Patchwork Mind

Often it seems like my day is a householder's patchwork quilt. It may begin in the zendo listening three strikes on the keisu and sitting zazen for an hour, but it then becomes a quilt of ten thousand things. Trying to hold all the patches together (or avoid collecting any more!) is exhausting. But not to try seems like abdication of my responsibilities as a householder, parent, supervisor, child, and all the other roles. That I spend much of my time at work on a computer does not help, with e-mail and ten thousand more distractions. I suspect my teacher would say: Sitting on the zafu, only Mu! Being in the world, only Mu! Going to sesshin, only Mu!

Only Mu.....

Samsara: Light and Dark

Watching longing and grasping arise and fall, seeing the light and dark, the ten thousand things all intertwined. It is a wonder I can find the breath at all in this darkness, or see in the light. All I want to do is grasp it! And yet, each grasping pulls threads of life, distorting the web, catching me in my own desires. Where is Mu in all of this? Yes indeed, where is Mu?

Equanimity

Suddenly, this morning during zazen, equanimity arrived. There I sat, longing in one corner, equanimity in the other. Connected to ten thousand threads of life, a gentle pool of still water. And in this, longing was gently present. But now I could sit and watch without succumbing blindly. Threads, light, water....

Longing

"I don't know you, but I want you, all the more for that."

Falling Slowly
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

Unfocused, raw longing has crept into my zazen lately. None of us are strangers to longing; longing for the past, for the future, for things, for a lover, for some thing that is not now. And that is the crux of it, as longing takes you out of now into time past and time future. Not this breath, but that last-lost-perfect one, or no... the beautiful one-that-is-coming! Now I sit with this longing, unsure of what it is for, but painfully aware of it's intensity in my hara. Watching it during zazen, not acting, not feeding the animal. This ache is hard, exquisite, painful, hungry, and here!