20201130

We debated trust. She said it was about someone being dependable. I said it was about someone being who they are. She didn’t trust the thief. I did, saying that you could depend on the thief taking every opportunity to steal. I presented this quandary to my Zen teacher, hoping, of course, that she’d side with me. She said that we were both wrong, and that you can trust the universe. I told her that she kept saying that. “Maybe someday you’ll hear it,” she replied. So then I ran it past my friend A, who said that it was in the Heart Sutra. There are a few zen texts like the Heart Sutra that say everything, so that’s always a safe bet. I asked her what she meant and she said, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” Maybe I’ll understand that someday. So I changed the subject and said that we have to both see that everything is the same and also, that everything is different. So being “colorblind” is necessary, treating everyone as just another member of one’s tribe, while at the same time recognizing that they are so different. Then she said that this is just about semantics, which to me is a “heads I win tails I lose” argument because if you deny it you aren’t really listening and if you accept it then you are just wasting your time. So back to the question, what does is mean to trust in the universe. We can trust that we’ll be surprised by “what’s next.” Or we can use the idea of probability to explain everything. Like, “it was bound to happen.” That feels cold and actuarial. We use the word “refuge” in Zen. Trusting the universe seems like taking refuge, beyond using probability. I can trust the universe to keep me on my toes, and to encourage me to be authentic and loving. Life will not be an easy race, but the ride is fun.

(2 days later) I've been thinking more about "trusting the universe" and it keeps coming back to karma. Whatever we do volitionally creates karma. We can depend on the universe in that regard. My sister and I would drink my parent's scotch, and then add water so the level wouldn't change. We got away with it for awhile until we were busted. I think a lot of people think like that. They drink and drive and didn't have an accident so they think they are home free. But the universe is dependable in the way that we make a difference even when we fail, and that nothing goes by unacknowledged. We can trust the universe in that regard.

20201129

20201128

The Dreams Escape

20201127: The Dreams Escape

Dreams are rising from the sleeper
like steam from a hot towel.
They waft past bedstead and dresser
bump and jumble their way toward the window.
The sleeper thrashes his sheets, 
throws off his blanket.
Fragments of dream—llama quilt-suited
for winter, striped Christmas candy,
spaceship diving toward Earth—
collide as they float.
Out they go into the damp of the night,
drawn by the need of dry-minded sleepers
up the hill, across the bay, fog on the water.
They are eager to say what they can't quite say,
share their stories that won't stand still,
find their way to dream islands, dream continents.
A wave of them—puzzle pieces, shards of letters—
float from the house, followed by a second,
and the dreamer drifts toward the day. —Sarah Webb

Blocked Out Fiber

Do you ever think you are getting any closer? This mean guy wanted to kill Buddha. As he walked toward Buddha to do the deed, Buddha stood still. Yet the distance between the two remained the same. Finally the poor guy succumbed and became Buddha’s disciple. Last night we looked at the koan where the young monk wanted to know about Zen. His renowned teacher asked him if he had eaten his porridge and then told the monk that he should then wash his bowl. According to the koan, the monk was then enlightened. I wondered why at this older age I’m still the kid, the youngest in my family. The monk, so to speak. Why do I identify with one person in a koan rather than the other? How many lifetimes will it take to identify with the master? To be the one answering the question rather than asking it? Getting closer means to reduce the distance between you and it. Yet just the opposite seems to be true. For me, getting closer is not even like standing still, but it is like walking backwards.

So earlier I was on the floor moving a keyboard drawer so that it would center on a larger monitor. At the same time, Mensa was talking to our 6-year old who was reading to us. If I was a good grandfather, I’d drop my tools and focus on the conversation with this delightful kid. But instead I thought about how I needed to finish the keyboard so I could get the turkey in the oven so I could do the 5pm family zoom call so I could do my 7pm class and so on. I became very anxious and started thinking about the neuropsychologist who did a podcast talking about how it is the job of the brain to regulate the body. So what is my brain doing? Why were these particular chemicals being produced and not others. If I was a Valium user, I would have done that. I knew I was stuck in this anxiety of getting all this stuff done, and yet that didn’t make it go away… or at least it could have quieted down. Within me there were two of us… the one who was anxious because, damn it, he had a plan to get a bunch of things done, and then there was the one who had an opportunity to forget the plan and pay attention to his precious 6-year old.

So I keep walking, apparently faster and faster. Sometimes I can almost touch it, and other times I reach out for that banana split and bruise my hand on the glass that separates us. Maybe if I walked backwards more I’d move forward. Moving forward just doesn’t seem to work. My daughter-in-law was talking about how when you walk in the room you should be authentic. I said something like then you can’t be wrong like when you are trying to be someone else. We talk in Zen about returning to our original self… our original nature… our buddha nature… who we really are. It is a long road, like when the Israelites took 40 years to take what should have been a one-day journey. They couldn’t have taken a longer road if they had tried.

I think that if it was easier it wouldn’t be so much fun. It would be like playing darts except the dart would be attached to an elastic band that went right to the bullseye. What fun would that be?

Blocked Out

Davis Meets Pollock

Neon Beyond

Neon

B&W

Guernica 2

L&M3

L&M in Gutter

COVID

L&M

Ran

To "Ran" by Kim Mosley

It is not what we see
in the bright shapes of the day--
a crinkled gold of sunshine
on flowers and steps,
a pond we walk by catching the sky
a watered lawn the right green.

These are there, of course,
and true in their way,
as is the gray of concrete,
rainy morning duty
where we rise with not enough sleep
and drink our coffee, shake our arms,
our shoulders, to rouse ourselves.
Look at the sunshine creeping
under the blinds, we say,
You can do this—get out there!

But behind all that—the sun catching
rainbow on the drops from the sprinkler,
the paper we draw from our briefcases—
lies an ocean that sun and paper
float in, a dark they rise out of, like islands.

An antelope runs the plain.
It leaps the absence,
the gap,
the lightless fjords between the known.
Its body—not-body—is a black possibility,
a night that turns into the face of day

that turns into so many things—faces
and oranges and isthmuses,
crowded onto our mainland of the real.

Beyond it float fragments and wires
of the ungraspable,

an island of fog
where the unnamed and the unnameable
rub against each other in the mist

and the broad water beyond it all,
the deep below things and their names,
the black of everythingalltogether
not yet born
ready to rise.

—Sarah Webb, 11/16/20

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