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October 2010 - Literary work by Andrew Libby:
Minding
the City was a dharma writing project I undertook during the summer
and autumn of 2006. Each year the Nalandabodhi Sangha Retreat has a
silent auction. My offering was to write at least one haiku each
day for 108 days.
The loose organizing principle, practicing in and around New York
City, lent itself to haibun, a traditional literary form most often
associated with travel journals. Haibun intermingles prose and
haiku.
These are the first 10 days.
Day 1
June 28, 2006, Wednesday
Are we there yet?
In a field of infinite space, time undone, the great BLAH BLAH of my words. Yet words I've promised. It seems so arid and tight-fisted-unimaginative-but "passing" is about all I can muster. Passing: From the NW Center to the airport. Waiting. Passing in the plane (Boeing 737) and waiting, reading a book on the volcanic mountain behind us now. Within, a sense of vastness-space like insulation against irritation: hah! This seems connected to the retreat, but not just a transient takeaway, I'm hoping. Passing in New Jersey, my girlfriend Yvette to greet me; sleep comes with resistance across the vastness. Passing to New York and home. More sleep: Mr. Karmapa inhabits my dreams in silence, and background mantra recitation. Waking dreams. To work in the Bronx. The bus home
Less full than in May,
skin tones dark, darker,
darkest
shared iPod earbuds.
Crossing the bridge, see
the dome of our campus glow
after I've left. The
gorge we pass over
doesn't dizzy me this time.
No captions: big mind.
This writing will probably be hit or miss, "like sex, it takes a couple of tries." I just read that a haibun "consists of one or more paragraphs with one or more embedded haikus." Associated since Basho with travel, it goes on, but my real inspiration, if that's what you call it, is my teacher Eve, who wrote a book in this form a couple of years ago. No index, so if you forget something you have to look for it again. My challenge, now familiar, is dropping the form. Let's see now.
Day 2
This is the path to work. Out the house door, then right or
left. Lately it's been left, towards the Hungarian pastry shop
that's one stop out of my way but offers delicious almond horns.
The name alone is worth the price of the marzipanish baked
crescent. You enter the subway at 110th St. station (103rd is
closer, but you have to turn right for that and miss the horns). I
take the 1 train (there is no nr. 9 anymore) to 181st Street.
This train passes the dizzying elevated 125th Street station at
the west side of Harlem, runs to 137th Street and City College.
Lots of students get off at 116th Street and 137th Street, and
there's a bit more space after they and their books leave the
train. Another group of people, medical professionals and sick
folks, get off at 168th Street, Columbia Presbyterian. I always
wonder about the children I see get off there with their
parents.
My stop is 181, which lies I'd guess two stories below street
level. You have to take an elevator to the surface. Four to chose
from, and usually all are operational. One is actually still
manned, a remnant of some Transit Workers' Union contract, no
doubt. What a job. Yesterday the attendant didn't have any music or
TV (most do), just sat there watching the walls. But they always
respond if you speak to them. Always. In the other elevators you're
on your own, though you're seldom alone. A slight wave of anxiety
always collects around the elevators; people throng as they wait. I
throng too. Word is there are emergency stairs, but like all doors
in New York's MTA stations, these are locked most of the time. Word
is also that the stairs are plenty disgusting, slimey. But if you
had too, . . .
Pigeons fly about the 181st Street underground station, finding their way to us from further upline where the tracks open into light and the surface our station forbids.
Underground birds fly
and shit, like the ones up
top.
People feed them, too,
like up top. Two cops
ticketing a man but my
train comes, cool inside.
It's hard not to paint this commute into a scene from some hell vision, and in fact I used to hate it and avoid as if it were a punishment. That hesitation still takes
hold of me sometimes,
and looking for marvels seems
dishonest, sometimes,
but sometimes they do
occur, if I can retract
me and let it show
itself as it will.
It never rains down here, no
mirroring puddle.
Vamoose, self! Stuff's happening!! Get out of the way! But I
don't. Not usually.
Day 3
Make the sound of rain-
you can't, really. Cars zish,
but
to give you all the
drops singly falling,
a kind of unison, no
you'd have to be there.
Rain brings a kind of quiet, especially in summer, when everyone is out walking, baring themselves to cool down. Before the rain there may be some action. One man just now was storming down Broadway, letting loose a single syllable at the top of his lungs every ten steps or so. But you couldn't tell what he was trying to articulate. Couldn't make it out. Maybe his outbursts meant "You cheated me" or "I'm late can't you see and all these people-you-are in my way" or my favorite possibility "Listen to me for a change." You can't do much for people like that, I tell myself in weak belief, but if I had tried, I might have asked, "What is it you want to say?" or "Could I listen for awhile?" or simply "Say more."
The bodhisattva vow is so wildly out there that I'm always falling short, left with
these contemplations.
The afternoon sky's made good
its big plans: skybound streets.
Day 4
Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.
Summer's set in. People like to show that they have bodies that move and glisten. Fleeting in space.
Bounce, bounce, bounce,
swagger,
bounce, flex, eyes meet, glance
away.
What captures this all?
The subway platform is like a shower stall after a hot shower. As you move through the air, the humidity strokes your skin and dampens your clothes. When a train is coming, your bare legs start getting cooler as the train breathes ahead down the tunnel. Only later can you detect its rumble.
In the old days the trains might have been hotter than the platforms, but for the circulation of air due to its forward motion. Imagine a stop signal or pulled emergency brake. Bodies. Now they are super-climatized, frigid as if in compensation, and I always get a cold at some point in the summer every summer.
For much of the day you don't need sunglasses, traveling
underground as we do and being in buildings. But few don't wear
them, and some keep them on in the train. What captures this all,
this brilliance?
---
Out to the airport to pick up my twelve-year-old son flying in
from Milan Malpensa. He summers with me every year. The trip out to
JFK used to be a time to relax surrounded by tensenesses of
preparation and then of single parenting, but that's subsided with
time. Take the A train to Howard Beach (smell the yummy brine of
the sea), then the barely two-year-old Skytrain.
No operator-
this makes me uneasy, my
son shrugs, then me too-
Why worry if it
gets you places, I suppose.
No one's in charge here
anyway. Poor signage
I'm looking for Arrivals
see only Lower
Level. Yes, that's what
I pressed last time, wasn't
it?
More waiting, his eyes.
Day 5
Shopping downtown. I get lost of course-that's the buddha mind that enwraps my karma core, one friend says-and steer us far away from our destination through the crowds of Sunday shoppers and tourists. Benjamin wisely suggests we ask. I'd rather wander on than ask-I always do-but ask anyway. "Don't know." No one else knows either.
How about a detour, then? Pork buns in the north part of China town. This is the day we call Papa-Benjamin, Benjamin-Papa, like every day of summer. It's so easy, hanging together, letting things arise. Not so much elation after a ten-month absence as "Yes, here we are." Not the shrill fear of "How do you be a father, a good father?" that swamped me years ago. Just, "Yes, here we are again, chilling." Good enough
Click. Take the bus
its windows let you take in
the city, sitting
talking. The way we
mix. At home a drunk sleeps
next
door on the sidewalk,
dead to the world. There
were many today. Did you
see them all? Karma.
They enter with us, climb the stairs and keep company as I make the salad, tired and watching my irritation rise and founder. His mother taught me how to dress the salad. Which movie do you want to see, the silent comedy or the sci-fi action flick?
Day 6
Thinner population for the holiday, July Fourth. Park visit, and oddly it's difficult today to find what to write. Too bound to thought, far from the moment.
Bank holiday tomorrow
Some start early: beer
at 9:30 am. Bank
holiday Tuesday.
The green means your eyes
can settle in. What's
to happen isn't here yet.
No drama today.
No melody, unless you
count spots of birdsong.
Night
New York's not nearly
as badass as it pretends.
Still, firecrackers
make me wonder at
our fragility. What we
do when we show off.
Day 7
Mists lie on the marshlands
of
New Jersey. How they
manipulate light
makes the fireworks less a
spectacle. Brillance
wants less not more as
we pass through. Liberating
yourself might be just
that easy. Lessen
Day 8
Lessen [from
nr. 7]
the ardor of wanting to
be a buddha, naked and
pure, true-right now.
Wandering through this
brilliance
called buddha fields. Know
what arises, since
there is no beyond, just
this;
this is omniscience,
they say, budding here.
Dream of Rinpoche
as I awoke: no reading
he'd made electric
neon paintings for the West.
Muse on them, wake up.
Sense it directly.
I woke up dreaming, vibrant.
this is me too, I
thought later, and you.
What if there is no changelessness, only more we're not in control of?
Day 9
What if Buddha were
a bubble? Float? Shimmer?
Burst?
Another! And another.
Make more bubbles! Bubble
bath,
sudsy dishes. Foam
rubber. Fish tank
breathing up a line of them,
bubbles cling to your
skin under water.
Bubbles heading up and out.
Away?-Bubble gum!
Your mouth, a buddha.
Is this buddha nature? Not the changing but the changing display, the colors thrown off effortlessly, the empty inside, the popping that only makes more bubbles. -No way. Knowing that the bubble image can't contain tathagatagarbha, that it's there when we know and when we don't know-we can still experience a soft delight in its outrageous play, can't we?
Day 10
Sometimes I just long for a climb up a soft, graded, clay path to a wooden hermitage somewhere on a mountain in southeast China. The path upward just steep enough to keep your mind on it. Too funny, my romantic fantasies of Kerouacian Zen lunatics, and me among them. Shades of Han Shen! And throw in the Lone Ranger for good measure.
Truth is, today's heap
of irritations has sent
me abroad, in search
of some simpler way-
effortless satori or
simply some way to
avoid the frictions
and aggravations living
with others entails.
In this scheme freedom
means away, not this moment
that flees without my
really wanting it
to. Bubbles would be welcome,
aid to mindful speech.
See the entire archive of Everyday Life: Personal Journeys by clicking here.
August 2010 - Fiber Artwork of Wrathful
Tara by Susan Sinisi
February 2010 - Contemplation by Denis
Hunter
Many years
ago, in my aimless twenties, I spontaneously arrived at the
conviction that any strong resentment or dislike we humans might
feel towards another person is usually rooted in a projection of
something we don't like about ourselves. I could occasionally see
this type of unconscious projection taking place in myself and my
own resentment-riddled relationships, but more often it was easier
to observe it, impartially, in the behavior of other people. (Isn't
that always the case?)
Later, when I began to study Buddhism and encountered the Tibetan Lojong (mind-training) teachings, I realized that this principle is encapsulated in the Lojong slogan, "Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment."
By meditating on whatever (or whoever) provokes feelings of resentment or irritation in us, we can not only begin to release our negative emotions and open our hearts to the other person, but we can develop profound insight into ourselves and our own "shadow" material. As Pema Chodron puts it, "Instead of the resentment being an obstacle, it's a reminder. Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully. It's a reminder to stop talking; watch and listen." By doing so, we become more able to stay present and experience the raw, uncomfortable energy of what Chodron calls shenpa, that gut feeling of being hooked into our emotional reactions towards others, beyond all our storylines.
In Jungian psychology, that hidden or repressed part of ourselves that we project onto other people -- which underlies so much of our shenpa -- is called the "shadow." From Wikipedia:
The shadow or "shadow aspect" is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts.... "Everyone carries a shadow," Jung wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is...."
According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to project: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized, "The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand...." These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world.
Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness -- or perhaps because of this -- the shadow is the seat of creativity."
Alan Wallace writes that the Tibetan text of this particular slogan, like many of the other Lojong slogans, is intentionally vague and could be interpreted in several different ways. He translates it as "Always meditate on those who make you boil." Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche translates it as "Always meditate on whatever is unavoidable," and suggests that we meditate particularly on those people who give us problems or compete with us, those whom we simply don't like, and so on.
I once encountered a fellow Buddhist practitioner at a retreat who was so innately talented at provoking my shenpa, that by simply walking into the room he could stir up a whole conniption fit of moral judgment and disdain in my mind. His entire manner of presenting himself as a practitioner struck me as phony, pretentious, holier-than-thou, a case-study of spiritual materialism in action. Everything about his self-presentation irritated me: his very spiritual-sounding name (which, damningly, I knew wasn't his real name), the excessively mindful way he walked, the meticulous, softspoken way he talked, the way he bowed, even the very religious way he said his prayers over his food -- there was no room in my mind for this poor guy to do anything right. But because of the close nature of the retreat we were in, I could not avoid him, and my intense closed-mindedness and judgment towards him were constantly being put in front of my face. He not only provoked an inexplicable resentment in me, he made me boil without even trying, and he was unavoidable -- however you translate this slogan, he fit the bill.
One day, I had reached such a crescendo of aversion towards him in my own mind that I simply couldn't stand it anymore -- I decided to devote the morning meditation session to reflecting on my resentment towards him and seeing if I could transform it. In my reflection, I tried to experience the raw, naked energy of judgment and dislike, and to analyze what it was about and where it sprang from; I tried to see what kind of storyline was attached to it and what the underlying forces might be in me that could arouse such a solid storyline and such a strong, negative reaction to this person.
In meditation, I realized that my whole way of reacting to him sprang from my own fear, insecurity, and jealousy. On seeing his particular way of practicing the spiritual path, so different from my own, I felt insecure and uncertain that I was going about things in the right way; I feared it meant that I was less spiritual than he was. I was jealous of his seeming comfort and ease within his spiritual practice, when I so often felt awkward about my own, and I felt competitive. All of these feelings hearkened back to my earliest childhood experiences of religion, in the Southern Baptist Church, when I had tried so hard to be a good Christian but felt absolutely no sincere connection to Jesus Christ as my personal savior, and consequently felt hopelessly lost and in danger of eternal damnation. These were all things that I was unable and unwilling to see clearly in myself, in the moment, and so they became shadow material that was promptly transmuted into a thick, impenetrable wall of irritation, judgment and resentment towards this poor, sincere practitioner who was just trying to follow the spiritual path in the best way he knew how.
Once I saw these things about myself, through peering in meditation into the historical and psychological roots of my resentment, the fog of irritation and closed-mindedness began immediately to dissolve. The deep-seated habitual tendency towards judgment did not entirely disappear -- I could still feel it well up when he took too long to bow at the door of the shrine room, or spent longer than I thought any person should spend saying prayers before eating his food -- but now I was able to see through the emotionality of my reaction, to observe my own egomaniacal judgments with a sense of humor and spaciousness. I even began to enjoy this man's company and to look forward to conversations with him. With my own shadow material exposed to the light of awareness, my judgments about his way of practicing no longer served as fuel for irritation and resentment. I became grateful for the presence of this person who previously had driven me to distraction, and I even began to think of him with affection and kindness.
All genuine spiritual paths emphasize the importance of transforming our resentments in this way: the Christian path emphasizes forgiveness and tolerance; the 12-Step path emphasizes moral inventory and making amends; the Buddhist path emphasizes meditation and clear seeing into the nature of our own mind, and moving beyond our habitual patterns. Whatever path we are on, if we hope to continue growing in wisdom, if we hope to be more free from suffering, we must face our demons directly; we cannot afford to continue wallowing for another day in the pig-sty of our own resentments. By meditating on our resentments and transforming them in awareness, they can become, as Jung suggested, the very source of our creativity and wisdom.
December 2009 - Poem by Tim
Douglas
I cry for the cookie that
I want relatively,But know I don't ultimately need.
Why do my sambhogakāya cookies
Taste so much better than what's on my nirmanakaya plate?
Ignorance...
Anger rising.
Fear that my empty oven
Will have no cookies to bake!
I'm going to toss my cookies
If I don't sit right now.
October 2009 - Poem by Robert
Bullock
Oh my old friend Ego,
I have bad news:
Your days are numbered,
And you shall expire soon!
Too long you've been in the driver's seat,
At times, I'm sure, protecting me,
But now my heart will take control,
And you give up your very soul.
Your beautiful smile will not change your fate,
Nor your rock and roll fantasies,
Nor the wealth you've stored away,
Nor your clever linguistic play,
Even this poem is your domain!
But you are nothing just the same.
You think your pride cannot be beat,
Tossed out like trash onto the street?
The simple truth, you will not win,
And when you lose,
The game begins