Be Here Now, Or Don’t Be
Think about this, now:
being here right here, there is no
being somewhere else.
What you “want” doesn’t matter;
wish in one hand, as they say.
If you choose elsewhere
as the place where you must be,
you’re not here at all.
And where does that choice leave you?
Just where did you leave yourself?
Take a minute to check:
you’re either right here and now,
or you’re not, at all.
If you think too long about it,
you’ve wasted another now.
25 JUL 2024
Zazen
Breathing in and out
Isn’t just for the cushion;
It’s the entire thing.
If you practice just sitting,
This moment is everywhere.
Try to stop breathing,
And your attention can’t last;
You are mind and body.
Pretending at something else
Requires a lot of thinking.
Everything you do
Requires breathing in and out;
It’s all important.
So everything is sacred,
And that is also empty.
21 JUL 2024
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Salt Dolls and Other Temporal Measures
In a dharma talk given July 15th for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (as part of their Summer 2024 Commit to Sit program), Zen teacher Norman Fischer said something quite interesting and profound. He was discussing the viewpoint and attitude toward life of Zen master Tongen Harada Roshi, who although Japanese was of the same generation as Norman’s father (and my father, as well) born in the late 1920s. He observed that each generation, each culture, each country, has their own unique way of defining and understanding what it means to be human – and that once everyone from that generation is dead, there is no one who really understands that point of view and how it affected and influenced the lives those people led, the choices they made, or the way they looked at relationships, religion, spirituality, friendship, love, conflict, or any other profound lens for the human experience. Norman, now in his late 70s, also noted that his own generation, those who grew up in the 1960s and experienced that whole counter-culture, e.g., hippies, free love, exposure to Eastern religions, the anti-war movement, the Kennedy assassination, the “birth” of television, etc., would soon suffer the same fate. Likewise, each of us living now – my own Generation X, across continents, countries, and cultures, for example. It made me think that ultimately, that inability to really understand another generation’s “definition of human” was the real failing of the “hard” sciences of anthropology, archaeology, and history. After all, the truth of my humanity is not defined in what I write down, or the long-lasting artifacts I create. It’s something much more ephemeral: a feeling, a notion, a sense of ennui, angst, fear or hope that pervades how I think, who I think I am, what I think is important, and who I include or exclude. To think that we understand the “mind” of Julius Caesar by reading his battle journals, or Sigmund Freud by his technical interpretation of dreams, is an illusion. Perhaps a useful illusion, but given that it’s filtered through our own judgment and definition of humanity, hardly a “true” and “accurate” grokking of reality. Makes you wonder. We THINK we know so much. We BELIEVE the world is the way we think it is. We have no idea, really. And the more fractured we become in our own time and place, the more that bucket of water you draw from the ocean that you believe to be the wholeness of everything and true representation of the sea, seems so small, separate, distinct, and alien to the bucket of water I draw from the shore just a few miles further down the coast. Neither is the whole ocean.
18 JUL 2024
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Well then there now…
What’s happening now
is all there is of what’s left
in your warranty.
If this was your life’s last act,
how would you be remembered?
Don’t put anything off;
put all of your energy
into everything.
You only have this minute.
What else are you waiting for?
11 JUL 2024
06.28.24
Becoming A
Have you ever seen
someone become, in this life,
a bodhisattva –
I mean, who wasn’t one yet
when they started on their way?
If you can become
a thing you’re not already,
how is that trick done?
Not through potential or work –
that gets you Somewhere.
When your salt doll self
measures the ocean’s suchness,
the shore melts away.
What could be left to become
when you’re only here?
28 JUN 2024
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The Same Breath
So many choices
in a moment’s tiny span;
is it destiny?
No matter your direction,
the path will stay beneath you.
The door is open.
You stand at a great threshold;
which way do you move?
There is just air on both sides.
Never take the same breath twice.
27 JUN 2024
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Prajnaparamita
With what great faculty would you describe
a something that is nothing in itself –
an emptiness that does not rise or fall,
but is and isn’t, both, at the same time,
and lights, but doesn’t land, adrift in time
(which is not quite a ribbon, nor a wheel),
a thought that thinking has no way to grasp
or shape into a solid universe.
Beyond, beyond, beyond what is beyond;
if you can see it, do not trust your eyes.
25 JUN 2024
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