Author Archives: Philip Martin

Approaching love

Driving to a meditation group this morning, I heard a report on the radio about the Beatles.  It was 50 years ago today…the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”  They played the live version of “I Saw Her Standing There,” and suddenly I was right back in those days.   Even if those days mean being 8 years old for me.  Still, even at that age I can remember the first time I heard that song, the sound of those chords, the high pitched ooooh, and the lyrics.  How they promised that moment of love, seeing her standing there, taking her hand, “my heart went boom.”  Much gets said about the clichés of love songs, how they paint a picture that’s unattainable, and fantasy.  But something that the Beatles could do so well was to encapsulate that simple idea of love, a pure expression of it.  Love is all you need.

They were such poets of the truth and mystery of love.  And love may be a cliche, may be a crock and a created fantasy, and whatever else we choose to call it.  But it’s also something very real.  We know it when we see it, like they also say about pornography, oddly enough.  The world might be just fine without the word, but without the thing itself?  It’s one of those words like God, or Zen, or beauty–hard to define, and yet so important.  So useful precisely because it’s so big, and can hold so much.  And the way they were able to speak of that truth to me makes them sort of the Rumi of rock and roll.

So all this went through my head in just the time it took the song to play.  The thought that love is a good metaphor, or a good substitute for what we’re looking for in Zen practice, or in any spiritual search.  It’s a way to be in the world.  I remember years ago my teacher Dosho Port giving a talk that began with his saying “I’d like to talk some about love today.  It’s not something we mention very often in zen.“  I laughed out loud at that truth.  “See, Phil knows what I’m saying” he added.  And further back I remember the only other time I heard it mentioned…a lecture when Richard Baker was at the Zen Center in Minneapolis, and talked about the power and magic of Zen practice, of the search for enlightenment.  “It’s more compelling and important than any love affair you might chase after,” he said, making me feel ashamed for the love affair I was in the middle of, and my thoughts of perhaps moving away from the Zen center to pursue it.  (Of course not that long after we’d learn of the love affairs he pursued at the expense of an entire Zen Center.)

Dosho told that day of the story of Yuan Wu’s enlightenment:

A thousand years or so ago, Yuan-wu had a glancing encounter with the ancient mirror, but his teacher Wu-tsu felt that it was too slight and that if Yuan-wu took this to be a true awakening he would be prey to deep self doubts later – blown about by any passing wind, at the mercy of the words of others. So he told him to stay with his koan. Yuan-wu took this as a snub and left his teacher in a huff, but before he departed Wu-tsu said to him, “Remember me when you are ill with fever.” Years later, Yuan-wu indeed did become desperately ill and finally decided to return to his teacher. Wu-tsu sang him a little song popular at the time:

“She calls to her serving girl, ‘Little Jade’

Not because she wants something

But just so her lover will hear her voice.”

And said, “That’s very much like Zen, isn’t it?” and Yuan-wu awoke to her calling. Listen! Listen! She is always calling – not because she needs anything but only so her lover will hear. And you are her lover when you ask, “Who is hearing?”, or “What is Mu?”, or “What is the source of consciousness?”, or return to one in your breath counting, or open to the night sky and the rain shaking the trees, or to your dry tongue. She calls unceasingly to let you know she is near. Better than near, actually! Much better than near?

The metaphor of the lover calling to her maid so her beloved knows she is there is lovely and ripe.  It contains so much regarding love….the call and response, the joy in another’s presence, one might even say the dependency and need?  For that’s the quality those of us in a practice, or soured and cynical, use to pass our judgment on love…it’s attachment, dependency, selfishness.  And yet, and yet….

The important stuff I find is always in that “and yet, and yet. “  I think of another earlier Rumi of popular song, Ira Gershwin.  Unlucky in love himself, yet possessed of a unique and beautiful understanding of it, and the ability to communicate it as well.  And perhaps what those like Lennon and McCartney and Gershwin can do, that sets them apart, is their ability to hint at more, what is behind the cliché of love.  What is calling from the other room.   Gershwin set out to write a love song that never mentioned the words love, and gave us “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”  A song that catalogs seemingly small, minor things about the beloved.   The way she wears her hat, holds her knife, sips her tea.  The essence of love, it seems, is as the essence of Zen has also been described.  Attention, attention, attention.

One could say that to be enlightened, or to be at least fully present in the midst of the world is to be in love and relationship with the ten thousand things.  I love that one of the words we use for describing that relationship with the world, with dharmas, with our teacher and the ancestors, with our koan, even with our body and mind, is intimacy.  That word (another big enough to contain all kinds of meanings) that is a euphemism for sex in our day, and a metaphor for love too.

Love goes both ways of course.  Much like how Dogen talks about the two ways of being: the 10,000 things advance and enlighten us, or we advance toward the ten thousand things and enlighten them.  And perhaps both can occur at once.  It is a dance.  It takes two to tango.  There may be nothing harder than unrequited love, and the ideal is when there is the yin and yang of loving and being loved back.  For to be loved is to feel at home in the world.  To feel that one is understood, known, that one can stand naked before your lover and still be accepted and wanted.  It is to be supported and wanted in this world.

And to be in love with another–that love may or may not transform the other.  But it certainly transforms us.  There is a poem, Gate C22, by Ellen Bass.

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport

a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed

a woman arriving from Orange County.

They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after

the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons

and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,

the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other

like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,

like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped

out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down

from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.

She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine

her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish

kisses like the ocean in the early morning,

the way it gathers and swells, sucking

each rock under, swallowing it

again and again. We were all watching —

passengers waiting for the delayed flight

to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,

the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling

sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could

taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back

and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost

as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,

as your mother must have looked at you, no matter

what happened after — if she beat you or left you or

you’re lonely now — you once lay there, the vernix

not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you

as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.

The whole wing of the airport hushed,

all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,

her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,

little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up. 

So what I want to ask is: Would you rather be the woman, or the man waiting at the gate?  The poet says pretty clearly, that she thinks everyone wants to be the woman.  But I read it and thought, I want to be that man.  And maybe thinking one can only have one or the other, be either the lover or the beloved, is a faulty question, though in this human realm it’s usually true.  But how wonderful to be seen as she is seen, as the mother sees the child.  We can feel that kind of love sometimes for another, and maybe it’s as rare and unlikely as having someone feel it for us.  But I know I’ve felt it in my life and when you feel it, it fills and warms your heart so, that perhaps you don’t even need to feel it back.  To feel it is to see the whole world as new, it’s a kind of enlightenment, it is for that brief moment to be as God.  And realize even God often looks at his or her creation in total amazement and wonder.  One of the lessons of love is not necessarily about being loved back.  Again, it is about what loving does to us.  How it can transforms us.  And the whole world as well.

Before leaving for that meditation group this morning, I’d walked out to warm up the car.  There’d been and still was some heavy winter fog, leaving thick hoar frost on everything.  And a seemingly happy and stubborn chickadee on a branch right next to me refused to be scared off as I walked by, standing his ground and singing his heart out to me.  I tried to answer him, but could not match the beauty of his song.  I had to settle for my croaking whistle, and he didn’t seem to mind.  And I felt the joy both of love for the trees and the bird, but also as though they were loving me too.  I mean, after all, the trees had put on their finest gown of white for me.  And the bird, well, I can choose to believe he was singing to me, can’t I?

Driving through more beauty, I arrived at the building where the meditation was.  And there, on a dry erase board someone had drawn a wild drawing, 4 feet high with a heart in the middle and filigree all round it, and in the center the single word “Love.”  What do they say?  That love is finishing each other sentences?  It seemed on this day the world had the same thought as I did.  Which can only happen when we are one and the same.  To love is to not know where I begin and the other ends.  Which sounds a little like enlightenment also.

One could pick a worse teacher and a worse path.

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.