The Buddha Taught Rahula: "This is Not Mine, This is Not I, This is Not Myself."

Life has a way of swooping in with heat, and drying out the noise that flies from your mouth. Since I left Minnesota, and my home sangha, my Zen practice has become something else. Still Buddha, still Zen, but not really visible as such. I've had a lot of internal knots unwind over the past year and a half. Limiting stories and emotional tangles that have defined me for decades. That unwinding has been excruciating at times. To say that I felt lost and groundless would be an understatement. A nice, tidy phrase to bind an endless array of emotions and actions that came and went, each feeling like a final statement on who I was in the world.

The Buddha once taught Rahula: "This is not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.”

And so it goes. This "I" is still a Zen practitioner. Still a social activist. Still a writer. However, it doesn't quite feel the same as the guy who used to write for this blog so devotedly.

In September, I began a clinical herbalist training program here in Berkeley. Although I have long been calling myself an herbalist, at some point, there came the recognition of needing to hone and deepen. My roots were entirely too shallowly planted, in soils deficient of nutrients, and also companion healers. In other words, I needed sangha, and I found one.

I also practice at East Bay Meditation Center when I can. Another sangha.

And yet, more often than not over the past year and a half, I've found myself alone with myself. Living with a partner, being part of various sanghas of sorts, in an urban area of several million people: the greatest sangha I felt was within myself. The sense of facing arising stories that I thought were "me," and then feeling more myself once I recognized them as simply stories. Not mine, not I, not myself.

There are more stories to face. Perhaps there are always more stories to face.

Years ago, I considered the online Buddhist blogosphere as a kind of sangha. It felt like one for awhile. Now I notice that it has kind of dissolved. Both the actual Buddhist blogosphere (at least the one I knew), and also the feeling I had.

A few weeks ago, I helped plant some cover crops in a local garden I volunteer in. Soon, they'll sprout and spring forth, filling the soil with nutrients.

Our sanghas are the soils, and our individual lives are the cover crops. Mutually beneficial, and entirely intertwined.

The Buddha Taught Rahula: "This is Not Mine, This is Not I, This is Not Myself."

Squrriel Friends

About a week ago, I noticed an overturned squirrel in the road, mouth and eyes wide open, but otherwise untouched. Maybe a heart attack victim; I don't know.

Yesterday, as I came upon the body while on my bicycle, I found another squirrel pausing, checking out the scene. The living squirrel seemed curious, interested in what was there, without really any extra jumpiness or fear. Just observing fully. For a moment, life and death came together, not separate at all. The living squirrel lifting its leg over the dead squirrel's body as I approached. And then it happened: the living squirrel ran, spooked by the oncoming, spinning bicycle wheel - and the giant figure sitting on top of it.

Seems to me this is how most of us handle life and death. We are curious and interested at times, but too often, something giant and/or spinning scares us away from our true lives.

How to see through the mirage? Time to go sit with that.

Fearless and Fragile in Life and Death

In an old issue of Shambhala Sun I stumbled upon, Zen teacher Joan Halifax Roshi is described by one of her students using the two title words for this post: fearless and fragile. Roshi Joan, as she is called, has spent much of her adult life caring for the sick and dying, and teaching others how to do so. What I find so inspiring about her life story is this simple, but profound commitment she made after her grandmother's death years ago. Her grandmother, she said, "normalized death" for her by being a caregiver for dying friends when Halifax was a child. However, the grandmother's own death was a long and lonely process, and Halifax later came to realize that much of her grandmother's "misery had been rooted in her family's fear of death, including (Halifax's) own." And so, at her grandmother's death, Halifax "made the commitment to practice being there for others as they died."

The fragility of life is all around us, available at every moment. We don't need the death of a loved one to be reminded of it, although often this is the only time when we allow ourselves to be reminded. Willfully ignoring the fragility of life is a particularly well developed, commonplace human trait. I've long felt that our society is particularly poor when it comes to the whole issue of death and dying. Many of us lack the support, and courage, to open to what is a natural process and a part of all of us. And, as a result, our relationships with the living, and the dying, suffer greatly.

I still remember the day I came home from a day trip to Red Wing with my ex-girlfriend to find that our beloved family cat, Buzz, had collapsed and was put down by my mother and sister while we were gone. It was a shock to realize that the vague glance I gave him that morning, thinking he looked a little tired, was my goodbye.

How many of us have multiple stories like this about friends, family, pets, co-workers? And by this I mean that the story includes some level of loss beyond the loss of the person or animal - a sense that you weren't really there, or had assumed a continuity about the others' life that turned out to be just a story. It seems to me that fearlessness involves being fully alive and deeply engaged in your relationships as much as possible. And not only human relationships, but with animals, plants, your every surrounding. To be able to be open to what is there without rejecting or manipulating - including your fears and failures.

On Dogen's "Death Poem"

Fifty-four years lighting up the sky.
A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds.
Hah!
Entire body looks for nothing.
Living, I plunge into Yellow Springs.

Zen Master Dogen, (1200-1253)

Four of us from zen center got together yesterday to start a little Dogen study group. It's funny how life flips about. Several months ago (can't recall quite when), I wrote a few posts questioning the "obsession" many Zennies have for Dogen's writing, and now I'm gonna focus on his work again. Actually, it seems like ever since I wrote those posts, he's been appearing in readings and conversations, sometimes in the oddest ways. For example, I recall lying in corpse pose during a yoga class awhile back, and hearing the teacher recite one of Dogen's poems for us to reflect on. There was this interesting moment of spiritual convergence there, which sort of sealed the yoga teacher training deal for me.

Anyway, I continue to stand by the sentiment expressed during those posts that people need to be willing to question Dogen, to not think the guy was somehow infallible. Last night, for example, I read the first lines of one of the talks in the Shobogenzo-Zuimonki, which basically said that monastics are light years ahead of lay practitioners. Gag! There's a pretty heavy monastic bias in many of these little talks, probably in part due to the fact that they were given during the early years of his monastic leadership.

But when you read Dogen's death poem, cited at the beginning of this post, all separation is dropped away. Even life and death itself. What's amazing to me about this poem is how direct, energetic, and even fierce it is, given that it's the writing of a man about to die. He's going into death as if life and death are one continuous experience.

During our little study group, one of the things we talked about was experiencing fully through the body itself. How so often, we remain in our heads, failing to let life run through us. Even as longtime Zen students.

And when you take in Dogen's poem, it's seems to me that he's fully there, even as the physical body is falling apart, on it's way back into the earth from which it came from.

There's an aliveness to this little poem that feels totally calm and at peace all the same. That somehow energetic fierceness can be expressed completely without being tipped over in the process. I find this very attractive.