In Praise of Practice

Sitting as the night gets late 
sleep not yet arrived
ever more I realize engaging the Way 
is best in mountain forests
Sound of valley streams enters my ears
moonlight pierces my eyes
Other than this
not a thought in my mind
– Dogen Zenji

Tonight is the full moon here in the Green Mountains. In winter, these mountains are not green at all, but pure white, and very quiet. I love this time of year for the quietness and the stillness which the deep cold imparts to the forests, hushing everything to a bare minimum of movement, only the very essential. Stepping out of our warm yurt into the frigid night, under bluewhite moonlight, something about the way a bare, thin branch reaches out over the glistening surface of snow, so quiet, so still, the way a faint wind comes up from the valley just enough to stir a small dried beech leaf still hanging on its stem, so that it quivers and rustles, scratches and whispers, the only sound in the entire universe it seems—the sparse and simple tenderness of it all, when I am receptive to it, is purely the mind of zazen.

Zazen, on the one hand, is the central practice of the Zen school of Buddhism, transmitted to America from Japan, to Japan from China, to China from India. It is the most venerable practice of meditation, in which I have been fortunate enough to receive instruction and ongoing training. On the other hand, zazen is nothing other than the pure mind, prior to any movement toward or away from anything. It is the heart of clarity which you yourself possess in this moment, only you must have faith and endeavor to realize it. Often, when one begins the practice of meditation, the instructions take the form of a kind of quieting or calming technique, to ease the accumulated tension of the bodymind. I have found that it is vitally important to engage these instructions wholeheartedly. I am also finding, however, that zazen includes this approach, but is not limited to it. Actually, I am finding that zazen includes everything, and is limited by nothing.

Like Dogen Zenji, my constant guide and inspiration, I also find that engaging the Way of meditation can yield fruit in relative solitude, or at least a simplified life. My life is quiet and very simple these days. I don’t go many places, and I am blessed to have been given much time lately for meditation, study, and to fulfill our basic chores, carrying in our water and firewood, keeping the living space neat, washing clothes and dishes. I endeavor to use this time to cultivate the Person, this one right here. This changing body from birth to death, this shapeshifting mind in eternal pursuit of what cannot be held, these comprise my immediate field of practice, moment to moment. And beyond this, of course, there is what Krishnamurti calls “the mirror of relationship”, that wider field of practice in which to see who I am, to better understand my capacity to actualize what is wholesome and what is not. I cannot know myself except in relationship. I can have an idea of myself, well-intentioned as I might be, and then be unpleasantly surprised by my own internal (or external) reaction to something someone says or does, as if what has arisen within me does not accord with the person I think I am. How often this happens, and such good medicine for the tricky illness of identity, of having to be someone, something solid and predictable, and preferably according to my own best intentions.

Zazen opens me up to who I am, for better or worse. But the “better-or-worse” part doesn’t really matter. When I can behold my own creation, all of its drama and history and habit and personality and hope and fear, with a sense of disinterested affection, a kind of relentless, tender patience, there arises a sense of freedom, spaciousness, and a stillness too deep for words. The need to be someone drops away, and in its place is just what I am at this moment, nothing special, like a thin branch so gracefully composed, so still over the snow, beneath the cold moon.

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Note to Self; or, the monologue internally addressed to its own speaker

Gathering you in hand like so many
scattered flecks of quartz the skin of my flesh
I feel you now you are what I have been
a stream in the bright air light in the glass
I glimpse in the morning of silent earth

You are close as to say you are nowhere
walking the long hill knowing together
the nearness of eyes in our own old way
yet who can say who walks ahead and who
is still inside this intimate body

All that is known is that nothing is known
but for the wasted days of this brief life
I can thank you for nothing is wasted
which is lived and nothing is lived really
without love yes it is true don’t you think

Language Without Metaphor

“We are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.”
– Henry David Thoreau in Walden

Here in central Vermont, the new year has come with unseasonably warm weather, and I say that knowing the word “unseasonable” is losing its precision in this uncertain age. Nevertheless, I am still on the whole able to enjoy these brief, gray days, for the muted poetry expressed in things like dead grass, cold rain, lingering patches of snow, bright lichen on the black bark of a tree. This sense, which Thoreau conveys, that things are ever speaking in an old language, is a sense that I think has always been with me. Yesterday I clambered up the creek by our yurt, climbing over mossy rocks until I found a wide boulder on which to crouch and look back down the hill over the swollen stream. I sat on the boulder and listened to that ancient sound of water, voice of the sibyl. If anything is ever conveyed by such a language, I think that it cannot be translated, only perhaps understood, if we listen.

I am thinking these days about language, and particularly metaphor, that creative process by which we come to an understanding, a familiarity with the unfamiliar. Julian Jaynes, in his astounding 1976 work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, speaks of metaphor as “not a mere extra trick of language…it is the very constitutive ground of language.” He goes on, “I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things.” In this sense, Jaynes would say, all language really begins in metaphor, insofar as language is always seeking to utilize familiar words to relate to unfamiliar experiences or things for which there are yet no words. So language is expressive, and it is also generative of new understandings, new ways of perceiving and experiencing. Jaynes goes on to make a convincing case for the evolved metaphor function of our language as the origin of our subjective, self-referential consciousness, a novel and profound theory that deserves all proper rumination before any attempts at speculation on this site!

It seems to me Jaynes would say that there really can be no language without metaphor. So what about this “language which all things and events speak without metaphor” that Thoreau wants us not to forget? If language-as-metaphor is the art of utilizing the familiar to contextualize the unfamiliar, then a language-without-metaphor wouldn’t be the kind of language you use with your mouth to convey something to another, and there would be no real distinction between “familiar” and “unfamiliar”. This might be moving into the realm of religious experience, a place in which I think Thoreau felt quite at home, though perhaps a little wary of speaking about, as one ought to be.

But if I may, I propose that this language without metaphor can be nothing more or less than the unfolding of things as they are in each moment. By this I mean, when I listen to the stream falling ceaselessly over rocks, the sound is an expression not mediated by the function of meaning, that process of familiarization by which we understand that “this” means “that”. This process is not at work in the language Thoreau is talking about, the language “which all things speak”. The tawny patches of meadow grass in winter don’t mean anything. They aren’t attempting to make a point in the way they appear to you. The sound of passing cars in the rain outside your window does not care to be heard in any particular way so as to convey something to you that you did not already know. It is simply a complete expression, nothing left out, no hidden meaning.

You may say, “So what? What’s so special about that?”, to which I would reply, “Nothing.” And that’s precisely what is so special about this unspoken language, I think. We are addicted to meaning, to making a point, to getting from here to there, to accomplishment, to finding and sustaining a sense of purpose, and this addiction has so eroded our capacity to hear the silent language which all things always speak without speaking, proclaiming nothing-special. I can say I have come into earshot of this language, into close proximity of an immanent freedom shared by all things truly born of this earth. It is a language that cannot be translated. You have to become very still and listen for yourself, or else risk losing your birthright treasure.

Solstice Reflection

There is anger in me. It feels constricted, charged, elementary in its simplicity, so familiar in its various forms. My tendency is to shrink from it, or to rationalize about it in broad generalities, that it is male, that it is generational, that it is justified, that it isn’t justified, on and on. But the fact remains, after all the storytelling runs its course, that there is anger. Between the two roads of reactive expression on the one hand and denial or suppression on the other, there lies another path. This path is lit only by the light of understanding, a light born in the dark.

Solstice, the moment in the turning of the year when light is most brief and night is deep, and the new moon, the moment in the turning of the month when not even the thinnest shred of light touches its surface, only our own round shadow that blankets the entirety. It could not be more dark, certainly. But this is a generative time. The ancient Chinese articulate the twin energies of the Universe as yin—darkness, earth, stillness—and yang—light, sky, movement. The moon, for them, was always the perfect symbol of yin, of one nature with night and water, earth and quiet. And even within the lunar cycle, where the play of yin and yang is manifest in the lunar stages, the new moon is total yin, darkness within darkness. This is where we are now: new moon, winter solstice. Take it in.

I have been returning to basics in my meditation practice, exploring some foundational teachings on mindfulness and embodiment, laying the groundwork for insight. I know this is a path that runs the length of my life, so I can’t afford to skip anything. In these teachings, I am invited to always begin by establishing an attitude of goodwill toward myself, a feeling of care, soft presence, totally inclusive of all hiddenness. Lately, when I do this, I become aware of a subtle, tender pain buried somewhere in my chest, a wound from which flows all manner of agitation, impatience, stress, all sense of being misunderstood, and the fear of being unknowable, unreachable. I am learning in my practice to soften around this place, whatever it is, whatever its source, not to analyze it, but to heal it, right where I am. For this, I need the dark.

And this is the time for that dark, the time for things which are deep, deep listening, deep feeling, deep looking. In the depth of this twofold darkness, lunar and solar, I come home to sit, way down at the bottom of all effort and energy, where everything comes to rest. From this place, just as the year turns toward light after this day, and as the moon gathers bright energy into a total fullness, the light of understanding is born. But it takes time. This is its own process, functioning on a scale that my conscious mind cannot access, a process for which patience and trust are the sole supports. When these are established, I am better able to actually take the time to soften, slow, and stop the habit energy of stimulation, in a world that incentivizes stimulation, a fertile ground for restlessness, irritation, impatience, frustration, anger, fear, repression. To pause, breathe, step back and heal the heart from this, I need dark like a seed needs to be utterly buried.

The True Direction

This morning, I make my way again into the snowbound woods behind our yurt, a dense, young forest of hemlock, poplar, maple and birch. These woods cover a west-facing slope that climbs up to a modest ridgeline of a few scattered hilltops with old farmer names like Hersey and Robinson, all around 1,800 feet, and perfectly quiet. I walk these woods almost every day, following almost the same trail every time, a loop I know well now, well enough to find my way in fresh untracked snow through leafless trees. Yesterday, I did just that. My first walk in the woods after more than a foot of heavy snow fell the day before, it was hard going. The trail follows steep, old logging roads, along frozen stream beds, and up over dramatic shelves of mossy granite tied up in thick birch root. In deep snow, the walk is more of a trudge, and yesterday, in the dead quiet of the forest, lifting each foot out of deep powder and burying it again one step ahead, I found myself panting and cursing, furiously shedding layers. When I would stop and scan the woods, catching my breath, I felt a faint sense of embarrassment, like I was the perfect representative for our species, laboring loudly under my own delusion of progress.

This morning, however, the going is a little less tough; I’d done the hard work the day before. As I set out into the trees, whistling to my dog to keep him on course, I find I have a choice: I can step in the tracks I made yesterday, and not work so hard, or I can trudge in the fresh powder between my old tracks, thereby making something of an evenly packed trail for others to use after me. I walk up into the quiet of the woods, trying each approach to get a sense of its ease or difficulty. As I walk, looking ahead every so often at my day-old tracks, steady and true up the hillside, it feels as if I am following a ghost, the evidence of the passing of a person I no longer know. Still I can almost recall what I was thinking of yesterday when I made those tracks, the persistent agitation, the vague fear that I am not making the most of my life, not doing enough for others, the gentle voice reminding me to return to the walking body, cold breath, cold feet, attention fraying again into vacillation. So familiar, all of it, my walk this morning being much the same; but whose tracks am I following? Are these movements of the mind in this moment the same movements of yesterday’s mind?

As I walk, I remember the way the Buddha spoke of karma, a word we all know, but the meaning of which we often aren’t patient enough to discern. To my understanding, karma is the way one thing leads to another. It is how the past creates the present and, perhaps more importantly, how the present creates the future. But more to the point, it is the way we create our own experience, in this moment. The Buddha metaphorized the movement of karma with the image of a river: when water flows in a certain direction, its very movement wears a channel into the earth, making it easier and easier for water to continue flowing in exactly the same way. Our actions of body, speech and thought are like this. Whatever I do, say or think, it becomes easier to do, say and think the same things again and again, like flowing water. I have laid down the path, I have made tracks in the snow. This is how I come to form an identity, to think of myself in a certain way, and how I validate my own ideas of who I am, by continually acting, speaking and thinking in deeply-ingrained and familiar ways, all of which I come to cherish, for better or worse, as “my personality”. But when this whole complex overlay meets an uncertain world full of other complex people carving out their own ancient channels of habit and identity, things get unpredictable, and the mind does not like unpredictability. So self-image shifts with the shifting circumstances of life. All the while, the restless mind seeks old patterns, familiar grooves, yesterday’s footprints.

Somewhere near the end of the trail, as I am descending the snowy hill, I notice something about my walking. I have given up looking for my old tracks in the powder. I am just gliding between the trees, cold air on my face, my feet beginning to feel cold in my wet socks. In a moment, I stop to listen to a soft thumping from above, a bird somewhere pecking at the bark on a rotting tree. I look up, my eyes scanning the bare branches against the bright sky, and almost directly overhead I see a small bird in the uppermost limbs of the very tree that stands before me, a lanky young poplar. The bird resumes its rhythmic work, and placing my cold hand on the bark, I can feel the vibration of her powerful beak in the wood, traveling all the way down the length of the trunk and into my palm. 

Smiling, I turn to continue down the hill. Looking at my old tracks in front and ahead of me, I wonder if there is a way to live with the person, the ghost, I have been and so often am, not bound to him, not bound to be him. I can try stepping out of my old footprints, bringing my intention to bear on the movement of this path, placing my feet in new places. But I think there is another way, too, to live. When I am just walking, entirely engaged in the activity of the moment, I can trust my own feet without calculation. When I walk this way, I see that yesterday’s walking was perfect, as it was, and today’s walking is perfect, as it is, because the unfolding of each moment is its own authenticity, never following in the footsteps of another. I am not one person, nor am I many; I am a constant flowing, always searching for the true direction.

The Last Beech Leaves

Given one more day
does the sound the water makes
on rocks remind you?
Do the last beech leaves hold you back?

Here and there for years
the trail has wound around
a mountain with your name
uncertain now there was ever
an end to begin with or reason
for walking but you know
the world can’t help itself
the shape of things is turning
it’s just that we are always
given one more day
sound of water and the last beech leaves

Written October ’22

Aloneness

There is a quiet wellspring of joy to be found in aloneness, which is not the quiet despair of loneliness, nor does it depend on the absence of others. I have known it in the midst of friends and strangers. I have known it as a child halfway to the windy top of a pitch pine on a hot day. And I have known it this afternoon, mid-December on an old logging road in central Vermont, late light of the setting sun so gentle on the snow where I step. It is now, nearly at the still point of the turning year, when I so often feel this quiet joy, joy to be with the stillness of the forest, all of the life gathered in, and the warmth preserved. Aloneness is a word that comes to me in moments like these, for it feels imperfectly evocative of what is most personal: there is no one who can live my life for me. This is just what life is: eyes on the ground before me, the crunch of ice under my boots as I walk, moving from the dark of the forest into a meadow clearing, my gaze lifting to the southwest where the lingering glow of the sun is spreading over the peaks and ridges. This is just what life is. The scenery will always change. All of it. But the simple, gentle ordinariness of the way it feels, to just walk, to just look, to wonder at the long road that led to this moment, this profoundly ordinary moment, and to be secretly in love with it all. This is just what life is. This is aloneness. May we each find joy in our aloneness, and may we never withhold it from each other.

To Will One Thing is the Circle of the Way

“Oh, blessed brevity, oh, blessed simplicity, that seizes swiftly what cleverness, tired out in the service of vanity, may grasp but slowly! That which a simple soul, in the happy impulse of a pious heart, feels no need of understanding in an elaborate way, since he simply seizes the Good immediately, is grasped by the clever one only at the cost of much time and much grief.” – Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas Steere

“The everyday activity of Buddha ancestors is nothing but having tea and eating rice.”– Dogen Zenji, Everyday Activity, trans. Kaz Tanahashi

What I most desire to speak about, now and at all times, is the One Thing of utmost importance, the raison d’etre of this moment. It can be difficult, in speaking or writing, to collect the scattered energies of the mind and allow them to settle of their own accord into the potent distillation of meaning that my heart intends. This is why it is said that “good speech is silver, but silence is gold”. And yet this is the task at hand, or rather, it is the task to which I set my hand, for better or worse. May my words therefore be the servants of clarity.

In college, I had a friend who liked to repeat the famous saying of Kierkegaard’s, that “purity of heart is to will one thing”. Neither of us knew what Kierkegaard meant by it, nor had we read the book he had written by that name. I think if we had we would have dismissed it as overly church-y. Nevertheless, I come back to that sentence often, remembering with fondness the twinkle in my friend’s eye when he spoke it, as if to know its meaning was not so difficult, as if he knew that I knew it too. Twelve years on, I think my friend was right, that to know its meaning is not so difficult, but I would add that to know its meaning is not like knowing other things. To know the meaning of “Purity of heart is to will one thing” is like knowing that you have eyeballs: you know it so well that you almost forget it. There are many things we know with such an intimacy, such a complete integration, that they have passed from our conscious awareness into the background, dissolved like salt in a warm glass of water. It is good, though, to bring these ordinary miracles back to the fore from time to time, to discern whether there might be some value of another order to be found among them.

What I’d like to do here is something like a brief East/West comparative exploration of the problem of effort on the spiritual path, and the contradictions inherent in taking up a spiritual path as a means to an end. I hope to do this by way of Dogen Zenji, beloved 13th century Japanese Zen master, and Soren Kierkegaard, beloved 19th century Danish Christian philosopher. Both of these men, in their own times and places, asked the same question, which I will try to put in as broad a language as I can: How can one move toward and attain unity with this One Thing, the Absolute, the Unconditional, when any effort one makes is conditional? Put another way, when we undertake any spiritual practice, prayer, meditation, or ritual, we do so with some end in mind, and we make of these things means toward that end. But when the end we have in mind is that thing which is not conditioned or fabricated, how can fabricated means ever reach it? 

For Kierkegaard, who names this unfabricated end of all striving “the Good”, to seek this end for its own sake is to will One Thing. The Good, the Unfabricated, is the only thing that is one, that is single. All other aims and goals are fabricated and thus not one, but double, following from the “double-mindedness” that the apostle James warns against in his Epistle. To will the Good, and thereby engage in any spiritual practice, for the sake of reward or for fear of punishment is not to truly will one thing, but many things. When I reflect on this, I come to an impasse. How do I make sense of my effort in meditation? How does one who prays make sense of their prayer? I must admit, when I determined to take up a meditation practice, it was as a fabricated means toward a fabricated end, though I may not have phrased it that way. Even now, I am never immune to this way of relating to my practice. I desire for myself peace of mind, internal stability and, I confess, to be perceived by others as being a person with such qualities. When this is the driving force in my practice, it does not fail to disappoint. Meditation, or prayer, so easily becomes just another thing one does, an isolated activity for which one has to block off time, a conscious choice one makes for any number of self-serving reasons. What is it to be free of these things, then? How, in our spiritual practice, can we will One Thing, rather than feed all of the half-hearted intentions that are born of self-deception?

Kierkegaard gives something of an answer toward the end of his book which, like a good Zen master, he puts in the form of a question, or a series of related questions: Do you, at present, live in such a way that you are yourself clearly and eternally conscious of being an individual? What is your occupation in life? What is your attitude of mind? How do you carry out your occupation? Are you of one mind about the manner in which you carry out your occupation, or is your mind continually divided because you wish to be in harmony with the crowd? With this, we are prodded into self-inquiry. We are not permitted to evade the questions at hand by the side roads of intellect, but as if we are, as Kierkegaard says, at our “eleventh hour”, we must take account of our life in this moment. We must become “clearly and eternally conscious of being an individual”, “of one mind about the manner in which we carry out our occupation”. I read the word “occupation” here not to mean the various pursuits of labor one may undertake in a lifetime, but rather, inclusive of these, the broader and more demanding occupation of living a life, that task with which one is occupied in each moment. Now, this is beginning to sound like proper meditation practice.

Let’s go back in time now to the year 1223, when a Japanese Zen monk named Dogen sailed to mainland China with the intention of finding a teacher who could give a worthy answer to a question that had followed him for years: If each person inherently possesses the fundamental nature of a Buddha, of awakening, why is meditation practice necessary? (Setting aside for a moment the notion of original sin, one could frame this question just as well from a Christian angle: If we are made in the image of God, if our sins are absolved, what is the use of repentance or prayer?) When Dogen returned to Japan in the year 1228, he returned a fully-recognized teacher of the Dharma, having inherited the lineage of Zen ancestors from the Chinese master Rujing. He had found the answer he was looking for. The remainder of Dogen Zenji’s lifetime was spent teaching and writing in order to clarify his answer. One of the ways he expressed it was in his teaching of gyoji dokan, which can be understood to mean the circle of continuous practice. He says, “Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way”. 

We tend to think of spiritual practice in linear terms: development, progress, path, means and an end. Dogen’s vision of the Circle of the Way utterly abolishes this framework. To aspire is to completely attain, to walk is to arrive on the spot. How can we, with limited means, ever hope to reach an unlimited end? Dogen would say we can’t, not when we see our effort in such a way. For Dogen, the means are as limitless as their end. When we look at the life of the Buddha, we can recall that he spent arduous years fasting and practicing various austerities, eventually gave them up, returned to sit in meditation at the foot of a tree and, after six days, attained complete awakening. This is the story, and yet it is told as if it ends there. One should consider, Dogen might say, that the Buddha continued to practice meditation everyday until his death. He did not abandon his practice upon his awakening. Likewise, Jesus is worshiped as the Son of God, as God Himself. And yet, one plainly reads in scripture that he prayed daily. This should be evidence enough that to regard meditation and prayer as means to an end is a mistake. As Kierkegaard puts it, “there is only one means and there is only one end: the means and the end are one and the same thing”. To take up spiritual practice as an end in and of itself, the End, is what Dogen calls “continuous practice”. He says that “to forsake name and gain in this lifetime and practice one thing thoroughly is the vast, continuous practice of the Buddha’s timeless life”. By willing one thing, practicing one thing, we actually, literally, give life to the Buddha. Our practice is the Buddha’s practice. Our prayer is the prayer of Christ. 

I sense that I am being urged to go beyond mere metaphor, and to penetrate the meaning of this in my life, moment by moment. It is not enough to say “That’s a nice thought”. As long as I stop there, inquiring no further, I will forever feel at a distance from that which I seek. Do I regard my practice as something with boundaries? Something that I do, that I pick up when I feel like it and put down when I want something else? Something I do to attain a result? If this is my approach, I will forever be one step removed from where the action is, standing outside of my own life looking in, or rather, standing inside of my life looking out. When there is this sense of distance, which we all know well, what are we to do? In a meeting with my teacher not long ago, I expressed this sense of distance, and how confusing it is to me that I could feel distant from my own body, my own life, when I know nothing could be more intimate. He listened with open eyes and a gentle nonchalance, and when I was finished speaking, he said “In the moment when you experience this sense of distance, try to see that it is just a moment, that you are simply having an experience of a sense of distance. You are already intimate with this experience. It is just a moment, and it is passing.” 

When I am engaging my meditation practice with a sense of distance, can I, in a single moment, recognize that? Can I become completely intimate with my experience? Can I see that I already am intimate? When you are praying, and you are doing so with a sense of being a small person supplicating to an immense God far removed from you, can you in a single moment become completely aware of your experience, without judgment? Can you enter your prayer as the very prayer of Christ himself, with no separation? I think we are asked to go beyond even becoming aware, becoming intimate, for when we try to become something that we are not, it means we have not yet abandoned our double-mindedness. To truly will One Thing is to arrive on the spot with every step. May we realize this intimacy.

What is Meditation?

To ask “What is meditation?” is a little like taking a shovel to the ground in Spring looking for your iris bulbs. If you can resist the urge (I couldn’t), with just a little patience you will see something beautiful. One does, however, have to do the preliminary work of planting the seed, so to speak. But assuming that much has been done, that is, that some effort has been made to still the body and mind, and that that effort has been applied with some degree of regularity, the next thing one ought to do is actually not a thing. That sounds too simple, you may say. Well, it is. That’s what is so complicated about it. We are not simple, and to do a simple thing is not easy.

I should back up. What do we think of when we hear or see the word “meditation”? What kinds of images, feelings, memories come to mind when we see the word? Perhaps you know someone who likes to meditate, and whatever feelings you may have about that person come up. Maybe you think of a hermit sitting silently in a cave in some mythical land. Perhaps you think of yoga class, tea, calming music, crystals and other such paraphernalia. You may see the word “meditation” and think, “Yeah, I do that”, or “Gee I’ve been meaning to do that”, or “I have absolutely no interest in doing that”, and so on. Maybe you have some historical awareness of the many ancient religious practices from across the globe that inform our modern understanding of what meditation can be. Can we plainly acknowledge that none of these associations we make with the word “meditation” are actually meditation itself? If we reflect for a moment, we can see that this is the case. It’s the same with anything really. I may have a lot of feelings, opinions, associated images and stories about coffee, for example, but none of these things themselves are the experience of actually taking a sip of coffee, for myself. Likewise, I can tell you all about coffee, how I think it tastes, why you might like it or not, how it should or shouldn’t be prepared, its health benefits, but not one of these things is the experience of coffee making contact with your lips, passing over your tongue, and into your belly. For this, there are no words.

I want to explore meditation in the way we might explore the indescribable subjectivity of any experience, for this is, as I see it, what meditation is. The question at the heart of it is always some variation on “What is happening for me at this very moment?”. The kind of inquiry we make into this question, however, is the difference between meditation and your run-of-the-mill mental proliferation. In this latter activity, we are all expert. So what kind of inquiry does it take, then? Here is where it might be helpful to make sure we really plant the iris bulbs. We bought them, they arrived in the mail, we’ve been scoping out a good spot in the yard. Now plant the seed. For me, this involves establishing a very clear and strong intention to meditate for 30 minutes every day, and then doing it. Sometimes, that last part is difficult. I think what makes it so difficult is, again, how simple it is. We may find, however, that when life can so often feel paralyzing in its complexity, to hold ourselves to something so simple can really be a source of gladness. Nevertheless, there are many times when I fall short of my own commitment, and in those moments some flexibility and a good sense of humor go a long way. There is only ever one place to begin. Right here, right now. So, what is happening for you at this very moment? What does this whole dynamic moment of experience consist of? Pause here before moving to the next paragraph, maybe two or three minutes, put the question to yourself with all the innocent curiosity you can muster, and just look.

Did you really do it? What did you see? What did you feel? When I try this, what I find is that my mind, or to be more precise, my attention, repeatedly narrows down onto something, a sensation of discomfort in the body, a noise or a movement nearby, but more often it is a train of thought with some particular sticky emotional quality to it. This is natural enough. It’s what we are doing with our minds almost all our waking (and sleeping) hours. In meditation, however, we are opening the range of our awareness to include everything, and this can feel like a real battle against the deeply conditioned, and basically unconscious, tendency of our awareness to identify and isolate sources of discomfort. It’s as if the thinking, searching mind has so much momentum behind it that, if it doesn’t have something to do, it will start to invent things for itself to pursue. This is one reason that so many practices have been developed in different cultures and traditions that attempt to essentially cultivate concentration. Of all the various themes, images, and phrases that have been used over the centuries as objects of concentration in meditation, none is as perennial as the breath. By giving our attention a point of reference, grounded in immediate somatic experience, the body breathing, we are better able to notice when the mind has drifted into conceptual proliferation. Again, this may feel like a tug-of-war, keeping the mind from wandering, fixating on the sensations of each inhalation and exhalation. But it should never be forced. It is a gentle process, a quiet and intimate time to be with our restless mind, to soothe it, to suggest to it a new way of being, to remind it of the immediate mystery of our own embodiment.

At the beginning of this post, I said that once we sit down with the intention to still our body and mind, the next thing to do is not a thing. By this, I don’t mean that we do nothing. Of course we have to bring some effort to bear on the direction of our internal development. We wouldn’t be sitting down to meditate in the first place if we didn’t see some value in applying our good intention to the chaos of the mind. And yet, when you bring your attention to the felt sense of your body and the very natural process of breathing, not tampering or interfering with any of it, what you are doing is not actually a thing. You are open, clear, sensitive to life, even if only for a moment. The more you do this, the more it becomes your default setting, so to speak, rather than the stuck, agitated, muddled and unsteady states of mind you move through in the course of a day. These states of mind don’t go anywhere. They are just what they are. But the more you prioritize a sensitivity to your embodiment, your breathing, sitting, walking, blinking, swallowing, smiling, speaking, loving… the better able you are to be clear and awake for your life as it comes, and as it goes. But don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

On the Path of Light, the Shadow of Turning…

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down the from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” – James 1:17 KJV

“…we turn from attention to inattention and back again until we feel surrounded by shadow, surrounded by things we have not paid our full attention to and thus haunt us with their incompleteness.” – Me, 2016

“The Truth waits for eyes not clouded by longing.” – Unknown

So here I am. I began this blog seven years ago, wrote a long first post, never published it, and so this page and that draft post languished unseen and forgotten in the digital nether, until today. Reading through the paragraphs I so thoughtfully put together, I could not help but smile at how far I have come, or really, how much has changed. What follows below is my real first post, written from where I stand today, 32 years old, married, a formal student of Zen Buddhism, coming to terms with my chronic suspicion of certainty. In this post I look back at my unpublished essay, and muse on what has changed, and what has not, about my perspective as I look down the length of my life, the Path we all walk.

Some context. When I tried to begin this blog at the age of 25, I was in the strange throes of considering myself to be a Christian. I say strange, but really it’s not that strange. It’s the way I was raised. By “strange”, I mean that it felt strange to me then. Up to that point I had studied Zen and Buddhist philosophy as a college undergraduate, precipitated I think by my early (high school) experiences with psychedelics. In my original post I wrote, “I [had] seen this place, where words mean nothing, effort dies before it is conceived, and identity is expanded until it is no more, while at the same time being tied in a never-ending knot with no feasible escape.” Sheesh. That’s big stuff for any 17 year old, to be sure. My friends were either atheists or Jewish, sometimes both, and as my college years went by I felt I had no one in whom I could confide my longing to contextualize my experiences within the Christ-stories that decorated my early life. So I made the connection on my own. In my mid-twenties I thought, “Maybe I’m a Christian”, began attending a Quaker meeting, and started a blog with a very Biblical title, The Shadow of Turning.

Now, 32, I find myself in a different place. My mid-twenties was a time of upheaval, change, debauchery, loss, and eventual gain (in the form of the blessing who is my wife). I was confronted, as many are at the outset of their truly adult life, with a profound reorientation of what’s what, as it were. In the midst of this, I found that when I had nowhere else to turn, sitting down and shutting up was the best move. Sometime in the cold, early months of 2019, on a ratty, green meditation cushion I had received as a gift years before, I settled down and settled in, resolving to sit every day from that day forward, in the meditation posture I had learned in college. What I have experienced since then has not been any great cosmic intrusions upon the soul, but rather the endlessly mundane turnings of the mind, punctuated at times by experiences of a deep and abiding stillness that leaves its mellow fragrance in the air about me. This has been enough to bring me back to the cushion every day, this, and the people I have met who, like me, have found some nameless place to stand, or sit, in the midst of this constant turning.

What struck me, as I read through the post I had intended to publish here seven years ago, was that much of the language I used to convey my sense of what takes place on the spiritual path, words like turning, light, shadow, and attention, to name a few, still resonates so deeply with me. So maybe not that much really has changed. I was and still am a lover of words, and the thrust of my original post is really driven by that love. So before I share a portion of it below, I must acknowledge that while some of the words I use to express my place on the Path of life have indeed changed, words like God, grace, and salvation, to name a few, some have not. But as I wrote in 2016, “To take the signifier, the word, for the object signified is to misunderstand the full scope of our words.” In other words, I would like to suggest that perhaps it is not the words themselves that we ought to be hanging our hats on, but what lies just past them. Now, try hanging your hat on that.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

If in the spiritual source of light, there is no variation or shadow, why is it that we can so often describe our predicament of life as vague, murky, shrouded in the shadows of doubt and haunted by the specter of the fear of death? Here is the crux: our predicament is shadow, and at the spiritual center where light is born, there is no shadow, nor is there variation. If that doesn’t make us feel hopeless, nothing can. Indeed, our spiritual predicament feels very much like the opposite to what James describes as the source of light. But, it must not be forgotten that James calls our attention to the gifts in our life, the good things, the perfect things. I do not think it is fair to say with cynical certainty that there are no good things, no perfect things, nothing which attends to a particular need on a given day. Admittedly, as we are all mourners of our own predicaments (life is hard; I don’t know where I am going or what I am doing; my life is an uphill battle; nothing is as it should be), we fail to see the tiny moments when our needs are attended to. We mourn constantly that which we think are our unfulfilled needs, while turning a blind eye to the little things we cannot mourn, for they are already taken care of. James calls these things “good gifts”, “perfect gifts”, which are born from the spiritual seed of light.

Where then, does the shadow in our lives come from? While in the source of light no shadow of turning is to be found, our own lives certainly exhibit the quality of shadow, of the unknown, of doubt. James calls it a shadow of turning. Turning from what? And to what? It might be that the author, being human quite like us, had a similar understanding of what it means to be human, that it is to be always turning from that which is good to that which we believe is not, and then turning back again, turning from that which we have to that which we do not; to be always turning in our minds from idea to idea, feeling to feeling, identity to identity, wardrobe to wardrobe; to be eternally turning, in the words of Kristoffersen, “from the rocking of the cradle to the rolling of the hearse” — our lives are a turning, and perhaps the turning casts the shadows we see around us. Perhaps our turning from this to that, here to there, him to her, actually is what casts about us the shadows of uncertainty, of doubt and the gnawing ambiguity which defines our days.

For those of us who struggle with a word like soul, Mary Oliver writes “the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” But what might our constant turning do to the attentive nature of our inmost selves? I for one can very often feel fragmented, as if it might take some inhuman effort to really attend, be attentive, to one thing only, rather than allow my attention to fragment from one thing to the next. We can attend to a task, but it is only so long before our attention is dragged elsewhere, whether past or future, this worry or that, and so on, until we are never really doing anything as a whole creature. So we turn from attention to inattention and back again until we feel surrounded by shadow, surrounded by things we have not paid our full attention to and thus haunt us with their incompleteness.

I took as my original inspiration for this post an innocuous verse in a book of the Christian New Testament, called the Epistle of James. The verse, quoted at the outset, evoked something to me then of the mystery of light and shadow as I experienced it in my own more down-to-earth spiritual life. I was, and still am, stimulated by the imagery of turning that is invoked in the passage. God is described by James as the Source of Light, in whom there is no shadow of turning. Then what are we to make of our own shadow? Our own endless turning-about? James seems to establish quite a divide between God above, the unmoving Source of Light, free of any shadow, and us below, the hapless, benighted ghosts turning about in confusion. In my original post I wanted to offer a more poetic explanation for this divide, to assure the reader that it isn’t as wide as it appears. I write “to admit that we are the ones who cast our own shadows is a step forward on the path to light.” Turning is what we do; it is the source of our shadow. Nothing to be discouraged by, but simply acknowledged.

Another perspective I’d like to offer here is one of a Buddhist orientation. Turning is something that gets a lot of attention in Buddhist discourse. Upon delivering his first sermon after his Awakening, the historical Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, is said to have set the wheel of Truth, or Dharma, in motion. The turning of the wheel of Dharma is an important image in Buddhist symbology, and signifies the activity of Truth in our lives. It is indeed something we do. To understand this more fully, it might be helpful to bring to the table another very important Buddhist teaching, that of dukkha. Commonly translated as “suffering”, dukkha might be better understood to mean anxiety, stress, discontentment, dissatisfaction, dis-ease, the not-quite-rightness of life. The Buddha  suggested that, if we really pay attention, we might notice that we are accompanied at all times, in every moment, by dukkha. Wanting what we don’t have and having what we don’t want, in other words, grasping and rejecting, are like the twin engines of our dukkha, our discontentment. These are subtle and shape-shifting forces that are at work in nearly every waking moment of our lives. The Buddha says that we only need to pay attention to recognize the truth of it. When dukkha is seen through and thoroughly understood, what arises in its place is sukha, often translated as “happiness”, but better understood to mean ease, peace, contentment, tranquility.

Here is where it gets interesting. You may have noticed that the words dukkha and sukha have something in common. Quite right. Their etymologies reveal that they share the suffix -kha, which in ancient Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages  signified the hole in the center of a wheel where it would meet with the axle of a cart, thus allowing the wheel to turn as the cart is pulled along. The prefixes su- and du- each respectively mean something like “right” and “wrong”, or “aligned” and “unaligned”. And so these words take on some depth of meaning. Our dukkha, our anxiety, discontentment, irritation, disappointment, can be compared to the wheel of a cart that isn’t turning quite right. Imagine riding on an oxcart in northern India sometime in the dusty years of the 4th century BCE. Imagine what it would feel like if the wheels on the cart weren’t affixed to the axle properly. They wobble, jerk side to side, making the ride supremely unpleasant. The Buddha says this is how our life is. Doesn’t it feel that way? Never quite right. And even when things go our way, there is always the anxiety of change, of losing what fortune we have. So this is the turning of our life. On the other hand, says the Buddha, the peace and ease we experience when we attend to our lives carefully is like riding on a cart whose wheels are true, turning in perfect alignment.

What I appreciate so much about this perspective is that it makes no value judgment on the turning of life. While James in his Epistle seems to qualify the turning as being the source of shadow, as opposed to the stillness to be found in God, the Source of Light, the early Buddhist perspective is that turning is the whole game, it’s just a matter of how we turn. So then what about all this light and shadow business? Well, we don’t have to be particle physicists to observe that the source of a shadow is twofold: an object, and… light! That’s right. We have the light to blame for all this shadow. Well, partly. What is doing the turning? And what is the light? Rather than try to put together anymore pretty answers to these important questions, I’ll let my 25 year old self have the last word.

It is almost as if our own attention is the light we seek, and when we allow it to fragment, it casts a shadow.