Finding a place to stand
The process of writing for this blog slowly reveals to me truths in my life that have been present but in some way un-gelled or not coherent in words yet. This in itself reveals another truth, that being how often our language is inadequate to describe experience. There is a teaching that says words are traps that try to capture experience and once you get it, let the words go.
Recent conversations have had a theme around them of a very difficult to translate word in English… possibly one of the most elusive to define, in fact…Love.
No, I’m not talking about any personal dating situation, so just simmah down if that’s where you were going. I just have had at least two conversations where the issue was at hand for a friend or was in the subtext of what was being discussed and the difficulty in being able to deal with that hard to define word was part and parcel of what drove the conversation. It seems pretty common that folks have the cling-ons for that word whether they be positive or negative.
I’ve found a more handy word in my Buddhist readings that seems to capture more of the essence of what I think love is. It’s called Bodhichitta. Bodhi has the meanings of awake/enlightened/completely open. Citta has the meanings mind/heart/attitude. Together they describe a state of openness and unbounded compassion for all beings. Now that’s love, ain’t it?
Love in the relative/historical (as opposed to the Ultimate) dimension is pretty limited. I know for me it has often only existed under certain predefined circumstances and situations. If the person or situation didn’t meet the criteria, he/she/it got no lovin. In the Ultimate sense, it’s easy to say the goal is to love everyone…because it really doesn’t take any effort or action to just speak the words. It’s like going to church on Easter and Christmas…just showing up doesn’t really put the rubber to the road.
Bodhichitta doesn’t let us off the hook that easily, though. In fact, it is a pretty large focus in the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism…where the concept of Bodhisattva comes from (a person who vows to work for the enlightenment of all beings before allowing enlightenment for themselves). It’s the energy that drives and nourishes the Bodhisattva ethics and it, like mindfulness, is also a muscle that needs development.
So I guess why these words keep bouncing around for me is because I’m trying to figure out where to put Bodhichitta into practice so that I’m helpful in my conversations with others and so that I’m improving my personal relationships with friends, family, and potential dating partners. What is the balance between loving kindness to others and loving kindness to myself so that I am not run down or taken advantage of and diminish my capacity for the practice? In other words, how do I be a loving person when people are sometimes not?
A quote from Pema Chodron in her book The Places That Scare You: “It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and – withouth even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.”
So for now, the Dirty Dharma lesson for me to explore is: When the shit hits the fan, love is where you stand”.
Giggles with Wolves
I recently toured and then spent a day volunteering at a wolf refuge near Pagosa Springs, CO where I’m on vacation. I wanted to go there because I was sparked by a quest to see someone’s unique take on compassion in action. It was really remarkable and if you are ever in the area, I suggest making an appointment to take a tour. The owner, Paula, is an amazing and gregarious woman who started her whole adventure by wanting to adopt a yellow lab from a shelter. While there it was a wolf puppy who captured her heart and the rest became history.
Whatever the case, as I explore my own compassion and compassionate direction in life, I was just really intrigued by someone who devoted her life of the past 15 years to this incredible animals.
So on day one I got to tour and visit and play with the wolves. Paula has a great many of them socialized for humans and the animals really ham it up and are very loving. The pic I’ve attached is of 2 brand new wolf pups that
came in from Alaska. They are 4 months old and super playful…which in wolf terms means watch your stuff cuz they will try and nab it. I almost lost my camera case to the little girl (she’s the lighter of the two). Her brother, the big black one, was determined that sister was not the only one who would be in my lap, so they both piled on. I was giggling so hard I almost fell over. They love to kiss and the little girl would put her huge paws on either side of my head and give big hugs too. I had so much wolf lovin by the end of the tour that I had to go home and wash off all the wolf slobber.
So most of the wolves had caught the kindness cooties from Paula and to cap off the day as we got to the bottom of the hill after feeding (and picking up poop) for 82 wolves and hybrids, I saw a small bumper sticker on the back of her truck that said “Compassion is Evolution”. I never asked if she was Buddhist or any other thing, nor did I ask where that sticker came from. I just knew that I had gotten a good dose of Dharma that day and left it at that…that’s the best kinda teaching really. (picking up several buckets of wolf crap will either enlighten you or make you sick, i opted for stepping up)
If you are interested in this place, it is called Wolfwood Refuge and the website is www.wolfwoodrefuge.com.
Curiouser and Curiouser
I know it ain’t a word (curiouser), but it does get the point across as you’ll see later.
Just in time for my vacation, my two favorite authors and people I consider to be my teachers…Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron, have both released new books. Wasn’t that thoughtful of them? I sure think so.
It’s a good thing, because when I have to travel (which my habit/conditioned mind reads as stepping outside of my daily routine) I start to experience fear tremors. This morning is 2 days away from setting off back to Colorado and the tremors are in full force as I try to contemplate packing and organizing for 2 weeks away from home.
Whatever the case, I got the willies and that means it’s Pefect Pema Time.
Pema Chodron talks a great deal about dirty Dharma around the notion of dealing with groundlessness. Groundless being the state of ‘WTF!?’ and ‘Holy Shit’ where your notions of the everyday world (relative world to use a Buddhist term..as opposed to the Ultimate world) are at best not helping and at worst causing pain. DEFCON 1 would be total mental meltdown. I’m only at DEFCON 3-ish and staying with my breath to keep from going any lower. You know the DEFCON rating right? It’s a scale from 5 (best condition) to 1 (worst condition) and stands for Dharmic & Equanimity Failure Coming On Now. I think I read that in the Sutra on Pulling your Head Out of Your Ass.
One of her methods of explaining the mindset that will defuse some of the intensity is to stay open and curious to your feelings and reactions. Curious would mean approaching your opinions and strongly held notions that are causing a low DEFCON number with a gentle questioning openness. This is opposed to clinging to strongly held ideas and opinions that are not working. Thich Nhat Hanh would call it embracing the feeling with mindfulness like you would a child.
However you choose to understand it, the practice means to have you step out of your habit mind and into unconditioned mind. Not an easy task if the mindfulness muscle is not present to help create space around the feeling.
Space and openness would be the opposite to clinging and contraction. It sounds counter-intuitive to how we are generally taught to deal with issues, but trying it over and over again does create a certain amount of peace. Even if the space you create is a small distance of time between the moment you want to throw your shit out the window and actually doing it, in that amount of time you might just save your shit…just sayin.
So I’m going to be reading the new books and maybe start putting together blog posts I’ve been wanting to do where I take an author’s book and do a post per chapter that explores more deeply what their teachings are. And let me tell you this also dear readers…I’m going to be staying in my house with my ex, so there may be a lot of Dharma hitting the fan for the next two weeks and creating a lot of material for blogging as well. J
…and to keep from throwing shit and/or my ex out the window, I’ll be getting curiouser and curiouser!
Time travel…seriously
Time travel is possible, ya’ll. I do it several times a week…sware to gawd.
I live next door to my parents, each of us in a small 1950’s style pier and beam house. The kitchens, bathrooms, and closets are all tiny and funky colored tiles of yellows, beige, and pale aqua blues abound. The thing is, my house is old, but my ego lives in 2009 and theirs live in a time bubble contemporary to their home. So with the 50 feet I walk to get to their house, I go back in time 60 years. See, I told you, time travel is possible.
Here’s the other thing…being parents, and old fashioned, they can’t seem to think about me as anything other than 12 years old. This phenomenon creates a parental black hole whose gravity well can easily suck 28 years off my age in the blink of an eye. I can get all meditated up and peaceful and BAM I’m in grade school in a flash.
So yeah, talk about dirty parental Dharma, it’s all there and it’s a daily struggle, especially with them getting older (and me too) and being an only child. I not only get pulled back in time, I also have to consider modern day issues of health care for aging parents. …if anyone would care to be adopted by them so I can have a sibling to help out with this, please contact me, the email address is in my ‘about zenfant’ page. I’ll sign you right up.
Anyway, my point of practice is to find a connection point with these time traveling folks. We really have nothing much to talk about because I have yet to find the language translator that converts my speech back to something that makes any kind of sense 60 years in the past. It makes time together incredibly silent with little bursts of conversation that quickly die as our individual sensibilities clash and recoil.
I have recently realized that I do have a bit of mindful magic that creates a rip between our two time streams and temporarily allows us to be in the same place at the same time with a focus that allows us to begin having a conversation. Food. Yup, it was there all along and I was missing it. I like to cook and they like to eat (well so do I). So I may be big as a house over this process, but in an effort to bring our lives to more common ground on a more regular basis, I’m dedicating myself to cooking more for them.
It also will give me a motivation to cook more (when it’s just me, I’m just as comfortable with a peanut butter sammich as with a meal…and a sammich is a lot less work) and share my cooking with them. I recently finished an article in the most recent Tricycle magazine on mindful cooking and the new Tassajara cookbook about to come out. Cooking to me is magical and a process that is totally ripe for mindful practice from the first choppings to the last dish cleaned.
Anybody got any good advice for getting along with parents?
Kindness cooties – or why i meditate
Why I meditate.
I want to be kind. I want to be compassionate. I want to be the person that makes others feel more peaceful and settled just by sitting in the same space with me.
I want be kind because it is the best possible, most clear, most sensible action to take. The goal is not to be ‘good’ or avoid Hell (whatever that is) or get extra points for Heaven (whatever that is). The goal is to have no goal and still be kind.
The meditation part comes in because it is during that practice of intensified mindfulness, I get to begin to penetrate down below what my everyday mind is attached to (it’s one of the cool side effects of regular mindfulness practice). I recently heard a talk by Shinzin Young (see his youtube videos in the links to the left) in which he talks about the concept of No-self as being like an old CRT monitor displaying a pure white screen. It’s white when I look at it with naked eye, but if I put a magnifying glass up to it, it breaks down into the pixels of red/blue/green. So which is it? Red/blue/green or white? Well, it’s both depending on the perception, so we could also say it is both and neither. ..or to quote the Heart Sutra “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”.
So when I penetrate deeply enough into my own mind, and see this to be true, the notion of being disconnected from other people, places, things falls away and true kindness emerges. And true kindness is contagious like a virus, it has an energy of it’s own. Can you imagine a world infected with kindness? Kindness cooties…go get some.
Wow, so yeah, my brain was running off at the mouth and I had to get up out the bed and put this stuff down or I’d not be sleeping. I know I ain’t right. I was just down at Wanda June’s Hairdo Place and Taco Stand just a couple days ago and she said ‘boy, you ain’t right’, and I said ‘yeah, I know’.
Wanda June is insightful like that. She don’t meditate, she mostly just smells too many hairdo chemicals. She got the tallest hair in three counties, ya’ll. They say the higher the hair, the closer to God. Maybe she’s got her own enlightenment gig goin’ on.
