coincidences: or, what Alan Watts, Neil Gaiman, and “Alice in Wonderland” teach us…

As dawn rises over this new day, I am filled with wonder and love for the bedrock of books. Books wise and curious, which draw me in every morning and sometimes allow for a marvelous coincidence to take place, a flame to flicker, as if the authors were hovering nearby, with smiles growing wide, because someone finally got it!
This morning, the light of wisdom was sparked by an accidental discovery in Alan Watts (The Way of Zen) that led me back to a book I just finished rereading yesterday: the obscure, frightening, and yet comforting story called The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. (Hmmm. I suspect Gaiman’s story contains more wisdom than appears at first glance. To do: read it again some day!)

The passage from Alan Watts comes from his explanation of the intermediate stage in a student’s life as he (or she) pursues Zen Buddhist training:
“The continued practice of za-zen now provides the student with a clear, unobstructed mind into which he can toss the koan like a pebble into a pool and simply watch to see what his mind does with it. As he concludes each koan, the roshi [master / teacher] usually requires that he present a verse from the Zenrin Kushu which expresses the point of the koan just solved. Other books are also used, and the late Sokei-an Sasaki, working in the United States, found that an admirable manual for this purpose was Alice in Wonderland.” (The Way of Zen, p. 167).

The passage from Neil Gaiman comes from the climactic scene where the seven-year-old hero is standing in a field as night falls, careful to remain inside a circle in the grass, as voices and shadowy figures taunt him. His friend, Lettie Hempstock, led him into that circle and instructed him to remain there no matter what happens. So he does. But it is so hard.
Here are some key moments from the passage, and the coincidences I heard along the way. Do you hear them too?

I sat down with my back to the dead tree in the center of the fairy ring, and I closed my eyes, and I did not move. I remembered poems to distract myself, recited them silently under my breath, mouthing the words but making no sound.
Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house let us both go to law I will prosecute you… I could say all the poem in one long breath, and I did, all the way to the inevitable end.
I’ll be the judge I’ll be the jury said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.*
[…]
“You are hungry,” said the voice in the night, and it was no longer Lettie’s voice, not any longer. It might have been the voice inside my own head, but it was speaking aloud. “You are tired. Your family hates you. You have no friends. And Lettie Hempstock, I regret to tell you, is never coming back.”
I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.
“Nobody cares,” said the voice, so resigned, so practical. “Now, step out of the circle and come to us. One step is all it will take. Just put one foot across the threshold and we will make all the pain go away forever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come. It will never happen.”
It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two people talking in unison Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many voices.
“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. … You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and fear. And when you are dead your circle will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a keepsake.”
“P’raps it will be like that,” I said, to the darkness and the shadows, “and p’raps it won’t. And p’raps if it is, it would have been like that anyway. I don’t care. I’m still going to wait here for Lettie Hempstock, and she’s going to come back to me.”
There was silence. … I thought over what I’d said, and I knew that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.
Time passed. … The moon rose higher. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I sang, under my breath, mouthing the words over and over.
[“The Mouse’s Tale” from Alice in Wonderland morphs into a snippet of a song by Gilbert and Sullivan, from Iolanthe]:

You’re a regular wreck with a crick in your neck
And no wonder you snore for your head’s on the floor
And you’ve needles and pins from your sole to your shins
And your flesh is a-creep for your left leg’s asleep
And you’ve cramp in your toes and a fly on your nose
You’ve got fluff in your lung and a feverish tongue
And a thirst that’s intense and a general sense that you haven’t been sleeping in clover…

I sang it to myself, the whole song, all the way through, two or three times, and I was relieved that I remembered the words, even if I did not always understand them.

***
(from Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane [New York: HarperCollins, 2013], pp. 132-133, 138-140.

* “The Mouse’s Tale” in Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—chapter 3, “A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale”.

***

The lesson: “I was relieved that I remembered the words, even if I did not always understand them.”

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love, authentic, from a book

It may seem odd to spend weeks making a quilt for a stranger and yet that is exactly what I’ve been doing. “Respect” quilt no. 10 is now done! As I worked, I reread the book which inspired it and realized on p. 230, that the quilt manifests an insight within.

“For the first time in my life, I was dedicated to loving myself so fully that the natural response was also to love unconditionally any authenticity I found in others.”

–Michele Harper, M.D., The Beauty in Breaking, p. 230.

I so admire that line and the mindset it suggests; would that everyone felt equally strong and capable of loving, despite the hardships and pain it may bring. Harper’s candid and sometimes heart-breaking writing provides a beacon of hope, and a means of connection, for us readers.

I hope she’ll like the quilt.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Respect Quilt no. 10, for Michele Harper, M.D.

day 50, the good side of emptiness

In times of stress, I like to pull out a huge volume of art, Mai-Mai Sze’s classic The Tao of Painting, and dip into its Zen wisdom and gorgeous plates of ancient Chinese art. By chance, I fell upon p. 96 this morning. That inspired the following thought pattern on emptiness:

Gloomy photos of empty streets have become an emblem of this era, when fears of contagion have driven everyone indoors. Emptiness incites melancholy because of what is not there; what can never happen again, the dead. Yet its etymology stems from æmta, an Old English word meaning “leisure”, and the word used to mean “at leisure, unoccupied, also unmarried.” It is only more recently that empty took on the connotation of “lacking, devoid of (specified contents or a specified quality).”*

Reading page 96 of Mai-Mai Sze’s wonderful book, I was reminded why I love her writing–the crisp, economical explanations of difficult concepts–and how empty space may also be a balm to the spirit. As Chinese writers in the Zen tradition have told us, “the spirit is an emptiness ready to receive all things. By stilling the heart, that is, shedding the thoughts and emotions of personal life, an individual can ‘reflect in his heart-mind (hsin) as in a pool or a mirror.’” There is even a word for it in Zen Buddhism, k’ai wu (open-awareness), which means apprehending in the deepest and widest sense. You can see the Chinese appreciation for this way of seeing in paintings like the close-up of a misty sky, shown here.

–from a painting in the Freer Gallery of Art, “Clearing Autumn Skies over Mountains and Valleys”. It is made of ink and color on silk, dates from the Historical Period known as Northern Song dynasty, mid-11th to early 12th century.

 

–Mai-Mai Sze, The Tao of Painting: A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting, p. 96

 

May k’ai wu come to all of us, everyone.

Yesterday’s mask production, fyi:

*The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 818

 

Day two: have a heart!

 

 

Today I added a heart to this quilt–in the pink and yellow batik triangles–and the effect feels totally different, lighter and more hopeful, I think. The little dandy has become a sweetie, who brings love into the world. He will take that love wherever he goes on his life journey, with Paddington Bear by his side.

Note the other symbolism which makes this quilt make sense, from top left (the arrival of the child in a tumultuous topsy-turvy moment) to the bottom right (his departure for things unknown). The retro French fabric squares add to the evolution:  note how the square in the bottom strip features the boy alone with seagulls.  So does the grey/yellow square of the bottom: it has a compass, instead of plain khaki…  the story says that this child has places to go, and he will know how to do it when the time comes…

As I was cutting and sewing all the tiny triangles to put this quilt together, I thought about the child who will one day sleep with it, and I felt so happy and peaceful.  A related thought for you, from Path to Peace:

“In losing ourselves

in thoughts of ourselves

we lose.

In losing ourselves in

thoughts of others

we truly benefit.”

 

 

ten days left: a Zen rebuff of Bachelard?

Today’s thought from Path to Peace seems at first glance to present a sound rebuff of the sentimentalism of Gaston Bachelard that I quoted yesterday. In her reflections, Venerable Wuling stresses facts we must admit, such as: to be alive is already to be dying a little every day, every action is ephemeral, and all love will end.

Grim realities.

Or are they really that grim? And do they truly rebuff Bachelard’s perspective? I think rather that they are complementary. They describe human realities at different levels of magnification–from the laser-like focus on the subtle perceptions of individual thinkers living with the material world in Bachelard to the Olympian scope of a Zen sage, who from a distant and dispassionate perspective looks over eons of growth, blossoming, and death in endless cycles. Both may be right, depending on how you look at things.

Although the Zen writings seem depressing, perhaps they are rather to be read as incitements to resist the inevitable! to enjoy every minute or at least accept it, out of mischief if for no other reason. Just to spite the fates, like a trickster in your own life.

June 17

four things are constant:

no world lasts forever

but will be swept away;

it is no shelter

and protects not;

one will leave everything behind

in passing to the next life;

life is incomplete

and unsatisfying.

– Shuling Wu, Path to Peace, “June 17.”

I prefer the entry for June 16 instead:

one who is free

from desire and sorrow

leaves all fetters behind

to pass beyond birth and death.

like a swan rising from a lake,

he moves on in peace

never looking back.

 

On bad surprises and apologies (and good-byes to Iris)

Iris, circa 2001

Much has happened since I last wrote. This week brought some bad surprises and a lesson which I will share with you.

1. Real estate surprise: bad

On Monday, some potential buyers made their second visit to our home. We were naturally excited as second visits are considered precursors to offers. However, it is now Friday and they have neither made an offer nor provided any feedback. (btw: Please, readers, if you are shopping for a new home, remember to pass along feedback. An hour and a half in someone’s house may not seem like a lot to you, but the owners had to clean, stop what they were doing, and go out while you were there.  They —like us—are likely anxiously awaiting your reply.)

Well, we are not really waiting any longer because we suspect we know why those people will not buy our house. To make a long and awful story short, here is the email I sent to our agent after the people left, on Monday night:

“Important update: Today’s people found what looked like the mummified remains of a raccoon in the attic crawl space. I just went in and brought it out and alas, it is Iris. Our long-lost black cat. She disappeared years ago and was clearly not feeling well. I think she went in there to hide and die in peace. We looked and looked, but I guess we never looked at the right spot.

There is not much sign of a struggle. Poor Iris.  I’ll take a picture to prove it was a cat, if you want, but we will bury the corpse. Please pass along that message so that they do not think we have rodents in our attic.”

Awful, right?!

Later that evening when I was up here in my little attic study meticulously grading sophomore essays and blog posts (argh), I suddenly realized that the place where Iris died was directly behind where I sit at my desk–about ten feet and two walls behind me. Isn’t that interesting?

Sweet little six-toed Iris. She was the cat who came with us to France and had that amazing accident in Angers–she fell more than six stories from our apartment balcony to the parking level below–and suffered nothing more than a disjointed jaw. The veterinarian said they see such things all the time. A dog or a person would certainly not survive. But cats go into l’effet parachute after the third or fourth floor (it has to be high enough), and it slows their fall almost magically.

Poor Iris. May she now rest in peace.

2. Teaching surprise: bad

This week I found myself issuing a veiled threat to some sophomores about what I thought was their disrespectful attitude toward my deadlines. On Tuesday, I said something like, “If your performance report is more than 10 days late—I don’t care if it is 11 days late or 111 days late—your final grade for that performance will be reduced by an entire grade. I know who you are! Turn in those reports!”

On Wednesday, one of the students came to see me and told me that he could not find any trace of such a deadline on the syllabus. He apologized profusely for bringing the discrepancy to my attention. And I felt HORRIBLE.  He was right; I had discarded that policy months ago when realizing that it did nothing to improve learning and only increased the students’ already heavy burdens.  (btw: Notre Dame is a very anxious world. To see the students walking around, earbuds plugged in and cell phones in hand, you’d think they had the weight of the world on their 19-year-old backs, and were dealing with international crises on a regular basis. That their anxiety is largely self-induced does not make it any less real.)

3. Ending the week on a good note: the lesson

After realizing my blunder, my stomach churned, my head ached, and I sat down immediately to apologize to the class via email. I apologized again the next day in class. The students got a reminder of the fallibility of authority figures, and I implored them to never hesitate asking questions because faculty members—like authority figures of all kinds—often make mistakes. I think we’re all ok. I know I felt better.

Before bed last night, I was reading Subhadramati’s Not Being Good: A Practical Guide to Buddhist Ethics, and came across the following quotes which sum up this week’s lessons.

“Apologizing is a spiritual act because it is a deliberate letting go of self” (110).

“This painful regret, in turn, becomes an incentive to act more skillfully in the future” (106).

***

Hope springs—or rather crawls out cautiously—anew.

 

 

a sign for the times

On our way back from the forest, in the cold windy night tonight, Honey Girl and I walked right under a sign that holds wisdom for the holiday season, I think.

It says, “Yield ahead.”

What a good idea. Why disagree? It’s all temporary anyway.

Next time you feel like saying, “If  ___________________ (person you dislike) says (or posts/tweets) that stupid joke again about my ___________________________ (marital status / weight / graduation date / job / joblessness / choice of pet / bra size, Viagra, etc.), I’m going to scream!” stop yourself. Give yourself a little smile, knowing that you are above such things. Your mind is aware. You are calm, and easily keep your distance from trivia.

Remember that in the big scheme of things, mean words and rude behavior are nothing more than negative energy. They burp briefly into existence and contaminate the atmosphere if allowed to multiply, but they fade quickly if no one pays attention to them.

Leave behind the culture of complaint. Yield and forgive, now and then. You might find that you like it. The world would be a more peaceful place if we could all remember to yield, now and then.

 

“reading”: a funny poem for students of all ages

Reading

 

When I read, I work hard at it,

but that makes me tired and dizzy;

so I put my book down and meditate–

then the book and I both forget about words.

 

When I feel like it, I flip the book open–

suddenly I’ve come to the Source of the Sages:

if I say this is enlightenment–

basically there is no enlightenment;

if I say this is the Mystery–

there has never been a Mystery.

It’s just a moment of happiness

when I find a passage in harmony with my mind.

But who creates this happiness?

It isn’t me, and it isn’t Nature…

 

What a laugh! All my theories are wrong!

I throw the book down beside my pillow.

 

by Yang Wan-li (Chinese poet, 1127-1206), Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow

a mysterious yet trusting postcard

Last summer, I received the postcard seen here: a sinuous black-and-white icon symbolizing the lesson, “Don’t be Selfish.” After marveling over its beauty, I puzzled for days over the message, asking myself things like, “What French-speaker do I know who is also learning Thai? Why would someone go to all the trouble to send this card to me, knowing I cannot read it?” and most importantly, “Who would trust me to figure out the answers?!”

When I finally got the card into the hands of a Thai-speaker, who translated the signature as “Jasmine flower,” I thought immediately of a lovely young art student (named Jaz) I met this year. When I wrote to her, she replied, “Finally!!!”

What a gift!  What Jaz gave me is the gift of trust. She trusted me to figure out the mysterious message. She trusted me to do so in my own time. She trusted me and waited patiently, until I did what she had hoped I would do.

Why is trust so hard for us?

As Bob Klein writes in Movements of Magic, “Don’t you trust yourself? Don’t you trust that you are a good human being who, if allowed to do whatever you wished, would do positive and loving things? What lies have you fallen for? Have they frightened you into believing there is a monster within you? It’s not a monster. It’s Body-Mind, your own true self….  the artist within you, the true creator and apprentice of Nature herself.”*

The next time you are dealt a mystery or encounter a challenging situation, try thinking in terms of trust. You are most likely capable of handling it. That is why you received it!

***

Bob Klein, Movements of Magic, p. 18.