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.

So instead of holding on, I let go. Letting go seems to imply that we stay in one place, and the beloved person, or object we were holding on to moves away from us. Like planets and the very universe itself, we are always moving away from each other, aren’t we? And when we let go, we let go of what we thought anchored us, not what we kept anchored to ourselves.

I saw the movie Spiderman with my son (who being 14 at the time, let me come with him and his friend, but made me sit in another row. Moving away, moving away.) In the movie Spiderman begins to lose his powers. He is climbing a wall and loses his grip. We see him falling, panic on his face, bouncing off walls and landing on top of a car.

That is what letting go is really like—it isn’t what I grasp which falls away, since I could never hold it to begin with. It is my self who is suddenly falling through the vastness of space, bouncing into a few things here and there, headed most likely for a hard landing. I don’t hold on to things so that I can keep them, but to feel I am on solid ground; to feel that as everything rushes by me, I stay unmoving. I am in a rushing river, and clutching the roots of a tree on the shore, rather than letting go into the flow of life.

But unlike dreams where we are falling, the goal is not to learn to fly. No, it may simply be to learn to accept falling, to see that there is no firm hold anywhere. Or perhaps with practice we learn, as they put it in “Toy Story,” another movie I watched repeatedly with my son: That’s not flying—it’s falling with style.

Have you ever watched a fisherman release a fish they have caught back into the water? Many summers ago I used to watch my nephew Shawn do it. He was never rough or careless with his catch. First, he would carefully remove the lure from its mouth. By then, the fish was usually calmer in his hand. He’d hold it very lightly between his palms, and return it into the water. Moving the fish back and forth, he’d allow water to flow through its gills, and then turn it upright into a swimming position and be sure that its fins were moving. Opening his hands and pulling them back, he’d let it go, watching it dart off quickly into the shimmering waters and shadows again.

During the whole process Shawn always was very attentive and gentle. He showed respect for the life of the fish, the struggle it had been to bring it in (especially the big ones) and then finally a wistfulness at letting them go.

I think of that act when I return to the lesson of letting go. For me the hardest letting go is with people. Again and again I am given this opportunity– with friends, parents, lovers, children. As I struggle with it, I wonder what it means to let go, and what it is I let go. It surely isn’t anything outside of me–I don’t and can’t hold or possess another person in the first place. It seems it is some part of myself I let go of, that I release back into those cool waters with tenderness, as I make sure it can return on its own to its deep home.

I also let go the struggle and the catch, the dance I did with the other. I let all that go, while honoring it. Relationships are beings in themselves, and to hang on after one has changed or ended is as dangerous to me as it is for that fish to remain out of the water. So I return that person to the stream of life. I hold loosely, feeling the cool currents, the clean way it gives life, and with that wistful, bittersweet feeling I let what I shared with them return to its source. I let that silvery gift go, as I would a fighting salmon, and watch it slip back into the current of time.

releasing the fish back into cool waters
the hand opens
and movement and life return in a jolt
the fish disappears into the shadows
a flash of diamonds as it goes
like the glint when it first took the hook.