i like zen

I feel like I’m at zero.

I said this just a few days ago to my husband, explaining how the last ten years of corporate marketing and management jobs means nothing anymore. Because I’ve decided that I want a career change to do something creative, to write.

And then came the phone call — a media company seeks a proposal from my husband to help them create an iphone franchise.

My husband panicks. I pick up the pen, putting the last ten years back to use. I guess everything that happens truly does build you for the next big thing in life.

Too busy to break away from analyzing market trends and start-up costs, I was digesting data instead of dinner tonight. Fortunately, my husband orders steam dumplings and vegetable fried rice from PF Changs.

Here’s what two fortune cookies foresee for us:

Doors will be opening for you in many areas of your life.

Failure is the mother of success.

It’s been crazy busy. But I’m happy and hopeful.

One summer, I read Gone with the Wind while lying on a blanket beside vines of scuppernong and muskadine. I remember the slight prick of grass against lanky twelve year old legs. Blueberries, cow pastures and a pond edged an endless driveway. It wasn’t my driveway. I lived across the street on the other side of Hazel Creek Road. This literary scene, this small corner of the Georgia foothills, belonged to Mr. Robert and Lily Owens. They were old cattle farmers, my neighbors and friends.

When I needed a break from the misfits of Miss Scarlett O’Hara, I walked aimlessly down the driveway and eventually knocked on the screen door to Mrs. Owen’s kitchen. She gently scooted me inside and told me to keep watch for humming birds while she made us sandwiches. I often stared past the wooden window and bird feeder … gazing out at idle fields and grazing cows. While I did this, she took out four slices of Wonder bread, a jar of Helman’s mayonaise and reached into a ceramic fruit bowl for a tomato. Her tomato sandwiches and sweet Lipton iced tea made summer eternal and seventh grade feel forever away. I remember thinking there was no other way to read Gone with the Wind.

This summer wild mushrooms sprout along my walking path. It’s been twenty years since that summer of tomato sandwiches. I wonder if Mrs. Owens would still be at her kitchen window watching for humming birds, wanting to make sandwiches. I wish I could go back and hug her.

Throbbing. For days, I have sat monitoring the sensations of pain in my mouth. Each tooth vibrates, the molars throb the hardest. They edge bruised tunnels where wisdom teeth once were. On the days with heavy pain, each tooth felt like a cage containing a restless humming bird. Constant was the thrashing. Finally, on day five, the buzzing subsides and on occasion, the throbbing feels more like the flutter of butterflies. But then the butterflies roost and there is the feeling of non-throbbing.

This has been my practice this week: monitoring the ebb and flow of pain…of change.

My father has called daily with sypathetic pain in his voice. Always, he ends each call with two encouraging words: oht ow. These two words my father says often and knows well. Oht ow means just wait or keep waiting. I’ve spent an entire week contemplating my father’s frequent words and wisdom.

Everything changes. This is what Shunryu Suzuki summarized when asked what Zen really means by student, David Chadwick.

As I’ve waited for my mouth to heal this week, I’ve witnessed constant changes in my life.

Wednesday afternoon, tennis balls bounce on and off ESPN while I tune in and out. The mechanical spew of sprinklers wetting foliage framing the patio catches my attention in time to see a siamese kitten pounce on one of the patio chairs. Her eyes contain the damp glow of an idle sky. I watch kitten claw and roll.

Later on, when the patio is empty again, I turn off the TV and listen to cool air huffing through vents and the refridgerator hum. My husband’s large birthday ballon turns slightly back and forth, hovering over the end of the couch. There are times when I cannot decipher if the throbbing is inside or outside of my mouth. At times, it all blends together into one long vibration: the AC, the refridgerator, the silenced TV, the empty patio and the pain in my gums and teeth.

Thursday, there is thumping from upstairs. It is the sound of new tenants hammering framed photos on bare walls. We receive exciting emails. The iphone game promotion went live and has launched our product ranking to top ten in several categories. The lease on a new town house got approved. On ESPN, Caroline Wozniacki heads to fight Nadia Petrova in the finals of the Pilot Pen and on to the US Open next week where she is seeded as #1.

Friday, I gain an appetite and make rice soup. With no where to go, I stand, patiently stirring a pot of rice…and my senses. In the those thirty minutes, I think of how the rice resembles first a pearl and then the moon…white and lumpy…gently bubbling and popping open…leaving craters. And then, I remember the bright bloom of flourescent white holly hocks in Taos. As I stand stirring, I see my mother’s delicate face and feel quite clearly sympathy pains…for my father, my mother and my family. We have travelled so far and waited so long for the pains of life to subside. I stirred… tapping into the motion of my own mother’s hands…the ancient act of making rice porridge.

Saturday marks my first day out and about. I go to Starbucks. I write. Slowly, I’m fitting back into my own life. It’s been interesting to see how things have happened this week with no particular pushing from me. I sat on the couch and watched tennis, a kitten and the days turn over. At the same time, I got a new house and my husband has new career options in the iphone market. All of this occurs while I patiently sat, watched and stirred.

Everything changes. It’s the truth… if you can keep waiting and watching.

Gaze in wonder at the ever-circling stars, as if you were floating among them; and consider the alterations of the elements, constantly changing one into another. Thinking such thoughts you wash away the dust of life on earth.

~ Marcus Aurelius

It’s my husband’s birthday.

Last Thursday, I lied flat on my back and patrolled the night sky. It was the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. The moon was an unobtrusive crescent, leaving a dark backdrop for comet debris to flash for the naked eye. That night a wizard waved his wand, trails of light darted in and out of the constellation Perseus.

I watched the universe re-arrange itself, losing sight of Mars, Venus and the moon. Alone, in a dark parking lot, snuggled in a makeshift sleeping bag of quilt and pillow from my bedroom, I made no wish. I stared into the foggy patch of sky where the Milky Way floated above large silouhettes of cottonwoods and mountains.

Underneath the astronomical popcorn maker, I felt as if every occurence in my life was special. I made no wish for at that moment I sincerely loved my life as it was. Stars, distant and dying, still illuminates the world. Their truth is my truth. My path of living is a small part of the larger magic of human life. Every thing happens to build us for the next. We are always part of the bigger picture.

This is the whisper of last week’s meteor shower.

the stars
distant and dying
dark and bright
are tealights
prayers
dotting the night

poem for Natalie

Down a crooked one-way street, cutting into Ranchitos Drive, sits El Gamal. The speed limit is 15 miles and the front awning is orange striped, inside stands a life size camel cut-out.

I’m sitting outside staring past my latte, over the sidewalk trimmed in yellow street paint. Beside a lamp post grows a cluster of sunflowers. Chevy and Toyota trucks litter the parking lot. An ornate sign says Gordon y Cuero, Leather Studio by Jaya and Larry Knapp. It hangs above an unfancy square window, bare and without shutters or frames.

A quilt of cumulo-nimbus clouds cover the distance in lilac. Pinon and sage brush dot the mountains. The pavement slants and is marked with parking meters when I glance left. Newspaper bins stand under the awning. Branches with unclustered black berries block the sky. I bend my gaze, down the road I see cloud shadows on the tip of Taos mountain.

My eyes scan east often, especially in the mornings when hoping to witness the wink of sunrise. In the newness of day and blankness of mind, my heart stretches with the horizon. Over this cup of silence, I sip on important matters… such as marriage.

Since being here, I have taken deep breaths…the air is delicious. In zazen, I imagine my breaths as ocean waves slapping rocks. So, cleansing and powerful. Yet, I am wondering, what exactly is the rock that sits beneath each breath?

Mabel, in her own words, said this of her rock…her mountain:

…When Frieda and Lawrence first came and we were driving them up to Santa Fe from the train, Frieda, I remember, looked wonderously at his broad back in front of her and exclaimed, “Don’t you feel like he (Tony sic) is a rock for you to lean on?” And I said, “no” uncertainly.

But we had only been together five years then. Now, twelve years later, he seems like a rock; more than that a mountain, that will support all the weight I can put on him. Nothing can really hurt a woman who has a man like this to give her moral and emotional support. We could lose our houses and horses, our friends, our health and our strengths, but as long as we are together, we are immune from essential loss.

Yes, I thought. Carl is to Taos mountain as I am to the clouds.

the clouds are pitiable
what night walkers humans become
awakened, I listen to one truth
- black rain on roof of Fukagawa temple

~ Basho

Natalie recited this poem in a gutteral, monotone voice during evening zazen and rain. Moments later, before hitting the bell, she asked us, you have one minute left, how will you practice?

New Mexico rain bonked roof and slid down walls and windows while the wind whirled…no answer for her question.

Out of the silence, throbbed thunder and flashed sideways lightning. In front of me were the unblinking wooden eyes of the zendo floor. On Wednesday evening, the Pueblo pounded the ancient call for rain. I listened to the blended howl of coyotes and native americans from my bedroom window edging Taos Mountain. Now, on Thursday night, the sky drums back.

Allen Ginsberg sits with me. His grayed photo is framed in yellow, leaning on the mantle by a pine cone. Pressed against milky mud walls are my shoulder blades, sagging with solitude. The zendo breathes wildly as an auspicious storm gushes in and out with my breathing.

It stings like hard liquor, the adobe sky hosing down the mesa. The medley of folk music, purple sage, blue spruce and silver maple wets windows, walls and doors.

Listening to the thrashing hunger pain of Sky, I fight the urge to kamikaze down Morada Lane, letting Taos gnash at me. At this very moment, I am intoxicated from black rain. How it beats into my bloodstream, making my heart into a fist clenching and releasing.

But no, I sit, in dim light, on black cushion and continue to breathe… choosing instead to softly decompose. Quietude shifts into focus, the storm becomes background noise, as I stair ahead. It is a slim doorway by the alter, framed in historic wood. It resembles a Japanese gateway or tori. My attention enters the thickness and something deep in me cracks open, shatters even.

The wind awakens me. I look left, the window panes are still square and intact. What is it that broke open from the storm?

Day two, Tuesday evening, I sat in the zendo eyes juiced and leaking endlessly. Tears dripped dry with the almost 9 o’clock breeze. I continued to sit, letting a river run from lids to cheeks, off chin and onto  collar bone. Taos and the retreat has turned me inside out, the underbelly of things being the only perspective I have. The air is medicinal and intoxicating, leaving me feeling healed and heady.

Natalie and Beate shared their recent experience from a Bearing Witness retreat visiting Auschwitz. The two friends and zen teachers are tender and tough, detailing for us what they saw… a 2 ton pile of Jewish hair… an immense pile of baby shoes… the train station where Jews were told to go one direction to be enslaved and the other direction to be slaughtered.

It was industrialized…meticulously planned, says a wincing Natalie.

Every Jewish body part went into Germany. The ashes were shipped to fertilize fields. The hair were used to weave rugs.

During the visit to Auschwitz, in the evening, Jewish, Buddhist and Christian ceremonies were conducted to honor the holocast victims, survivors and perpetrators. There was chanting, meditating, dancing and standing in crematoriums, gas chambers and bunkers; trying to honor all who was destroyed.

Both women spoke of reading many books to prepare for the experience. One author in particular, wrote of a common thread that holocaust survivors had: the ability to hold onto wholesome thoughts in unhuman conditions. There was a Jewish man who everday replayed the memory of riding the bus home, walking up the stairway to his apartment, gripping and turning the door knob, gently opening the door and feeling the wall for the light switch, turning it on.

After sharing this, Beate urged us to be attentive to the mind and to train it. As a German, she had carried the shame and guilt of her people, for killing over 1 million Jews in Auschwitz. On the journey she asked, how did it all start? With simple things, she found – making it a law that Jews couldn’t eat ice cream. This was an example of how Germany layed foundation for atrocious acts, with small steps that met no resistance…building carefully upon…one small injustice upon the next.

Be vigilant, she urged, please. Don’t separate yourself from what’s happening. Be alert.

Every heart in the zendo broke open by the two storytellers, one Jewish and one German.