaving new bonds.

Sweetness

Lunch break at work…I pull out the computer to write.  I have a drawer full of jawbreakers, and I’ll have a few of them and call it lunch.  There was food at the meeting earlier, so I’m good anyway.  The jawbreakers come from a client who always has his pockets filled with them.  Each time he comes to my office to go over some paperwork, or for help with paying bills, he reaches into his pocket.  Pulling a handful he drops them into my hand like a pile of jewels.   And I am reminded of the importance of giving and receiving, and how so often the rules of this job and this role don’t allow me to accept very often.  They also don’t allow my clients to give of themselves very often.  So I’ll savor this jawbreaker and think of the kindness of Dan, bald and big-bellied, a Buddha in a parka who always makes me smile.

 The jawbreakers remind me of being 10, how I’d get a quarter and go to the store to buy a brown paper sack of them filled with them on a Saturday.  Back when penny candies really were just a penny.  I’d stretch them out over that whole day, trying with each one to suck on it until it was completely gone, and always instead end up chomping down on it before there was nothing left.  An experiment to see it pass from form to nothingness that I was never able to wait for, but instead had to hasten along.

 Saturdays in my mind are filled with so many memories of sweetness in that way.  The penny candy.  Cartoons and cereal fresh out of bed.  Riding my bike as far as it would take me.  Going to the movie theater to see a matinee for fifty cents.  I wonder why with such sweetness already in my life that I needed that bag of candy.  Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire” talks about how so many people in the pioneer days in America spoke of heaven being a place of “sweetness and light” because there was so little of it in their actual lives.  There were no lights other than the that from the fireplace or stove.  Sugar and fruits were non-existent.  So they’d dream of a place where what they lacked was there in abundance.

 I don’t think my life lacked that sweetness at that time.  In the way that some people just like sweets, and some don’t, I was always on the side of those who liked it.  And I was pretty good at savoring it, even with that tendency to always bite the last of the jawbreaker.  But I could entertain myself, loved being outdoors.  Give me a good book or a pile of Boys Life magazines, and I’d read all afternoon.  There were places that were sweet to me, the beauty of the woods across the street, the little pond in the center of that woods, and farther down the path, the rotting little shed that still stood in the bottom of the hollow.  Even the air in there was sweet, filled with the smell of dirt, and rotting wood, the kind of wood that was wet and spongy, and seemed to still hold a shape and semblance of wood though magic only.  Green light slanting in the windows after filtering down through the trees overhead, a bench against one wall and only jars with rusty mason lids, or no cover at all.

 And still that urge for sweetness.  A sweet kiss.  The silence of a snowy winter night, or the brutal clarity of stars when it’s 20 below.  I was aware in times of depression how sweetness was a balm and a protection against pain, misery, and what…boredom?  A chocolate donut, provided a few minutes where the world and my life for a moment were a pleasure, a brief respite.  Life is brutal and short, some say.  Which might be true, but even when I don’t see them there are such moments, fleeting as they are, of sweetness.  And at times such as in depression it seems we can’t find them, or don’t see them.  But they are there. 

 The third noble truth the truth of joy.  Or is it sweetness.   To breathe is sweet, each breath a wonder, to have a body and senses even with pain or craving is sweet.

 There was a man walking across an open field, when suddenly a tiger appeared and began to give chase. The man began to run, but the tiger was closing in. As he approached a cliff at the edge of the field, the man grabbed a vine and jumped over the cliff. Holding on as tight as he could, he looked up and saw the angry tiger prowling out of range ten feet above him. He looked down. In the gully below, there were two tigers also angry and prowling. He had to wait it out. He looked up again and saw that two mice, one white, the other black, had come out of the bushes and had begun gnawing on the vine, his lifeline. As they chewed the vine thinner and thinner, he knew that he could break at any time. Then, he saw a single strawberry growing just an arms length away. Holding the vine with one hand, he reached out, picked the strawberry, and put it in his mouth. It was delicious.

 I loved that story the first time I read it.  Even as I was frustrated that it didn’t seem to have an ending.  “But what happens to the man?” my mind shouted out.  I wanted to know, how does it turn out.  Is he saved?

 These days I know that the story is sufficient.  Caught for this short moment between birth and death, with danger and uncertainty around me, the moral being that in any moment there is sweetness to be found.  Life gives us strawberries.  And jawbreakers.

 

Dying is easy, comedy is hard

The dead have so much less to worry about.  Let the mail pile up.  Pay or don’t pay the bills, doesn’t matter.  Don’t worry about the leaky roof, the peeling paint.  Let the car sit out in the drive rather than protected in the garage.  Supervisors be damned.  Paperwork piles up, everything falls behind.  Calls to friends unmade, letters not returned.  No matter.  Even if everyone gets angry, which they won’t, the dead don’t care.  They’re out of reach.  Incommunicado.  No need to keep up.  No need to apologize.  Nothing has to be said or done.  No amends to make.  Let the tv stay on, the veggies rot in the crisper.  The dead won’t care.  Doesn’t concern them.

And what IS there to worry about for the dead?  Coming back to life, I think, the only error or misstep they can make.  And that’s happened very infrequently.  So even that is a small concern.  I’ve never excelled at much, so I’m sure that’s not something I’ll have to worry about.  When dead, I’ll stay dead.  May even revel in it.  Catch up on my napping, on doing nothing. 

Dogen and writing

It’s easy for me to focus on Dogen’s philosophy, dharma and teaching, because it’s so compelling, fascinating and challenging.  So much so that it’s also easy to forget sometimes what drew me in so strongly in the first place…the guy’s an amazing writer.

Breaking Genjokoan down as we’re doing in studying , spending time with each section, allows me to see the depths that are there, but also lets me see the beauty and poetry in each each section.  And every so often I have to go back to read the whole thing again, to see the power of it in its entirety.  But here’s the section I’ve been studying this week:

When you first seek dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. At the moment when dharma is correctly transmitted, you are immediately your original self.

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

Dosho says, “There’s not too much to this one.”  And he’s right.  There’s not that much here.  Certainly not compared to some of the other denser passages.  I imagine few of us these days are unfamiliar with this idea , accustomed as we are to traveling in boats, in cars, in planes, to that disorienting feeling we’d have as a kid looking out the window of the car, wondering what’s moving and what is still.  Still it’s a not always easy for us to remember, and I think this is what he’s saying though he never makes it explicit: that in the same way that when we don’t concentrate on the boat, if we don’t concentrate on this body and mind, we believe all is change “out there” in the world, and forget body and mind too is impermanent.  We too are moving in the stream of time.

Sometimes metaphors are all we have to express what is beyond words.

All of which brings me back to what I began to say in my roundabout way: that what drew me in and still blows me away is the fact that Dogen writes amazingly.  Sitting with this section for a few weeks, and even setting aside this might be a more novel idea to readers of his time, I agree this is a bit of a “slow” section.  And when I thought of it that way, I saw it was like the slow movement in a Beethoven sonata or quartet.  A true artist knows that the work can’t be relentless.  There needs to be pacing, rhythm, we need time to catch our breath, to absorb what has been said or expressed.  And pause can help to prepare us for the final movement that ties it all together, that often is the thunder and lighting of the piece, as much as it is for Beethoven as it is with Dogen.

His skills as an essayist are as good as an writer I can think of, I see when reading the whole piece.  He circles around a subject, bringing in all sorts of seemingly extraneous thoughts or stories.  Then just when you think he’s lost control, tying it all together in a masterful move and boring back in to what he hinted at in the beginning.  Or when he can’t find a word to express what he wants to say, he’ll invent a new one.  Or use an old one in a new way.  Like the best poets.  Catullus would do that, stretching the limits of words.

He also tests the limits of syntax and grammar, like E. E. Cummings did.  The language is in the service of the teaching, never the opposite.  That’s why it is true dharma words and teaching.  But also why it’s damn good reading!  Fresh and exhilarating.  Never willing to settle, he will reveal new teachings in old words or stories.  He can also teach the deepest truths of Zen and Buddhism without ever having to rely on the words “Zen” or “Buddhism.”

And that’s why he remains an example for any practitioner to follow.  As well as for any who writes to shoot for.