When my son J. was little, one of his favorite books was a Little Golden book, “The Bunny Book.” It tells about a little bunny who wonders what he will be when he grows up, and shows all the different options available to a grown rabbit. All the rabbits are serious sorts, and work at all kinds of grownup (male) jobs. But the story ends with the bunny finally knowing what he will be when he grows up….a daddy bunny. With lots of little bunnies to tuck in and tickle and love.
I thought of that book as I watched with pleasure J. and his partner getting ready for the birth of their own child. And how he beautifully he loves and cares for his stepson too. They were excited by everything their son did, and also couldn’t wait to “meet” their new baby, as he put it. J. confided to me one day just before their baby was born, “I did something naughty the other night.” My mind went through the things that could mean, mainly extrapolating from all the things that have worried me over the year. But if I have learned nothing else in all these years, it’s that it’s usually better to just shut up and say, “yeah?” “Yeah, I did some online shopping,” he said. I thought again, immediately going to the worst possibilities– what, new video games? Electronic equipment? A new guitar? “Yeah, there was the cutest black onesie that said ‘One Love’ on it with a picture of bob Marley, I just had to get it for the baby.” And I thought, “he will become a daddy bunny….”
My good friend Michael, as I shared with him this unfolding of this new development in J.’s life, said, “Phil, I hope you know that a part of the reason he is so proud to be a father, and so invested in it, is because you worked so hard at it too.” And I smiled, and knew that he was right. I don’t want to brag, and I’m also certainly not one to feel we men should be given lots of credit simply for finally stepping in and really BEING with our kids. But for several reasons I was lucky enough to be able to spend years being home and raising him, from the time he was 2 to 4, and again from about 7 to 11.
The real secret of this, that I try to share with other men, isn’t that you do it because you will help grow children who will be more balanced, who themselves will believe men should be more involved in parenting, or because it’s a gesture for the bigger world. No, the reason for doing it is twofold. One that it’s a blast. And the second, that it will change you and inform your life in ways you never could have imagined. So my pride is selfish, in that I know in that selfish way what it did for me.
When J. was 4, at the time when I’d spent two years with him everyday, staying home to be the primary caregiver, he had spent a Sunday doing the kinds of risky things he loved. He’d driven a go kart, climbed around in a ravine, and hit softballs in a batting cage. The next day, we were playing in the park with pump water rockets, and as he was running across the flat ground, he tripped and fell and hurt his shoulder. Thereby showing the time when we are often most at risk is when we don’t think we are, when our attention is loose because there seems no need for it.
Anyway, he seemed to just take a tumble and roll over his shoulder in a way that shouldn’t have injured him. But he kept complaining that his arm hurt, and I could see no injury there. But I knew him well enough to know he was really hurting. And I knew him in ways I didn’t even realize. They say mothers and newborns take several months after birth to realize they are actually separate from each other. I’d never realized how strong that connection could be. But as he tried to tell me his arm hurt, but couldn’t tell me how or where, I noticed an intense pain in my collar bone. At first I didn’t give it any credence, but it didn’t lessen, and somehow I knew, that’s what J. is feeling too!
So I immediately put him in my rusty old pick up, and drove to the clinic just before it closed. I felt the pain of every bump we hit, as he grimaced too. And walking in to the clinic, they laughed a little at me when I said I thought he’d broken his collar bone. But they ran a quick X-ray and found that, sure enough, he’d had a green stick fracture, like the damage bending a young bough will do.
I never knew I could have such a connection with another person. It was a lesson in what can happen when your own boundaries soften, when you care more about another person than you do yourself, and when you just become still and pay attention.
So last year when J.’s younger son turned 1, I searched and found a copy of “The Bunny Book” for him to read to his sons. He told me just the other day, “I read it to A. every day. He loves it.”
And so the secret is passed on.

Half a lifetime ago, I sat upright in the meditation hall during a long retreat, fighting off sleep–with little success. Finally I decided to stop struggling, and all at once the sleep stopped fighting back. Emboldened by this success, I embraced much more that afternoon, and let go of much too. And it was as though I had broken through, up or down–who can say?– to another level. I sat with it for two more days, savoring it, before I went to see the roshi. “You’ve become quiet enough you ran right into your true nature.“ “Will I lose this,” I asked, and he answered, “It will always be there, beneath your practice, supporting it.”

For years I didn’t speak of it. We don’t speak much of those openings in Zen practice, at least not in Soto Zen. Maybe in part it seems too intimate. I remember in college my friend Michael and I were sitting in meditation together at his house. A housemate of his came in. She was terribly embarrassed, and said she felt as if she had walked in on us having sex. Of course meditation seems more normal these days. But I wonder if all the talking about it, about inner experience, does kill the immediacy and intimacy of it. Or it may that aspect of American culture toward self-disclosure– so that talking about openings in meditation feels like going on Jerry Springer to talk about being in love with you mother-in-law.

But I’d like to risk it. Because it’s important to remember that opening is available to anyone in each moment, in any activity. Every moment contains within it the seeds of enlightenment. It has to. And in something that sounds close to the idea of grace in Christianity, we must strive for it, make effort toward it, and yet it occurs beyond effort and striving. But it does seem to help when I remain open to opening. Perhaps we strive hard so our letting go of striving can be just as strong.

Ten years later I sat on a porch all day in the rain, my three day old son sleeping and waking and sleeping again, cooing beside me in his bassinet. Another kind of opening sneaked in on me, one I would not begin to understand for many more years. But my heart slowly opened, something took root, and pushed the boundaries of that heart further and further. Some openings come crackling like thunder, sometimes like rain gently seeping into the earth to slowly open a spring flower. This opening was as gentle and slow as the all-day rain that fell outside my porch that summer afternoon. And I suspect it will take a lifetime to ripen.

It seems most of the time I am living the moment I was in just before this present one. So when opening bursts onto me, I try to fit it into what I already know. Which is really never possible. To be in a new place, a new realm, to become a new person, means I can’t operate as I did.

Opening also requires things of me. Once opened, I can only close up again with intense effort. The world enters into me, through the walls built to protect that shaky self. Those cracks not only let the world in, but let something else out. Part of me that is hidden and protected slips out into the world. “No point closing the barn door once the cows are out.“ Knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it takes effort to avoid or forget it once it is given.

That moment in the zendo, it felt as if I had been birthed again, brought into a new world, and for a while I tried to claw my way back into that old world as hard as I could. When I opened to clarity, I could not easily go back to my muddy world of attachment and misery. But I tried, through drinking and drugs, sex and work. But the world you are in keeps pressing insistently in on you. And finally finds the crack to enter you once again. In that case, it took place on the shore of Lake Superior, in a little motel on vacation. Reading an old Elle magazine in the lobby, there was a brief review of “Nine Headed Dragon River” by Peter Mathiessen, and I was dragged back in that clear spot again.

So I move through openings, through layers. It seems sometimes it is moving upward, like the Hopi creation stories, where the Hopi people moved up, always climbing into new worlds one after another. And other times the movement seems downward, like falling through the ice. The sense of falling into a new world, or a world less certain than the old one. Either that movement out of the muck and into the light, like the hand of John Goodman bursting through the earth in the movie “Raising Arizona.” Or downward, like the time I was replacing the rotten roof on my friend’s cabin. I took a step, the roof gave way, and suddenly I found myself halfway through the roof, my feet dangling in his kitchen, Rumplestiltskin in a tool belt.

What is comforting is that when I stop running away, it is quite easy to slip back into that openness. Perhaps, like that fall through the roof, only part of me breaks through sometimes. And the rest struggles to stay behind. Until I can just let go, give way to opening, to fate, to the moment, to gravity. Until I can fall into the place I belong. I imagine, even when being born into this world, part of me wanted to move forward, and part wanted to stay where it was dark, warm, and familiar.

With that opening that occurred on that rainy porch, I had the chance to see it ripen, as well as the chance to escape. That moment was quietly overwhelming. Perhaps such things are like an enlightenment experience that comes without the structure of practice, or a teacher. People have told stories of great enlightenments occurring. Rather than feeling blissful, they worried they had become psychotic. Only with guidance could they see it for what it was. The overwhelming feelings for my son were more perhaps than I was fully ready for, and I found myself backing slowly away. Not intentionally of course. But it is easier as a man, when there is a mother to care for your child, and all you heard your whole life was that your job is to provide material needs, not love. And so I fell more heavily into work, and practice, seeing him only for brief times during the day. The phrase was new then, of “quality time.“ Of course there is no substitute for time, and quality time was often just a way to rationalize and soothe our guilt.

So one morning, I was running around getting ready for work, Joe in my arms, my briefcase in my other arm. I went to get something I needed from the porch. Joe arched his back like 5 month old babies will do. I could not respond quickly enough, and he rolled backwards out of my arms. In a cluttered porch filled with tools and pots, he fell avoiding all of them, leaving only a shovel to graze his shoulder–a small scar to remind me of my mindlessness. It was enough to make me believe in divine intervention, as it seemed like a hand had laid him in the only safe place there. Guilt overwhelmed me. But guilt is a useless thing unless married to action. So the next day I took the day off, and we spent the whole day at his favorite park. And finally giving in to that opening would lead to a year off from work, and taking on the sacred and joyful task of raising a two year old. That is one other thing I have learned. When I give in to opening, I never quite know where it will lead me.

Hiking the bluff
on a winter morning.
Old oaks and birches creak
in the wind, in the cold air
like a great door opening.
I hear it and know
great and small doors
opening constantly–
into wonder, into love,
into awakening.