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Being ordinary

Dosho reminded us that yesterday was Katagiri-roshi’s Memorial Day, and in some discussion on our online meeting place, he mentioned about how he was “most ordinary.”  Reading that last night brought back memories of stories my mom told about seeing another side of him, and of a picture I have from long ago.

My mom used to have a bed and breakfast in Rochester.  I talked her once into donating a weekend at her Canterbury Inn to the Minnesota Zen Center silent auction.  I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, whether someone gave it to Roshi, or if someone else used it and then brought him there when a group of people were headed down to Hokyoji.  But it came about that he went there several times, sometimes with a group of priests, and sometimes with Tomoe.

I think he found it a respite from being “Katagiri-roshi, “and just being able to be “Hojo-san. “ My mother and her partner were both two expansive, wild women who liked hosting and taking care of others.  They had their apartment on the third floor, and the rooms were on the second floor.  They’d serve breakfast to their guests, along with an evening hour for tea and sherry.  If they became friends with you, they’d have you up for dinner at their place.  And they had Katagiri and Tomoe up several times.  They’d make sure to have a good bottle of whiskey for him, and cooked meals they knew he liked.  I imagine that being a teacher can be a lonely role sometimes, all the more so when you’re Japanese and surrounded by American students, who have a picture in their minds about how you should act.  At the inn with my mom and her partner he didn’t have to meet any expectations.

My mom is also a hugger, and so she’d always greet them with a hug for each of them.  She told the story of his coming one time with some priests, and when she greeted him at the door she could tell that she shouldn’t give him a hug that night.  Later in the evening, after everyone had gone to their rooms and was in there to stay, she heard a knock on the door, and there was Katagiri.  He held his arms open and gave both her and her partner a hug, saying, “I couldn’t do that in front of my students.  But I still wanted to give one to you both.”

I thought of those stories as I drifted off to sleep, and of wondered at how he must have chafed sometimes as he tried to teach us to be ordinary, and was just himself in spite of our wishes for him to be magic.  That he was able to do so was perhaps his real magic.  When I woke up this morning I went into my basement and dug through some boxes to find this picture.  The quality isn’t that good, but it’s a photo of him leaning back after having emptied the bowls of food you see there in front of him, wearing my mom’s wild red reading glasses. Image

A common root.

Zilverschoon_plant_Potentilla_anserinaThere’s been talk recently on the Vine of Obstacles, the online sangha I’m a member of, as we have been trying to put into words what we share, and what has been created by Dosho Port, our teacher, in collaboration with all of us.  Partly this is due to an article Dosho shared with us he’d written on Cybersanghas, and partly the sense we all have that it has gathered strength and intensity during this practice period. Dosho says it is not quite the same as monastic life, or even in an urban center, where the metaphor used is “polishing stones.”  Like in a rock tumbler, the process of practicing together rubs off our rough edges.  Until we come out smooth and beautiful.

The fact that we share our struggles and challenges without an expectation of response reminds me a little more of a 12 step meeting, where the rule of thumb is “no crosstalk.”  Some people have trouble with this approach.  They are either the kind who love giving direction or advice, or the ones desperate to receive it.  I finally realized that in my life, the people who have helped me the most are the ones who never tell me what to do, but instead remind me it is up to me to decide, up to me to act, and up to me to experience the consequences of my actions.  As some Zen teacher has said, you can’t even exchange a single fart with someone else.

And so I was reminded in trying to put words to what the vine and this practice period is like for me, of my experiences in those 12 step meetings.  Some people new to the program who have trouble with the idea of a higher power are told, “That doesn’t have to be god.  It can be the universe, a doorknob, or the group that you come to at your meetings.”  I did have troubles at first with that idea, but was able fairly quickly to fit it into a Buddhist framework.  So because I never had to struggle with it, I also never had to take the group as my higher power.  It was only after years of coming to sit in those meetings with others, where people met to discuss life or death issues for them (for that’s what addiction is; maybe that’s one reason we see so clearly the benefits) that one day while sitting there I awoke to the realization that the group was a source of strength and truth higher than myself or anything else I had in my life at that time.  I could be stronger, more honest, more open, because I really could take strength and honesty from what the other people shared there.  I didn’t need to be told what to do, because they helped me to clarify who I was and what I wanted in my life, and the needed actions were clear once the rest was clear.  And though I might not feel strong or smart, I could take the strength and intelligence from the group.

And that is what I’m finding with the vine as well.  When I don’t want to go sit at night when I’m tired, I remember that all the others are doing that, and it becomes easier to take my cushion.  When I feel I can’t be honest or open in an interaction at work, I think of what someone else on the Vine shared about their efforts to do so, and I find the courage also.

Years ago we had a plant in our front yard.  It was a Dutchman’s pipe that took over a whole garden.  It was like other plants I have dealt with in gardens, a stoloniferous one.  That means you might appear to have a garden or yard full of different plants poking out from the soil, but it was really one gigantic root system.  The plants are joined by a series of horizontal roots called stolons.  So in reality it is just one massive plant.  That allowed it to survive when a few of the shoots were not doing so well.  It also made it a bear to try to remove when it had overgrown and was threatening other plants!  But I’ve taken it as an image for what this world is like: we’re all shoots from that same great, deep root.  We pop out, look around, and think we’re separate and unusual.  But in the same way I doubt any flower comes forth and thinks that of itself that way, it’s important to remember the strength we come from below the soil.

I think the way the Vine is set up allows us to find that common root we all share, and to take strength and purpose from what we have in common, not from how different I may think I am.

Hmmmm…”a garden of stoleniferous plants. “ Just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “polishing stones.”  But it does seem to go well with the name “Vine of Obstacles.”  We are a vine ourselves too.

Show your work

We began the 6th week of the practice period yesterday.  Today is the 37th day of the 100 day training period.  As I thought of those numbers I was all set to break that down into the smaller fractions, but damn!  It’s a prime number.  The percentage is easy enough….37%.

It used to drive my dad crazy when I’d mow our one-acre yard.  I’d break it into numerous little sections, doing one, then the next: the area at the bottom of the hill.  The parallelogram between the pine trees and the road.  The nice flat square on top of the front yard, a perfect croquet pitch.  He was a trigonometry and calculus teacher, he actually carried pencils and a slide rule in a pocket protector in his white shirt.  Like most of us in the 60’s who didn’t want to be like our fathers in any way, at the age of 14 I quit taking any more math once I’d completed geometry and didn’t need to do any more required classes.

But as I find in so many ways, no matter how fast I run from it, one day we all become our parents.  And though I left off with math in 8th grade, I still inherited his head for figures.  I can do equations in my head.  I can figure fractions and percentages without much effort.  (As I’m writing this I thought of an article I just read that gave the advice that the first 10% of any written piece is all “throat-clearing,” and should be deleted so that we get to the meat of the story.  And I’m already wondering if I’ve reached the 10% point and can delete this yet.)

For years when I’d sit zazen by myself and didn’t have a good timer, I’d have to keep checking the clock to know how much longer I had to sit.  And in the same way a watched pot never boils, when I kept checking the time it never seemed to arrive at the end.  In fact it was something like Zeno’s paradox, posited by a Greek philosopher, where an individual wants to go from point a to point b.  The person must first travel half the distance, then half of that distance, then half of that, with the outcome being one never arrives at the end.  And in the same way when I keep checking the time, each time I’d look, half of the time remaining from when I’d checked before was always gone.  So it seemed too I’d never get to the end.

I’ve also always had an ability to know what time it is, within 5 minutes or so.  Which doesn’t help me in long sitting periods.  Even when losing track of time, I find it’s easy to start figuring based on “my legs are just starting to get numb which usually happens about 20 minutes in…” Times when I was the doan for sitting periods at the zendo, I’d keep glancing over at the clock incessantly.  Fearing always that I’d go over the time period.  Because when someone else was keeping time, I’d be certain some periods they had gone over and in my frustration, become incensed at him or her for making us all sit longer.  Ok, just for making me and my aching knees sit longer.   So if i was the timekeeper I’d not want to incur the silent wrath in all the minds of the people who I was forcing to sit longer than scheduled, and keep looking every few minutes.

I think I broke the task of mowing up because I didn’t like it all that much, and it let me keep feeling I was making progress.  And accomplishing small tasks each time I’d finish up the little area.  Oddly enough, we’re told that is the way to tackle big tasks, to break them down into smaller parts so they’re not so overwhelming.

But for me it’s not even about doing what I don’t like.  I do the same thing when I’m doing something I enjoy, thinking, “oh this movie is wonderful, and it’s already half over!”  Which seems to me to be part of what is the dukkha in even pleasurable things that Buddha spoke of.

And though I’m to the point of settling in to the practice period now, and really enjoying it, I still do that figuring in my head….”37%, already more than 1/3 of the way done, only 73 days left…”  Like the figure in zeno’s paradox, I never arrive at the goal.  The goal for me is this present moment, and I’m always only halfway there when I’m counting.

I’ve been reading “The Flowing Bridge” by Elaine MacInnes, a book on mu and the miscellaneous koans. And I’m struck as I think about my discursive mind’s obsession with measuring and counting, that there are quite a few koans that deal with that very thing.  “Count the stars in the sky.”  Another speaks of “one who can count the grains of sand in the sea.”  Yet another of “the one who can survey land.”  Another version of the last one has it, “Why is it one who fences off land can’t leave that enclosure?”  I laugh as I think of how I fenced off land in my own mind as I mowed.

At the same time I’m on the section in Genjokoan on wood, fire, and ash.  And I don’t think that what Dogen is aiming at is not for me to try to figure when the wood is halfway on the way to being ash.   Letting things be fully what they are at the moment they are existent in is what we aim for.  When I can put the clock aside during my zazen (thank god for the timer apps now, so I can put that aside and forget about it.) I am able to more fully enter into what is in front of me and around me.  When I am always counting or figuring, I seem to be keeping the ten thousand things (there’s that counting again) at arm’s length (and measuring again!)  When I fence off things, I am fencing myself off.  I keep on dividing what can’t be divided.  Counting what can’t be counted.

Perhaps the teaching of my father can serve me well here.  When he mowed, he simply started at the edge, and worked either back and forth, or in concentric circles growing smaller and smaller until the last blade of grass was cut.  No dividing what is indivisible.  No measuring, no figuring, no looking to the end–just him, the mower, and the lawn, until there was nothing left.  Just the fullness of the moment, and the smell of the sweet grass.