When The Child Was A Child

I saw this film when it was new, beside a beautiful young woman with whom I did not yet realise I was in love.

She was also a German speaker, and afterward, shuffling through the autumn leaves of Northwest Portland, she taught me to say „Als das kind kind war“ properly.

Or any road, as properly as someone who doesn't speak German can say it.

I served her tea in my apartment, her eyes imprinted on my soul, and we parted without kissing.

Re-watching this opening scene almost 40 years later, it's like prophecy – the filmmaker's patina of memory, the palpable Zen in the poetry, and the young man as yet too distracted to be awake to it.

At least I had a better excuse in that place and moment.

St. Valentine's Day Meditation

Love is an act of courage, a losing bet that makes all who place it holy. Absurdity, sacrifice, and heartbreak are integral to it; marks of valour, not folly.

Those who refuse to honour it are first damned and last saved.

– From the journal of my 100 days of solo meditation in the forest, the story of which – 100 Days on the Mountain – I'm currently shopping to publishers.


(Photo of traffic signal trafficked for St. Valentine's Day – a lighthouse in the trackless night – courtesy of François Detemmerman and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Final Precept

In the early days of my monastic practice, a Franciscan friend shared a bit of his acquired wisdom with me:

"You should only ever take a vow if you're already doing that anyway."

Sounded a bit paradoxical at the time, but as I've since learned it's exact.

People tend to take vows (or precepts, as we call them in Zen) as a declaration of intent – generally, to abstain from some urge they would otherwise indulge. And this negative emphasis – "I will forgo", rather than "I will accept" – won't convince your impulses to stand down.

"All you're doing is setting yourself up for failure," according to the friar. "And a vow you don't keep just creates greater discontent, more suffering, and more doubt that you'll have to overcome."

Instead, he suggested, you should vow to do something you've already come to do naturally; a principle you've resolved, if unconsciously, to refer to in future decisions. Then the vow is conscious confirmation of insight, instead of a promise to behave as if you already have insight you don't in fact have.

It took me years to grasp fully the truth of this teaching, but like all good resolutions, it came when needed.

In my case, the precept in question was the one governing my sexual life. I should state up front that I have serious problems with the role sex plays in my culture, the importance it's conceded in our ethical and spiritual domains, and the superstitions we weaponise to enforce them.

Thus I was reluctant to address the issue at all, as a red herring, when I was working to found an authentic Zen practice to free myself from such delusions.

There's also the fact that for me, conduct toward members of the opposite sex has always been governed by my desire for companionship, with the sexual component solidly subservient to that; since puberty I've had zero interest in sex before or in absence of a relationship.

So the very nature of a sexual conduct vow struck me as beside the point – something that doesn't address my problem, and therefore a waste of time.

Finally, the second dependent vow of my Rule clearly states,

I will honour my karma.

And contrary to common Western misconception, karma isn't just the bad stuff that happens to you. So at that time I reckoned that to deny true love, if fell from the sky, would have, to quote the catechism of my youth, "almost the nature of sin".

Therefore, the precept I took was, "I will not initiate courtship." And I gave myself leave to lay even that aside if a solid case for it could be made.

I believe that was wise on my part, especially since adapting that precept to circumstances proved extremely instructive. And particularly because some of those circumstances were ultimately painful and regressive.

Which led me a few years ago to the Final Precept – the big one, the one everybody thinks of when you say "monk".

And by that time, like the friar said, it was really academic.

Because by then I'd meditated for years on my lifelong search for love and belonging, and especially on the sustained train wreck that pursuit of same has been over my lifetime.

I came to the conclusion that the investment was underperforming, and speculated on what might have been gained had I directed those resources elsewhere.

Toward my karma, for example. (If women wanted me, they'd've come looking for me.)

Toward things that have in fact brought peace and purpose. (My relationship with the planet, my Zen practice, the slow but steady opening of my mind and heart to The Great Not-Me.)

And especially, toward my monastic vocation. Of every angle I've worked since birth, it's the one that has consistently performed, without making anything worse. Had I initiated this practice at 16, where might I be today?

Somewhere, that's where.

So I married my Path.

And just like my Christian comrade told me, when at last I took the Final Precept, it was positive – "I will cleave to the path that works" – and not simply "I will refrain from sex", which vow, taken in a vacuum and without clarity, would probably not even stick.

Most importantly, it was moot. I no longer required convincing, and no deep existential temptation threatened my acceptance of it.

Now, when the possibility of courtship flickers, I remind myself that I'm otherwise committed. And that the partner in question is unfailingly faithful.

And there is zero cause to fear either will change.

(Photo courtesy of Chris Yang and Unsplash.com.)

Hindsight

I was difficult when I was younger.

Part of me would like to go back and face some of those challenges and circumstances again, except... not be a jerk this time. Think it might help?

"Not making a bad situation worse." Right up there with "being grateful for your blessings", and "cherishing other people just because they're in the boat with you."

Lessons it took me longer than most to learn.


(Photo courtesy of Jonny Keicher and Unsplash.com.)

You Damn Well Can Do Something About It

This week I encountered a piece of apparent fluff from The Stranger, Seattle's edgier (or maybe just more sophomoric) alternative newspaper. And as often happens in The Stranger, it turned out to be hard-hitting insightful fluff.

A Playlist for the Brokenhearted is a Valentine's Day laundry list of good hurtin' songs for the damaged, courtesy of Sean Nelson. (By the way, Sean, if you see this: pretty much the entire Magnetic Fields catalogue. Not just Smoke and Mirrors. I Don't Want to Get Over You. I Don't Believe You. You Must Be Out Of Your Mind. I Don't Believe in the Sun. Seriously. Throw a dart.)

Seems like a throwaway premise, until you start the half-page preamble, which turns out to be an extended Zen contemplation on a "little morsel of non-insight" that crushed people are often thrown:

"The past is past. Nothing you can do about it now."

Regular readers know that facile responses to suffering are one of my detonators. And the writer goes on to vivisect this one with literary power, even citing at one point an early work by Alan Watts. (Is Nelson a Zenner? He writes like one. Not a Baby Boomer Western Zen "When Things Fall Apart" mandarin, but a gritty younger guru-sceptic "Hardcore Zen" type, from our invisible-but-still-next generation.)

The text amounts to a didactic consideration of the philosophical ramifications of love – something the Buddha suggested we'd be better off just not doing. But we're gonna do it, since it's our nature. It's also about forgiveness – of others, of ourselves, of love itself. To which end he offers his mixtape, as a means to revisit and reanalyse the reader's specific train wreck.

So I'll just let you savour it yourself. There's much to appreciate, even if the playlist itself turns out to be beyond your tastes or knowledge. (Again, you'll find the Stranger article here.)

In the meantime, I'd like to drop a bomb of my own:

You damn well can do something about it.

As William Faulkner famously said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Yeah, the events – and often the people – that hurt you have fled into the past, where you can't reach them.

But the suffering is right here and right now. Where you can totally kick its butt.

The fact that Zen is all about here and now leads some to imagine it means ignoring the wrongs and wounds of the past; to insist they're not alive, not important, not still banging around out there causing suffering in all directions.

If that were so, Zen would be a pointless New Age pipe dream.

So let me be perfectly clear: you damn well can do something about the pain, regardless of what caused it or when. You can make it bearable, which is the same as declawing it. You can even turn it into insight, forgiveness, fulfilment, contentment. And in a very concrete sense, you can go back into the past, to the place where the past lives, and pull it out by the roots.

Many paths will take you there, but I advocate zazen as a good start and the foundation of a lifetime practice.

I also advocate Zen and Buddhist insight into the origin and nature of emotional pain.

Most of all, I advocate awakening to the fundamental nature of reality and our own existence.

It works.

Peace and progress to all brother and sister seekers.


(Art from Sean's article in The Stranger.)

An Education

Asleep on my lap in bed.

Three days ago I had the sad duty of accompanying my mother's cat out of this life. A cherished family member, he's figured many times in these pages, most recently only weeks ago.

Since I was a child I've seen many pets die. It's been educational, in some ways more than human deaths. There's so little drama when an animal goes, so little desperation. Our pets seem to die as they live: with acceptance, if a little apprehension. When they become too sick to sleep well, you see this come into their eyes.

He was just ten years old, but probably had liver cancer for some time before it became debilitating, and therefore noticeable to us. Suddenly he became lethargic, lost his appetite, and started holing up in dark places. Most alarming, he refused to purr, no matter how much affection was lavished upon him. By the time we could get to the vet, I was fairly sure what I was going to hear.

That same day, before our appointment, he began crying, loudly and urgently. Mostly from fear of abandonment, it seemed. Therefore I stayed close to him, except when he was in the lab. At last the attendant brought him into the examination room, laid him on an old pink towel, and left us alone for a few minutes. He lay on his side, his breathing shallow, a dull, half-open expression in his eyes, as if in meditation. I stroked his soft, thick fur and struggled to tell him what a good kitty he was, how much I loved him, and to thank him for taking care of Mom these last years.

At last the doctor came. I fondled the kitty's ears as she searched for a vein. Her calm competence at the end of a long workday helped keep me from crying, as long as I breathed mindfully and remained silent. I did my best to remain present, and not confuse the observer (me) with the events.

It came fast when it came, with so little disturbance the vet had to tell me he was gone. I stopped petting and stepped back from the table, and she swept him up in the towel. The last I saw of him was his head and ears, disappearing through the swinging door.

You and I will be lucky to go so softly.

One of the great strengths of Buddhism is its recognition of the universality of life. I've known too many animals to believe there is some qualitative difference between sentient beings. Cats are born; they live, to the best of their ability; and they die. Scientists warn us not to be anthropomorphic about this, but I warn them back not to ignore the evidence. If it's true we can't know what's going on in an animal's head, it's also true we can't know what's going on in each other's heads, either. Yet decent people don't assume that we can't fathom the feelings of a crying stranger, just because when we do it, we're sad, scared, or in pain.

That would be stupid. And as I've often said, nothing stupid is Buddhist.

Animals may love differently from humans, but they love. And anything that loves is worthy of love.

Also: life – all life – is brief and unrenewable. So love now.

Because sooner than later, we all pass through that swinging door.

We called him Sherlock, by the way. We'll never know what his real name was.

Tough Love

Once, when I was in Grade 2, my teacher had all of us save our milk carton from lunch. Afterward we folded it into a flower pot, filled it with dirt, and planted a single bean in it. Then we lined up our little pots on the windowsill and waited.

To nobody's surprise, within a week each had produced a shoot. Our teacher then divided us into groups and issued new orders. Group Number 1 got to leave their bean plants in the sun and care for them as usual, but everyone else had to stop watering theirs, relocate it to a closet, sit it on the radiator, or the like.

I was ordered to put mine in the refrigerator.

What happened next remains as vivid to me as this morning.

I have a loving, if independent, nature, and in the few days I'd been tending it I'd conceived an affection for the bright green tendril striving upward. I also wasn't a moron. What seven-year-old doesn't know what happens to a living thing in the faculty room fridge? Years later, as a teacher myself, I could have prepared a better lesson plan than that during passing period. Using nothing more than what I had in my desk.

On a Friday afternoon.

I hung back as the rest of my group came forward, hoping she wouldn't tally us. But she did.

"Robert?" she demanded. "Where's Robert? Don't you have a plant?"

I mumbled the affirmative.

"Bring it here."

I hesitated, carton in hand.

"Do you hear me? Bring it here."

"But…" I stammered, barely audible. "I don't want to kill it."

"What?" she snapped, incredulous.

I raised my eyes.

"I don't want to kill it."

At this point my teacher pitched what can only be called a power tantrum. "Oh, I see!" she snarked, enraged beyond self-respect. "Everyone else is participating, everyone else has to do what they're supposed to, but Robert (her voice dripped) doesn't want to kill his!

"Everybody look at Robert! He's not like us! He's special!"

I began to sob, and she continued to demonstrate why I have so little respect for authority. (And possibly why my attitude toward women was for so long uncharacteristically hostile.)

"You put that bean plant on the cart THIS INSTANT!" she commanded.

I did. But I didn't stop crying for some time.


Half a century later, I'm just starting to catch a whisper of public commentary about the state of empathy on this backwater planet. Not much. Not enough. But a few writers, here and there, are beginning to question the fitness of our souls to ensure our continued survival.

Empathy is the defining human strength, the single advantage that pushed our fangless, clawless arse to the top of this heap.

But we have a knotty relationship with the stuff of our success. The "toughness" and "courage" we admire in leaders and ourselves amounts most often to cruelty, self-centredness, and indifference. Those who betray a glimmer of "weakness" – empathy, compassion, sophistication, humanity, evolutionary superiority – are abused and ridiculed. The rest of us are conditioned to look on silently.

Which is why empathy needs claws and fangs.

In my life I've consistently been punished more severely for empathy than for cruelty. When guilty of the latter, I've been disciplined; when the former, I've been humiliated, ejected, and blacklisted.

Therefore, it's increasingly critical that decent, fully-evolved human beings learn the difference between insensitivity and just pissing others off. We must refuse to pipe down when advocating forgiveness, generosity, and the objective analysis of karma, regardless of sneers and threats. The alternative is what we already have, what's killing us progressively faster: government by the least human. Whether national, local, or in some grade school classroom.

Most importantly, we must actively patrol the state of empathy in our communities, and teach future generations to honour and protect their own evolved souls and defend those of others.

So check it out, bitch: this entire species depends on the beans we produce.

Stand aside, please.



(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. New Life [photo] courtesy of Juanita Mulder and Pixabay.com.)

Love Advisory

"When you say 'I love you', you should know at least one of those people."

Oscar Brown, Jr

(Photo courtesy of Mike Tungate and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: NF+JG

(This log washed up the day before I took this picture, after a violent storm. As the declaration of troth it bears is clearly not fresh, it must refer to parties elsewhere, on some other beach. How far away, in time and space, one can only suppose.)

Love Testimony

It's human to love the things that support us. I thought of Tom Hanks and his volleyball friend Wilson. I hadn't named my walking stick, which in any case had no mind beyond its reflection of my own, but the image made me laugh.

We judge love of objects crazy, childish, or most damning of all: sentimental. Of course, we say the same thing about love of people. All dependence is weakness now. But it's what got us here in the first place.

And so I say, love away. Equating indifference with strength has brought nothing but decay. Love built us. I won't apologise for it.

(Edited from 100 Days on the Mountain, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Heart of Karma

Three things you must always say when they are true, and must never say when they are not true:

I'm sorry.
I love you.
You can count on me.

Suicide: The Cure

A year ago this month the suicide of a former student prompted me to get real on polite society's fancy backside and name the actual perpetrators of suicide, right out loud. I ended with a direct request that they knock it the hell off.

You'd think that would do it, but here we are a whole year later and my demands still haven't been met. So while we're waiting, here's a tip on how not to be their victim.

As I pointed out then, suicide happens because the culture refuses to admit that life sucks. This leads people to desperate measures to escape the deep loneliness of being the only hurting person in the world. How did they reach this improbable conclusion? Because they were lied to about the pie.

Stay with me, here. All of your life, The Consensus (aka society, "the world", people, the public, The Man, The Matrix, "they", the culture…) has force-fed you a definition of happiness based on others' acceptance: equal parts companionship (for which you must beg peers) and material success (for which you must beg The Man: teachers, the market, employers, etc.) Let's be clear: you didn't come up with this definition, and (o thunderous coincidence) you can't get either of its two requirements by yourself. The approval you need to buy Consensus-brand happiness is only sold by The Consensus.

If this sounds like some kind of dystopian sci-fi hell, welcome home. I call it "the pie". Because I love lemon pie. There isn't much I wouldn't do for lemon pie. Make that: there didn't used to be much I wouldn’t do.

Dig:

The universe is a giant dessert table. It's got every dessert ever invented, plus millions more not yet invented. But you've been told that the onliest dessert worth having is the lemon pie.

Yeah. That's likely.

And – what are the odds?? – lemon pie is also the only one you have to ask for. You could grab literally tonnes of others, FOB. But Consensus says the lemon pie is "the only true happiness". And you literally have to sell your soul (to The Consensus) to get it. What’s more, The Consensus gets to decide if it even wants your soul. Which it often doesn't. In which case you're screwed. For life.

Unless you take the trifle. Or the cobbler. Or the fruit plate. Or the beavertail. Or any one of a billion other happinesses The Consensus insists aren't even there. Every one shouting "Bite me!" (Get it?)

Enough about the pie. Listen. Some people never find a wife or husband. (And lots more do and wish they didn't.) Some never make a comfortable living. Many never attain social acclaim, whether by choice or default. Literally millions of us never get lemon pie… I mean, "success". And we're doing just fine, out here with the dogs. It's not that Consensus-endorsed happiness isn't good. It's just not better than the others.

I have close friends in (apparently) ideal marriages and/or careers. They have problems, challenges, compromises, regrets. Things are missing from their lives. I have others that have neither love nor status. Some wanted them dearly, once. (I sure did.) But it didn't happen, so we cultivated other happinesses. And we're as fulfilled as the pie-eaters.

In sum:

1. WE suffer because we don't have their happiness.
2. THEY suffer because they don't have ours.

––––> Balance: there is no pie.

In adolescence, the contradiction between pompous promises and bedrock hypocrisy comes into stark relief. As their souls come online, lots of young people find themselves at the wrong end of the table. They don't date well. God didn't make them mathematicians. They aren't reassured by conventional copouts. They like weird music, clothes, books, movies. They're too sensitive. Too visionary. Too intelligent. Too gay. And the suicide begins.

But here's the thing: you don't have to play. When I meditate (you knew it was coming; does this look like a fashion blog?) I clear my mind, shut up the critics– including the one I was trained to be – and walk right past the pie. No more starving navel-deep in food. When you cultivate inner silence, truth finally gets a word in edgewise. Suddenly sunsets and rivers and flowers and wildlife are blindingly awesome; a provocative book, a road trip, a cup of really fine chai; the drum of the surf, the om of a city; a song, a joke, the utter indifference of Time itself. That's the real world. And it's infinitely bigger than people.

They tell you not to settle for that. I just go ahead and settle for it. And you'd be astonished how unhappy it doesn't make me. I'm still sad sometimes; lonely, especially. I have regrets and misgivings, fear and anger, roads I wish I'd taken, roads I wish I'd never seen. In short, I'm living exactly the same life as the pie-eaters. It's just that now, it's devoted to ending suffering. (Trade secret: start with your own.)

Word up to all my world-weary brothers and sisters. No time for small minds. Eyes on the prize.

(But why am I so hungry all of a sudden?)


(Photo of Bunter Teller (27 Stücke) im Tortenkarton courtesy of Hedwig Storch and Wikimedia Commons.)

St. Valentine's Kyôsaku 2013

...and in the end
  the love you take
  is equal to the love
  you make.

Lennon-McCartney







(Last line of the last song on the last album the Beatles ever released. Image courtesy of Beatles 4ever Facebook page.)

Suicide: The Cause

(See also Suicide: The Cure.)

A former student of mine recently committed suicide. He was a truly exceptional young man, still in his college years, with a powerful soul that blazed a phosphorescent trail through his community and left a persistent retinal impression.

When I was a teacher there was much talk about suicide and how to prevent it. But I was amazed at the utter lack of insight into the core causes of suicide, and truly alarmed at the rank incompetence of official responses. Virtually all anti-suicide programmes for young people can be summed up by a poster I saw in a middle school counselling centre: a big yellow sun with a smiling cartoon character beneath, and the caption: "Life is beautiful! Don't throw it away!"

I wonder how many kids that poster killed.

For the record, people don't commit suicide because life sucks. They do it because people deny that life sucks. They're in pain, and everything they see and hear defines that as failure. Suicide is not an act of sadness or disillusionment; it's an act of loneliness and alienation.

The fact is, even concentrated individual treatment of suicidal persons is often embarrassingly nugatory. Know why? Because when it's over, we dump these unfashionably-perceptive people back into the same abusive, self-satisfied population that almost killed them in the first place.

So take a deep breath, brothers and sisters, because things are gonna get real.

It's not suicidal people who need treatment. It's you.

Your eternal War on Humans makes this life an unendurable hell. The practice of identifying humanity itself as weakness, and advancing shallow, half-baked ideologies, political, social, and religious, over decency, is deadly to human life.

When you brand someone a "felon" for life and deny her a job, a place to live, the vote, you fill this fishbowl with mustard gas. And it kills, liberally and indiscriminately. Because that's what mustard gas does.

When you meet poverty, sickness, and injustice with pat excuses, employ dehumanising rhetoric to smear their victims, preach and screech about this group and that group, value trophies over solutions and money over morality, you burn up all the oxygen in this Mason jar.

When you make an individual anathema, on any grounds, hold him up to ridicule, mock, bait, and blacklist him, you kill legions of faceless bystanders, though they be far removed from your victim-du-jour.

The suicide epidemic can't be addressed with the simplistic one-to-one arithmetic our plodding culture calls data. But whether or not the link can be easily demonstrated, every time you withhold basic dignity, respect, and forgiveness, you chop up the ties that connect us all. Fear and resentment and hopelessness drive the most human of us out of the herd, where they perish. And sometimes, every so often, what goes around comes home, and someone you love dies.

As for me, I wrote this world off a long time ago, and dedicated the remainder of my time here to transcending it. So today I am commemorating my brilliant young brother's life and death in accordance with my vows, by sitting sesshin on a small uninhabited island. In the course of this day I will perform acts of atonement, renew my commitment to the Dharma, and sit metta meditation for us all.

I'm inviting you personally to join me, by whatever path you walk. Please undertake the struggle to change your heart, and so change your species. Please find the courage to remain calm. Please abandon the wisdom of this world. Please cleave to truth.

And please stop being a mass-murderer.

So here's to you, brave Uncle Francis
When the snowflakes fall, I will sing the blues
And when I think on how you left this world
I will remember how the world left you

Michael Marra

Forgiving Our Fathers

The advent of Father's Day puts me in mind of Sherman Alexie's riff on Forgiving Our Fathers, a poem by Dick Lourie. This is something many of us must do, because, for reasons as complex as the culture itself, fatherhood is a controversial undertaking. Fortunate are those, child or parent, who come through unscathed.

The poem is hauntingly declaimed by nerd shaman Thomas Builds-the-Fire in Smoke Signals, one of the most undeservedly obscure movies of the last century. That performance, narrating the heart of a young Cœur d'Alêne man as he consigns the ashes of his own complicated father to his people's holy river, can be savoured in the video below:



Forgiving Our Fathers
(edited by Sherman Alexie from an original text by Dick Lourie)

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream.
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?
Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers?
For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning?
For shutting doors?
For speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent?
Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs?
Or in their deaths?
Saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

(The Lourie original is here.)

Reconciliation Koan

Loyalty, forgiveness, and reconciliation make me cry. Death and suffering and loss, these also touch me; I'm sensitive and I won't apologise for it. But people loving each other makes me cry.

I'm not sure why. Envy, maybe. But it feels more like elation.



(Photo of De verzoening van Jacob en Esau (Gen. 33), by Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Staatsgalerie im neuen Schloss Schleissheim.)

St. Valentine's Kyôsaku

"We are all surprised when when we read a story about two people who fall in love and marry even though one is terminally ill. It seems to require great love and courage to risk such a frightening and painful journey, to decide to love someone who you know will be taken from you soon. Yet isn't that what all of our lives are? We live day after day, and love other human beings with a tenuous hold on life. Doesn't this require great courage and love?"

Philip Martin

Street Level Zen: Play It Again, Sam

Woody Allen once said "Eighty percent of success is just showing up."

I agree with him.

And eighty percent of love is just holding your ground.