A Short Meditation on Spring Arriving

There are all kinds of ways to avoid the natural environment. To act like you aren't part of the earth. But even so, you can't escape it: we are all, still, just mud and clouds.

This time of year, when winter is disappearing and spring is stepping forth, often feels unstable. ,One hour, you're slipping on half melted dirty ice and getting honked at by some woman in a grungy car, and the next you're marveling at the beauty of the first opened flower, the miracle of breathing, just being alive together.

Some of the plants in my apartment window have suddenly started sprouting little clones of themselves. Tiny sage bushes, strands of mint, leaves of lemon balm. A few others have sections which have suddenly dried up, as if the life that was there was borrowed to make the new life in a neighboring pot.

Seasonal transitions aren't given their due in modern culture. We wake up with a cold, and shrug it off or complain about it. We feel a new calling or interest, and fail to connect it to the ways the Earth is shifting.

The fleeting, ever shifting nature of life is more apparent right now. And whether you choose to honor it or not, the sometimes dramatic nature of change is never too far away. Step on the wrong sheet of ice and you're gonna fall through. Overturn a loose stone and find the ground below has been colonized by weeds.

We are the seasons and the seasons are us. As spring unfolds all around you, pause and remember. Taste the sun that stands higher in the sky now, bringing forth new life.

Hope Isn't Really a Buddhist Teaching

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

By Thich Nhat Hanh

I disagree with this statement. It panders too much to the stickiness that lies behind hope. The longing for a future that may not come. The desire for something comfortable and stable to rely on. The fear that things will "get worse." I have written on this blog before, and continue to believe, that hope is mostly a hindrance. Thus my disagreement.

Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, using the word "hope" can be a skillful means. Telling someone "I hope you feel better soon" can be skillfully supporting them, as can offering optimistic views of the future. That's where comments like Thich Nhat Hanh's above might be pointing us in a useful direction, but you have to reflect on where that might be.

We can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing of hope. I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains have to work with such language all the time, and must consider the people before them and what is most skillful in the given situation. But I think there are ways to work with really difficult situations like families facing terminal illnesses that are both realistic in the now, but also optimistic about life as a whole.

Optimism is different from hope in my opinion. Although it tends to be linked with hope, I think optimism is grounded in confidence and a trust in the boundlessness of the world.

My mother is a pretty optimistic person. And although she gets caught up in misleading hope narratives like the rest of us, what I tend to see from her is a great trust that things will unfold in the way they need to unfold. The other day, her car broke down on a freeway ramp. She was initially irritated about it, and worried about having to get a new car. However, within a few hours, she had shifted all of this. With a friend of hers, she'd considered some of the possible outcomes, and then let it go to the mechanics to deal with. And although she had a hunch that it wouldn't be too bad (which it wasn't), what I mostly saw was that she trusted that what needed to happen would happen.

Optimism also, in my view, is seeing everything as an opportunity to learn, to become more fully yourself. That whatever comes, there's a way to integrate it into the whole of your life. I don't see hope doing that. Hope is usually about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes.

Now, even the word optimism is tied to a binary: pessimism. It feels a little clunky to me as I write this, but I'll opt to use it anyway.

As a final thought, I'd like to ask people who feel hope is essential a few questions. When you say hope, what exactly do you mean? How does it actually function in your body and mind when you hope for something? And what happens in your body and mind when you don't get what you hope for?

Squirrel Watching as Meditation

This blog is almost two years old now. After the morning sittings during our lay practice intensive at the Zen center, I walked through a park in downtown filled with fat and people friendly squirrels. Those experiences reminded me of this post, one of my first on DH. Enjoy!



They are ubiquitous here in the city. On days when the sun splits through every tree branch, and the air has warmed sufficiently for the comfort of feet, it seems like every turn of the eye brings sight of one.

Squirrels: bane of gardeners, cranky homeowners, speeding drivers, and hungry winter birds.

You might be asking by now, what do squirrels have to do with meditation?

In the Genjo Koan, Dogen wrote, now famously, "To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things."

Have you ever stopped and watched a squirrel? I don't mean for a few seconds, nor do I mean having an "awe, cute" moment. I mean stop, fully, and be with the squirrel, and yourself.

Try sticking with it for a minute, two minutes. If you don't move much and your lucky, maybe you can even go five minutes with the same squirrel. All sorts of things arise in the mind, especially if you're in the city. Labels. It's fat, skinny, sick looking, grey, white, brown, black, bushy. Judgements. It's ugly, cute, anxious, crazy, goofy, stupid, smart, thieving. Opinions. I like this squirrel. I don't like this squirrel. I hate this squirrel. I have better things to do than watch this squirrel. I love watching squirrels. Paranoid thoughts. What if it leaps on me? What does the neighbor think of me standing still here in the middle of the sidewalk?

And if this isn't enough, the odds are also fairly good that, during this period of watching, you have failed to "watch" some portion of the time. A car rolls by behind you. You turn away for a few seconds. The neighbor steps out of his door for a smoke. You turn away again. From somewhere unknown, a loud sound, and you turn away again. You become bored, and you turn away once more.

It's hard to stay fully with the same squirrel, the same old stories in your head, the life that you have at this moment. And to the extent that we can't stick with it, we miss an opportunity to dig in and really wake up to who we are. I miss a lot, you probably do too.

We are fortunate then, to have so many squirrels in the world to remind us to come back to ourselves. To come back to our lives right now, as they are. I bow to the squirrels for their teaching.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Another cold day here in Minnesota. But very bright and sunny! I'll take it. I have been messing around with a new networking gadget, Networked blogs, which you will see on the side panel. If you are a reader with a Facebook page, but not a blog, you can click to follow Danger Harvests on your Facebook page. Or if you are already a follower, but just want to put you face up again - lol - you can do that too!

Last night, I watched a recent film based on the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was a French journalist and author. In his early forties, he had a massive stroke that left him totally paralyzed, without speech, and with only one working eye. Sounds entirely bleak, doesn't it? The movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, chronicles the last year of Bauby's life, during which time he learns to communicate by blinking to called out letters, and then uses this skill to dictate a memoir to one of his therapists. The actual memoir, which goes by the same name as the movie, was released just two day before Bauby's death. It sold 150,000 copies in the first week, and went on to become a best seller across Europe.

One of the most powerful things about the movie is the sense of care given to ordinary details of life. Much of the film is shot through the eyes of Bauby. You're in his mind, seeing what he sees, and given his circumstances, what he sees is fairly limited. However, there's an almost reverent quality to the way this film pays attention. Long pauses on the faces of people who come to see Bauby, and work with him. Repeated appearances of the beach outside the hospital, shot from only slightly different angles each time. Even a fly that lands on Bauby's nose in the middle of the film is given it's due.

In addition, the amazing capacity of the human imagination is on display in the film, as Bauby constructs alternate realities filled with romantic dinners and unwritten manuscripts finally written, as well as reconstructs his past, partly in an attempt to make amends to those he had harmed.

During an interview clip with artist and director Julian Schnabel, he says he actually didn't want to do this movie. It was more like it came to him, and he had to do it.

“I used to go up to read to Fred Hughes, Andy Warhol’s business partner, who had multiple sclerosis. And as Fred got worse, he ended up locked inside his body. I had been thinking that I might make a movie about Fred when his nurse, Darren McCormick, gave me Bauby’s memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Then, in 2003, when my father was dying, the script arrived from Kennedy. So it didn’t feel quite like taking on a commissioned job."

Towards the end of the interview, Schnabel says that the movie is kind of Buddhist, and I think he's right. One of the strong elements present was a sense that the condition of one's body - one's form - does not make or break being human. In some ways, Bauby was much more alive and awake during the last year of his life than at any time before then. And Schnabel's film doesn't show this by separating him from his body - it's through embodying exactly where he was at that Bauby exudes aliveness. Even his dreams and imaginations always come back to the present, sometimes almost seamlessly.

A friend of mine used to volunteer in a program founded by Matthew Sanford, a paralyzed yoga teacher. This quote from Matthew rings a similar chord to the movie:

"It took a devastating car accident, paralysis from the chest down, and dependence on a wheelchair before I truly realized the importance of waking both my mind and my body.”

Odds are that many of us will never experience this kind of physical devastation, but nearly everyone seems to face, at some point or another, a traumatic event or series of events that provide great opportunities to see life clearly and live it more fully.

After the film was over, I wrote this poem. There are more on my creative writing blog if you are interested. May we all be awake and fully alive.


How Many Tears

How many tears must I shed
before you see this life
for exactly what it is?

Endless white mountains
blocking every step;
the heart cannot beat
fast enough
to make a fire
sufficient.

Time has never been
an enemy,
but too often you have chosen
to make it so.

The ice on the river
barely goes below the surface;
even the pressure
of a single foot could break it,
if only you’d step forward.

There’s nothing lost
in crying, so long as
it’s let to stain you,
through the skin
straight to the marrow
without stopping
in front of mirrors.

How many tears must I shed
before you see this life
for exactly what it is?

A lone crow calling
from a barren tree;
the midnight moon
melting the snow
before these very eyes.