When Dorothy peered behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz her world fell apart. All that she hoped for, all her dreams, all her plans dissolved in the sudden awareness that no great and powerful being could save her, could rescue her from the suffering of loss or satisfy the cravings that beset her, and her companions.

I know just how she must have felt. More and more I’ve sensed the smoke and mirrors of this illusory life as they shift and shatter all around me. Possessions I once thought I couldn’t live without have lost their pulse of beguile. The dull ache of lust for all the pretty things and beings of the world has faded. Ambition has leaked away through the cracks in the veneer of my livelihood. I’ve come to question my countless views, each insipid thought as it arises, seeing more and more how dukkha, dissatisfaction, permeates every corner of our human existence. I’ve also seen how much peace can enfold me through my practice and how I long for that peace to be my way of life.

At times it seems as if I am watching an absurd Felliniesque world in which we all are playing our prescribed parts with addictive accuracy. Addiction to anger, hatred, fear and greed. Tantalized by the temporary, crossing a desert of quicksand on our relentless quest for an imaginary mirage and never considering the possibility of another way. Yet it is in the seeing of the absurd, of questioning the assembly line of the mundane that another way can be found, can be awakened. Disenchantment with the worldly is the potion for our ailings. The spell can be broken.

Last week disenchantment asked a kind and rather pointed question of me: what are you waiting for? The answer was as clear as a summer sky.

Poet David Whyte in his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words writes that “Longing is divine discontent, the unendurable present finding a physical doorway to awe and discovery…making us willing to give up our perfect house, our paid for home and our accumulated belongings.” The answer inside of me was that divine discontent opening the doorway to my heart.

At the end of August I will retire from the working world, give up my perfect apartment, nearly all my belongings, and will go to live among the trees at Birken Forest Monastery to be of service in the role of steward.

This time, this place, this practice is where my longing lies now. And Dorothy, there’s no need to look any further. You are always home.

Photo Credit

Forest of Light by Petri Damsten via Flickr Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Opening quote excerpt from Sweet Darkness by David Whyte from The House of Belonging © 1996 Many Rivers Press

It’s a simple chant: Om ka ka kabi san ma e sowa ka.

Easy to remember, and rhythmic enough to break through the muck that is arising. Sometimes, I chant it for an entire bike ride, and sometimes just for a few blocks. The original impetus, to stop getting so angry at careless drivers, has morphed into a deeper awareness of the very act of traveling brings up all kinds of challenging emotions and energies. And when I don’t pay attention to those energies and emotions, they get lodged in my body, and control my thinking. Arriving at work after an “unconscious” bike ride, for example, can bring on a depositing of negativity on co-workers or my students that didn’t need to occur. This is one way violence begins on a small scale. People dump on each other, or jump on each other in small ways, and over time it builds up. If those builds up go unexamined, and uncared for, violent outbursts can be the result. At an extreme level, people rape, torture, blow up things, and kill each other.

We need to develop, and/or utilize more strategies to break through that which leads to violence. Individually, this can be things like the Jizo chant, meditation, non-violent communication (NVC), and the like. On a collective level, more of us need to be willing to both resist the systemic -isms (racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism), and start building more alternative approaches to share resources, organize communities and be in right relationship with the planet.

You can start with yourself. Right now. Remember the practices of peace you already know and do them. Or seek to learn something new that will bring more peace into your experience.

How do you build peace in the world?

Photo Credit:

Bike flower by Jonathan Teixeira via Flickr Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Sitting in silence at a recent meditation retreat with my Buddhist teacher was a cool breeze of ease in the heat of these summer days. A monk for over 25 years, he shared with us brilliant, funny, insightful teachings that flooded my parched heart with renewal and fertile understandings. One of his lessons asked us to notice when we experience greed or hatred and to bring to mind the words, “Ah, I am deluded.” What a simple and kind way to acknowledge dukkha, suffering, in ourselves and others.

Walking outside in mindful meditation I practiced another of his instructions, concentrating on joy and its arising in my being. As each step softened in the exploration of happiness the silence was suddenly punctuated with the sound of a weed-whacker whirling to life. My previous encounters with similar sounds would be to immediately label such a product of my hearing as noise and then sequester it to the category of unpleasant. To my surprise what arose instead was immense gratitude. The words “I can hear!” exalted in that present moment and I felt a glorious expansion of my being, enabling me to witness a profound shift in the way I could be in the world.

Unfortunately being in the world of late can be very hard and the news is not so joyful. There are downed planes, some missing and others shot from the sky. There are neighbours killing neighbours in Gaza and Ukraine and Burma. There are girls and women kidnapped in Cameroon, and increasing threats to the sustainability of our planet taking place around the globe.

I’ve found it immensely painful to read the news these past few years. The politics, the scandals, disasters heaped upon disasters, the hatred seeping from the headlines was more than I thought I could bear. Perhaps it was avoidance; perhaps it was that I thought I needed to strengthen my capacity for compassion before I could impart it to the beings I read about in my daily internet news feeds. I see now that my aversion to all the suffering and unthinkable malevolence is also just another form of delusion. Where I am contracted, where I pull away is exactly where I need to lean in, where I must open and be with whatever exists in this moment, only this moment.

When I see pictures of sobbing Palestinian children and surreal remains of crumpled airline fuselage scattered amidst a field of brilliant sunflowers I know I am witnessing unfathomable suffering. Turning away is no longer an option and labeling the people and events with any surety is as misguided as the condemning of a sound emanating from a piece of garden machinery.

The world is burning. The sparks of greed, hatred and delusion, the three “roots of the unwholesome”, fuel all of the cravings of this existence. Bhikkhu Bodhi, the eminent Buddhist monk and scholar, writes that these roots,  “… exist not only as motives in individual minds but as forces that energize colossal social systems spread out over the world, touching virtually everyone. Thus they are now much more malignant than ever before.” The hard truth that the Buddha spoke could easily have been delivered in the context of dark times, of shadowy sides to us humans and thus hard to see, things that can be dismissed for their elusiveness. Yet he used the simile of burning, of flames, of something that cannot be avoided, something that threatens every being to its core.

So what can we do? Is remembering “Ah, yes, we are deluded” enough when the flames of discontent rise higher and higher? A shift in any course can only begin with a change of mind, a new way of seeing. Perhaps it starts in knowing that Israelis and Palestinians, Buddhist and Muslims, factions of all beliefs and systems, all of us can and must wake up in this burning building and recognize the dire outcome if nothing is done. Greed, anger and delusion are the incendiary devices. Generosity, loving kindness and wisdom are the cooling waters that will ultimately extinguish the flames.

For me it begins with opening the next news article and noting what arises in me. It could be sadness or revenge, despair or anger. Maybe there will be joy and tears for a survivor found in wreckage or compassion for the person who fired a misguided missile. It’s recognizing the delusion in each expression of our separateness and hearing the echo of a mother’s wail on the other side of the earth as a wail for the suffering in each of us to cease. What I must do is be aware of each and every moment and be open for all of it. For wars and floods and weddings and funerals and gasoline powered weed-whackers that remind me of the madness and beauty of this precious world.

Excerpt of The Buddha from Adittapariyaya Sutta (The Fire Sermon) (Samyutta Nikaya, 35:28)

Please read more of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s insightful article, Reflections on the Fire Sermon, in Parabola Magazine, Winter 2012 Edition.

 Photo Credit:

Gaza Conflict by Associated Press via HuffingtonPost.co.uk

A version of this article was previously published at the author’s website, dhammascribe.com

Growing up Catholic I enveloped myself in the rituals and sacraments the church offered up to me. First communion, confirmation, Catholic school and its hair-skirt plaid uniforms. A matinee of The Trouble With Angels and I dreamed of following in Hayley Mills’ footsteps by becoming a nun. When I wasn’t at church or in the confessional, the public library was my second cathedral. I’d check out dozens of books over a summer and words became my constant companions. I’ve cultivated a journal from the time I was eight or nine to this very day. A rather lacking poem of mine was published in my junior high school newspaper and the writing bug had me. I’ve gone on since then to spend a good parcel of my life crafting one form or another of written expression.

Although my relationship with words has been rather steady, spiritual commitment has at times been wanting. I left the church in my early teens and since then I’ve been searching with a lost hunger for some sort of divine direction to guide me home. Along the way there have been my explorations into the world of Jesus freaks, New Age metaphysics, Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings, and Unitarian Universalism. All seemed to hold my gilded passion for a time but then their luster waned and I again found myself questing for more lasting answers.

Then along came Buddha. For the past five years or so I’ve been settling deeper and deeper into my Theravada Buddhist practice. For me that means a commitment to daily meditation, more retreats, putting real effort into a mindful life and staying as present as I can. As a householder, a term denoting someone in the lay life vs. a monastic, I am in the world; working, buying groceries, riding the bus, balancing my cheque book. I break things and lose things and want more things and in the midst of all that longing I sometimes pluck the perfect words from the ether to help me along on my path of this thing-full existence. Just a few feet away from my meditation cushion and altar is my other place of practice: my writing desk.

It’s where I’m sitting now, where I write articles, posts for my blog, edit submissions to Life As A Human and hone my craft. There have been the transitory times of writing drought, times when either I or the words went on sabbatical. Abandonment from or by one’s muse can muddy the waters of a writer’s creative flow, but sometimes life’s eddies and deltas beckon us on warm inlets of tempting diversions. I’m grateful that over the years of my comings and goings from my commitment to writing the words have been generous in returning, much like the tide.

For awhile now the yearnings to become a nun have been arising again more frequently. And Hailey Mills is nowhere in the picture. Instead the desire to commit solely to meditation and study feels like providence to me, even taking into account the distinct assurance that DVDs and lattes and dark movie theatres will be few and far between in a new life of robes, alms bowls and a clean shaven head.

It’s a direction I realize would cast me upon the waves of an entirely different sea of life. A friend of mine who had been a Buddhist monk told me that as I move more resolutely from householder to monastic I would at some point have to set down the writing. When he first told me that, a gnawing dismay swelled up in me. Give up writing. I couldn’t imagine giving up something that had illuminated the dark passages of my years and quenched the thirst I had to share my voice with the world.

Imagine my surprise over the last few months as I watched my desire to write slowly evaporating. In a sense I was relieved. I had imagined abandoning my laptop to a vault where I would only have visitation rights once a week to type out an email or two, or perhaps a well conceived haiku. Instead the gift had unwrapped itself and the dismay I once felt has transmuted into a calm acceptance of yet another passage, another letting go in this life of comings and goings.

A few weeks ago I ran into Ruth Ozeki on a busy street corner of my home town. She was here for a reading that night of her latest novel, A Tale for the Time Being, a book that was short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction. I first met Ruth when we both lived on a small island in British Columbia where we shared not only a common love of writing, but also our path of Buddhism.

Catching up on that sun-soaked day I mentioned to Ruth my leanings towards ordaining as a nun and the fading of my desire to write. She was the perfect person to talk to about these changing winds in my life for besides being a published author, Ruth is also a Zen priest. I asked her if she had experienced a waning of words in her practice. Ruth smiled and said she had, guiding me to an article she had written last year about the experience. “It will come back”, she said. “It will.”

And it has. I find now that I can sit with more presence in watching the tides move in and out of my days, my hours and moments arising and disappearing in this holy now. For this time being, the words are gifts, and each one comes wrapped in gratitude.

The scene is always the same. The children, in various states of unkemptness, run wild, while the man, older and dominant in a quiet sort of way, pontificates to his younger wife about some Bible passage. He frequently takes shots at all organized churches, and includes them among Satan’s work. Meanwhile, for a long time, I wondered if the children were even getting home schooled, given how little they seemed to be able to read, write, or interact socially.

So, there they were doing their thing today. I sat down, and the guy sitting behind me started leaving a message on the phone about a Bible study session. For a moment, I thought “Man, you’re surrounded,” then let it drop.

Over the years, I’ve struggled to not run a litany of judgments through my mind about that couple and their kids. Until a month ago, I’d never said a single word to any of them. Then the wife turned to me, as I was working on a blog post, and said “Aren’t you that guy who goes to that Buddhist place?” I said I was and she looked at me, paused, and then said “I always found it funny that people would worship a guy who isn’t a God.” I smiled because it probably is funny from the outside, what we Buddhists are doing.

I’d forgotten that exchange this morning as I sat down and opened my laptop. As the couple gathered their children and started to leave, I was reading a post on someone else’s blog. For some reason, I looked up just as the wife said “I’m wondering if …” (short pause) “if you’d ever consider being challenged on you views?” Now, in the past, I probably would have been interested in such a debate. To prove that I could stand up as a Buddhist, even if the discussion went nowhere. However, as she said those words, I just thought “Life’s too short for this.” So, instead of engaging, I just said “I don’t think it would be worth our time.” And she nodded, stepped back, and said “Everyone has free will.” And walked out.

The guy behind me, who was reading a passage in the Book of Romans (he’d said as much in the phone message he left), says “Do you know that woman?”

“Barely,” I said, not knowing how else to explain this odd connection we’d had over the years.

“What was that all about?” he said. And I sat for a moment, wondering if telling him what it was about would just open up the same issue I had just cut off.

“We could have a long discussion about it, but it probably wouldn’t be worth it.”

He laughed a little at that, and said something about how that had been an odd exchange between her and I. I agreed, and then he went back to his Bible, and I to my blog. Which is where I am now, no less worn for wear.

Photo Credit:

It’s the Simple Things via Flickr Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

The Tibetan spiritual leader, speaking at an event hosted by former Mexican president Vicente Fox, said that “the exception” for smoking marijuana would be if it has pharmaceutical virtues.

“But otherwise if it’s just an issue of somebody (using the drug to have) a crazy mind, that’s not good,” he said after being asked his position on legalization at the outdoor event at the ex-president’s Fox Center in the central state of Guanajuato.

Over at the Buddhist Blog, James Ure offers the following in support of the Dalai Lama’s comments:

For eons, marijuana has been used medicinally by humans to treat ailments. Historically, marijuana has been legal for use up till only recently. Ironically, legalizing marijuana will simply return it to its historical status of acceptability. Marijuana truly is a miracle drug as it alleviates so much suffering from a plethora of conditions. It helps relieve my chronic depression to the point of saving me from suicide a few times. In addition, medical marijuana blunts the aches and pains of my bursitis to enable my body to meditate properly. Why wouldn’t compassionate-minded Buddhists support the use of a healing, natural, herbal, non-addictive medicine such as marijuana to treat symptoms of medical conditions?

As a non-user who doesn’t have a personal stake in the plant’s legality, I also support decriminalization. Billions of dollars have been spent across the continent in the futile war on drugs. In the U.S., we have prison cells filled with folks whose main or only crime is using and/or selling this plant. There is a heavy racial bias towards men in color particularly when it comes to arrests and incarceration, one symptom of a broader pattern of systemic racism that could be alleviated through decriminalization. Like alcohol prohibition, marijuana prohibition has only increased the power of drug gangs and cartels, while also providing governments across North and Central America an excuse to ramp up the militarization of law enforcement agencies.

All in all, prohibitions have been an immense failure. It’s time for another way forward.

Photo Credit:

Dalai Lama via Wikimedia Commons

I remember that feeling as almost a holy insistence. The clear beacon of a found star I sighted nearly six years ago when I landed on a date for the move from my birthplace in the United States to the home I’d found in Canada. Although my schemes and invocations had laid out a path of sorts for this life changing event it was in the choosing of a square on a calendar that gave my decision to leave all I knew its momentum and clarity. It felt as if in that end of deliberation the universe stepped from the darkened wings of my life and escorted me toward a journey that would forever claim a new trajectory in the orbit of my existence.

That feeling is with me again, the knowing of purpose that came with another choice made a few weeks ago as I sat in meditation. It was a choosing that I had been toying with for quite some many months, a stilling of the silty waters of the lotus pond to see a clear broadening of the direction I had set out upon as I make my way along the path of the Dhamma, the Buddha teachings. The mire of wondering and planning, of calculations and lurking fears for now seems to have abated and in its place is the sure footing of patient fortitude.

With my plans fixed on a new brilliant star my Buddhist friends tell me the Dhamma may conspire to advance my journey, moving the winds and parting the seas of this world to celebrate my decision, to clear the path I must take to surrender fully into the teachings. And yet it is also the time when Mara, the demon tempter, may toss storms and doubts in my way with all manner of dukkha, the cravings and dangling jewels of the all too ripe fruits of the world.

For now I feel the weighted promise of a sextant’s knowing of the sky before me. The stars laid out in perfect equations, their missive written on the vast waters of this sea of presence, harkening me forward in a casting beyond my vision, but not beyond my heart.

On land one is surrounded on all sides by recognizable objects.
But when one enters the sea, the back is turned to
recognizable objects and the face to something else.

From American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity
by Robert Bly (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 37.

 Image Credit

Stars by Fabio Ricco via Flickr Creative Commons

This article originally appeared at DHAMMAscribe.com

These are the three base-level feelings we experience about everything in our lives. Peel off the skin of any emotional response and you’ll find these at work.

If we learn to let these three just come and go, a lot of trouble can be avoided. Easier said than done of course.

A simple example from my own life might help illustrate this. As a lifelong bicyclist in a city, I have had my struggles with cars and traffic. Bicycling in the city isn’t terribly easy. Planning and design work almost always privileges motorized vehicles over bikes and pedestrians – at least here in the U.S. Even when things are well marked and it appears to be “safe” for bikers, you can still run into inattentive or angry drivers that would rather you weren’t there.

For many years, I biked with a deep resentment towards motorized vehicles. It didn’t matter if they were actually doing anything dangerous or not in any given moment. Someone might offer me a chance to cross ahead of them, for example, and I’d think they were trying to shoo me through quickly. That shooing quickly snowballed into “these folks don’t respect me at all.” Which usually spun into “bikers are second class citizens.” Although there’s still some truth to the last statement, the stories aren’t at all helpful while actually biking. But I’d get hooked by them, and it all stemmed from an initial “don’t like” that came up again and again.

About three years ago, I began cutting through the thoughts and emotional reactions that developed in response to this don’t like by chanting the Jizo Bodhisattva chant while riding. Jizo is kind of an archetypal Buddhist figure that is said to protect travelers, children, the dead, and vows among other things. Chozen Bays Roshi of Great Vow Monastery wrote a fabulous book about Jizo several years ago that I was fortunate to study soon after it was published. As soon as I learned about it, I knew Jizo would be a companion on my spiritual journey.

Biking with Jizo has become a norm for me. Although I have to confess that I haven’t been so diligent in recent months and it’s starting to show. However, more often than not, I experience the like, don’t like, and neutral more clearly. Without a lot of getting lost in elaboration. Stinky alley. Don’t like. Fall leaves. Like. Dog in a yard. Neutral. End of story.

Do I still get pissed and reactive towards motorized vehicles at times? Sure. However, such experiences sometimes colored my entire day in the past, and now usually burn off within minutes. And when I think about it, it really comes back to this point of being able to see, and experience, these three base-level feeling tones without getting lost in emotional and thought elaborations.

What’s your experience with all of this?

Photo Credit

Bike Stand by Dan Zen on Flickr

Ruth Ozeki‘s new novel, “A Tale for the Time Being“, is a brilliant modern time journey, told across a landscape of ocean waves, quantum physics, Zen monasteries, and portend crows. Ozeki brilliantly weaves the nuanced world of Nao, an angst ridden Japanese teenage girl, desperately trying to find meaning in anything, from manga superheroes to her 104-year-old great-grandmother. Her journal, bound in a worn, red leather cover of Prost’s “A la recherche du temps perdu” (“A Search for Lost Time”), mysteriously washes up on the beach of a tiny British Columbia island and is found by Ruth, a blocked writer trapped between her previous work and her incessant now. From there a bond is forged between these two out-of-time story tellers and wanderers.

The novel opens with the beginnings of that journal, written by Nao in a lonely Tokyo cafe:

Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you , and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

From those first lines until the final epilogue, Ozeki masterfully chronicles the severed moments of Nao’s tremulous life and Ruth’s urgent need to make sense of those capsules of time. Much like the origami insects Nao’s father creates from discourses of dead philosophers, we’re invited to partake in the possibility of seeing life as other than what we perceive, witnessing through the back and forths of time and place the luminous surprises an author of Ozeki’s caliber can summon into our time being.

Soaring on currents of regret and forgiveness, lost and found, the ordinary and the heroic, “A Tale for the Time Being” is a novel for this now, for this time of nuclear drift, of economic bubbles bursting and internet propensity, epidemic suicide and climate evolution. Yet it is also a messenger of compassion, of wisdom, of honour and of shared humanity. Find your way to this remarkable book. It’s about time.

ruthozeki.com.

Book trailer by acrossborders.com 

Checking in with my teacher while at my retreat, knowing he would soon be going into seclusion for his own year of silence, I asked what instruction he had for me in this coming year. That was when he told me about The 20% Solution.

Examining my waking hours in a week, my assignment is to cut 20% of extraneous duties out of my life. Besides editing the bottomless to-do list, I am also to set aside one holy day each week, filled only with what brings me joy. No musts, no have-tos, only the tenor of my imagination to answer this question: what would two hours filled with exquisite beauty look like?

Doing the math of my daily rising and setting, I figured I would be re-imagining about 22 hours each week. Breaking up that total across my work days and the weekend opens up 3 hours each weeknight and a fully inspired holy day of 7 gorgeous hours.

The weeknights proved to be fairly easy to rein in: coming home from work, I’ve substituted an evening meditation sit and sometimes a dhamma talk or long hot bath for sitting in front of the computer and catching up on email, balancing my cheque book, or any number of internet explorations. Already I have noticed my exhaustion is waning and my internal focus is strengthening with the additional time for reflection. My holy days, on the other hand, have been somewhat hit and miss.

The first week was profoundly enriching as I walked through my neighbourhood park, taking in the awakening nods of spring flowers and then savouring an exquisite wildlife photography exhibit at our local museum. The next week was not as rewarding as I headed to a nearby community and almost immediately realized there wasn’t much there to see or do except to shop. That misstep was not so much imagination of a profound experience as an old paradigm of what I remembered to be “fun”. The marketplace and its wares don’t hold the same allure for me as they once did. I’d mistaken my ego’s urging with a calling to something of spiritual value.

A deva (angel) may have sidled up next to me at the end of the trip for as I was about to catch my bus to return home, I decided to pop into a used book store for a quick look around. Within a few minutes I found a copy of  “Venerable Acariya Mun Bhuridatta Thera: A Spiritual Biography” by Acariya Maha Boowa Nanasampanno, the same book I had started to read on my retreat. What a find!

This past week, on Easter Sunday, I regained the holy intention of the day. Relishing the warmth of the sun’s rays, I beheld spring’s becoming, its pastel palette flung far and wide across the sky, the sand, the sea, the crevices of gardens yawning wide with buds and leaves hungry to meet this quaking life.

The holiness stands as but a marker to remember that this land of enchantment, the flowers and the beach and this body of mine beginning to uncoil, are ultimately impermanent. The worldly delusions still tug at my consciousness, but now there is the pausing to see it all arising and passing away. That pause, that moment, sets my course to follow the inward thread, far from the lists of doing and the unremitting “I” that never relents from its struggle to become.

For now I’m embracing the 20% solution. Somehow I think 100% must be called Nibbana.

Something new in the air today, perhaps the struggle of the bud
to become a leaf. Nearly two weeks late it invaded the air but
then what is two weeks to life herself? On a cool night there is
a break from the struggle of becoming. I suppose that’s why we
sleep. In a childhood story they spoke of “the land of enchantment.”
We crawl to it, we short-lived mammals, not realizing that
we are already there. To the gods the moon is the entire moon
but to us it changes second by second because we are always fish
in the belly of the whale of earth. We are encased and can’t stray
from the house of our bodies. I could say that we are released,
but I don’t know, in our private night when our souls explode
into a billion fragments then calmly regather in a black pool in
the forest, far from the cage of flesh, the unremitting “I.” This was
a dream and in dreams we are forever alone walking the ghost
road beyond our lives. Of late I see waking as another chance at
spring.

“Spring” by Jim Harrison, from Songs of Unreason. © Copper Canyon Press, 2011.

Originally published at DHAMMAscribe.com

Image credit:

Colorful spring garden via Wikimedia Commons