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A student asked Zhaozhou, “Does a newborn baby have consciousness?”
Zhou replied, “It’s like tossing a ball on rushing waters.”
The student went on to ask Touzi, “What does tossing a ball on rushing waters mean?”
Touzi said, “Moment by moment, non-stop flow.”

—Blue Cliff Record, Case 80

How do we find resilience in a world of darkness and despair? How do we get our footing, come to laugh and love in a world filled with loss and hardship? Some people make a song of it; that’s how they enter the non-stop flow.

Muddy Waters once said, “Exactly I fits one shoe, and that is the blues.” His one shoe, his one life; it fit his music just exactly so. Soon after being born to a sharecropper family in the Delta, McKinley ‘Muddy Waters’ Morganfield’s father ran off and his mother died, leaving his grandmother to raise him on a cotton plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Self-confident, gracious, and commanding on stage, Muddy was also an oft-absent father and had a half dozen children outside his marriages. Eventually he was able to bring most of them under his roof.

A couple of mornings ago, I was walking through downtown Clarksdale, searching for a breakfast place. About a third of the businesses look shuttered, though the County Courthouse-Jail and four or five juke joints looked busy. Somehow, this small, rather plain rural town, an hour and a half outside of Memphis, became the birthplace of the blues. Countless musicians have come from there including greats like B.B. King, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy.

We found Our Grandma’s House of Pancakes. One review complained about cockroaches crawling about the floor and wall, saying, “I had to take a shower when I left.” Another said the food was “cooked to perfection!” My huge plate of “fully-loaded hash browns,” served with a plastic utensil kit, cost about five bucks. It was good; lots of bacon fat and salt.

For the half century beginning in the 1920s, six million African-Americans moved north, going against the flow of the wide river. The Great Migration was trying to escape cotton and the Jim Crow South, hoping to find jobs in the industrial North. They brought their music with them; to St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. They brought their heart and soul.

The gypsy woman told my mother, before I was born
You got a boy child’s comin’, gon’ be a son of a gun
He gonna make pretty womens jump and shout
Then the world wanna know what this all about

~ I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man (Listen here)

The muddy waters run deep through New Orleans. Last week, I found myself standing on the deck of a Mississippi paddle wheeler, originally built as a casino but turned into a tour boat. Staring into the brown waters, I could see clouds of silt endlessly billow and swirl, with Forster’s terns and double-breasted cormorants diving for fish unseen. The captain came on the loudspeaker, “Kids, I already told you once: Stop running on the deck!”

Well I wish I was a catfish
Swimmin’ in a oh, deep blue sea
I would have all you good lookin’ women
Fishin’, fishin’ after me

Sure ‘nough, after me
Sure ‘nough, after me
Oh ‘nough
Oh ‘nough
Sure ‘nough

~ Rollin’ Stone (Listen here)

—Jon Joseph

COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community