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Monday, May 21, 2007

eating life

During the winter, I felt as though the darkness of the early morning were eternal. Each morning I would rise between 5 and 5:30 in the darkness and in silence, I would drink my morning coffee, and then I would sit. The whole world seemed intensely private at that hour. It was as though there were nothing but that darkness and the silence of sitting.

I came to love this moment.

At this same time, the trees were bare, the air was cold, and everything seemed as though it would be that way for ever. I adopted to the winter in an almost animal fashion, understanding it in some peculiar way as the only condition that there was. And indeed, it was true-- for each of those moments that was all there was. It was the act of investing in it as a completeness that did not admit of any memory of spring or summer that created this inner feeling of a clean, cold, perfect and eternal winter.

There was nothing romantic about this. It was simply the fact of living within what we call winter.

When the weather began to change, it was a tremendous shock to me. Counter intuitively-- after all, this is that wonderful moment called spring when everything is supposed to be perfect --I resented the intrusion of daylight into the early morning hours. The warming of the air and the greening of branches and trees was a further shock; winter, that now intensely internal quality which I had inhabited, was changing. What was this about?

I returned from China and I am surrounded by green trees whose greenness and lushness and fullness falls into me like stones into a well. The lush colors of the trees and flowers and the sounds of the birds are substantial, material, edible.

I have had to change to adjust to this. I feel like I am inhabiting an alien universe that I never knew before, where things are growing in this manner. So the whole act of winter turning into spring has become a very different experience for me, and the fact that these impressions are actually a kind of food is felt and sensed more intensely than ever.

Yes, it's true. Perhaps I am merely the victim of some unusual psychic malady, a mild form of psychosis that causes me to see the world in an alienated fashion. I don't think so however. I think this is more a matter of the impressions falling more deeply in the body, reaching places where the assumptions do not dwell. And there are such places in us, make no mistake -- places that do not know what summer or winter is, but that know much larger things our mind is unable to grasp.

We really don't see how our life is food. How impressions are food. Not in some conceptual way: I mean to really see it with the organism itself.

This reminds me of today's morning walk with the famous dog Isabel. I saw her shadow and I realized that when we discuss that famous Zen koan of the dog having Buddha nature, of course we can't know the answer.

How can we know the nature of the dog, when all we ever see is the dog's shadow?

May your wells yield water; may your trees drink it; may they yield fruit;

May your fruit, when pressed, yield wine.

snakes and birds

"Something truly extraordinary must have happened on this planet," I remarked, "in order for reptiles to have grown wings and taken flight."

In the process of transformation on earth, absolutely remarkable things have taken place. In this particular case, scaly, earthbound creatures transformed their outer coating -- that is, their tough, stiff protective scales -- into refined, delicate, airy new structures called feathers. If there ever was a more extraordinary transformation, it's hard to think of it. The nature of the transformation, when combined with further coordinated changes in physiology, specifically metabolism and bone structure, allowed these creatures to transcend their earthbound origins and move into the skies.

In the process, they separated from each other so completely that their original relationship became obscured. When mankind arose, his mythology incorporated them as opposing entities: on the one hand, the snake, the dragon-- evil, poisonous, scaly creatures of the nether regions. On the other hand, the Eagle, the Peacock, the dove-- elegant creatures that soar above us, embodying noble qualities that we earthbound organisms can only aspire to.

In our cultural and scientific infancy, we were unable to see the connection -- that these creatures are cousins to one another, two ends of a single stick bound together through time by a force we call evolution. Without reptiles, there could be no birds. So convinced were we that no such relationship could exist that we ultimately went so far as to negate and erase their origins in our science, creating yet another myth:

the dinosaurs are extinct.

Now we know that the dinosaurs, those lumbering, toothy, carnivorous beasts that seem to come up from the very depths of our collective unconscious itself, are still with us. They have transformed themselves from the creatures of our nightmares to animals that populate much sweeter dreams. Instead of claws that rend and tear, teeth that bite, they offer us songs that lift the soul.

Perhaps we are equally mistaken about the lower nature of man. Do we measure its potential correctly? It's true that we are violent, nasty, dangerous creatures, but can the scaly, hardened scutes of ego we cover ourselves with open-- to breathe, to let air flow through them, and to lift us up, instead of weighing us down in the soil of our worldly attachments?

Perhaps the idea is too romantic. Then again, as I often maintain, perhaps every lesson we need to learn, every intuition we need to have, is already present before us in the lessons of nature.

As I consider the trees, half of whose existence is lived in dark regions we cannot see and do not know, I realize that they draw half of their sustenance, all of their stability, much of their nourishment, from these parts that tap into the marrow of mother Earth. In the same way, we need our lower in nature to anchor us.

Consider it an investment, to see how we are animals. As we discover the humility of being a part of organic life on Earth, we open the doors to the sky and, like the birds, grow feathers, learn to fly.

In Dogen's Shobogenzo, there is a chapter called "Hokke Ten Hokke." "Hokke" means "The wonderful universe, which is like flowers itself." The word "Ten" means to turn.

So this chapter is entitled, roughly speaking, "wonderful universal flowers turning wonderful universal flowers."

At the very end of the chapter, the last two lines state, "the past was exhalation and inhalation, and the present is exhalation and inhalation. This we should maintain and rely upon as the flower of Dharma which is too fine to think about." (quoted from the Nishijima and Cross translation, Dogen Sangha.)

Every thing is like this, my friends. When you are hungry, seek this food. As we go forward over this Memorial Day weekend, let us remember the present as exhalation and inhalation, and hope that our flowers open and bloom,

...with the assistance and blessings of God.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.