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
04.30.24
Thisness
I think, therefore I am not being.
When I am, I don’t need to think about it;
How does a raindrop perceive itself,
either forming in the cloud,
dripping down the sky,
or disappearing in the ocean?
It is only wet.
There is no deep dive required.
30 APR 2024
06.5.17
Rainbows and sunshine: tanka
This note may be dark,
but it reflects the weather.
Besides, too much light
fades color from everything.
What a gray world that would make!
Rainbows and sunshine
do not help the whole world grow.
There must be dark storms
to fuel life at its deep roots,
build jungles out of deserts.
Seeing only good
is merely self-hypnosis;
dark and light exist
in equal measure out there.
Why persist out of balance?
05 JUN 2017
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What is Love: sestina
Is love a thing that lasts, or a mere trinket,
a toy that fascinates until it bores,
a passing fancy, or eternal compact
between two souls and never any more,
a gift from gods above, or social stricture
meant as a mere distraction for the mind?
If only short-term passion or mere pastime,
who was the first poor fool to ever think it?
Imagine, if you can, that sadist’s picture
of all the violence that love held in store.
It’s hard to even fathom a much more
effective way to stymie human contact.
And what divine creator is so lacking
compassion for their children, all mankind,
that our connecting is a frightening chore,
as fragile as a momentary blink?
Who would believe in such gods any more,
that leaven pain in such a heavy mixture?
And yet, if love is an eternal fixture,
there seems about it a confounding lack
of solid substance built in at its core;
it takes so long for even two to find,
yet needs so little work and time to sink it.
How could it last beyond a day or more?
It seems so ill-equipped for what’s in store:
a world that frowns on any cheerful picture,
that trades not in eternity, but trinkets
designed never to bind, but just attract.
Thus all the poets say that love is blind;
what difference, when our eyesight proves so poor?
Does love last once it’s left the showroom floor,
or does it leave its victims far from shore,
where stripped of all illusion, each one finds
what they imagined was a solid mixture
begins to crumble into dust and crack,
and leave them on a sea with naught to drink?
No, love is more than either of these pictures;
you neither score, nor spend time keeping track.
You find eternity in every moment’s wink.
26 MAY 2017
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You Came to Hear: rondeau redoubled
The music that you came to hear:
a sonic bridge that helps you cross
some gulf of time no longer near,
or spend as a mere hour’s loss,
so in the maelstrom sound’s great fosse
you find your sorrows light to bear,
your jagged rocks made soft with moss,
the music that you came to hear?
What in these tunes allays your fears,
makes sunshine from an endless dross
and with a modicum of beer
a sonic bridge that helps you cross
in mirthful, bright and shiny gloss
from disconnection, felt so clear,
to friends who share a sense of loss:
some gulf of time no longer near.
And when at last the end appears:
last call, that winging albatross
whose warning bursts the happy sphere,
you’ve suffered a mere hour’s loss
and gained a bright and shiny gloss.
Now, when the new day’s dawn appears
and there may seem no way across,
you can reflect back in the mirror
the music that you came to hear.
05 MAY 2017
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Small Towns: ode (Keatsian)
For what it’s worth, most places on a map
merely exist as clots in highway veins:
mere wisps of web for speed or tourist traps,
perhaps historic, where that sense remains.
At thirty thousand feet that’s how they look:
just blips on distant radar, single grains
of sand on beaches that in recent books
rate just almost a star; not worth the pains.
But down here, where the highway meets the chrome,
a place takes on dimension. It retains
some spark, and for those souls that call it home,
an energy that tourists feed upon:
a tilting match between living and death.
The ebb and flow is more or less a tide:
a feast and famine cycle that repeats
quite often at so slow a speed, the ride
seems dull, not worth the ticket price for seats.
At other times, the fulcrum tilts so fast
there seems no forward motion or retreat,
just wearing down what once seemed built to last,
a winner’s gait slowed down to shuffling feet
that struggle two steps forward, one step back,
and finally collapse in a bar seat,
where like an aged and rusted Cadillac,
their owner basks in golden yesterdays
and stares out at new flowers every spring.
Sometimes, influx of new blood fills the streets,
its holy and exuberant refrains
erasing painful memories of defeat
and adding camouflage to ancient stains;
for a brief hour or two, time is forgot,
and with it all self-loathing and distain.
The shiny, feverish fish won’t know it’s caught
until the hook reminds it once again
from whence it came, and how its future runs:
a circumscribing series of events,
monotonous once they’ve just half begun,
and covered with the dust of drawn out days
as soon as the car’s headlights fade from sight.
7 APR 2017
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What Happens Next
What makes reality
ever so puzzling
that vain attempting to
just pin it down
becomes a deception
ensnared in illusion,
naught but a fleeting smile
behind a frown?
What then of fantasy?
Will we think ecstasy
merely a distraction
from duty and will?
How can mere utility
evolve a society
whose fleeting passions live
only in dream?
What is reality?
Now and not yesterday,
wrapped in the presence of
what happens next.
13 MAR 2017
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