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Quick, don’t get ready!

—Miscellaneous Koans

Lingyun was wandering in the mountains and became lost in his walking. He rounded a bend and saw peach blossoms on the other side of the valley. This sight awakened him and he wrote this poem:

For thirty years I searched for a master swordsman,
how many times did the leaves fall,
and the branches burst into bud?
But from the moment I saw the peach blossoms,
I’ve had no doubts.

—Miscellaneous Koans Case 37

Life Practice

Spiritual practice/Zen practice is life practice, a laboratory for paying attention to what arises in the day to day of our living. Your life is a gift. In welcoming the gift, you participate in the great flux, the endless changes that living brings.

It is uncertain how or where a gift might come. Arising from a source not known, a gift is a surprise to the one who receives. The people you meet, the opportunities that come as you arise from the unknown source. Surprise! Doors close, other doors open. Who knew? At times when you are uncertain where to turn or what to do, a path opens and you take the next step.

In meditation and with koans it is much like this. It is best to allow meditation to come to you, you will meditate as you meditate. Too, koans will come to you. No need to figure them out or explain them to yourself. What will come, will come, as you open to meditation, koans and life. This life practice is simply to notice and pay attention to what arises here in this moment.

The bottom line? You are here. Your practice is to notice, to pay attention. And what you notice is never what you expected. This gift of life, from the moment you are born until you die, is unexpected, a surprise.

As you are opened by life’s surprises, your heart will recognize something beyond surprise, beyond imagining: you are not separate. Indeed you live, breath and have your being in relationship to everything else. So, one day Lingyun went out into the mountains, losing his way. He rounded a corner and saw peach blossoms in full bloom across the valley. From that moment on he had no doubts. There was no one to harbor doubt. It was just this. He was awake. Who can prepare for that? So, “Quick, don’t get ready!”

Paying Attention

I remember time and again being called out by teachers in elementary school. They wrote notes home, put it in their comments on my report cards, “Does not pay attention in class.” There is a style of attention that is alert and focused, the sort of attention that learns multiplication tables, hears directions for the next assignment, sticks to the task at hand. Yes, and elementary school teachers like that sort of attention. However, attention can go the other way. Alert, yes, and open, casting a wide swath, noticing connections and relationships as things arise, including my place in the dance of things.

In her most famous poem, Mary Oliver comes with big questions:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Only to be drawn out of speculation into life, as it come to her in a grasshopper:

This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

She brings it home confessing that she does not know much about much; prayer, paying attention, on how to be idle and blessed…the very actions that have made up her day:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

My 6th grade self rejoices, she does not know how to pay attention, the attention that narrows and focuses. Instead, outside of knowing, her heart is blessed in its idleness, receiving what comes. This is attention as well, alert and open, in connection with what comes (like meditation.) I believe we can call this love.

Love your Life

You have heard it read at most every Christian wedding you have attended. First Corinthians 13, wherein the writer, Paul of Tarsus, speaks of a most excellent way, the way of love. I have paraphrased this passage a great deal to fit our context:

Love is patient and kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others, is not self seeking, nor is it easily angered. It keeps no records of wrongs. Love does not hold separate, but opens to life as it comes. Love receives everything, trusts, and abides in all.

Surely love can be our approach to one another, but more broadly love is an approach to living, welcoming and trusting what comes. Patient and kind, love includes, welcomes. Love will not boast—there is no thing to promote over anything else. It will not seek for self, for in love there is no self to seek or grab hold of, or add to what is here. Nor is love easily angered, there is no thing to protect. We can appreciate life—no, love life—all of it as it comes our way. That which a separate self might call “good” or “bad,” all of it is included in our full lives, endlessly changing and in flux.

—David Parks