The Birdman

There's this neighborhood guy that some call "The Birdman." He's maybe about 5 foot 9, has a thick, but somewhat receding head of dark brown hair, and is right around fifty years old. Sometime during his early twenties, he was in a very bad car accident, and, among other things, hit his head hard during the crash. For most of the last seventeen years, he has had a very steady job in custodial - until a series of run ins with his supervisor led to his ouster. After a period of unemployment, accompanied with some depression, he's now working again and is back at his favorite hobby - talking to and feeding the birds and squirrels.

Early this evening, I ran into Mark, the Birdman's real name, just after he finished dumping some seed under a tree. Walking across the street, he whistled into the sky, shifting his sound to mimic his favorite birds. Seeing me, he stopped and said "Cinnamon Girl, you should have seen her, she flew across the alley then dove straight down." He made a swooping motion with his hand, and then said "it was so cool." "I said, "I love you Cinnamon Girl. I know she love's me." Then he laughed in a very carefree way, nothing like the bitter snickering that accompanied his every other word during the long winter of unemployment he had just went through.

Suzuki Roshi once said "Trying to become someone else, you lose your practice and your virtue. When you are faithful to your position or your work, your true being is there."

Some people don't really know how to handle The Birdman. I have watched a few people - all older adults who you would think had left their high school antics behind - set fires under Mark by picking fights with him and belittling his love of the most common of city animals. Others I have seen laughing at his whistling and calling of names into the air - Cinnamon Girl is just one of many that has been given a name. Still others are simply perplexed by the well grown man standing in the alley with a bucket of seed calling sweet nothings into the trees.

I sometimes wonder if Mark isn't a modern day St. Francis, sans the Christian overlay. There are even stories of Francis preaching to the birds of God's love for them. With Mark, the middleman has been taken out, and love is simply transmitted from his heart to birds and back.

In some ways, it would have been interesting to know what The Birdman was like before the accident. However, at the same time, it really doesn't matter much in the great scheme of things. There is something divine in his presence as it is, even though he is just another ordinary guy, with ordinary ups and downs like the rest of us.

And isn't that the greatness of it all - that anyone can let their "true being" be present, even if only for a little bit, and for those of us who notice it, life could never be dull, never be boring. Those birds and squirrels are very lucky, and so is Mark. And the rest of us are better for having met someone like him, who is able to drop off social conventions and just be who he truly is.

Steven and Ondrea Levine

In nine minutes, you'll learn a lot about life and love from these two. I have never met either of them, but the Levines have taught me so much about meditation, awareness, and relationships. I am very grateful to them both. Neither of them is in very good health right now. Ondrea has cancer again, and Steven has some kind of neurological disorder which, as he mentions in the video, has already nearly stripped him of the ability to walk. And yet, even in the pain of their current states, they both still exude wisdom, genuine love, and compassion.

Please check out this video if you have a few minutes.

And please check out this blog letter for more information about the Levine's current state.

http://stephenandondrealevine.blogspot.com/2007/12/open-letter-from-jack-kornifield-ram.html

Confidence

I have been told before that I am a pretty confident person. I stand before classes of learners everyday and usually can talk or direct things so that learning occurs. I often speak my mind, even about issues that clearly place me outside the bounds of "normality." I have walked into the offices of State Senators and Representatives, asked pointed questions, and clearly stated what I wanted to see the government do or not do. So, sure, there's a level of confidence present.

When it gets down to it, though, I can feel an instability in that confidence. There have been plenty of times I have stumbled about in fear, anxiety, even spinning anger that sends any sense of confidence out the door. But beyond that, there's a certain lack of trust that runs through me at a deeper level - a kind of whispering that can turn into a roar saying "You're not good enough" or "You'll pay if you fail." Now, clearly, this internal talk doesn't hold me back all the time; in fact, I have gotten to the point now where there are times when none of this kind of talk even arises. However, I can feel a tug to dig deeper, to unearth the roots that still hang on with in me.

Today, I lifted a chuck of soil matted with roots and dead grass and named it for my class: a clod. They peered in on it, and I looked at it too, a little closer. The soil near the dead grass was loose and falling between my fingers as I spelled the word for the class. A warm breeze blew behind us, the sun hitting our backs as we kneeled. I turned the clod over. The soil near the roots was packed tightly, barely moving at all. I could thumb my way through it, loosening it some, but otherwise it stood pat. We talked a little more about gardening; digging trenches, preparing a bed for flowers. Thry knew how to do it all, but didn't know any of the words for it. I said "usually, when we prepare a bed for flowers, we throw the clods out." And then I threw it.

Unpacking the soil around the roots of no confidence, or non-trusting, requires a little more than simply tossing away the manifestations when they arise. After some practice, it's easy enough to cut off negative thoughts, and to eject false story lines into the trashbin. But I think the kind of confidence that stays with us even in our toughest moments is born of sticking with this life as it occurs, moment by moment - in other words, to bring our zazen and mindfulness into everything, not just that which appears while we're meditating, or in a good mood, or in a bad mood, or in a spiritual mood. And I think it also means being ok if you fail to do that, and even if things get a bit messy as a result of that failure.

I'm not always so hot with things being messy. I often like clarity, simplicity, lack of clutter. At the same time, that's not always true. I have no trouble getting really dirty while gardening. I pedal a bicycle all over town and return home sweaty, sloppy, and happily spent. Ah, those internal contradictions.

Here's Suzuki Roshi's words on it all, with an aid from our good buddy Dogen: "In China and Japan there are many stories of teachers who attained enlightenment suddenly like this: 'Umph!' [laughs and snaps his fingers] You may think it was sudden, but it was actually the result of many years of practice and of failing many times. Dogen Zenji's famous words concerning this are "Hitting the mark is the result of ninety-nine failures." The last arrow hit the mark, but only after ninety-nine failures. So failure is actually ok."

Some of my learners have been trying to teach me phrases in Karen and Burmese. I fail often, just as they fail often with English. But all of us have kept trying, and as a result, some learning has occured. Much more on their end than mine, but that's not the most important thing. The effort put forth is necessary, but also being ok with failing, missing the mark.

It's always interesting to me how the ability is always there in some places of your life. And yet, in other part of your life, you just can't seem to transport it in, as if there's a wall holding it back from sprouting forth. Maybe I just need to keep examining the clods a little more, before I reach back to throw them away for good.

The Questioner

I have been contemplating my next step career-wise for months now, maybe even longer. It's been nearly five years now at my current position, which is the longest I have stayed at any job. I love teaching. I love that moment when someone, or even an entire group, "gets it," or gains some clarity about something that they didn't experience in the past. I often feel like the learners in my classes do most of the work, and I'm just there to be a guide, or to give a push or two when necessary. In some ways, like a good zen teacher - not handing out a lot of answers, but able to hold a space for the truth of the moment to appear.

And yet, I find myself struggling more and more with the limitations of my work. The endless federal and state laws and directives. The funding issues of schools, which are slamming my workplace hard this year. The limitations of the classroom itself, an artificial construction that often makes learning into something a little too abstracted from the everyday lives of people. Standardized tests which don't measure out of the many ways in which we as people learn, nor get at the plethora of possible learnings and usages people might have while studying. I could go on, but you get the point.

What is it that I'm called to do now? I keep asking this question, but cannot get any sense of clarity about it. I have applied for other jobs over the past several months, but often without a whole lot of strong feeling that this is what is the next thing. I have thought about staying where I am as well, but I don't know how to do that in an awake, fully engaged way anymore. The creativity isn't much there anymore, nor is the desire to try and fight a system that does everything possible to force learners out the door and into jobs before they've learned enough to thrive in the U.S. - and which more and more pressures teachers into teaching "tests" in a similar way to the K-12 system post-No Child Left Behind. I don't feel valued as a creative, passionate person in this system (the Adult Basic Education system), and I don't feel my learners are valued as the intelligent, diligent, and caring people that they are.

I have often been a questioner. In fact, this was true even as a little child, and no amount of schooling and society propaganda was able to beat it out of me. Sometimes, I love it. There's such openness in questioning, and not assuming that you "know" everything, or that something is "common sense," or whatever else people use to solidify their experiences. Other times, though, I find being the questioner difficult, even really lonely. Questioning what is commonly held to be "true" isn't much of a friend-maker. There's a certain anxiety that appears when you place a question in front of a train that that everyone assumes is on the right track. What if four walls, desks, chairs, a white board, and a teacher in front of the room isn't the best way to work with people in the 21st century? What if we view mass education from the standpoint of it's origins as a tool of industrialization and nationalism? How does knowing that make us change or not change what we are doing today?

Maybe I should be in academia, but the same problems are there as well, maybe even more so, given how much many universities have given over to the college as stepping stone to employment approach, or the way in which university funding has become more and more tied to corporate sponsorship.

I keep coming back to Buddha's insistence not to just swallow his teachings, but to thoroughly investigate them in our lives. More and more, I feel this is what our entire life is about - stopping the urge to just believe any old story that's been passed down to us, or which we have come to believe because it made sense when we were children, or because some celebrity or the president, or whoever said it was true. To completely be open and to question everything (not in a small minded, doubtful way, but in a broadminded, wide open way)is so at odds with the way most of our world works, that it's amazing any of us are able to do it at all.

Frankly, it really can be a lonely place. You get a lot more negative feedback and outright dismissals, than you do positive feedback. It's a great place to practice not attaching to the "worldly winds" - praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and shame, happiness and despair. But also, for the same reason, an easy location of suffering when one falls into clinging to one or more of those "winds."

Here are some choice words from Suzuki Roshi, who is popping up everywhere lately due to it being the fiftieth aniversary of his arrival in San Fransciso from Japan.

"the way to understanding yourself is not by understanding yourself objectively or gathering information from various sources. If people say you are crazy - 'Ok, I am crazy!' If people say you are a bad student, maybe it is so. 'I am a bad student, but I am trying very hard.' That is enough. When you sit in that way, you accept yourself and accept everything together with yourself. When you are involved with various silly problems, you sit with the problems you have. This is you at that time. When you try to get out of your problems, this is already wrong practice."

When he says he's crazy or a bad student, here, I don't think there's any attachment to those assessments. The first one, he seems to affirm the statements being said without believing in them as representing who he is. And the second, he offers that maybe he IS a "bad student" without taking that on as a final judgement. Sometimes, I can ask a question I know might ruffle feathers and be right there with Suzuki. Other times, I'm caught by the desire to protect myself or defend my opinion, or some other thing before I even open my mouth.

None of which really does much to get me closer to "What is it that I'm called to do now?" Which makes me wonder if I'm provoked by my own question, and the possibilities it stirs up.

Suzuki Roshi Video as Teaching

Thanks to James on the Zen Community for posting another Suzuki Roshi video. His posting was the first I had ever heard of Roshi speaking, and what a gift. This beautiful sense of oneness with birds and sounds Roshi expresses. And then this video I found posted on Youtube, which is sort of a collage, but which gives some family history about Suzuki, and also gives a flavor of how he taught in an uncleaned up, personal way. I love how he says "you know" over and over after nearly every sentence. It's something you'd never get in his books, or in quotes of him in others' teachings. And the sort of subdued but very full laugh, and mischievous smile ... I very much appreciate these little glimpses into Suzuki's ways of being and presenting the dharma. Anything that makes a person more human and alive is worth the effort to pay attention to, so I offer this video, and the suggestion for those of you who didn't study personally with Roshi to check out others on Youtube. This video is the first of several that offer insights into Suzuki's time in the U.S. and the development of San Francisco Zen Center. To me, this is a teaching in not elevating the teacher too high above yourself, and not abstracting the teacher in such a way that you fail to see the person behind the words and actions.

Dandelion Yoga

A beautiful spring day here in St. Paul, MN. Partly cloudy, a slight breeze, temperatures in the low seventies. I took myself to a local park to do some outdoor yoga. No mat, no props, no book of poses. Nothing but what would arise while I was there.

As I rode into the park, I was greeted by a field of dandelions. Ghost dandelions. Thousands of little, white heads waving in the wind together as if to say: we're not quite dead yet, we're not quite dead yet.

I parked the bike near a bench, and stepped right into the middle, kicking up a dust of seeds and dried silk attached to them. I looked down and saw that my brown shoes were now nearly white. And the thought came to me that I wasn't sure I wanted to do this.

I did a standing forward bend and then came up and surveyed the land. There it was right in front of me: a large tree stump. My escape from the dead.

I nearly lept on it, starting to conjure poses I might do now that I was free from the clutches of the ghosts. I spun my arms around and around, working to open my shoulders. I did half moon pose, to stretch my sides. And then I got up on one leg for Warrior III pose, first the left side and then the right: the opposite of what usually happens when I'm in class, a quirk I blame being left handed on.

And then, on the way up from the second side of Warrior, I saw the stump. Not that I hadn't seen the stump before, but now I truly saw it, the wavy lines that marked the years, the knobs around the edges, the places where it was already beginning to crumble, even though it couldn't have been more than a few years since the tree had been cut. Another marker of impermanence. Another image of death.

It was then that I realized that there was nothing much else I could do on the stump. Sure, I could have done tree pose, but really, how cliche is that. So, I stepped off the edge, the hundred foot pole as we say in zen (ok, maybe not, but maybe so), and into the dandelions again.

Putting my hands on the ground, right into the mess of the dead, I worked my legs into down dog. The sun warmed my back as I heard a bird singing overhead. My eyes landed on the tussle of stems and jagged, green leaves - old friends I was re-aquainting myself with. After a minute or so of just noticing what was there, I saw them: a pair of yellow heads sticking out of the dead, white ocean I had stepped into. The cycle of life, all in one field - why is it so surprising? Even after hearing Buddha's teachings on interconnectedness and impermanence a thousand times over, still this moment of awareness was a little startling.

I patted down a body space worth of the dead, stood up, and threw my arms to the sky. The perfect place for a few rounds of sun salutations, I thought to myself. A few minutes later, arching into up dog, I saw a middle aged man walking on the sidewalk, about to pass. I think our eyes met briefly, although I can't be sure of that. And as he turned away - confused, embarrassed, distracted by the bird in the tree - I smiled, and slid back into down dog, my eyes filled with ghosts, and the leaves that support them still, even in death.

Social Dukkha

Working with people from all over the world, whose ideas and ways of living are often very different from my own, has definitely helped to jar the sense of self I have. In addition, the discussions I have had with these same learners in my classes have shown me as much as anything how constructed our views of the "good life" or "proper life" are. Here's a simple example of that from a recent class.

A woman originally from Somalia is pregnant, which sparked a discussion about family size and also happiness. She was asked by another learner how many children she would like to have. I believe she said "maybe four," although I may be misremembering that number. Another woman, a very joyful Ethiopian woman in her fifties, said "why not more?" She went on to talk about her eight children, and how she loves big families, and would have more children if she could. Recently, her son graduated from college, the first degree in her family I believe, and she's been walking around beaming about his accomplishment, telling anyone who will listen about it.

A few other learners, ethnic Karen from Burma, gasped upon hearing the desire for very large families. One said something to the effect of "three is enough, thank you very much." And there were other expressions from this group about the hard work and difficulties large families create for mothers. Which brought us to economic issues in the U.S. and a short conversation about how expensive it is in the U.S. to have a lot of children. But the woman from Ethiopia didn't stand down - she still felt that there was more joy in a bigger family. I have had other learners in the past, from other nations, express very similar views. Yet, even within groups, as should be expected, there is a fair amount of difference of opinion about this question.

However, despite wide differences of opinion within any group, it can be said that culture and social structures of a given society have an influence on how people think and act in the world. And because of this, I believe there has been a failure on the part of many in the convert western Buddhist world to see beyond individual practice, and individual "enlightenment," as a way to address the suffering of the world.

Dukkha is the Pali term which is usually translated as suffering. It is often viewed as the sense of dissatisfaction or disease a person feels with the world as it is presenting itself in one's life now. Of dukkha, Buddha said that all of us experience it in our lives - many of us so much so that we are consumed by it. And yet, as Buddha himself experienced, there are ways to be liberated from it. In terms of Buddhism, these ways are expressed as The Eightfold Path. (Other spiritual traditions have other methods which I would argue also can be gateways to liberation, but discussing those would lead us off track today.)

Returning to the classroom discussion above, the Ethiopian woman in my class seems have pinned at least some of her happiness in life on having a large family. Although I don't know for certain, it seems that larger families are more common in Ethiopia than they are here in the U.S. When you think of the droughts, famines, wars, and other difficulties that have plagued Ethiopia over at least the past century, it's very understandable that an emphasis on procreation might be promoted not only in individual families, but much more broadly, as a social or cultural value. So, then, since she has a larger family, the woman in my class might be viewed in a positive way by others in her cultural group, and she might internally view herself more positively because she has manifested what has value within the larger group.

Of course, there are also many individual factors that play into this as well. Her family seems to work together well. The children are doing well academically, and unlike other learners I have had in the past, she doesn't come to class with a heavy burden of problems her children are having at home, or at school, or elsewhere. So, it's very much possible that her emphasis on "big families" is as much, if not more, tied to her personal experience than to cultural or social values or constructs.

Yet, I think it's foolish of us, especially if we believe in the view that there is no solid, fixed self or "I," to place all our eggs in the individual basket. Any one person's suffering or joy is a product of a complex uprising of causes and conditions, some of which one might be personally responsible for, but also which include others that are much bigger than any one person.

No one person, no matter how powerful, is responsible for bringing about war for example. Or environmental destruction, or patterns of patriarchy, or racism, or sexism, or heterosexism, or any other number of social ills that infiltrate and effect our lives on a daily basis.

In his excellent book The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory David Loy spends a lot of time examining these kind of larger patterns. Using the term "social dukkha," he argue that Buddhist teachings: the precepts, emptiness, compassion, and others can be applied to broader social issues as a means to potentially reducing suffering on a larger scale.

Now, he certainly isn't the first to say any of this, nor is he a lone wolf crying in the wilderness, but it strikes me that until there is a critical mass of us speaking and acting in ways that might address these larger scale issues, no amount of individual effort on spiritual practice will be enough to greatly reduce suffering in the world. Maybe if we all took up meditation practices, and stuck with it diligently, there would be some massive change. But I still wonder even then if oppressive social structures would simply fall away, or if, in spite of our efforts, we'd still be facing the problems these structures create. I have a hard time believing that racism, sexism, and heterosexism, would simply vanish as a result of all of us individually, or even as collects of individuals, doing meditation practices. This is not at all to denigrate meditation - I love it - but to suggest that given where we are at on a global scale today, it seems additional, more collective approaches to the dharma are being called for.