Everyday Zen

Just a follow up note on new EVERYDAYZEN website: we launched the site in April, and since then we've added about 100 of Norman's talks and lectures, so please feel free to stop by and check it out. Here are two of my favorites, about language and poetry:

Language (audio)
Language and Dharma (text)

Norman is a poet, as well as a Zen teacher, and so language is something he returns to again and again. As a writer, too, I'm fascinated with language, thinking about it, thinking in it, trying to see it for what it is, sometimes joyfully, sometimes miserably, failing, always. Language is my living.

EVERYDAYZEN is the virtual home of Zen teacher Norman Fischer, and the Everyday Zen foundation and sangha. In addition to the 500+ dharma talks available for download, there's also a Study Guide and a schedule for events and retreats that Norman leads.

The Art of Losing

I just figured out that I can upload files to this weblog, so here's a link to the PDF of an article called "The Art of Losing: On Writing, Dying, and Mom," that I wrote for Shambhala Sun magazine last month. It's based on a talk I gave at a benefit for the Zen Hospice Project, and some of the bits of it are from this weblog. I really like the way Shambhala Sun did the layout, with such nice photographs of my mom. I don't know if it will look as nice in the PDF version, but you can always buy a back issue of the magazine, too, if you really want to see how cute my mom was.

samish island

Another summer, another sesshin. The Japanese word "sesshin" means "touching the mind" or "joining the heart." It's a week-long Zen meditation retreat, and I've been doing this one at Samish Island for several summers now. There were about fifty people this year, which was a big group, so the energy was pretty strong. We sat zazen from Sunday to Friday, then on Friday evening we did a Jukai ceremony. "Jukai" (Receiving the Precepts) is the Zen lay ordination ceremony. There were three of us ordaining, and in the ceremony we received the sixteen bodhisatva precepts, our rakusu (a mini-version of Buddha's robes, which we had each sewn), our lineage papers (connecting us back, through time, to the historical Buddha), and our new Buddhist names.

The power of the ceremony took me by surprise. When I was growing up, my family didn't do religion. We were a small, nuclear unit of mixed cultural heritage. My parents were social scientists and secular rationalists: my mother, a linguist; my dad, an anthropologist. As a child, I remember observing, with a kind of anthropological detachment, other families celebrate their rituals, but I always felt acutely embarrassed when I was called upon to participate in any kind of religious ceremony myself. Even Christmas made me feel somewhat fraudulent. So I was nervous about the jukai ceremony—I hoped it would be nice, that it would go off smoothly, that we wouldn't screw it up too badly—but I never expected it to be so deeply moving. And moving is exactly the word for it. When we entered the zendo and approached the altar, it felt quite literally like we were stepping into a stream, whose current would carry us, and there was no need to be nervous or anxious or anything else. It was so much bigger and stronger and older and longer than any of us, and we were just these little motes or particles in the current, bobbing and flowing along. It was a powerful feeling. There's something to be said for a 2500 year old tradition. It puts things into perspective.

But religion aside, I'm always awed by the effectiveness of formal meditation as a technology for studying the mind. In the retreat, we do very little. We sit, we walk, we listen, we work, we chant, we eat. But everything feels brighter and lighter and more spacious after sesshin, like you really have touched, however briefly, the mind of the world, and rejoined it at its heart.

walking meditation

mom

My mom is luminescent. Her skin is paper thin now, so transparent that you can see the light of her shining through. Oliver says she looks like a glowing pupa, preparing to emerge from a cocoon. From time to time she twitches. Her limbs are bone thin, bent, and brittle as an insect’s. Her fingers curl like claws. Occasionally, a myoclonic spasm wracks her, and when it subsides, her hands lift as though on strings, reaching for something in the air. When she opens her eyes they are blind, but I believe she can see me. I believe she knows I’m sitting here beside her.

We’re all waiting. There’s no such thing as a dead person, Buddhists say. Only a dead body. I believe this is true.

Oliver’s image is accurate, too. Mom’s life force is pupal, curled and waiting for change. When the time comes, her spirit will shed the skin of this old body, but for now, she twitches in anticipation of her next incarnation. Maybe she will metamorphose into someone else’s mom. She was an excellent mother, and it would be nice if some other daughter or son could have the benefit of her for a lifetime.

“You’re the best mom I ever had,” I whisper into her ear.

It’s an old joke. I can see the curve of her cheek lift in what is left of her smile, or maybe I’m just imagining it.

She wasn’t always a mom. She came to it fairly late in life, after she had already gotten a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale. Her dissertation topic was “Eighth Century Japanese Verb Morphology.” She was forty years old when she married my father, forty-two when she had me, and after that, her career in linguistics dwindled and then died out altogether. It was the 1950’s after all. Women weren’t supposed to have careers and be wives and mothers, too, and besides, Yale wasn't hiring women.

Maybe now she’s finally done with mothering and will move on to something else.

A few weeks ago she moved beyond language entirely. Or was it earlier? I don’t remember. The unfolding of her illness has been so achingly protracted, as one by one her words began to disappear. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1997, but she’s been forgetting for much longer.

Here are the things she has forgotten: how to talk, how to eat, how to walk, how to sit down. When she forgets, you have to propel her, drawing her toward a chair, turning her around and pressing down upon her shoulders. Sometimes you have to reach down and press behind her knees. Eventually she sits, but it is always a struggle. Sitting scares her. Sitting is uncertain, an act of faith and courage, like bungee jumping.

Then again, some days she astonishes everyone, strolls out of her room on her own, sits down and feeds herself dinner.

But that was last week. She won’t astonish like that anymore, and neither will she forget. As I’ve been writing this, somewhere in between paragraphs or sentences or words, my mom has died.

It happened very quickly. Her eyes popped open, really wide, but this time I knew for sure she wasn’t seeing. Her breathing changed, becoming shallow and jagged. I put my arms around her. Oliver touched her forehead. Her eyelids fluttered and slowly closed, and the light began to drain from her face. The breath was leaving her, and for a while she hung there, subtle and liminal, and then she was gone. Her life was over, and this brutally terminal fact was both unimaginable and unacceptable.

How can this life, which has persisted here, on this earth, for over ninety years, be over? Just like that? The mind balks, refuses to accept this information. In moments in-between, the imagination trembles.

We stayed with her afterwards in case her spirit was still around. I bathed her, and Oliver helped me dress her. I tucked a couple of clean, folded tissues into the cuff of her shirt, where she liked to keep them. She was still warm. We sat beside her bed, sat zazen for a while, and then we told our memories of her. By the time we left, hours later, her body was cold.

That was on Monday night. The cremation took place on Friday. She didn’t want a funeral. She was ninety and had outlived most of her friends, and the ones who survived her lived far away. So it was just me and Oliver, come to see her off.

Several days had passed, and I was a little scared about how she might look, but when we were led into the anteroom of the crematorium, where she was laid out under a sheet in a cardboard box, I just felt really happy to see her again. We’d brought some of her favorite things to put in the box with her: photographs and letters and cards from friends and family; an old crocheted lap robe that she’d especially liked; her favorite sneakers and her mittens; a couple of bars of chocolate. Emory boards. Scotch tape. A watercolor painting. Flowers. Oliver wanted tropical flowers, from Hawaii because she’d grown up there, so we’d bought anthuriums from Hilo, and ginger, and tea leaves and a big bird of paradise.

We pulled up a chair beside her and made a little altar with the flowers, and a card with her name, and a small statue of the Buddha that had belonged to her parents. I’d brought a photograph of my mom, taken when she was a young professor in Honolulu, looking beautiful and strong. We lit a candle and offered incense, and then we sat zazen again and chanted for her. The Ten Verses Of Infinite Life. The Heart Sutra—form is emptiness, emptiness is form…

When we were finished, we kissed her good bye, and she looked nice in the box with all her things. Comfortable. We called the funeral director. They wheeled her into the crematorium and put the top on the box, and we watched as they slid her into the retort, which looked like a giant kiln. We turned the dial to start it up. She was so tiny, the director said, only 74 pounds, it wouldn’t take long. A couple of hours. We could pick up her ashes after two.

We took a walk around the memorial garden outside, which was next to the funeral home. It was a beautiful morning. The Pacific sky was streaked with clouds, but the sun was shining through, and everything was wet and sparkling and golden. Big Douglas firs, the kind my mom used to love, surrounded the garden. All the deciduous trees had turned colors, and their yellow and orange foliage looked brilliant against the darkness of the conifers. The grass was littered with bright fallen leaves. We walked around the pond, following the path until we could see the chimney of the crematorium. We watched for a while. There was no smoke coming from it, but we could see a dense column of shimmering heat, which was all that was left of my mother’s body as she became air. Oliver said that in this form she could ride the jet stream back to Hilo. I liked that.

My mom was exceedingly practical. She was a woman who didn't go to her own mother's funeral because she thought it was silly to travel all the way back to Japan to sit on her knees on the floor in a cold temple, when her mother was already dead. She feared she’d become so Americanized that she wouldn’t know how to behave at a Buddhist funeral, and she didn’t want to embarrass the relatives. Mostly, though, ceremony didn't mean much to her. She was practical and entirely unsentimental.

If my mom had a spiritual practice, I never knew about it. Her parents, my grandparents, were both Buddhists, and I used to tell her about my Zen meditation retreats. She always listened with interest, but I could tell she thought it was odd, as though meditation were a recessive trait, a kind of atavistic tug toward the ancestral faith. To her, I was the Zen equivalent of a Born-Again.

Still, in her attitude toward life, you could sense the early influence that Buddhism must have had on her. When we used to talk about her Alzheimer’s or her cancer, I’d ask her if she was worried, and her response was always this:

“If worrying would cure me, I would worry as much as I could. But it won’t, so why should I worry?”

This wasn’t denial. She acknowledged that the world was often a sad place, and life was full of suffering. She simply felt it wasn't necessary to dwell on it.

"If being sad could change the situation, I would be sad. But it won't change anything, so why should I be sad? It's better to be happy."

You’re absolutely right, mom. I’ll try to remember that.

Masako Yokoyama Lounsbury, 1914 - 2004

words, words, words...

Last week I helped co-convene a media conference called Media That Matters which was very cool, indeed. Does media matter? Well, in an ultimate sense, who knows, but it sure is a fun question to ponder, with like-minded souls, during our sweet, short tenure here on earth. Often, though, I get pretty sick of the media, tired of all the reactive chatter, including my own. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have pretty much been talking non-stop since March 30, which was the first day of my book tour. Don't get me wrong, I had a very good time and many great conversations with wonderful people. It's just that I've been moving around so much that now I can't sit still long enough to write, and when I try, the chatter in my head is so deafening, I can't hear the words or get them down onto the page.

Luckily, there is a fix, a way to reboot the system. I'm going on a zen retreat, for a week of silent meditation--no talking, no reading, no writing, no email, no computers, no cell phones. Just sitting. In one place. In silence.

After a book tour, this feels like bliss.

summer camp

Back from Zen camp. What an amazing thing it is, to sit perfectly still and in silence for sixteen hours a day. Total reboot of the system. Of course, you’re not just sitting. There’s some walking involved, and chanting, and eating, and meetings with the teacher, and even some physical work as well. In fact, it all seems quite busy, so much so that you start to wonder how you are ever going to manage to return to your civilian existence and fit in all the stuff that life demands.

The retreat takes place at a Church of Christ Bible camp on Samish Island, Washington, and the first thing you notice as you come up the drive are forty litle identical brown cabins, laid out in a perfectly symmetrical grid pattern on the flat green lawn. Each cabin is intended to hold four children and is equipped accordingly, with two sets of bunk beds (mattresses encased in plastic, just in case), a folding chair, a astebasket, and a broom. Since there are fewer than forty of us, each meditator has his or her own cabin. Our zendo, or meditation hall, is a basketball court, and my cushion was on the foul line just up from center court.

The camp overlooks a spectacular tidal basin and an improbably high, humped island to the west, beyond which the sun sets. There's a great blue heron rookery in the forest, just inland from the mud flats, and when the tide recedes, the birds are drawn from the treetops onto the shallows, where they stand on the gleaming mud, at dawn, or dusk, or under the moon, perfectly still, waiting for morsels of marine life to scurry by to catch and regurgitate to into the wide and waiting mouths of their fledglings.

In the forest, you know you are nearing the rookery by the ruckus the young birds make, a Jurassic cacophony, as dissonant as the fledglings are ungainly. They stick their necks out of the tattered nests and turn their beaks resolutely toward the sea. When one of the parent birds makes its pterodactyl-like approach, they screech with wild and uncontainable excitement. The fledglings are huge, and down below, on the forest floor, the underbrush is splattered white with excrement, and specks of feather and cottonwood down drift through the air.

In his daily dharma talk, our teacher, Norman Fischer, quotes a lovely Rilke poem, with a line that goes something like, “Even a bird must fall before she learns to fly.” This must be a startling thought, if you are a fledging heron.

Meanwhile, as I was sitting on my cushion, the world continued without me. Here’s a very encouraging update from the meat world, about McDonalds’ new anti-antibiotic policy, sent to me by Larry Haveson. Thanks, Larry. Let’s hope this is real.

And if you're interested in the Starbucks vs. Haidabucks story, there's more information and some cool pictures of the interior of the cafe here.

Thanks to everyone who sends email. It really helps.