Let me respectfully remind you – (And me!)

I’m going back up to the Zen Mountain Center one last time for this training period. It ends this Sunday. The gang up there has been sitting hard for almost three months and I have enjoyed sitting with them once a month for the last two.

This weekend I will sit and then say good-by to my friends as they go off to new adventures. I will then drive back to Phoenix in time to see Apollo at Doc’s Place and say good-by as he heads out for his new Traveling Poet adventure. Monday I go back to work and say good-by to my seniors as they too move on to new adventures. With every hello comes good-by.

I called teachers troublemakers in a past post. Well, actually, Pema Chodron called them troublemakers. I borrowed her title and added my own two cents.

Not everyone liked the word troublemakers. Bad connotation I guess. How about the word instigator? A spiritual teacher drives us to strive harder and push further that we could on our own.

Ah, but there’s nowhere to go and nothing to gain.

True. . . .

NOW pick up that pen and write! Open that book and read! Go deeper into that Koan! SIT Stronger! Sew that rakasu! Build! Create! Help! Love! Smile! Shout!

STRIVE HARDER & PUSH FURTHER!

Yes, right now you are perfect and complete. But you’re not finished.
(And why would we want to be finished? To be finished is to be done.)

During training periods, like sesshins, there is a gatha (verse) that is spoken at the end of each day before we leave the zendo for sleep. It goes something like this:

Let me respectfully remind you -
Life and death are of supreme importance,
Time swiftly passes,
Opportunity is lost:
Awaken!
Awaken!
Take heed. Do not squander your life.

When I was up at ZMC in April it snowed and was quite cold for a little desert rat like myself. One afternoon I had a vivid dream. There was a break of a little over an hour after lunch. The sky was grey. I was cold, tired and decided to take a nap. I went back to my cubbyhole, set my alarm to give myself 25 minutes before the next sitting, and was out in seconds.

In my dream I was in the same room at the Zen Center, but it was down in the desert with palms trees out my window. I was a beautiful sunny day out so I opened my door and stood at the threshold taking in the sun. Then, literally out of the blue, Genpo Roshi walked up to me with a big smile on his face; arms outstretched, and hugged me warmly.

He said, “Dan! How are you?”

Still shocked by his surprise visit, I did not respond.

“And you say, ‘I am well. Good to see you Roshi. How are you?’”

I repeated what he told me to say. He pulled back with his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said a bit sarcastically but playfully, “There you go. Good.”

He let go of my shoulders, snapped into a serious look and said, “Oh and Hoen, WAKE UP!”

I sat up in my bed and saw that I had slept through my alarm. I had 8 minutes to get to the zendo. I swiftly put on my robes, ran over, and made it seconds before the first bell.

Thank you, Roshi, as always, for the push.

Hello. Good-by. Hello. Good-by. Hello. Good-by. Endless Practice.

Beautiful.

Who draws the line?

I had originally intended to write a post about my friend Eric’s opening this weekend. I even had a little film clip from last summer that we made on the rooftop of his studio in Brooklyn. Then I read this post on the Shambhala blog, SunSpace and felt the need to respond.

Here’s a quote from the piece: “Eric Manigian’s past reflects his respect for Zen philosophy; however, his use of the ensô could also be seen to reflect the co-option of religious symbols by secular commercial art. Most of Manigian’s art goes to high-profile private clients. The Ensô Table will be shown at BKLYN Designs, which is presented by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, May 8-10, 2009.”

The key issue I have with the post is the usual crap I see with “spiritual people” who feel that the sacred is somehow outside of the material, that people with money equals bad and people without it equals good.

I work with people who have little money every day. I find that only those in a position of money and privilege can afford to romanticize those without. Here is my response:

Who draws the line?

Art and architecture have always had high-end patrons, including projects of a religious nature. Buddhists temples (and magazines) in America are created by people with money. The Buddha himself slept homeless in a park designed and donated to him by a king.

In this post, Heisler elevates the ensô as a sacred religious symbol with lines like, “. . . only a spiritually complete person can draw a true ensô.” And then she suggests that Eric Manigian’s Ensô Table is “secular commercial art” because his “art goes” (is bought by) “high-profile private clients” (rich people).

The sacred remains sacred by its very nature.

An ensô creates a distinction of sacred AND secular, yet its essence points to the non-dual. If there is no outside to the circle, then nothing can be seen as sacred. If there is no inside, then nothing can be seen as secular.

Manigian is an artist and a Zen Buddhist who has been practicing for 20 years. What makes his Ensô Table any less sacred? It becomes “secular commercial art” because rich people might buy it? Really?? So rich people are bad and artists must be poor. Sounds like childish platitudes to me.

Tozan's "No Cold and Heat"

A monk asked Tozan,

"When cold and heat come, how should one avoid them?"

Tozan said,
"Why not go to a place where there is neither cold nor heat?"
The monk said,
"What kind of place is it where there is neither cold nor heat?"
Tozan said,
"When it is cold, the cold kills you; when it is hot, the heat kills you."

-Case 43 from The Blue Cliff Record

Spring is a time of temperature extremes in the Southwest. We literally can go from 60F/15C to 95F/35C in a weekend and when you include the whole elevation factor it gets even more extreme. You can go from sweltering heat to freezing cold in an hour or two.

When I went to Zen Mountain Center in mid-April the forecast for the weekend was sunny and 70F/21C. Before I drove up that Friday afternoon I had lunch with my friend Andy in the valley. It was 85F/27C. We were in shorts and sandals. Then, my Hyundai Santa Fe climbed up the mountain. It was a bit cooler but nothing too extreme. I sat with the group that evening and headed off for bed around 9:00.

When I got up Saturday morning at 4:00am I heard what sounded like wind and rain outside. In a sleepy daze I washed my face and got dressed for early morning sitting. I grabbed my umbrella, opened the door of my cabin to go to the zendo, and stepped into wet, heavy snow.


I was wide-awake. It was about 26F/-3C and I, a little desert rat, was walking though the snow in sandals. Needless to say, it was a bone-chilling day of sitting. All I could think of as I froze was sitting with Andy the afternoon before eating in the hot afternoon sun.


My friends all offered warmer clothes and better shoes but after walking a sitting during the arctic part of the day without them, I decided to just be cold.


By the following afternoon it was sunny and 70F/21C again and within a few hours I was driving through the desert on I-10 sweating in 100F/38C. After freezing my feet off the day before I decided not to turn on the air conditioner but to bake in the sun and just be hot.

I turned the vent on but it was so hot outside that the air blowing on my feet felt like a hairdryer. I could still remember the ice cold sensations in my toes from the day before but now, in the heat of the desert, the idea of running around in my sandals through the snow felt good just as it had only been in the snow that the burn of the desert sun on my feet felt good.

“When cold be cold. When hot be hot. When in pain be in pain . . .” Etc. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.

“Just watch your breath and count to ten. Then start again at one,” I was told by a teacher back in 1988. “If you lose track or get distracted just start at one again. The key is not to get to ten but to forgive yourself for not getting to ten.”

Someone recently asked me what to do in his head when he’s meditating. I told him about counting to ten. Then he asked me what it was like to get to ten without a thought. I told him when it happens to me I’ll let him know.

A Practice For What?

Way back when I first started dating Helene she caught me in a big lie and almost dumped me. For her, lying is a deal breaker. The strange thing was I could see from her perspective that I was a liar but until she called me on it, I did not see that I was lying.

I promised her that from that moment on I would be as honest with me as I was with her. And I have spent almost a decade peeling back the layers of lies I tell myself everyday as a means of keeping that promise. Somewhere along the way she must have seen that I was sincere as she did finally marry me.

Through this experience I have a hard time looking at homophobic conservative preachers and politicians caught with their “fingers” up inside the “cookie jar” claiming, “It was all a miscommunication!” with anything other than compassion. On some level or another, we are all sneak eaters.

Still, as most of my friends will tell you, no matter how many layers of self-deceit I dig though, I will always be full of shit. That’s why I need BS detectors in my life, like Helene, to keep me honest.

Recently a friend of mine invited me to one of her upcoming gigs. I looked on my calendar and had to decline as I was going to be sitting that weekend at Zen Mountain Center in California. “Damn,” she said, “you’re always going off somewhere for Zen.”

“Yes,” I replied piously, “It’s part of my practice.”

“A practice for what? Avoiding your life?”

Her comment pissed me off and I should have looked at it right there. If she was wrong, I would have laughed as it was said playfully not maliciously. The fact that I was pissed and indignant should have told me that I was lying to myself about something.

Three weeks ago Dogo Sensei lent me the DVD How To Cook Your Life: with Zen Chef Edward Espe Brown. I loved the film so much that as soon as it ended I looked Brown up and saw that he was doing an all day workshop at Green Gulch Zen Center on April 18 and running the Sunday service April 19. In investigating it, further several other details made it so that could have flown there, stayed with family in the area, and done the whole event for less than $100.00. I felt like the timing of it all was a sign and that I was being called to go. (Called by who you might ask.)

Then I looked at my calendar. Damn! A Zazenkai on April 18 here with the Sitting Frog Zen Sangha. I picked up the phone. “Well,” I thought, “I’m just going to call Dogo Sensei and tell him he has to run this one on his own. After all, it’s not like I would be blowing the Sangha off for the Coachella Music Festival. Seeing Edward Espe Brown is Zen! I’d be blowing them off for my practice.”

Then my friend’s words pierced me, “A practice for what? Avoiding your life?”

I put down the phone and started my April Zazenkai To Do List.

photo by Vegar Svanemyr

Zen Geek, Music Freak

Zen Geek, Music Freak, I’ve been calling myself that for years now. At first I saw these two major passions of my life being at odds with each other. There are some great shows over the years that I have missed because of Buddhism retreats. When I first meet Genpo Roshi at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico I asked to be his student. I had never asked that before of any spiritual teacher and was quite serious about my commitment. I asked him what I should do next. “Coming up to practice with us in Salt Lake City might be a good start,” he said. This was before we could download dharma talks from the digital zendo.

Later that night, I looked up their website on my laptop and saw that the October Bodhidharma Dharma Big Mind Zen Retreat fell perfectly into a week that I already had off from work. I had intended to go to the Hardly Strictly Blue Grass Festival in San Francisco for my vacation. I felt like the universe was asking me how serious I was about working with Genpo Roshi. My response was to skip the festival and sit in SLC.

This weekend is the Coachella Music Festival. For the last few years America has had two regular legendary music festivals, Bonnaroo and Coachella. The second one is a mere four hours from my house. Last weekend, I drove through Coachella, California to get to the Zen Mountain Center, which is five hours from my house. While I was sitting on the mountain last weekend Mirah and Vetiver played in Phoenix and I missed them. The week before Leonard Cohen played in Phoenix and Zen commitments kept me away from that show too.

So am I back over to the desert cities this weekend for music? No. I’ll be sitting for 12 hours on Saturday with my Phoenix Dharma family, the Sitting Frog Zen Sangha. The funny thing is I think I’m the one that picked this weekend for the April Zazenkai.


There was a time when I felt that these two major passions of my life were at odds. Today I don’t feel that way. Ultimately I can’t do everything so I choose to prioritize those activities that involve family.

Saturday I will sit with my Dharma brothers and sisters from 5:30am to 5:30pm. At 7:00pm I will check out the end of National Independent Record Store Day at Stinkweeds owned by my friend for almost 20 years, Kimber. (Who also owns the space where we sit on Sundays, Modified.) Then, around 9:30, I will go to fellow Zen student and friend, Lonna Kelly’s gig, Grand Ole Opry at the Ruby Room. She has asked that Dogo Sensei and I come in robes, cowboy hats and boots. Zen Geek, Music Freak! Odd? Maybe but not at odds.

Teachers Are Troublemakers!!

Being both and English teacher and a Buddhist monk, I’m generally doomed when it comes to meeting other people’s expectations of me. Somehow that combination means I should move through this life with a detached holy piety of perfection. Or at least that’s what’s suggested. It’s funny how many times I am told what I should or should not be doing. I should be a vegetarian. I shouldn't drink beer. I should be driving a Prius. One guy insisted that if I was a monk, I should get a divorce, as I shouldn’t be married. Nice.

Ahh, projection, projection, projection.

There seems to be this notion that spiritual teachers must live up to people's ideals of what a spiritual teacher should be. The only problem is that each person has a slightly different set of ideals based on their own ego issues and they project all their own shit on their image of perfection, their teacher. In his book, The Spiritual Tourist, author Mick Brown, a journalist, travels around the world checking out different spiritual traditions. In India he visits both living and dead Gurus and at one point makes the observation that he prefers the dead ones.

Genpo Roshi has often said that the problem with only having teachers like Jesus and Buddha or even a man like the Dalai Lama (if all you’ve ever done is read his books and see him in movies) is they’re our ideals of perfection and because they are not here in our everyday lives they never disappoint us.

If we take on a spiritual teacher, part of that teacher’s job IS to disappoint us, to use our own projections against us. If we see the imperfections of our teachers we become more likely to see the imperfections within ourselves. And if we learn to face the real in our teachers and the real in ourselves, we might actually start living life as it is and not as we wish it could be.

A living-breathing teacher is SUPPOSED to be a troublemaker. An instigator.

It works like this: My teacher is the mortar and I am the pestle that grinds my ego to a fine power. Ground fine enough, it becomes a healing compound for others.

But don't just take my word for it, here's what Pema Chodron has to say about teachers:
(Facebook readers click here.)

If you want to read more about this check out Trungpa Rinpoche's book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Oh, and Happy Easter.

Detroit Street Retreat Snapshots (Revisited)

My friend Jeanie just finished presenting her dissertation last week on the Transformative Effects of Street Retreats. I met her on the first ever Detroit Street Retreat October of 2007 hosted by Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple and Zen Peacemaker teachers Sensei Grover Genro Gauntt and Sensei Francisco "Paco" Genkoji Lugoviña.

This past Sunday, when I arrived at Modified to prepare for Sunday Morning Frog Sitting, there was a homeless person wrapped tightly in blankets asleep on the stoop in front of the building. I was on my own to get the place ready that morning as Dogo Sensei was up in Prescott to celebrate Joko Beck's Birthday so I quietly went in to clean, and when I came out 20 minutes later to offer her some water and the use of a clean bathroom, she was gone.

The rest of this post is for her.

Originally posted on Oct 23rd, 2007:


I got off the streets of Detroit last Sunday afternoon, flew back to Phoenix Monday morning, and have been spending the last few days trying to wrap my brain around what I did. In a word, the Detroit Street Retreat was “intense,” in a good way.

I started writing about the experience last Tuesday morning. Originally, I was going to wait until I had a piece of writing completely together before I posted, but after working on it for five hours Saturday morning I realized that my piece about this experience is going to take time to unfold and I waned to post something shorter than seven pages on my blog.

The place last weekend’s Detroit Street Retreat holds in my soul is immense. The stories I could tell feel like fragments, lots of little pieces that could never really convey an understanding of the whole. In my head is a cardboard box of snapshots, which represent stories from the streets. These snapshots have become symbols of the depth of my experience.

I want to take out my shoebox and show you my pictures even though I feel like my stories are a bit like trying to capture the splendor of the Grand Canyon with a disposable camera. Rather than give a linear timeline of what happened, I will pull pictures out of the box as they come to me.

Admittedly, when my father dropped me off Thursday afternoon in front of the Still Point Zen Center, a red brick duplex on Trumbull Street, I was a little freaked out, like when you are in the front car of a really high, fast roller coaster at the top of the first hill looking down and there is that split second pause before the car drops you. I was the first to show up. So I sat on the front steps looking out at the city. There I was by myself in Detroit full of apprehension knowing damn well the car was about to drop.

I walked on to those streets open, not knowing what I would find. With a small army of thirteen other souls, together we lived on the streets of Detroit for four days bearing witness to the lives of people who generally are invisible in everyday life.

In coming back I have been asked several times why I think people are homeless. I don’t know. The notion of simply getting a job just doesn’t begin to touch the needs for those that I met. One of the things I can say about the homeless in Detroit is this. Most were men and most of the older men are Vietnam vets whose wounds from that war still bleed. I had no idea. Many of the younger street soldiers I met were vets from a very different war, the war on drugs. I always thought of that phrase as a metaphor. Not in Detroit.

But my stories are not war stories. It was quite evident all around me that Detroit is a hard, harsh city filled with much suffering. But the people of Detroit, both those on the streets and those who served us, are filled with love and compassion.

Some Street Life Snapshots:

• Getting fed fried chicken and french-fries for dinner on Woodward Avenue by Muslims outside their Mosque.
• Being constantly asked by all sorts of people, “What are you doing?”
• Being given the opportunity to tell people what we were doing.
• Sitting and talking with folks in the soup kitchens over meals.
• A salad at lunch made from vegetables from the church’s garden behind the parking lot.
• A big pot of various Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pastas mixed together and a side of beans for dinner.
• Flowers in bloom in empty lots.
• Sitting zazen outside in the long wet grass after dark.
• Checking out graffiti art with Mike and Shawn.
• Paco, standing over us as we sat in Cass Park, asking for us to pray for him.
• Listening to Don and other people from the streets tell their stories.
• Bumming cigarettes for Don from White women at the Eastside Market.
• Collecting cans for change.
• Being fed and taken in by the Pilgrim Church for the night.
• Being given a second blanket in order to keep warm at night.
• Cheap 24 hour Coney Island Restaurant coffee.
• Receiving a bag lunch from a hesitant young volunteer at a soup kitchen and remembering when I did the same thing “helping the homeless” as a teen.
• The tone of the bell that Sensei Grover Genro Gauntt used to start the sitting periods.
• Sitting in Heart Plaza by the Detroit River.
• A man handing us a sketch he had done of us as we sat.
• Rudie, (My man from Amsterdam) and the hole he walked in to the bottom of his shoe.
• Being pushed out of the way by a stranger on the street just before a pigeon would have shat on my head.
• Eating and sharing a fresh Mango that I had begged for and received from a vender.
• A homeless man named Eddie offering to share his mouthwash with me when I joked that after four days of not brushing my teeth I felt like a monkey lived in my mouth. (I did accept.)
• Carrying around the city pink, white and burgundy gladiolus that I had been given.
• Offering the flowers to a homeless woman after breakfast in a soup kitchen on Sunday morning. She took one stalk of burgundy and told me she was going to put them on her father’s grave that afternoon. When I offered her the rest she said, “No baby, I want you to keep the rest and give them out and make other people happy today.”
• Hugging my mom when I got home, giving her what was left of the flowers, and seeing that for lunch she had made me all my favorite foods.

This experience has left me open to the fact that the world may be a place of great suffering, but in the face of that suffering there are many who respond with love and compassion. In a snapshot, this is how I would describe myself after this whole experience, “a heart full of love and compassion.”

Understanding a Frog

Last Fall, when I was in SLC, I got a chance to see the American Literary Icon, Peter Matthiessen, speak and read from his latest award winning book Shadow Country. I was there for a Zen Retreat with Genpo Roshi, who graciously excused us from his Thursday night talk so that we could go see Matthiessen. I was torn but thought, “I can always see Genpo Roshi’s talk on ZenEye later.” Thus, with the miracle of modern technology I got to see both men speak that night. I have always known about Peter Matthiessen the author, reading At Play in the Fields of the Lord as a young man changed my life. But it has only been in the last few years that I have begun to discover some of the other books and teachings of Roshi Peter Muryo Matthiessen. Roshi Muryo is a successor of my dharma uncle Roshi Bernie Glassman Recently, I was at Bookman’s and Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1985 jumped off the shelf at me. This book follows the American Zen world during that time and much of it is specific to my lineage, the White Plum Sangha. And then these lines at the end of chapter four pierced me. "(Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, If you have truly understood a frog, you have understood everything.) Zen is life, each moment of our life, thus Zen is everywhere." - Roshi Peter Muryo Matthiessen

Maezumi, Matthiessen, Bernie at Matthiessen's Ordination (1982) Picture from ZenPeacemakers.org

What I Did Over My Spring Break.

For Spring Break this year I went to Yokoji-Zen Mountain Center in Southern California. I’ve wanted to check the place out for some time. When three friends from Kanzeon told me they were sitting this spring’s Ango there I packet my bags and headed West. Most of the Zen Centers I’ve been to are city centers like Big Mind Western Zen Center in SLC, Still Point in Detroit, and Village Zendo in Manhattan, In fact, a city center model is what Dogo Sensei and I are developing here in Phoenix with Sitting Frog. Now I have sat at more rural centers, like Green Gulch, but this experience was something entirely different. At Yokoji-Zen Mountain Center I felt like I was at a Soto Zen temple of the White Plum Lineage. It is a place where I felt my Zen family ancestors manifesting within the space of the present moment.

And J. baked really good bread.

I'm gong back in April.

Sacred Space

Morning Sun

Block & Bell

The Bread Man

The Bread

The Boys

Some Poetry on Practice

Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma and endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn how to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon.
Master Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you.
Master Sheng-yen (1931)

I sit alone weekday mornings. On Sundays, I go to Haku-un-ji Zen Center in Tempe, Arizona. Saturdays, I lay in bed with Helene. We talk the morning away together. Then, I go out and get her coffee. When I come home, she makes us breakfast, usually omelets.
Dan Hoen Hull (1968)