[November, 1996]
At the end of the Summer, within six weeks, the wheels came off of my life. I had a serious falling out with my parents and my older sister, had a knife held up to my throat in Spain, found my storage space ransacked and all of my financially valuable possessions stolen, and caused a freeway accident that totaled three cars and put six people in the hospital. Needless to say, I was depressed and unhappy to an exponential power by the end of all that. I had talked to my friend Jeremy about some of my travails and pain, and he, having lived at the Santa Cruz Zen Center for over a year and having just visited his former SCZC housemate at the San Francisco Zen Center City Center, recommended that I consider living at the latter place. I was superunhappy with the idea of giving up that much of my personal freedom, but I wasn't exactly in a yee-ha party mood to make good use of living in SF as a free man. Besides, finding a place to live here in the City (any place, not just a decent place), is a Herculean ordeal these days, so I went and interviewed at the Zen Center. I talked with Vicki Austin, the director, and Paul Haller, the tanto (director of practice), each individually. Both interviews went well, and I felt optimistic. I was in the middle of my job search so I had the idea of sending thank you cards, and I did. I was accepted to move in, and hired my friend Erik and his van and we moved all of my stuff in. It was a warm feeling, to finally have a home of my own, after a year of traveling and roaming. The schedule began for me the next day - waking up at 4:50 am, an hour and twenty minutes of meditation - almost all of it sitting - and then twenty minutes chanting, twenty minutes temple cleaning, and breakfast. The first two weeks I went back to bed after breakfast most days. I was mad - people seemed superunfriendly, my freedom was being severely restricted, and the whole things seemed dumb. I wanted to leave, and had a sick feeling that I had made a mistake. I feel differently now. I've done lots of meditative sitting in the eight weeks since - including three Saturday all-days, which, as it always is, have been challenging and painful but leaving me with ecstasy, clarity, and peace. I feel like it takes lots of strength to sit all day like we do.
I am taking a class with and occasionally do dokusan (private interview about how meditation and life are going) with Paul Haller, one of the priests there, who I find helpful and who I respect lots. He's a good role model for me, and also we have fun, weird word-game conversations like I like to have with people. He seems to like me. I feel humanized and glad to be alive after interacting with him. I am also finding that Zen awareness is seeping into my days everywhere, which was just what I had hoped for, moving in there. I feel certain that living there has been healing, in comparison with my emotional state I was in when I moved in. Even though I sometimes feel a tightness of regret over missing out on the wildness and fun going on in the city all around me, the narrowing of choices seems somewhat positive - it's forced me to spend my time meditating and going to spiritual classes, things that, in the final analysis, I most want to do. Also, it seems, now that I have been there for a while, I connect much better with people now - it seems like there was an attitude towards me (which hurt for a while but which I can also recognize in myself towards others now) of not wanting to spend too much time on someone who might leave the next week. One other aspect of my living there is that it has been involving larger amounts of responsibility - locking up the building and being night watchman once a month, greeting people arriving in the evening for classes once a month, cleaning all the altars of old incense once a week, washing dishes for sixty people twice a week, watching the meditation-hall door during morning sitting once a week, there's more also. In addition to all the sitting each morning and my forty-hour-a-week new job, of course, it adds to having a full life, turning down lots of social offers. But it's also a nice feeling, being part of a community, all pitching in. I feel adult taking care of the community in these ways.
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Say Yes Quickly
Forget your life. Say Divinity is Great. Get up.
You think you know what time it is. It's time to pray.
You've carved so many little figurines, too many.
Don't knock on any random door like a beggar.
Reach your long hands out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, "How are you?"
and no one says, "How aren't you?"
Tomorrow you'll see what you've broken and torn tonight,
thrashing in the dark. Inside you
there's an artist you don't know about.
He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
If you are here unfaithfully with us,
you're causing terrible damage.
If you've opened your loving to God's love,
you're helping people you don't know
and have never seen.
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you've known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
-- Rumi
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[February, 1997]
Since I wrote that, I am doing well. I moved out of Zen Center for most of December to live at my friend David Rauch's house in order to use the extra time to apply to graduate schools in clinical psychology. It is something that I have thought about doing for four years, and now have done. It took a huge amount of time and attention to detail and favor asking (could you please write me a letter of recommendation? could you please proof read this?). I almost didn't move back in to Zen Center at the end of December, and, when I did, I had made moving out and finding a new house with friends a high priority. But I didn't do that, and I've settled into being superhappy to live there. I've found ways to sneak doing what I want to do in to little cracks of time, and I feel much less stressed about skipping things there (I find that I can do that a lot more at City Center than I could when I was living at Green Gulch - I think that there is the recognition by the senior staff that it's life in the big city). I've gone to yoga class three times in the last nine days, that is nice, that I can live here and still fit that in. Also, there are now four straight more-or-less single women under thirty-five living there now, and there were none when I first moved in. It changes the vibe by quite a bit. They all moved in because of me, if we're really going to be honest. Anyway, I feel friendly or at least comfortable with most people there. I've been there for five months, it's my home. The beautiful building is a powerhouse of good chi. Too bad so many people who live in it are such dorks.
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FAMOUS
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
-- Naomi Shihab Nye
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[September, 1997]
My life is going pretty well at this point. I have lived at the SF Zen Center City Center for over a year now. This has involved getting up at 4:50 during week days and six on Saturdays, to meditate for a while, chant, and clean (I usually sleep in and skip the schedule between one and three mornings a week, however). I don't have to shop, cook, or (for most meals) do dishes, but then again meals there are served at fixed times, and I am rarely there for them, so that helps me little. It's somewhat good California hippie food, when I am there. I have other jobs around there also, setting up tea on Saturdays for the people who come for lecture, scrubbing bathrooms, locking up the building one night a month, doing dishes twice a week.
I attend lots of Zen classes and lectures on weekday nights and Saturday mornings (I almost always really dig the ones that I go to), although I go to fewer than I am expected to. When I first got there, I took a class about the flow of awareness, being aware of what goes through my head and what I am perceiving and what interpretations I am giving to my experience. After that, I took a class that was tough by a priest aligned with the more militant, action-orientated wing of Zen (Rinzai Zen); this class was about generating energy from the belly, energy to yell loudly, stay rooted when someone tried to push one over, to use in martial arts exercises, etc. Then I attended a class on the difference between effortless, "enlightened" non-karmic action done with the awareness that the universe is interconnected, and karmic action done willfully, individually, with a goal in mind, in a compulsive, striving manner. I just finished a class about the Heart Sutra, one of the oldest Mahayana Buddhist scriptures. This class, like the rest that I listed, was taught by the priest who has been my "practice leader" (I meet with him episodically and talk about my meditation), Ryushin Paul Haller. It dealt which dealt with such Buddhist topics as the five skandhas, the twelvefold chain of dependent causation, the relationship between the relative and the absolute, how nothing exists independently, and how we can be aware of this through mindfulness and settling into inhabiting our experience. On the class/lecture tip: we had a very interesting presentation a week ago by a honkey Zen Priest who lives in Australia and named Brian Victoria concerning Zen collusion and integration into Japanese militarism during the twenties through forties. It was freaky but somehow liberating, like those "perfect" Zen guys over in Japan are just as human as we are over here.
I don't know how you feel about Buddhism at this point. I dig meditation. Looking back, I can see that I dug it years ago, and did it all the time, then for a few years I started thinking that it made people weak and passive, now I'm way into it again. It helps me to be the person that I want to be, to achieve my highest goals, and to not do things that I regret later. I also dig most of my Zen classes. I can do without the lots of the chanting and the unspoken religious-y rules of self-negating behavior, and I can do without the fact that many wounded people show up to the center and that many of them are kinda hard to deal with.
Living there and doing all of these activities has involved being part of a whole community, many young people, more older people, many who live in the building, many who don't, some uptight and some fun, mostly white people (those that aren't are mostly Latin or East Asian), lots of them from Jewish or Catholic backgrounds. It's gotten to be comfortable and supportive for me, although there are also lots of people who I don't dig and actually don't like seeing as often as I do.
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No one lives his life.
Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,
we come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.
Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.
Maybe all the paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.
And yet, null,
though you and I struggle
against the deathly clutch of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.
Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?
Is it the animals, moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?
Who lives it, then?
Divine Spirit, are you the one
who is living life?
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
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[December, 1997]
My tenure at City Center is winding down. There is a seven-day Rohatsu sesshin there this week, and, with one foot already out the door, I am not sitting it. I feel uncomfortable being in the building, especially this week with the meditation intensive. Most everyone there is on that deep-inside Buddha vibe and I am not (I had the same experience last year, when I was living at a friend's house for a couple weeks, getting graduate school applications out the door, busy busy busy mind, and went to Zen Center a few times that week to pick up some things). I could use some meditation in my life these days: I feel centered, because I know where I am going and am moving solidly in that direction, but a few days of all-day sitting would still be a good thing. I haven't even been sitting during the morning schedule much. I plan to sit tonight, tomorrow morning, tomorrow night, and then both weekend days. I am also planning to sit a five-day spring sesshin, like I did last year while living here, and like I did when I was living at the Green Gulch temple the year before that.
The Rebster [my teacher, the former abbot Tenshin Reb Anderson] just got back from being in Tassajara for the Fall practice period, but he was gone for three months before that. A while back, I was going to a weekly group with him that was the bomb. It was initially at a yoga studio, but then it moved to City Center, which was more convenient for me. It was great. I remember the last time the group met -- there were about thirty friends of mine in the room, and maybe a hundred strangers - it was a warm social feeling for me that was so rich that it was almost too much. During most the class sessions, he talked about the difference between effortless, "enlightened" non-karmic action done with the awareness that the universe is interconnected and karmic action done willfully, individually, with a goal in mind, in a compulsive, striving manner. But, during this last class, he talked about the eight-fold path, and about a koan that touched on original enlightenment (the story laid out the idea that enlightenment is not like a commoner suddenly being made prime minister, it's like a commoner suddenly realizing that he/she comes from a long line of royalty). Reb (literally) also talked about the Zen teaching on how to urinate (full-on, and then full-off - I guess that little trickles at either end indicate too much muscular control and ego-mindedness).
A guy asked a bitchy question about how Siddharma Gautama never taught original enlightenment, he taught a progressive path to enlightenment. Reb's answer was artistry, it was colossal, I was honored to have witnessed it. He sat there for a second, and his whole body seemed to have lit on fire, and then he said, "I dedicate my life to Shakyamuni Buddha. I love Shakyamuni Buddha with all of my being." He named other teachers in the lineage as people he loved and gives his whole being to. He said, "I give all of my being to all of you." He said, "Only one person has ever taught what Shakyamuni Buddha taught, and that's Shakyamuni Buddha. I teach what Reb teaches, and Dong Shan (the Chinese teacher in the koan) teaches what Dong Shan taught. Because I love Shakyamuni, I am Reb, and he is him. Because Shakyamuni loves me, he wants me to be me, not to be Shakyamuni Buddha. If you don't care about Shakayumni Buddha, try to be like him. If you love him, be yourself. Ultimately, you have no choice." He then fucked all of our minds by pointing out that Shakyamuni Buddha is completely responsible for the teachings of Dong Shan, and those of Reb, and of Joseph Smith (the founder of Mormonism), and of the question-asker, in the same way that the question asker is completely responsible for all teachings that happen in the world, and for all that happens anywhere. He explained that, as soon as you make any distinction between anything in the universe, the whole thing falls apart, and that that doesn't work, it's all one big show. He said all of this and more, except somewhat more coherently. It was tres chic.
But now, I am going to be enjoying all that Zen vibe as a non-resident, rather than as a resident. I have been looking for a new place to live, and, although it has been a royal pain-in-the-ass, I think that I have found a place that will work out. I think that I will miss the community at City Center, the many people that I love and am comfortable with. I have also been appreciating the spiritual discipline that the place demands, as I prepare to leave (the frequent one- or two-day all-day meditation sits have been going great - the experience of sitting them so often has been helping me to see why I am as committed to Buddhism as I am). Also, I am appreciating how the kitchen staff there do the food ordering and cooking, and how I only have to do dishes twice a week. I do plan to come back and visit the center often, but many things won't be the same, I predict.
However: no more getting up at 4:50 am, that will be nice. I look forward to seeing friends more, having more free time to go out and go to yoga class and do other things. An even bigger reason why I want to move out of Zen Center is to have more time to play music. Playing music is what is exciting to me these days. My aim is to waste away over the guitar, not leaving the room except for the occasional meal or yoga class, once I move into a new house (joking). I bought a nice old guitar, a bass, and a guitar amp in the last six months, I have been taking guitar lessons again for six months now, that's been phat. I have played bass with a band a few times a while back, although I think that that is over (they haven't called me, I haven't called them - yesterday I learned about a show that they are doing tonight by seeing an ad for it in a music paper, which was ever so slightly painful). I also preformed a song with a band (I played electric guitar and sang) at a Zen Center skit night on Halloween. I had forgotten how cool it is to play music with people (and how much work it is).
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