Fear and Faith

It looks like we’re really going to move. The new place is just down the street here in Worcester, but the idea of sorting and packing everything I own fills me with a low key dread that I don’t like at all.

As a good Zen student, I like the idea of simplicity and lack of clutter. In practice, however, I also like all the sweet little things people have given me or I have collected from my travels over the years: the three tiny clay animals a friend gave me for my fiftieth birthday, the pretend bow and arrow I made in a workshop two years ago, the origami sculpture my daughter made when she was fifteen. And then there are the clothes: the beautiful t-shirt I painted in 1990 but have never worn, the innumerable pairs of underwear that I stuff in my dresser that occasionally come in handy when I don’t have time to do my laundry for several weeks.

What to hold onto? What to let go? As I contemplate these questions I realize that the real issue is the interplay between fear and faith. From the place of fear, I want to hold onto as much as I can – to the memories, to the convenience, to the many options. I see myself in the things around me and begin to ‘take refuge’ in them – to look to them for solace and comfort. To a certain degree, it works.

But from the place of faith, I see that what really sustains me and makes my life possible are not the practical and lovely things of my life, but rather some aliveness and generosity that has no fixed form. So far, every day of my 57 years, I have been given enough to eat. I have found a place to sleep. I have had something to cover my nakedness. And beyond this, most often, I have found myself surrounded with a beauty and luxury beyond what I ever dreamed for myself.

The realization of this kind of faith, however, does not yet function freely in my life. Sometimes I see and feel it so clearly, and other times there is a gap, a yawning chasm between this realization and my experience of my life. I expect, to some degree, this will be so all my life. But I also know that my intentions, my thoughts, and my actions have the power to move me toward what is most true and alive or to move me deeper into my fear and clinging.

So my intention today is to practice faith and generosity as I go through my closet letting go of what I no longer need in preparation for the move.

Not Working

There is work I am not doing – bills I should be carefully paying, a desk of clutter to straighten, a stack of books and papers that should be dismantled. But I have escaped to the back deck this late afternoon with the brightly colored pansies smiling at me – purple and white faces that remind me of my grandmother. She would not be happy with this time wasting.

Like her, I fall naturally into busyness. Not that I intend to – I just find myself carried away with all the good and worthwhile and important things of my life. Periodically (like now) - I awaken to realize I am running at full speed with no memory of the acceleration. Traveling pell-mell once again along the familiar roads of responsibility, work and pressure.

Now children’s voices come through the trees behind me. Enthusiastic exclamations, the content of which is lost on the breeze. I imagine they are innocent in the activity of their play – going about their business of growing up without the least awareness of any other possibility.

There is work I am gladly not doing. The breeze pushes bushy treetops that really do look like the green lollipop trees I used to draw. Apple trees were easily made with little red dots that had to be drawn in first before the green.

Sitting still I find my way back to the one who knows nothing of work.

Moving Forward

Oh my goodness. It’s happening. I mean it’s going forward. It’s still just an idea – that Melissa and I buy this larger house and set it up as a Zen Center – hosting daily sittings and leading retreats. But last night we received word that the seller agreed to our counter to their counter to our counter to their counter to our offer to buy this larger house and property on Pleasant Street.

It’s just half a mile down the street from where we live now, but we seem to be stepping in slow motion into a whole new universe. Crossing this threshold that will mean letting go of the dailyness of our current lovely house that has supported and protected us so kindly for these past eighteen years. We will be stepping into a strange house and a new life that we have dreamed of but can only begin to imagine.

I suppose we’re always at this threshold – stepping out of bed each morning into a new world of unknown challenges and unrealized opportunities. On most mornings, however, each morning this new world looks reassuringly like the one we knew when we went to bed.

So if:

• the zoning proves out and
  
• the building inspection shows no major issues and 
  
• all goes according to plan, (does this ever happen?)
  

our familiar feet 

will be swinging 

out of our familiar 

beds to step 

on new floors 

and make new 

pathways in 

a new universe.

Practicing Love

Someone once told me you need to practice loving by starting with a rock. I took him seriously and for a while carried a rock with me at all times. It was a big enough rock that it wouldn’t fit in my pocket, so it was a great conversation starter – like a pet, only much weirder. From my perspective, the rock and I had a pretty good relationship. I was devoted and respectful. The rock accepted me exactly as I was and was totally dependable. I can’t remember how it ended, I imagine the passion just slowly faded and at the time I couldn’t afford a relationship coach so we just parted ways.

[time lapse of several years]

The day my wife and I moved in together – into a small apartment near the Wesleyan University campus where our ‘bedroom’ was only big enough for the thin futon that we unrolled on the floor of it and where the first night I realized our back yard was adjacent to the air conditioning system for a University building and it made noise that whole hot summer night and I was sure we had made a huge mistake – on that day, in the afternoon, I brought home a kitten. Held in one hand behind my back, a gray ball of fur, this irresistible cuteness – a present for this irresistible woman who had turned my life upside down. We called the kitten Mullein, after the gray-green fuzzy herb, and we thought we were practicing being parents on her. She was always slightly crazy and would dash wildly at random intervals from one end of the apartment, or house, to the other. We wondered if this was a reflection on our parenting style and were broken hearted when Mullein died in Melissa’s arms some ten years later. Our daughter Rachel, who was three or four at the time and was already turning out much better than the cat, was broken hearted too.

I still like the idea of practicing loving by beginning with what is around us – the rocks and trees, the desks and sinks, the dogs and cats. Other human beings, especially ones we really care about, are so complicated and challenging that we would do well to use all the practice we can get.

Familiar Suspicion

It’s a little cool to be out on the back porch so early in the morning, but I can’t resist the green suffusion of this spring morning. A blanket over my legs, I sit with my comforting cup of tea in the bouncy deck chair that used to belong to my grandmother. Birds squabble near the bird feeder while the nearby prehistoric ferns still long for the dinosaurs’ return. And I wonder at the generosity of life.

The generosity of sight and smell – of imagination and locomotion. My fingers moving across the keyboard demonstrate a percussive intelligence that far outweighs these simple thoughts that leave their traces in these words on the screen. I recognize the flexible pinkish tubes as ‘my’ fingers, yet I have no idea how each one knows the position and timing of its duty. Nor do I have any idea where and how the thoughts arise in me and how I choose one over another. I would say that I am writing, yet the ‘I’ who is writing and how he does it, is fully hidden from me.

I come back to my familiar suspicion that this one who I imagine myself to be is only the merest of coverings - a thin veneer self masquerading as prime mover. I must again confess the embarrassing truth that I appear to myself as God. From this deck chair, unless I pay very close attention, I am quite sure it is all up to me. My job is to make sure everything goes right – to think and feel the right things, to make good choices that lead to good results, and to ensure the smooth function of the universe.

But this morning I catch a glimpse of the imposter and am relieved to step out of this weighty and impossible job.

With no plan the squirrels delight in the free seed scattered beneath the bird feeder. And in this moment, I appreciate the plan of each finger and the arising of each thought come for free from the mysterious source that gives life to all.

What Zen Retreats are Like

I’m just back from a three-day Zen meditation retreat that I co-led with my teacher, George Bowman. Now nearly thirty years of these Zen retreats in one form or another and I still find the experience to be enormously surprising, challenging and rewarding.

Going on a Zen retreat is like:

• taking your brain out of your head and rinsing it out in a clear mountain stream

• trekking in the Himalayas – visitas of unimaginable grandeur and sometimes the going so rough and the air so thin you have to pause and catch your breath after every step

• being abducted by aliens then escaping and then somehow finding your way home to find everything the same except yourself

• being Harry Potter in the last book where you know there is something important you need to do and the whole world hangs in the balance and you only have the vaguest idea of what it is you are supposed to do and can't imagine how you will do it

• a vacation in Costa Rica – minus the lounging around and the need for sun screen

But whatever it was like, I'm here reporting that the time/space shuttle my self has re-entered life here at 23 Berwick Street and I’m happy to be back.

Spring Fireworks

Spring is in full splendor here in New England – a time of unexpected becoming. Each year, though of course I know it’s coming, it always takes me by surprise. Especially the dark silent trees that stood uncomplainingly through the winter, their unmoving trunks thrusting obstinately upward toward the quivering prayers of branches so small they are in constant conversation with the wind. And now, and now, each tree sings a new song of soft green leaves and flowers. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally learned that every tree is a flowering tree – even the maples that grow like weeds around here throw forth their fireworks of blossom and renewal.