Manual Labor of the Mind

It's a Scary World out There by BGLewandowski

I wasn't sure whether to add a post before I depart for Sesshin -- this time it's Koans Sesshin! Big, bad, scary, super-Zen-y, Rinzai-style Koans Sesshin! Stirring up the hungry ghosts and scary thoughts in my mind just in time for Halloween.

How did I even end up on the path of Zen, anyway? I think in some alternate reality, I am really a Vipassana practitioner. I love colorful scarves and shawls, and would love to wear them while meditating with the community. Or maybe I'm a Shambhala practitioner at heart. There's a common stereotype about Zen that it's the most hard-core, and the Vipassana and the Shambhala practitioners are so much gentler. I have a very high tolerance for fidgeting in the Zendo, and can sometimes feel out of place with what seem to me like a bunch of stone Buddhas. But now I have more black shirts and pants than anyone I know. And I pack nearly every one of them in a big suitcase to stay one week at the monastery where nobody is looking at me.

It's all just pre-Sesshin jitters. Pre-Sesshin jitters are very interesting to watch. The small mind just knows the jig is up, and that it will not get to live in the manner to which it has become accustomed. It can get very energetic and create some mighty delectable and hard-to-resist trains of thought.

I am also noticing that the more I go, the less I understand why I do.

Anyway, I was inspired, as I usually am, by the Dalai Grandma. Today, she writes about that tender feeling of compassion for those who leave Sangha, or leave the practice of meditation because they think they can't meditate, or it has become too hard. Which it is. Hard. Which is why we need to be so compassionate to ourselves in practice. And yet disciplined. Sheesh. She explains it a lot better than I do! Give a bow to the Dalai Grandma.

I have kept the July issue of the Shambhala Sun right by my computer, because I have been meaning to turn a few sentences of an article from it into a blog entry. Again, this koan of Right Effort.

Here are a few snippets from "It's Not Us and Them" by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche:

Because as practitioners we are doing something that is good and wholesome, we too have difficulties. It’s important for us not to give up. We should not be foolishly seduced into fantasy, thinking that somehow something miraculous is going to happen. When it comes right down to it, the practice path is manual labor of the mind, and it’s hard work. But that doesn’t mean that there is no magic. When we pay attention to the details of our life, we do find magic. This particular magic is all-pervasive; it is something that is part of us all the time. Seeing it, we appreciate the honesty of this spiritual tradition that says we have to work to uncover it.

With gentleness and mindfulness, we can appreciate what we have....

...we all need to practice responsibility and discipline ourselves. We must look at our own habits and begin to alter them. We can’t hire out our practice and have somebody else do the work, but we can do the manual labor with delight and decency. True relief lies in finding what lies under the chaos and negativity—our inherent awakened nature. The notion of fearlessness is finding it now.

Manual labor of the mind.

I believe it was last year on Sesshin when I was assigned to groundskeeping, and was a crew leader for a team of us assigned to dig out blackberry crowns. Not cut them to the ground -- that had already been done. But digging them out, digging down to the root ball and removing the whole plant once and for all. That is the stated goal.

The reality is not even close. More often, the roots travel sideways in many directions, and wrap around and under big rocks the shovel clanks on. Then it's digging up a big rock. The roots also wrap around and hide under tree roots, so it is hard to know what to dig out and what continued digging might be harming a tree. More often than not the blackberry roots get cut by the shovel, and end up escaping and not found again, and then there's a huge series of holes that need to be filled back in. Factor in rain, or mud, or cold.

Workhorses, SoulCollage card by Laura

At one point, checking in with one of my workmates, who was not feeling well, we broke Noble Silence. She said, "It's no use. These are all just going to grow back."

I realized then one of the reasons for Noble Silence. Her words echoed in my head for days.

But sometimes, I could find the crown-- some people called it the heart, one person called it the brain -- the tangly ball that is the source of the lanky, leggy, stickery, pervasive blackberries. I started calling it the shin -- the heart /mind. Sometimes I would find it, and successfully dig it out. Only then could I know that at least this one blackberry plant would not return.

At the monastery, they say everyone who is assigned to the blackberries for work practice always returns saying "It was just like my mind!"

I enjoy this kind of manual labor. I know nature can and often will just grow right back without some regular maintenance. It's so obvious. So unarguable.

This practice keeps saying that the result is not what's important. Matching reality to a picture I have in my mind is not what this is about. It's the process, including the compassion I might bring to a wholesome day of work, whether that is shoveling around in the mud at the monastery, or just pinching the spent geranium blossoms, or lying down because I'm bone tired.

It's our intention --- to just be open to the experience of this life. Simple. Not easy.

Maybe there are ways to meditate lightly, to do what you can, still maintaining the essentials. What are those? The intention, I think. It has to move from being the hope to feel peaceful or to rest to being something more, like the hope to be fully human, to be entirely with it for this moment.
~The Dalai Grandma

Life Among the Brambles by bibliona

Coming Home Part II

What have 16 years of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival given me?

Bodily Safety
I wrote about the feeling of bodily safety on my first post. This is one of the more obvious gifts of the Festival. Speaking of a different kind of bodily safety, I cannot quantify the effect of seeing real women's bodies, naked, in the showers (or out) every day for a week for sixteen years. Even women who would be considered conventionally beautiful; to see even those bodies and their curves and creases and stretch marks and imperfections -- it was surprising -- to be so surprised that is. I mean, I knew that real women do not really look like the women we see in media, but it was still a shock to see this full range of bodies, and none of them looking like any of the "bodies" I had seen in media. All of them beautiful. I had no other opportunity to experience this reality in my childhood nor my adult life. Not that I have it all together about that, but

I. Have. Come. A. Long. Way, Baby.

I have been given the experience of bodily safety from within. Internalized. I am so grateful.

Sisters
I didn't get to grow up with a biological sister. I was not a girly-girl. I started fighting against dresses at about age 3 or 4. It was clear to me that being one of the guys was a waaaay better deal. I loved softball through grade school, and junior high, but then the human gyroscope of puberty hit.

My aforementioned porn-addicted boyfriend in college had a wandering eye. It drove me batshit crazy, and because I didn't have what I needed at the time to kick him to the curb, I projected a bunch of the resulting insecurity and crap onto the other women he was attracted to. *sigh* It was a rough time. Untenable for long though, and the stars aligned for me to finally say enough! Just a couple years later, I heard on Day Stage THE song that summed this up completely, "As Cool As I Am" by Dar Williams (I am the others! oh do please listen):

And I must say here, that there is nothing -- nothing -- in this world like the feeling of standing with thousands of my sisters to the yearly anthem at Opening Ceremonies, "Amazon Womyn Rise"

Love
In 1997 I fell madly in love at Festival. Seriously. Madly. It was the kind of thing about which I had absolutely no choice. It was a knee-weakening, all-consuming, dizzy-making collision that had an impact on me from the very first moment like a speeding U-Haul truck. It would have involved a U-Haul truck, except that she was from another country, and had all of her belongings in a backpack, so there was no need. It was passionate and sweet and lovely until, for a variety of reasons some years later, it wasn't, and it ended. In my story with all the hindsight, there are no villains, and I would readily do it all over again; maybe just a few teeny changes there towards the end. Sometimes these chapters in our lives just write themselves. Those are the ones we learn the most from, I think.

And just for fun, here's a great FAQ sheet to address the annoyingly persistent myths about bisexuality: Enjoy.

Spirit
"She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes."

Ah, Puritans. In my DNA seems to live the presumption that the flesh is completely corrupt, especially female flesh, and the only hope of Grace resides in a distant and moody male God, and that Grace comes only from faith, which is invisible and uncertain in us flawed humans. According to Max Weber, the Protestant Work Ethic developed in this absence of reassurance from the (Catholic) church authorities of Grace from "good works"; so its only visible expression got channeled into the zealous pursuit of a worldly "calling" (work) and the only evidence for Grace would be worldly success. The Puritan asceticism, deep mistrust of any form of pleasure, and belief that "idle hands are the devil's workshop" all congealed in an anxious spiritual backdrop that I could never do enough to be okay. And I'm probably not working hard enough.

So...abandoning the disconnected body and spirit patriarchal white-guy-in-the-sky stuff was only possible because I was able to find an expression of spirit I could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste in the patterns of nature and my very own body.

The snake became a potent symbol for me -- the reclamation of the snake -- from the embodiment of evil and temptation to a potent symbol of wisdom symbolized in the shedding of skin, the natural cycles of death and rebirth. I found comfort in the seasons of nature, the inevitability and connection of death to life, the seasons of a woman's life, the appreciation of the four elements: fire, air, earth, water, (five if you count spirit), every aspect of this Earth and the acceptance that large natural forces exist internally in the form of emotions, and that these are just as pure and whole as a volcano or a gentle rainshower.

Without a local group of women to practice with, my yearly trek to Festival allowed me to be in community with others practicing in this way. I did workshops with Vicki Noble and Z Budapest. I got to experience raising a "cone of power" by toning with maybe 30 women and usually a singing or chanting workshop in the beautiful moss-covered oak grove of the Meditation Circle. It was incredible. And so healing. There is no hierarchy in a nature-based spirituality, but there is an ethical guideline, blessedly simple, "And it harm none, do what ye will." All this was so refreshing.

Magical Moments

There have been so many thousands of magical moments. This is really the biggest gift of Festival, these ordinary and extraordinary moments. Here's a random few:

• Walking past the African Dance workshop in the Community Center tent, feeling the heat and power and joy emanating from it.
  
• In workerville, after getting off my shift a little early and catching much of the Indigo Girls' show, then showering alone under a full moon during their encore and hearing "Closer to Fine" live.
• Unbelieveable thunderstorms at night, wondering if the tent would leak, enjoying the chorus of appreciation throughout the woods after every lightening strike and thunderclap.
• Seeing the amazing womyn who cook the food in enormous iron vats over a firepit in the heat of summer in their heavy gloves, jeans and longsleeved shirts, hats and hankerchiefs covering their faces.
• Tarot readings with clearer significance after a week of quieting down.
• The damp, wooded, shady fern-embraced path from Waterworks Way to Tubman Trail. My favorite walk in the whole Festival.
  
• Every single show with sign language interpreters, sometimes more amazing than the performers themselves.
• Walking all the way to the parking lot after night stage performances were over to use the phones at night. Only slightly intoxicated, calling my sweetie, and then lying down in the meadow watching shooting stars streak through the clear sky.
  

Obviously there are too many to mention. I could think of a thousand more. Multiply that by the thousands of womyn who attend. That's a lot of magic.

Michfest 1995

Epiphany

I thought I would wait until after the Life Vows Sesshin to make a decision. Then I would know it was coming from a clear mind. But that's not how it happened.

Companion

It was just the right conversation at the right time, with the right person (my gratitude is boundless, Tay). And whatever movement that occurred then and there was certainly also the result of all of the work that had come before. The last snowflake to fall before the avalanche. No turning back now.

Burnout: February 2007

I have decided to take a Sabbatical. Finally. Just writing it makes my shoulders go down, and I exhale extra long. It also causes a subtle surge of energy to flow upwards through my body, and it causes a feeling of hopefulness and interest. Curiosity. Excitement.

Workhorses

How did this get under the Protestant Work Ethic Radar? What on Earth kind of justification did I come up with to legitimize this? Who do I think I am?

Inner Critic

Tay just calmly encouraged me to make a Plan. Look at Sabbatical applications and proposals from university websites, write objectives, market it. Indeed. I now have a manila folder labeled "Sabbatical," which proves it's real. I even have articles and information in said folder. I have also borrowed three books from the library on the subject. I am in the "geeking out" phase, and I am learning a lot.

I have yet to decide a few things:

1. Exactly What I Will Do
2. How Long It Will Be, and
3. When.

I do have a multitude of ideas for #1. And many of them are career-related, which is one way I have been able to throw a few bones to the Inner Critic and the Inner Puritans. I would like the answer to #2 to be a year. That's what my heart wants. And according to the books, I need to give my workplace LOTS of time to prepare, and also give myself lots of time to make this plan so I can submit a proposal. I have a couple obligations there that I can forsee needing to last into late Spring.

So right after this avalanche, my friend Senryu had an "Epiphany Party," which was something she made up because she noticed that Epiphany was on the calendar for January 6th, and became enamored of the word, and decided to have a bunch of her favorite women friends over, bringing all their crafting materials to share and to make something that would carry an intention into the new year.

I got there faster than you can say "glue gun."

And made this little Altoid box portable Shrine: It's a Shrine to the Transformation of My Relationship to Work (see front of shrine atop this post). My friend Robin is a wonderful collector and appreciator of little objets like these, and I acquired a few of the items from her last February. This little shrine has been wanting to be made for quite some time.

There are many butterflies for their obvious transformational energy. A star to orient myself in the right direction-- stars can only be seen when the sky (mind) is clear. A broom and what I thought was Cinderella's Fairy Godmother (close enough) to help me out of the toiling mind. There are lots of fully blossomed red paper roses. I am no longer a puppy in this field. A little frog in the corner -- they always symbolize Wise Mind to me -- a synthesis of Logic and Emotion Mind, because frogs can live on land and in water. I even dared to include that wonderful admonition from Joseph Campbell to "Follow Your Bliss," even though that still seems rather impossible.
I got to meet with my professional support group today, and share all this. I received so much validation and support. So much encouragement and love. This feels very real. And then tonight, while Patrick is away at a Blazers game, and I have the house to myself, I finally went to the mailbox, and there was a letter I had written to myself six months ago.
I wrote it at the Omega Institute when I was taking the training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The teachers gave us this task, and promised to hold our self-addressed letters until some undetermined time, then they would mail them. And of course, I had by now completely forgotten what I had written to myself then.

It was a lovely and reassuring message, with some heartfelt good advice. A reminder to Pause. Encouragement to keep the Inner Critic in perspective, because she is not going anywhere, and to treat even her with compassion. But mostly to treat myself with compassion.

Kwan Yin

"Go to bed early." This is so true. Laura of July 11, 2008, you were so right. That was coming from a very clear place. "Go to bed early" is the cornerstone of any subsequent regular morning practice. "Go to bed early" requires attention to my evenings and how they are spent. "Go to bed early" comes from that inner mother, that self-nurturing presence. "Go to bed early" is a way to be gentle with myself, and give love to myself in a very tangible, physical way.

But most importantly, to just allow myself to Be. To experience this life. This one wild and precious life. Thank you! Thank you everybody who is supporting me. I am so blessed.

Non-Doing and John Tarrant

I want John Tarrant, Roshi to be my cool Uncle that I can call up and have lunch with from time to time. John Tarrant currently teaches at the Pacific Zen Institute in the San Francisco Bay area. He's had lots of incarnations -- Jungian analyst, accomplished poet, lobbyist for Aboriginal rights in Australia (he's from Tasmania), factory worker, industrial fisherman, and on and on. He has written a couple books, one of which is called Bring Me the Rhinoceros & Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy.
I went to see a talk he gave, and a workshop at the Unitarian Church, who sponsored him to come to Portland. It was a wonderful introduction to koan practice, which had been totally mysterious to me -- well, it still is. But now it's just slightly less scary, because I can now hear the koans in his warm Tasmanian accent.

He has an earlier book called The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life. This book brings a lot of his Jungian influence, and is easy to open at any page to just enjoy a painting with words, really, that blends archetype and Zen, human experience and light.

Here is one of my favorite parts of his book. That rumbling underground you hear is my Puritan ancestors spinning in their graves.

Doing Nothing

We often forget the value of allowing the night and the day to flow in and out of the house while, on the hillside, the grass grows by itself. In general we are not lazy enough, and struggle too hard. Anyone can achieve things but to do nothing requires resolve. To become one with sitting is to become one with walking, with working, with jumping about, with being sad, with falling in love. The world goes its way, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and we are at home. What our integrity leads us to do then is what the old Chinese teachers called "the things of Buddha" -- eating, drinking, laughing, feeding the children, weeping, burying the dead.

The man whose aorta split open at sea said that when he was recovering after surgery, he noticed something: "The habit body, the opinions and thoughts that I normally carry around was quiet. Usually they make a kind of veil, or a buffer over things. But they were silent. And that was very nice."
When we let drop the veils of our usual preconceptions, we are closer to our lives, sustained without knowing why. When we cannot see how healing or the next step in our lives will appear, and no longer know what we can expect, the step we must take just emerges out of nothingness, like the grass. What rises to meet our need comes from a domain deeper than the realm of custom, more ancient, beneath our feet and our awareness, thousand armed, beyond our control. To live without veils, in modesty and unknowing, is to trust the abyss, as a swimmer trusts to the ocean, and gently moves both hands and feet; it is to flow through the day like boys on a raft down the Mississippi. The old Chinese teachers called such activity "doing nothing," or "not-doing." This doing nothing is an inner event that can take place in strenuous action or utter stillness. To do nothing is always harder than we imagine.
Not-doing, in which we lounge around and loaf at our ease, is a kind of falling out of our lives, the way when his aorta split the man fell through and beyond his habits. Visible and invisible hands reach out and we find that we have always been supported by much that is unknown ans beyond our plans. Just as Alice, in the surprising, uncontrollable moment of dropping down the rabbit hole, found a marmalade jar on a shelf, we meet common things in a field of wonder. The orderly progress of breakfast, lunch, and dinner catches us and there is the beauty of work, tea, jam on toast, the body's cabinet of pains, the quick feet of rain scratching toward us over dry leaves.
Unlike ordinary laziness, in which we merely avoid something we think we ought to be doing, the laziness of not-doing has a refined and charged quality. By comparison, ordinary laziness is hard work, and requires distraction. When we truly do nothing, a fertile, widening silence appears. Close to the mystery, we drift along. There is no resistance to delusion, yet delusion can find no ground to cling to. In the midst of action we rely on the stillness that is everywhere present. If the world is imagining itself without our existence, why then, we let it do so. When we truly do nothing, we allow that falling can be good, that arms might catch us when we do fall, that the world may sustain and surprise us at the same time. We respond naturally, witnessing the web of life of which we are a part, just as water runs downhill and the white clouds run before a breeze.
After a certain point, knowing and effort don't bring us into closer harmony with eternity; our love for fragile creatures provides a route. Francis of Assisi spoke with the birds. The Japanese poet Issa was concerned for the little forms of life:

Don't worry spiders,
I keep house
casually.
Not-doing, having no urgent plans, we dawdle in the intimate while, like a child jumping puddles on the way home from school. The world comes to us then, and we belong in it, in the morning light at equinox, with the hawks swinging on the updrafts over the headlands and, in the afternoon, with the fog rising out of the ocean to fling itself, kraken-like, onto the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. At last we are at home in this fleeting life.

karma

I carry the weight of some serious Protestant Work Ethic family karma.

I am descended from these characters on both sides. My mom's side at least mellowed into the kinder, gentler Methodists. Dad's? Hardcore Pilgrims, who first went to Holland, and then the "New World". Here are some of the roots of my family tree:


And from them descended a line of super-religious Presbyterians, many of them those travelling reverends. Here is a photo of my favorite one, Rev Nathaniel Oliver Cobb. Sometimes when I look at this, I can smell the brimstone:

So I felt so understood, so validated when I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. When she set out on a voyage of pleasure, something that seems like it would be so easy, she was able to articulate just why it became a challenge to her every fiber, to her very DNA:

Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of super conscientious people. My mother's family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they'd ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them "oxen".) My father's side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad's family tree all the way to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

Here's a cheery photo of some of those Puritan descendants of mine: The words that come to my mind when I look at them are "pinched" and "tired."

Sometimes it feels like my life is one that would make them all spin in their graves. Then again, I sometimes feel compelled to work harder, longer, do more, knowing it's never enough. That idle hands are the Devil's work, and that Goodness can be found in hard work, and that if it feels good, it must not be work, and is therefore inherently suspect at the very least.

At least I come by all this honestly.