The Zen of Wild Turkeys and Snakes

It was a beautiful day here in Minnesota. Sunny. Light winds. Spring time temperatures. The perfect conditions for having encounters with other creatures!

Now, I'm not talking aliens. I'm talking wild turkeys and snakes.

After parking my bike this morning, I walked behind a construction site near our zen center. Turning the corner, I came nearly face to face with two wild turkeys. Wild turkeys sightings have become more common in the city in recent years, but I haven't been close enough to almost touch one - until this morning. As they strutted along in front of me, I just stood there, watching their funny necks move, and thinking "what is this?"

What is this? Not just the turkeys right in front of me, but the whole experience of living at that moment. Their appearance startled me out of morning sleepiness, and that general apathy we so often have towards our lives when things aren't "exciting" or "dramatic".

Apparently, being startled into the moment was the story of the day. This afternoon, as I biked on a trail along the Mississippi, I felt myself lost in gaze. The sun shining over the river, and all the little green plants shooting from the ground after a long winter were just too much. Gazing at it all as I peddled, I felt a bit punch drunk, loving spring for being spring. At one point, I vaguely saw something laying in the middle of the trail, and before I knew it, I had run over a snake.

It was a small snake, and I'm guessing I only hit it's hind end because almost immediately after I registered it's snakeness, and my tire going over it, the snake was gone into a patch of brush. I stopped and went looking for it, but couldn't find it.

Later, I took a hike in the woods - maybe a mile away from where I hit the snake. It was a section that had been partially cleared away, where shrub trees mingled with upturned soil, broken beer bottles, and chunks of stone near the river shore. I was enjoying walking around down there when a train came along the tracks and slowed to a stop not too far from me. Figuring I was trespassing, I decided to make a quick exit, walking back up the hill I had come down into the wooded patch from. About half way up, I looked down just as my foot was about to land on - you guessed it - another snake. Two in fact. Almost exactly the same size and color as the one I had hit.

I watched as the snakes slithered away, and then finished the walk back to my bicycle. No creatures were upset the rest of the way home.

What Are You Afraid of?

Yesterday, our class had a short discussion about snakes. A few of my students had the idea that there aren't any snakes in Minnesota because they hadn't seen any. Living in the city can do that to you. But mostly, what was interesting about the conversation is how we ended up talking about some very large snake from Burma that seemed to scare a fair number of people. Things got detailed when discussing this snake - hand gestures to show size, comments about how it can swallow a buffalo - which got me to thinking about how we humans get about the things we fear.

Now, I'm not so afraid of snakes, but that storytelling I experienced yesterday certainly reminds me of favorite approach to fears. Namely, to get lost in exaggerated stories.

What am I afraid of? Well, I still haven't been liberated from good old fear of death yet. And I still have a fear of failure more often than I'd like. And there are days when I get the feeling that I'm completely afraid to fully step into my life as it is.

Life as it is. I've been contemplating the fact that when things aren't going well, I believe stepping fully into them will somehow prolong the misery. This is a curious negation of all I have learned on the path, and yet I can see myself doing it daily when it comes to my current job, and what I need to do to get to the next one. I find myself saying things like "If I just accept everything here," I'll never leave here. Or I'll only leave here if someone pushes me out."

It's a story. I don't know what would happen if I completely accepted things as they are at work because I haven't done it yet. What's interesting is that I've tried everything else I can think of. I've stopped arguing about every last thing I disagree with. I've done zazen on breaks. I've done metta meditations for everyone I work with, even the few people who I really clash with. The list goes on and on. But I have never truly, fully accepted where things are at.

When it comes down to it, I think all fear is tied in some way or another to death. Not just death of the body, but also of parts of our life that have become familiar, comfortable, loved, or even hated. And I've found that when you get to stage where something, or someone is on life support, all sorts of stories arise that can get in the way of letting death come. The roller coaster rides of the end for both of my grandfather's certainly taught me this, if nothing else has.

So, can you let the stories just be stories? Can you accept them too? I say this to myself, but also can imagine you all who are reading this have your own stories to work with.

What are you afraid of anyway?

*Litho of Edvard Munch's "The Scream"