Tag Archives: love

Trump, Zen, and flan

I had the task, yesterday morning of all days, to take Iris, an older woman I work with in my job, up to St. Paul to apply to get a new passport. She moved to the U.S. over 20 years ago from Mexico and became a citizen, but had lost all her papers. So we had an appointment to see an immigration lawyer first thing today. I knew her daughter Estella was riding along, too. Estella is 18, was born in the U.S., and is both fiercely American and proudly Mexican.

I pulled into their driveway to pick them up, and immediately saw as they got into the county van I’d signed out that Estella was crying. “Are you ok, Estella?” I asked.

Her words tumbled out. “I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. He won. A man like that won. He said he’d have sex with his daughter if he could. He said he’d move any of us Mexicans even if we were born in the U.S. back to Mexico. He’s a liar and a rapist and I just can’t believe anyone would vote for him. I feel like no one wants me here in this country.”

We talked all the way up during the 45 minute drive to the attorney’s office. I told her I felt a similar grief over what had happened, and also offered her a little of my experience from past elections, from Nixon to Bush. I said that in a way it’s an opportunity when this hatred shows itself, because it can push us even harder to fight it where we meet it. She stopped crying, but continued talking about her despair, and particularly her fear that she’d be deported. I pointed out we had the perfect opportunity to ask the question about that of the immigration attorney we were about to meet with.

We arrived at the office, and went in to meet with the attorney. She looked exhausted and momentarily defeated, and said she’d been up most of the night watching the returns. She addressed what needed to happen for Iris to get her passport replaced, which was a simple matter, if not cheap–$345.00 to be exact. At the end of the discussion, I reminded Estella there was one other question she wanted to ask, and she talked about her fears and anger. The attorney gently said, “No, your mom’s a citizen, and you’re a citizen, and nothing that anyone in the White House does can change that.” She was relieved at that, but remained angry and frustrated in feeling she was not wanted here.

We got back into the car, and Iris said, “Do you want to have some good food for lunch before we go back?”

“Always!” I answered, and she directed me to Burrito Mercado on Cesar Chavez Blvd., a very old Mexican neighborhood in St. Paul. We walked into the market, a riot of bright colors, art on the walls, and a pastry case 20 feet long with the most beautiful breads and rolls. And against the far wall, a grill and cafeteria line with tortillas, tamales, and by my count 16 different varieties of spiced meats to put on them.

We sat in our booth eating sopes, tortillas, and nachos, accompanied with big glasses of horchata. And allowed our conversation to turn more positive, to stories of Mexico, of Los Angeles, of being Mexican in a little rural town. And then to stories of foods from our distant memories, with the lovely realization that the taste of a salsa on the tongue can carry all your ancestors and your home in it.

It was, as the name implies, a thriving market. As we drew closer to the noon hour, it filled up—with Hispanic locals, with white men and women coming from office or jobsites, with soldiers, with Somali women in hijabs with their children. I looked around at all the different people drawn by food, by this act of life that we all shared. And I marveled, at first thinking, “This is what people are afraid of?” And my answer came that yes, somehow, it isn’t the danger of the supposed “rapists and criminals out to harm us” that frightened people, for some it was this very activity, all of us losing our selves together in laughter.

As we finished, Iris asked, “Do you like flan?” She went to get us each one, and insisted on paying for it. And though I know she is on a limited income, and except in rare cases I cannot take gifts from a client, but in this moment it was important to her, and seemed right. The cool flan and slightly burnt flavor of the caramel eased the sadness of the morning, as well as the carne asada.

Driving back to the office after dropping Iris and Estella off, I felt the waves of despair and how this did feel different than some of those other elections I’d mentioned. Those men (for of course they were men only) might have been people I disagreed with, but I did not feel they were…I cast about for a word here and can only come up with…evil. They were not dishonest, hateful, self-centered men who seemed to put us all at risk in the same way. Rather than reminding me of those elections, the feeling this morning took me back to being a small child during the Bay of Pigs, when my mother and father’s fear was palpable, and my mom would encourage us to pray a little harder to ask that God spare the world.

And in that was part of the answer I hadn’t known I was even looking for, the answer that I had to rededicate myself to practice. And I thought of the book by Joan Sutherland, Acequias and Gates, where she talks about the arising of Zen teachings and practice:

“In the eighth century, a new kind of Chan Buddhism

developed in response to a cataclysmic time in Chinese

history: in the space of ten years, two-thirds of the

population died of rebellion, invasion, famine, and disease.

A sort of order was eventually restored, but Tang dynasty

China was no longer a flourishing empire, and life had a new tenuousness…

And Joan states the question they confronted as being, “How do we fall willingly into

the frightened, blasted, beautiful, tender world, just

as it is?”

I’m not certain of that answer. And this may not be as cataclysmic a time as that of 8th century China–I certainly hope not. But I believe part of the answer is practice. I’m convinced it also includes flan.

Dharma Lion

Chinese_lion_amkMany Dharma Lions and Lionesses leaving this world recently, it seems.  I was sorry to hear of the death of Stephen Levine on January 17th.  Years ago, when I’d drifted away from practice for a time, I was able to go to a weekend teaching on death and dying presented by Stephen and his wife Ondrea.  To my surprise it was pure Dharma, so that I almost felt guilty that it was being paid for by my employer.  But it was powerful, and returned me to the path.

And some years later when I first struggled with depression, I took much from their teaching about facing pain, softening into grief, and keeping love primary.  It helped me to formulate a way to work with that pain.

I listened to this final teaching from Stephen and Ondrea’s website the other day after reading of his death, and found again the power of their wisdom, compassion, and their great gift to all of us.   Deep bows and gratitude to them both….

 

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.