Читать книгу St. Nadie in Winter - Terrance Keenan - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPart One
Death of the
Fathers
The End of the Rational Ideal
What makes a life? What makes its choices? Who am I when I stand before another? Before myself in a mirror? And the many things are all mirrors. Who is this when I am alone and nameless, sitting in the woods with sleeping trees and snowy dusk? The answers are always conditional.
Is it where you live? I have an American passport, but I was born in Munich of an Irish mother and an Irish-American father who was then a soldier stationed there after the war. I have a German birth certificate. Does this make me German or American? I know what I have a right to claim, but that does not answer the question. I can claim citizenship through my grandparents. My paternal grandfather was from Belfast. Does that make me Irish or English? It depends upon whom you ask. My grandmother, his wife, was Czech. Her country does not even exist now as it did for her. What does that say about me? Nothing.
I have lived for more than thirty years in upstate New York. This is not Westchester County or the Hudson Valley, but the real upstate that has its own weather section in the Farmer’s Almanac. Up here that thirty years makes me merely a “long-time resident.” My wife is a “native,” born here as her mother was. But I have also lived and worked or studied in Liberia, the Canary Islands, England, and Puerto Rico. I used to consider my roots to be in the rural Delaware Valley, where I was a small child. Now, I don’t know.
Perhaps it is what you do? I used to hate that question. In America the common way of finding out who a person is comes from posing a question about what they do. “Hi, I’m Bob. I’m an engineer. What do you do?” It saves a lot of probing guesswork. One is either this or that, and whatever our stereotypes about that happen to be, we find ourselves satisfied by them. And it is true that many people identify themselves with their work. Can you think of any medical doctor who would not say he or she was a doctor when asked who they were? I could say, for example, that my dad was a grocer, for he worked in grocery stores, supermarkets, and the food business most of his adult life. But that hardly explains the complex and troubled man who gave me a copy of Voltaire when I was only fifteen.
When our children were small, I stayed at home as the primary caregiver. This was unusual at the time. My wife’s career in industry was just beginning to blossom. I had by then been a teacher at a small prep school in Pennsylvania, a lecturer in American literature at a Spanish University, and a freelance writer with one book to my name (from a small press that immediately after went out of business). I also had sold the independent bookstore I had founded and operated for seven years. I worked at night teaching business communications and American literature at the adult education extension of the local community college. I wrote poems while the children napped, and I created paintings on weekends.
I learned quickly not to say I was a homemaker. People would wince as they tried to place a Betty Crocker template over me and my firm handshake. Nor would I say I was a poet or an artist. Despite national poetic figures as wildly different as Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, the stereotype of the Oscar Wilde aesthete tiptoeing through the tulips was what I felt came to mind for many of the people I would meet. I’d say I was a writer and taught at MVCC. That was okay. It had a ring to it. But it wasn’t who I was.
Even after fourteen years working in rare books and manuscripts at a research library, with an MLS and professional publications, I do not call myself a librarian. After doing consulting work for UNESCO in Germany, I find I could also call myself a documentalist, but I don’t. For six years I’ve worn the shaved head of an ordained Rinzai Zen monk, but unless people ask me about my head (and some do!), I rarely mention it, despite my deep involvement as a clergyman in our community. It is because of who I am that I am a monk, not the other way around.
Perhaps it is the way you live or what has happened to you? Are you handicapped? A widow? A Catholic? A Jew? A victim (of what)? And me? I’m a drunk, an alcoholic. Twelve years ago I went into rehab and have been working recovery ever since. For six of those years I taught meditation to other alcoholics and addicts at a local rehabilitation unit. My twelfth-step work. When I finally went for help, I was a tenth of an inch from losing everything—job, family, life. I have absolutely no doubt that if I had continued as I was I’d be dead now. This is the real thing. I am not afraid to talk about it but neither do I advertise it. I was told that if I wanted to get better I had to completely change my life. Yeah, right, I thought. I was 41. I was me. I could be a good boy and not drink anymore, but I could not change who I was. I was wrong. I am not the same person I was twelve years ago. I could not have predicted who I became, nor how substantively different. Clearly, being an alcoholic is not a defining characteristic.
Vanity is such a subtle thing. Twice a year I am supposed to attend intensive “retreats” called sesshin at a traditionally-run Buddhist monastery in the mountains as part of my training as a monk. It is the kind of training one comes to realize has no end point. It is a life-long way of keeping in shape spiritually. One of the two sesshin is always supposed to be Rohatsu Sesshin. This is an eight-day affair that takes place in the first week in December, ending on December 8, the day that traditionally marks the Buddha’s enlightenment. It is the most demanding and the most rewarding sesshin, with up to fourteen hours of meditation a day. The mountains can be beautiful in December. One year a heavy snowfall wiped out power in a three-county area and temperatures in the zendo dropped to thirty-three degrees. But we just put on long johns under our robes and sat in a silence so deep (no heat pipes, no water running, no lights humming, no white noise), we could hear the snowflakes settle outside. We were transported back three hundred years to a monastic experience impossible almost anywhere today.
In December of 1997, I was sitting through my eighth Rohatsu and my fifteenth or sixteenth sesshin at the monastery. Compared to some participants, I was still in my sesshin adolescence, but I was not a newcomer. I knew from experience that the first two or three days are the most difficult, rather like a wilderness canoe trip, and then one toughens up and truly enters into the rhythms of the extraordinary silent dance sesshin becomes. But this time I did not toughen up. Pain in my legs and back increased each day. The little sleep we got was erratic at best for me. By the sixth day I was nearly passing out from pain. But I refused to say anything to anyone. We do learn how to deal with pain and I was convinced I was failing to do so in some way, weakening in my resolve. Certainly Rohatsu in a Rinzai monastery breeds a kind of samurai attitude, a sense of toughness—we are the Dharma Marines! This may be helpful in some circumstances, though I am not so sure what they might be. It nearly killed me, at any rate. I would not let myself see something was indeed wrong with me—not a failure of will (ironic in this ego-eradicating environment) but of body. I would not listen to the warning signals. I was very sick.
It took some time for the doctors to get it right because the symptoms are easily disguised as something else. Besides, men who grew up as athletes, as I did, tend to hold on to the notion that they are immortal and don’t need doctors anyway, so I didn’t even mention at first some of the things bugging me. I thought they’d go away by themselves. But I was finally diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a hyperthyroid condition rare in men. The pain I experienced at Rohatsu came from loss of muscle tone in my body as my overactive thyroid consumed my proteins. I was so convinced I was beyond egotistic concerns for myself I couldn’t see my arrogance of denial. Subtle indeed. Does this make me an invalid (curious word in this context, if you shift the accent a little . . .)? No, I am getting better. It’s serious, permanent, but manageable, like a low-grade diabetes. This humbling lesson has not, however, changed who I am. Something else has, and I am still discovering what that something is.
The American Soto Zen teacher, Dennis Genpo Merzel, writes in The Eye Never Sleeps: “We think life and death [or sickness and health] are separate phenomena. We never think of life and death as the same; that would be illogical. Only one problem . . . reality is not logical. Truth is not rational; only our minds are. We are so egotistical, so arrogant, that we want to make reality into a concept, reduce life to a logical idea. We spend all our time looking for some concept of Truth, but Truth is what is left when we drop all concepts. . . .” Who is not dying or ill in some way? Death is the one thing at which we cannot fail.
Vimalakirti says: “All sentient beings are ill, therefore I am ill. My sickness will last as long as there is ignorance and self-clinging. As long as beings are sick, I myself will remain sick.”
It is a way of saying I will remain human. Merzel comments on this: “When we are trying to be strong, defending ourselves, we can’t let ourselves get sick. We force ourselves to stay well because we don’t feel strong enough to be vulnerable Delusion is a concept; enlightenment is a concept. Health is a concept; sick is another concept. We seek after health and try to avoid sickness, seek after enlightenment and try to avoid delusion. All are just concepts! Without concepts we find ourselves unbounded, undefined; and our greatest fear is to live without boundaries, without definitions Everyone and everything can come in . . . .” When my own health broke, something hard and bitter in me broke as well. There stood Nobody.
A Sweetness Appears and Prevails
The reason we bother
to get up in the morning
is because of everything;
is because there is another arithmetic
without internal sense
and we ache at the borders;
is because the grey music
of the first chickadee before dawn
in the hemlocks
is the grinding engines of the humpyard
carried on morning air;
is because we are afraid
and know everyone is afraid
and do not know
who will soothe our tears
nor how many tears
we will hold unshed.
You seem to be you
and I seem to be me.
My sorrows are no greater
than your sorrows.
Thou art beautiful,
o my loves,
as tears are.
This is how we begin—in the morning with small birds near and echoing train yards in the distance—afraid. Exactly like one another. If the grass, the trees, the small birds, the snow, the wind, and all things living and inanimate belong each to themselves, to whom do we belong? I am you when you are alone and nameless, before any river or tree, when the darkness before the stars itself was fearless.
Unravel All This Interim
There is almost always
sometimes an answer.
Each summer day the cabbage-white
lives forever
and has no use
for the center of anything.
As for the dried stones of winter—
he’s been them all.
In a universe of so-called oneness, what is not the same? We want it to be us. And we do not want it. The Chilean poet Cecelia Vicuños writes: “In Nahuatl, one of the names for God is ‘nearness and togetherness.”’ We wish to be unique and together at once. It is a kind of sadness, this longing.
Voices in Your Understanding
After this sadness
there is another sadness
and it must be addressed
without mute
for it presses urgently
for utterance
the endlessness of our longing
to return once again
to where the body
is blue leaves of sky
torn by the wind.
There is a mathematician and glass artist I know who claims we are simply our bodies and that our bodies are our memories, not the magnetic tape computer model but an inchoate mass of all we have experienced, from which we select our particular past to be who we think we are. It is the latter part of this equation that is mutable. Jorge Luis Borges pushes this vision to the limit in his short story, “Funes the Memorious,” in which a boy comes to remember absolutely everything without any choosing and becomes incapable of thinking about who or what at all: “To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teaming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence . . . . Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.” We are not our memories. We are not spectators. As Samuel Beckett writes, “Think about what you are saying. Do not think about what you are saying.”
There is a word that comes to us from the Middle Low German that means to be tongue-tied. Not so much that one cannot think what to say, but that the experience is so beyond words and the conditions defined by words and their reasoned order that the tongue is tied by expressing silence. It is mumchance. It is the experience one has confronting something beyond meaning. When something “means.” it means for us. I am tongue-tied when I confront what is, as it is, with no me as a referent. It is accepting a sense that is not our sense of the way a thing makes sense.
It has something to do with a new experience of faith. Not faith as one learns it: a compulsory belief in something one can’t really know. That was faith as an ideal. This is more of what a friend of mine in AA calls, “a willingness to take the next step even though you don’t know what will happen.” It is seeing the “truth” of every stone, every tree, every wind without concepts of truth or words to define it. The late Iris Murdoch suggests that concerned attention “effects a removal from the usual egotistic fuzz of self-protective anxiety. One may not be sure that those who observe stones and snails lovingly will also thus observe human beings, but such observation is a way, an act of respect for individuals, which is itself a virtue, and an image of virtue.” When I become without boundaries, I know without fear I am nobody.
Mumchance
It is not for understanding
nor clarity of meaning
I listen carefully to you,
late thrush
across the meadows.
The End of Perfection
The spiritual life is often described as being on a path. It implies direction, purpose, end. Even an endless path suggests to us an evolution toward some kind of perfection. One is either on it or off it. I think I can tell those who are on it from those who are not. I am not on it—or if I am, only tentatively, by default, an accident, or some mistake. Some day I’ll be found out and bumped off by those who deserve to belong on it. I can never reach perfection, though I assume it’s out there. In other words, despite being driven by my ego, it is difficult to accept that I can ever be free of the traps from which the spiritual path is supposed to lead me.
In Buddhism they sometimes refer to the wayless way or the pathless path. To enter the way of the Dharma is to enter a territory without maps. Maps and paths are concepts. Concepts no longer apply. This is terrifying to most of us, especially if we are trying to find our selves! The Lotus Sutra says the Buddha’s teachings are like the wind, powerful but without a discoverable source, leaving no trace in the sky.
There is a wonderful scene in the film Black Robe, a film about the coming of Jesuitical Christianity to Canada in the early seventeenth century. A group of people are traveling by canoe. They are a mix of trappers, Jesuit priests, and Native American guides (including a woman), the latter tentatively converted to Christianity. The canoes come around a bend. The spreading vista of a lake and deeply forested eastern mountains opens before them. It is a breathtaking scene of wilderness at the edge of winter, just before the first snows, before the grey waters freeze. Totally still, silent, vast, sleeping. One of the priests gasps. He curses the landscape as a God-forsaken, demon-ridden realm, wild, outside God’s laws. He is afraid. To him it is like death. It is without guarantees. It is without maps, wildly imperfect, without order, directionless, chaos. There is no reasoning with it. We desire acquired wisdom (science) to become infused wisdom (Dharma).
No Talk of Dying Well
When are you not afraid,
o my loves?
Go there to be born
a swirl of dust,
shadows of wind,
traceless cloud life.
Until recently, I thought I first met St. Nadie in a not very coherent poem I wrote about twenty years ago, also called “St. Nadie In Winter.” I did not recognize that the voice had always been with me. It is clear to me now I was only half listening to the voice all that time. The poem had some surprising bits in it that I did not understand but that I knew held the seeds of something interesting:
With a lamp and keys
Desire prowls among these trees
crippled with diseased soil.
Do not meet it.
It will eat any scrawny wish,
Then swallow you whole.
. . .
Is it only the Dead say something
worth remembering,
or is it each small soul bent,
huddled outside the enemy camp,
genius and immortality grey or broken
in its hands?
. . .
A crow flaps and is still
in the dead harpy’s worms.
. . .
Who does not wish to be air
free of itself
alone in red sky?
I spent many lines trying to make what I sensed to be important to come out. But I was in the middle of my long, painful apprenticeship to the art of poetry and, like any apprentice, I did not have the master’s perspective. Desire, death, remembering, freedom, fear were things I had not lived sufficiently. I was so busy looking for meaning for me I couldn’t hear the wisdom of Nobody. I ended up playing a game of words and pretend. We do not leave make-believe behind when we emerge into so-called adulthood. We just call it rationalization. It is said rationalization is more important to life than money, food, or sex. While we can get through weeks, months, even years without some of these others, it is impossible to get through a single day without rationalizing something. How difficult it is to know the actuality of our inner voice, to know it is not some fiction we have created, a rationalized mask over our own godless wildness. I wanted to be free of myself and was at the same time afraid that to be so was a kind of death.
Life continuously refuses to show us the plot. The desire to give it shape, and by shape, meaning, is so great anything will do. But Orwell would have us stand against all the “smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don’t cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being.
When I was eighteen or nineteen I lived with my parents and sisters on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. At the northeast tip of the island is a mountain pine forest called Las Mercedes. We lived a short ride from there near the old city of La Laguna. One day I was determined to take a camping trip to the forest. I borrowed a sleeping bag from a colleague of my father. I took a skin of wine, a loaf of the crusty local bread, and some cheese and fruit in a pack with the sleeping bag and made my way by bus. I don’t recall what I said to my father or sisters, but I told my mother I was going for a mystical experience. Odd as it may seem, she accepted this. She knew I had an intense relationship with nature. She used to joke with friends when I was little, “Terry is so cute. He talks to trees.” I had felt myself slipping away from that “conversation.”
So, I took the bus one afternoon to the end of the long valley, northeast out of La Laguna. By the bus stop, there was a small grotto used for picnics and as a toilet by those awaiting the bus. I found a trail leading up the mountains and followed it. The day was sunny and dry, the scent of pine heady in the air. I crossed a road and continued upward, following into the mountains a trail that kept disappearing and then reappearing in odd places. I began to pause frequently, partly from the steady climb, partly from the slippery footing on the pine needles on the forest floor. There was little undergrowth. Just before dusk I reached a ridge. The trees grew right to the top of it. I found a small bowl-like indentation in the slope, about ten feet across, filled with pine needles, that faced southwest. I decided to settle there for the night, hoping for my “experience” while the sun set, as though I could schedule an insight into the true nature of the universe. I took out my food and ate half of everything, happily watching the sun go down. It was lovely, but nothing “happened.” I crawled up to the ridge, overcoming my fear of heights somehow, and looked over. It dropped off suddenly several thousand feet, but instead of darkening forest and ocean, I saw a sea of grey as a vast bank of clouds spread just below me. With the cooling air after sunset, the clouds began to rise toward me and flow over the top, filling my side of the forest with thick fog and a soft, misty rain that was part of the air itself. It became cold and damp. I pulled my clothes and food along with myself into the sleeping bag and hunkered down for a long, silent, wet night. I was tired from the long climb, so I slept regardless.
The first edges of grey light and the dawn birds woke me. I sat up stiff and wet. Cold. Feeling a bit sorry for myself. Disappointed I had been unable to have the special moment I had come for. I took a leak, watching the little yellow river flow under the pine needles and down the slope. My bread and cheese had remained dry, so I made a small breakfast for myself and washed it down with the remaining wine in the skin. Then I just sat there for a while. I stopped assessing the situation and joined the still trees as the last of the fog drifted down toward the valley. No sound but the soundless sound of fog moving off in the sunrise. After some time, I have no idea how much, there was a kind of music off to my left. Someone was whistling a tune. I heard footsteps and saw a young man, perhaps only a few years older than myself, striding down the trail. He burst into song briefly, into one of the local cantos folkloricos and then continued whistling as he forgot the words again, on down the mountain. He never saw me among the pines. I remained still as the whistling faded. Some resistance in me followed the whistling away and I was suddenly filled with a great and inexplicable love for this stranger singing in the morning. For the silent trees around me. The welling love burst me, or rather there was in that instant no me to burst, only the forest, the mountain, the teeming sun misted valley all humming and huge and breathing itself
Times later (seconds, hours, eons) I found myself again, shaking, tears running freely down my face. Whence this vast exhausting unconditional love? I used to marvel at the story of St. Tarcisius, whose name seemed a little like mine, who was martyred holding the Host against his breast. I felt this burning joy in my own breast that day as I methodically and neatly gathered my things and walked home, the whole way, ignoring the bus, past farms and dogs and the outlying hamlets. By the time I got home, dusty and quiet, I had banked the coals of that fire into a corner of my inner hearth.
This was not an occasion for exalted self-feeling. It was not forced, though initially I had tried to force it. It was not reasoned attention to nature or to myself, but an experience to which I could avail myself only by dropping any pretense of a participating individuality or self And I had to drop it without thinking about dropping it. The completion, the presence brooked no inner or outer sensibility, no being part of or being apart from. I have never spoken of this experience before now. I never questioned its reality, but, as I had with similar ones when I was younger, I learned not to say much about them. Imagine my shock of recognition when I discovered these lines in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself . . .
I was not alone. No one is alone. This is the first understanding.
A professor of religion I know at Syracuse University once declared that the “Age of Miracles” is past, that insight experiences are no longer possible in our empirical world. He is wrong. It was through such experiences, affirmed by reading Wordsworth, and through these words I read at sixteen in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that I decided to give up dreams of being a botanist or some sort of scientist, according to family wishes and my own desire to be with plants, to become a writer: “Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race.”
There is something I chant every morning. The words are in Pali and said to be the only actually recorded words directly from Shakyamuni Buddha (all the subsequent Sutras are enlightened glosses, brilliant fictions), spoken on his deathbed, his final and greatest message:
Atta Dipa
Viharatha
Atta Sarana
Anana Sarana
Dhamma Dipa
Dhamma Sarana
Anana Sarana
The translation I like best is:
You are the Light itself!
Do not be afraid.
You are the refuge of the Light.
There is no other refuge.
You are the truth itself.
Light of the Truth!
Refuge of the Truth!
When I told my teacher I wished to be ordained, she said, “Who is this who wants to be a monk?” I sat with that for many days. One early morning the sangha was chanting “Atta Dipa.” It has a lovely singsong quality that most of our chanting, in the Japanese style, does not. As we settled into zazen (sitting meditation) after the chanting, I let the modest tunefulness trail around in my brain for a little, saying the syllables over and over. At some point the meaning of the words slipped into the flow: you are the Light itself! Suddenly I was flooded with light and tears, not unlike the morning on the mountain, and I knew the answer to the question, not just in my head but in my blood and bones: Atta Dipa, the Light itself There is no wishing. There is no monk. There is the Light itself, as Soen Roshi loved to say, already and always.
The metaphor of the bird, who comes and goes without leaving a trace in the air, whose song goes no one knows where after it is heard, is commonly used for the wayless way. I turn, further, to alcoholics and addicts, those who have reached their bitter bottom where choice has been removed by addiction, where learned values and sense are overruled by a sickness that can allow one to rationalize behavior that will kill (alcoholism is usually fatal and can only be arrested). Such people are my companions, not just reminders of what it is like to have choices removed, to be a prisoner of a socially stigmatized disease, but because I am one of them. Then how do we mean?
I Am Not Ready to Be Without
Once upon a time
once and for all went away
without a trace.
The drunk—his heart bewildered,
he has become my companion.
The flying bird—
pathless in the winter sky,
she has become my heart.
Picture a small boy looking out his bedroom window at dawn. He sees below him a walled garden under very old trees, the brick walls heavy with ivy. There is the scent of green on the air, of apples, of earth and manure from the nearby farm. The grass in the garden is wet, and the small flowers are heavy with dew. In the garden he watches a woman with long white hair, the first time he has seen it long, let down. She is walking barefoot. Her nightgown and robe are wet at the bottom. She is holding a cup of tea, walking very slowly, talking to her plants softly, words he cannot quite hear, until he realizes they are words she has never spoken to anyone, they are Czech, her birth tongue. He senses, without words of his own to articulate it, that this is a private moment, how she places herself into her day. The unexpected intimacy moves him deeply. Though he witnesses it again over the years, this first touch of an inner other stays with him—what it is to be with another without judgment, to enter their vulnerability, a sudden unsought intimacy that eliminates “other.” It is the intimation that the “light itself” has no boundaries.
Your Miscellaneous Way
Occupying your own skin with joy,
I watch you
listen to yourself living,
discovering each day
how much less of everything
steadies you into being.
The End of Linear Certainties
To have something to say is to be a person. But
speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is
an intensely relational act.
—Carol Gilligan cited by
Kate O’Neill in Buddhist Women on the Edge
Each day at work I encounter what Isaiah Berlin calls, with only a little melodrama, “the inflamed desires of the insufficiently regarded to count for something among the cultures of the world”—in this case the culture of working in an academic research library. There are 200 employees here. Our work is largely service. Each of us would like our work to count for something, for ourselves to count for something. Usually we do not experience either. There are many people who are lonely and afraid. We recently survived a strike by unionized support staff with all the attendant acrimony. Yet the administrators are not bad people. They are really quite ordinary. It often seems to me a case of loneliness in Herder’s sense: “To be lonely is to be among people who do not know what you mean.” However mindfully we witness our own experience, if it does not include that of others, we remain lost in it. A shade is not the whole dark. But the arrogance of our Western linearity, where we hold to the singularity of our own experience of the world, denies a deeper relativity we all sense that gives the lie to any single moral and intellectual universe.
Buddhism does not interpret, does not place values, which are necessarily conditional. To say the end of truth or morality is the beginning of nihilism is just another duality, a mere pairing of concepts. It is a way of copping out—saying nothing matters; I’m not responsible.
A person has every right to say, “So what? How about me? I’m more than this. I’m less than this. You don’t know what I am or mean.” But we all have something to say and a need to be heard, a responsibility to listen. To listen, to hear with an open heart, we have to know forgiveness, perhaps Christianity’s greatest single gift to the world, and its most ignored. In a prayer we recite regularly, the Bodhisattva’s Vow, we are admonished to be warm and compassionate toward those who would turn against us. Even if they abuse and persecute us we should see them as teachers. But the real test comes when you change the pronoun from them to us. “Even though we may be fools . . . if by chance we should turn against ourselves . . . by our own egoistic delusion and attachment.” If you can forgive yourself, “who can be ungrateful or not respectful, even to senseless things, not to speak of a man or a woman”—or ourselves. Here we find the beginnings of understanding what it means when there is nobody to forgive . . . when first we forgive ourselves.
We Forgave Each Other at an Early Age
Not the path
overgrown with dead summer grasses,
not the chilled cedar swamp
not the imperfect strategies,
not the grief,
not the world—
two old hawks
high over the darkening fields.
“What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, was not the real thing?” Tolstoy writes someplace. I’ve been asked that if this were true of me, could I forgive myself? For what? Living a lie? Coming to the place where I could face the lie has been a long journey. We are asking for something not wiser, better, or more perfect, but for something authentically real for us as human beings, real as we are real, imperfect, incomplete. This humble and humbling attitude has the effect of allowing us to revere what is.
Too Old to Unfurl the World
Step by step we taste the ground.
Step by step we taste the ground.
The sound of a name
the name of a sound.
The request of the soul
is closer
than we are to ourselves.
During the winter we sit down to breakfast half an hour before sunrise. Through the window by the table, in the grey light under the cedars, I watch juncos land on the birdfeeder’s metal roof and slide down the new powdery snow to the feeding bar. At first they seem startled, but then they do it again and again. Small winter birds sledding at breakfast. May we find each other in this experience.
The Whole Household Is Pending
Dishes rattle in the sink.
Cupboards slam and the smell of food
rises from floor to floor.
So, say, then, from the heart
that you are the perfect day
and in you dwells
the little ruined light
that does not fail.
In a direct, linear way we see desperation approaching, wordless, enveloping, inevitable. But it is not inevitable. We have a choice how to respond, unless we have given over our choice to addiction. The wisdom by which we are able to realize in ourselves the truth of a thing must not be only intellectual. It needs an element of attentive affection. One of the names for the Buddha—any Buddha—is Tathagata. It is usually translated as “thus come.” It also means, at the same time, “thus gone.” It makes no difference. At the turn of this paradox, just as we suspect that birth was the death of us, in the midst of total uncertainty, we can love.
Loathe to Leave You to Your Death
When you are no good,
when you are fodder,
when your ground is soiled,
when the precious child leaves you
without looking back,
when your truth is falsified
by terror and death,
when all doors are ashes
and all walls are deaf,
when your breath tastes like iron,
when you will never know a day
without some sort of aching,
you are beautiful
o my loves
as tears are,
comely as the first holy snow.
