living dharma

I often think about something Michael said to me on my birthday, when we were sitting up in the forest above Lily Pond (the most beautiful spot on the Morning Sun land).

Michael and Fern were offering reflections on the several months we had spent together at that time (April) and doing an informal “shining light” of sorts (a practice we do in Plum Village – talking about what we see in others, the wonderful things about their practice and those areas which require some attention).

Michael talked about the profound perceptual shift, and all that it entails, from seeing things from the perspective of “what does this mean for me?” to “what does this mean?” There are so many little nuggets that we can point to and say, “oh, THAT is the heart of the practice.” And this is one of those nuggets.

At this point I’m thinking about some news I learned last night: Thich Nhat Hanh (my teacher and the founder of Plum Village) is in the hospital in Boston with a serious lung infection. He is a very vigorous and remarkable 83. But he is 83 and the particular bug that is in his lungs is one of those really no fooling bugs.

Given the marvelous and maddening complexity of the brain, my reaction on learning the news unfolded on two tracks simultaneously. The non-egoic track had me down the road with love and compassion and sending blasts of healing energy to this extraordinary person. The ego/separate self track had me down the road thinking about ME. The ME who has just, finally, decided with clarity and determination to return to Plum Village and become a monk.

Quite a difference. What does this mean for Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh), for the community, for the thousands of people who look to Thay’s living example for inspiration and guidance? Quite a difference between that and, “what does this mean for me?”

So many aphorisms. “It is all practice.” Yes. It is all practice. Compassion, love, understanding, service – can I cultivate and nourish these qualities and apply them even to my own narrow egoic moments? Transcend them? Act and live from a place of courage and non-selfishness?

What does this mean?

P.S. The picture is of a little object d’art at the cottage my mum and I visited last week.

I’ve met so many wonderful people the last few years. Mostly in the Plum Village universe. But not exclusively.

In the ten-day stretch just passed I’ve been blessed with a couple of great encounters. And, Canada being such a small place in terms of human community and who knows who and how we stumble across each other, both of the people I’m grateful to have spent time with hail not so distantly from pretty old chapters of my life.

My mum and I spent some time with a friend of hers in the Muskoka region of Ontario (classic Canadian cottage country….thousands of lakes, little towns, boats, fireflies, deerflies, deer, shooting stars, warm water). The friend had a friend with her. The friend of the friend (am I being clear here?) turned out to be the mother of an old much-loved friend of mine from high school (Auni). Which is now quite some time ago.

It was really great to be with Auni’s mum – sharing a house with her, cooking for her and others, talking a bit about where we are in our lives, where we’ve been and where we’re going. Given the cusp on which I am (off to the monastery to ordain) there’s a certain cocktail party tidbit exoticism to what I’m up to right now. So – we talked about my choice etc. This is a conversation that I’ve grown a little jumpy about over the last stretch – people tend to form opinions rather quickly and that can be unhelpful when one is trying to maintain one’s “up” energy for an unusual choice in life.

But it was all smooth sailing, with Charlene and with Earlene (no, I’m not kidding). They were interested in hearing about why and what and such. And I was interested to hear their why and what too.

Then there was Bill. Bill Shepherd. Bill, it turns out, is the father-in-law of the first woman I ever lived with, almost 30 years ago. Yes, small country. Anyway. Bill is retired (from what I don’t know – it didn’t come up) and spent a bunch of years building a simple lovely cottage on an island in one of the kabillion lakes. We spent a couple of afternoons together (he is a good friend of Earlene’s….flow chart to follow in another post). Bill is one of those great gifts. A gentle man with a good sense of humour. A good listener. A good story teller. A good boat driver. He and I just really clicked. Without knowing anything about Buddhism or monastic life, he seemed to “get it” viz my choice.

Acceptance. Understanding. Respect. Kindness. We use these words a lot. Or at least I do these days. But they are relatively rare in their pure, undiluted state.

So – here’s to Bill Shepherd and all the Bill Shepherds out there. May they flouirsh and multiply.

P.S. The picture is from the lovely cottage and lake belonging to my mum’s friends, Mel and Art….they generously loaned us their sweet spot for the last few days – about 1.5 hours west of Ottawa.

Pema Chodron talks about a thing that seems to happen to many who launch down some kind of spiritual path, departing from the track we’ve known well and heading for we don’t really know where. She calls that place the in between place. And a good name it is too. I think some of us may wish that once we launch in a new direction the very fact of the launch would somehow deliver a steady state new reality. And that may be the case for a lucky few I suppose.

The in between, where we’ve recognized many things about the lives we are perhaps leaving behind and we can see some aspects of the path that will lead us somewhere else. It is exciting. It is terrifying. It is full of faith. Then doubt. Then faith again. Beautiful transcendent experiences and distressingly familiar ones, where we deal with challenging situations as we always used to in our lives before launch (LBL).

I think I’m coming to the end of at least one version of the in between state. Having changed everything these last years; leaving community both willfully and unintentionally (my old political/professional life) and creating/finding new community….leaving old habits and behaviours in how I related to wine to women to everything else….anyway. Everything has changed and I’m now about to head back into the monastery with the intention of staying there.

I’m in the final phase of visiting (family and a few friends) and some version of freedom, where I can go where I want when I want without checking with the community about whether it is ok to do so.

My in between state these last few years has been about immersing myself in spiritual life while dancing all around whether or not to ordain as a monk. A few big outstanding issues have shifted in the last few months and I now feel a clarity I never did before; the absence of which exacerbated the in between state thing I was doing: It is a relief to be moving out of that zone into another unknown zone…..in the monastery requesting permission to ordain….a process I know about technically from having seen friends go through it….but now it’s my turn. Gonna be different than watching it I bet!

P.S. The picture? Yup – from Plum Village, at the foot of a field/orchard in the hamlet where I’ll be living soon.

I’m grateful for a lot these days. And only scared of a little. Which is a different kind of schematic than the one I’ve lived with for most of my life. And, not to discriminate or anything, I like this one better.

One of many things I am grateful for is my mum. Since I started down the path that carries me back and back again to Plum Village, she has seen a lot of change in me; the kind of change a parent wants to see in a child (I know as I am one, a parent that is). As she put it yesterday, I am happy and at peace for the first time in my life – solely and only because of the total change in how I am living and what I do with my time and waking energy now as compared with my former life of inner and outer chaos.

Because of all the change my mum has been increasingly interested in how it is happening and why. Not just because I am her beloved son doing all this weird stuff that seems to be working. Yes, some of that. But also because there are parts of her life and her deepest self that she thinks might benefit from some changing.

So – she has been opening more and more to the practice and to Buddhist teachings of a variety of flavours. She visited Plum Village (the monastery in France where I am headed in a few weeks with a one-way ticket) and she “got it”. She had a powerful felt experience of the magic of the place. What a gift. For her mostly. But also for me. To have some level of shared understanding in a family that is not necessarily so well known for shared understanding….so good.

Here in Ottawa we’re spending a few weeks together before I head over yonder to France. And every morning we practice sitting meditation together. Mum is reading books by the teacher who has so inspired me. And using them as a base for her meditation practice. I invite the bell and we sit and breathe side by side. A pretty simple thing but really a great joy.

Ever since I saw Dances With Wolves I can’t help thinking of all kinds of three word names – so apropos of that and the above, I am for now and for always Sits With Mama.

P.S. I took the picture last year in one of my favourite spots in Plum Village. It was so overpoweringly beautiful (that moment) as to reduce me to tears. Yes, I am a sap for sure but it takes a pretty big blast of godlight to make me well up.

I’ve got a stack of books with me here in Ottawa. I’m thinking that one of the things I will do while I am here is transcribe all the passages that have spoken to me deeply the last few years – centralize them in my own little vault of wisdom. Also – they weigh a lot and airlines charge like a wounded bull these days.

I’ve sometimes thought that I should tattoo wise words on my forehead so that I would see them every day and be brought back to their power over and over again, so that at some point they would carve new and healthy neural pathways just behind the spot where they are etched; replacing the calcified ones that arrive and take up residence over a lifetime.

Here’s one such very long tattoo, from Grace and Grit (actually quoting the Course in Miracles):

“What could you want that forgiveness cannot give? Do you want peace? Forgiveness offers it. Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset? All this forgiveness offers and more.”

Talking about this passage in the Course in Miracles, Ken Wilber (the author of Grace and Grit) goes on to say:

“….the primal emotion of the ego, according to this teaching, is fear followed by resentment. As the Upanishads put it, ‘wherever there is other, there is fear.’

In other words, whenever we split seamless awareness into a subject versus an object, into a self versus an other, then that self feels fear, simply because there are now so many ‘others’ out there that can harm it. Out of this fear grows resentment. If we are going to insist on identifying with just the little self in here, then others are going to bruise it, insult it, injure it. The ego, then, is kept in existence by a collection of emotional insults; it carries its personal bruises as the fabric of its very existence. It actively collects hurts and insults, even while resenting them, because without its bruises, it would be, literally, nothing.

The ego’s first maneuver in dealing with this resentment is to try to get others to confess their faults. ‘You hurt me; say you’re sorry.’ Sometimes this makes the ego temporarily feel better, but does nothing to uproot the original cause. And, as often as not, even if the person does apologize, the likely result is now hatred of them. ‘I knew you did that to me; you just admitted it!’ The fundamental mood of the ego: never forgive, never forget.

What the ego doesn’t try is forgiveness, because that would undermine its very existence. To forgive others for insults, real or imagined, is to weaken the boundary between self and other, to dissolve the sense of separation between subject and object. …”

P.S. The picture is of a beach in Massachussetts that my mum and I went to a little while ago. Wow. I remembered how much I love the ocean, no matter the weather.

The other day – the day before leaving Morning Sun on the slow boat to Plum Village (actually not a boat, but a car….actually two cars, all my very few remaining possessions in one and then the other – slow relay race style, one kinda hip Vermont town and a Canadian customs official who did not even want to look at passports as we came into Canada on our way to Ottawa, the eerily Groundhog Day staging ground for all my recent adventures) – I was up early as I tend to be. I’d made my way through the incredibly lovely forest to the house I lived in mostly since October (I moved into a hard to describe for its being so beautiful cabin a bit more than a month ago – in the Morning Sun universe). As I sat on the back porch sipping my final vice (strong coffee) looking out over the misty field, I saw a very pretty cow hove into view.

I knew this cow. Know this cow. Fairly well; she’s been grazing the pasture behind our house since late spring. But this time she was on the wrong side of the fence. Or so would be the view of her owners. It was my view too, since I am friends with her owners and since there is a road near by where she could wander and both meet with and cause great misfortune.

A gift. In the Plum Village practice we are encouraged to look to daily life as the source of objects for our meditation. A cow wandering potentially into harm’s way was perfect (which I realized after Michael and I managed to get her back on the “right” side of the fence, no small feat for a couple of very journeyman Buddhist cowboys).

What was I keeping the cow safe from? The road obviously. But by getting her back where farm reality would have her, I was just making sure she would be available for long-term exploitation at the dairy up the road or an early execution at the local slaughterhouse. So, safe to be moved along the supply chain of quasi-artisan food production in New Hampshire. Safe too for the folks hauling up and down the Gilsum Mine Road; they would not careen into her and damage their fine vehicles or themselves or family members riding shotgun.

Safe I suppose from a less orderly demise than the agricultural machine would deliver at some point. Safe from a cougar, should there be any left in New Hampshire. Safe from a posse of coyotes. Safe from a rogue bear. Safe from those kinds of messy deaths.

Anyway. It got me thinking. When we are presented with these moments we end up responding in a variety of roles, consciously or not so much. For me I suppose the relevant ones that I understand myself in these days are practitioner of Buddhism, citizen of some sort (mostly Canada if pressed but more post-modernly of the world), father, community member (along with my sense of responsibility to my friends who “own” the cow in question), incipient monk, vegetarian and food wonk…..other roles too as conditions call forth.

It is interesting to see how all these roles stack up. Are they consistent? Does one massively contradict the other? Is there a sort of internal Sisyphean feedback loop, where the results of one role cancel or mess the aims and intentions of another? Are we in harmony with ourselves and the world around us really.

And all this reminded me of the Buddha’s teaching on releasing our cows, where cows represent the burden of our possessions and the churn required to make our way through the machine of economics, ownership, livelihood etc.

If she had been “mine” to release I think I woulda.

P.S. The photo is of the cabin where I spent July and a bit more. Yes. Lucky. Very. I know.

I’ve thought a lot about home the last couple of years. I’ve been officially homeless for a bit less than two years now: I left Vancouver in early summer 2007 to head to Plum Village and my open-ended monastic inquiry. Since then, I’ve been more places than I can count. Beds and tents and sleeping bags and Spain and France and England and Holland and Canada and the United States and back and forth a bunch of times between all of them. Much of this time has been spent in Plum Village in a couple of different long stays. But all of this period has been so markedly different from the rest of my adult life, where I had my own home, my own stuff in my own home etc.

A few weeks ago I headed out of the wonderful small community I had been living in for the fall/winter, thinking and feeling pretty darn strongly I was bound for Plum Village. For good. As some of you know, a whole lot happened between then and now. And all of it happened bouncing around from Ottawa to Toronto to Guelph to Peterborough to Toronto to Ottawa (that’s Ontario, a province in Canada)….all of it living the most intense chapter I have lived in some time….all of it lived without the support of spiritual community; spiritual community being the thing that I have been so hugely surprised to find to be about as important to happiness, stability and nourishment as oxygen and clean water.

It was the combination of this intense chapter, the absence of healthy spiritual community (because I had left one!) and the presence of some enormous negativity – all this combined to really drain my reserves.

One thing I’ve been aware of since I started to live so differently a few years ago…I’ve been aware of how I’ve been building such great reserves rooted in a beautiful (if radically weird to most) way of life; spiritual practice, Buddhist teaching, simplicity, mindfulness and a pretty thorough departure from my former career and the formal economy (where is that formal economy these days anyway?). But, man, I sure used up a lot of that reserve these last weeks. Spent down that account. And even overdrew it a couple of times before finding my way back to some wacky break even point.

When I decided to come home, back to New Hampshire, I started to revive. Or I started to be ready to start reviving.

Got home yesterday afternoon. And was welcomed back with so much love and grace and ease and simple joy….it was like hooking up to the world’s gentlest I.V. drip….both arms, veins wide open and receiving. Home is mostly the feeling for me these days. The people. And yes this place is beautiful too. SOOOO good to be out of the city.

So many cliches. Pretty much all of them true. Sometimes it takes leaving to see a place. I’ve done so much leaving in my life I should be seeing perhaps more clearly than I do at times. Whatever! But – here I am, home safe and sound and filled with gratitude….filling back up on solidity, clarity, spaciousness, freedom too….some healing to be done from the hurts suffered in this round of intensity….and some gentle contrition too for the impacts of my whirling about.

I was driving from Peterborough to Ottawa today, across flat, cold country, with a biting wind outside the cabin of the red rocket (my mom’s Honda – I’ve been all over this bio-region in the red rocket while she sabbaticals in Europe).

Some of the ride is lovely. Some of it is real scrappy and not so aesthetically appealing. It was in one of those kind of endless stretches that I looked up and saw something I hadn’t seen in some time; a bald eagle.

In the +/- 20 years I’ve spent on the west coast, I saw bald eagles virtually every day. But I’ve been away from the pacific northwest for a while now.

So it was some kind of omen or totemic gift to see a lonely bald eagle soaring the winter winds as I moved down the road (again, still….over soon s.v.p.)….the omen whose meaning I do not yet know. But the gratitude for its provenance is here and now.

I’m one of those people who is fairly good at a number of things; endowed with a randomly distributed set of attributes that our society finds valuable or useful, from how I look to how I sound to how I put language together in persuasive ways etc. I never really had a sense of all this in terms of how I inadvertently became a perfectionist, starting at a very early age. The way the emotional architecture of my earliest days went left me always in search of ways to shore up the supply of love around and for me. It didn’t take my squishy little brain long to figure out that I might be able to “convert” my randomly distributed attributes into affirmation and approval, if not actual real unconditional love (that oft talked about if little practiced greatest of gifts).

Over the last weeks of self-created instabilty and pressurized decision-making….puzzling through (again, still – at higher and higher heat….looking to burn away all the confusion and come up with a hard cinder of clarity) the monastic/houselholder choice – in all of this I now realize how perfectionism has played through it all and how the fool in me (we all have one, even you) has brilliantly blown the perfectionist mask to dust.

Having changed everything in my life in the wake of a beautiful spiritual discovery (via my immersion in the practice as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastic community of Plum Village) – a discovery that has immeasurably improved and even saved my life, it only makes sense, in some silly way, that I would follow that path to its logical conclusion; the life of a monk. But/and my weakness for perfectionism has followed me into spiritual life, just as it dogged me in my much less happy pre-practice life….in some important ways I have been looking at monastic life as the truest and best way to express my spiritual self, live in radical simplicity and be of service. And part of that view (Buddhist teaching of course reminds us gently and firmly – over and over again – to let go of all views) has meant that I have set myself up for a great dualistic dance….I must be a monk or I am a spiritual failure….Good, eh?

Add to this the other big project I have been holding space open for (what I have come to think of as divine union, a partnership relationship with a woman) and we have the makings for a bit of a perfect storm.

So – on October 14 – when N showed up on a long bus ride and sat down beside me five days after I had left the monastery….to begin a conversation that continues to this day (growing more intimate all the time)….when that happened, my fool began to smile – patiently, a bit wryly – to the perfectionist in me….that persona looking for the perfect spiritual life or the perfect partnership life….the fool, being wise and unconcerned about my pride (in fact – quite devoted to annihilating same) allowed me to heat up the tension between these two choices….allowed me to manufacture a crisis that was subconsciously intended to surface the truth, the one, the only right path….and here the fool in me began to laugh quite hysterically at such a ridiculous notion, this grand one true path stuff is just too rich for him, mirthful madman that he is.

Anyway. All this stuff broke over the last couple of weeks. I over-shared with a number of people as my intense process played out. I was unskillful. I was child-like (in ways beautiful and not so much). I was – well – foolish.

Perfect.

Now I have taken everything off the front burner. Shaved another big slice of pride off my separate self. And learned so much in such a short time.

I have some friends who were watching this process; they were concerned I was on such a thorough ride that I might gift myself a full-on psych trauma and meltdown….thanks to the practice (which always, always keeps some part of me totally stable as some other parts of me are being ridiculous) – no meltdown. But a lot of material created or freshened up for review and learning.

In these bursts, I feel like I learn more in 10 days than I used to learn in 10 years, which is handy since the tranches of my available 10 year allotments are diminishing.

So. Yes. Back to gratitude. To the fool. For the practice. For the love and support that is here for me – scattered hither and yon across Big Mama. For my health. For the weird combination of courage, craziness and beautiful aspiration that fuels me through this period of life.

D bemusedly asked whether I was cooking all this stuff up, this rich chapter I have been living, so that I could have good material for the book (when I get back to writing it!)….no, not deliberate. But, yes, some good material….maybe if I can put it together in a humble and compelling way a few people might learn along with me.

I’m in one of those moments – maybe you know the one? Where you find yourself working hard just to stay upright….as winds howl and scream the full distance over the tundra – hitting you in the chest….as the desert scirocco scours your soul, leaving you a wondering husk, muttering the words, “what happened, how did I get here?”

It’s one of those times. And as is often the case for us privileged westerners, these leave-you-naked-and-raw winds are largely self-created.

I’ve been trying to make a decision. A series of decisions. Worldly love or monastic vocation. They’re both alive. They’re both so real in me. They’re both in hand. They’re both beautiful and terrifying. They both call for courage and love and generosity and trust and letting go and reverence and diligence and non-self….they’re the same in so many ways. And pretty different too, yes oh yes. The sweetnesses of each are so different. In the essence of the lived experience, the monastic life of Zen and the partner life of intimacy have such very different flavours.

Perhaps they converge in an energetic way – at a measurable brain wave, blood flow through the heart level. I don’t know. They both have the capacity to bring such enormous joy. Their capacity for generating suffering is not so similar though. Maybe not so different in terms of the challenges of living in spiritual community (as distinct from one’s own intensely private connection through Buddha/God/Presence/Nature etc.) and the challenges of being in intimate relationship….it’s all human all the time.

Anyway. It has been a borderline frantic pace in the choosing and vectoring toward one destination or another….me in a robe in the monastery….or me absolutely not in a robe and in bed with a warm loving body.

More chapters to come.

And – as always – in times frantic and less so, I’ll try and come back to my breath. To my slow steps. To gratitude for all that is wondrous, refreshing and healing within me and around me…..can’t hurt, eh?

….I’ll try and get posting photos figured out again soon….I have some very pretty ones I’d like to share.