Here are some excerpts...

Morning Chill

Morning chill –

one sip of tea

is nectar.

this morning it hurt

to rise

but already it is sweet

Commentary: Morning Chill

1969.  At 3:30 am I rise in my little cabin.  Not easily.  I have slept maybe six hours.  I dress and go outside to shovel snow off my car.  I drive down the Maine winter roads to the zendo.  There is no time to complain.  Now it is 4:10 and I am sitting on my cushion at morning tea service.  My body is settled cross-legged on the earth.  The breath is finding its way with familiar regularity into and out of my body.  Each sip of tea brings warmth and quiet blessing.

Out of the chaos of tired early-morning energies, the jumble of sensation and emotion, the crosscurrents of motivation and resistance, there is knit the integrated acceptance of this moment.  There is just this.  That is the nectar.

Every moment is just as this morning.  We are rising out of the chaos of random energies, the dramas of grasping and resistance, into the simple availability and demand of this moment.  Prior to the fulfillment of our desires, prior to the morning’s deep sitting, prior to our own true awakeness, we allow ourselves that first sip of tea.  We open to “just this.”  Already it is sweet.

prayer flags in winter

against the snow

and the barren trees,

the gentlest breeze

moves the prayer flags.

white, red, green,

blue – they lift their skirts

just a little –

their frayed edges hang

like threads of compassion

into the world.

the slow morning sun

lights up the snow

and a bright empty space

for the whisper

of their tender secrets

to bless the air.

Commentary: Prayer Flags in Winter

Prayer flags have been around a long time.  Before their later Tibetan incarnation, the instinct to send out blessings and to feed the holy is already present in all the flags and fringes of early peoples and in the dance of leaves in the wind.  Prayer flags are strung everywhere in Tibetan cultures and they are becoming more popular and familiar in the west.  Their sequences of brightly dyed cloth – blue, white, red, yellow, green – hang down with printed blessings for health, wisdom, peace, and prosperity.  Now a gentle breeze tosses their bottoms upward.  But they may fly in the most severe of climates and the most barren of circumstances.  They are an ever-present and gentle reminder of what lies at our heart.  They are a testament and a celebration.

Each life is born into the world as part of an endless string of prayer flags.  The heart is open as the radiance of pure blessing.  But the heart may quickly come to experience itself as under siege.  The need to defend overwhelms the capacity to bless.  At best we end up with a frozen possibility, a winter compromise.  But the sun of our true nature is always shining; even in the winter world.  And so we must stay open to the winter sun; let the gentlest breeze stir us.  Let the blessings in our hearts lift their skirts a little.  Let the threads of our own struggle become the threads of our compassion. 

In our vulnerability lies our great gift, our great potential.  There is something    venerable about our frayed edges; something quite capable of blessing.  Let these frayed edges hang down into the world, dance in the wind; allow them to release more of our compassion.  This is the passing world.  Prayer flags will not unfray and recover their bright dyes however much the world resists, denies and pretends.  Their tattered bodies will be burned and replaced; all that is left is their power to bless.  That is the sum of a life.

On a morning like this it is all so simple.  The sun shines on the barren trees.  Our frayed edges hang down.  A gentle breeze lifts them.  The snow reflects.  We all carry tender secrets – more tender than we know, and more capable of blessing.  We needn’t shut them away in endless hibernation, in endless retreat from a cold winter.  We allow the slow morning sun at our hearts to gradually open up a place for them, so that the whispers of these secrets, the secrets of our true tenderness, may blossom with the possibility of true compassion.

Heart Sutra

On November 22nd, 1994,

the author of this poem, riding

the N.Y. subway, clearly saw the emptiness

of all conditions.  O Senorita,

form is no other than emptiness,

emptiness no other than form; your form

is exactly emptiness, and

emptiness always exists as form.

There is nothing that can be known

that isn’t exactly this.  Past &

future, time and space, aging and

death, the subway, the city, your Spanish

lips, all desire a dream within a

dream as we sit here with

compassionate indifference to that

which has never been and will

never die. It is 5:55,

2nd Ave. and Houston.  At

Frutti di Mare my date arrives

45 minutes late.  That’s OK, I say.

There’s no time like this time.

Excerpt from the lengthy commentary: Heart Sutra

....Just as a thought may be said to be insubstantial and occupies no space – yet if we are preoccupied with it it is as if solid and takes up all space – so does the world of our perceptions, and of the self, arise spacious or unspacious, spontaneous or fixated, according to the nature of our preoccupations.  Take as a metaphor the space of a room that is filled with boxes.  Relatively speaking the space of the room is “filled.”  The boxes take up all the space.  Perhaps there is no room now for anything else.  There is not even room for air.  But the actual “space” of the room is in no way reduced.  If our attention is preoccupied with the boxes, we may see it as “no space.”  But if we turn our attention to the space itself, we see it is the same – as spacious as ever.

When we relax our preoccupation and conditioned response space reappears, and the arising world and the self does not interfere with, but expresses, the empty and awake fullness of being – Buddha nature.  The empty fullness of being is the natural play of form and emptiness – mind, emotion, and world – that is free to manifest and disappear without binding effect on our true, original, or non-dwelling mind, as it is variously called.  It is only the mind’s activity of preoccupation and fixation that selects, chooses, and creates a substantial and separative drama out of the whole – a drama that appears to have a binding effect upon us.  Samsara versus nirvana.

If the objects of perception are empty – if reality is a field of spaciousness and potentiality rather than a field of fixed truth – then our choice and our mature capacity to love is supremely potent, for it can shape the world of our experience.  Our essential nature and our ultimate calling is to be the very occasion of love in this universe, from moment to moment, from arising to arising.  This is bodhicitta, enlightened heart – the heart of the awakened teaching of Jesus and of the entire Mahayana Buddhist canon.

The question of whether the “world” is “real” or “unreal” is not the true question.  “Real,” “unreal,” and “world” are all concepts.  The question is whether we relax and radiate within the field-of-presence and within the field of arising perceptions, expressing and affirming the unqualified nature of being, and caring for its manifestation in all others; or whether we engage in the activity of cognitive and affective contraction within that field – shrink in our awareness and in our feeling life – solidifying in our perception a world of separation, of self and other, of for and against, and of negativity.  The question, that is – and the ultimate yogic practice – is whether or not we love.

Consider for a moment that we are the universe, or the one mind, dreaming itself.  When we as that one mind become lucid within the dream, releasing the fixation around the play of meanings we consciously and unconsciously assign to experience; when we relax our mental preoccupation with things – including the abiding mental preoccupation with the idea of self – and when we lovingly re-allow the natural spontaneity of the mystery of our lives and of all phenomena, we may experience that all appearance, like all thoughts, takes up no space at all; that all existence remains infinitely spacious or empty – already love!, already liberated! already us!– even as it takes on appearance; even as we engage it, even as it is known – arising from one source in the play of consciousness.

This lucidness, this awakening to our essential nature, enables us to truly care for and support all life in all of its manifestations and to cherish the freedom and well-being of others.

Just Sitting

It is the beauty of just sitting

that the great sorrow, the great failure

that breaks and illuminates our lives,

stretches before us like a lover waiting to be

made love to, or like one of the great cats,

whose purr sounds like a rumble from the heart

of the world and says, “Dance with us.”

And the great failure burns with the fire of

ecstatic being, and the rains come

from over the mesa, across infinite space.

Excerpt from the lengthy commentary: Just Sitting

....At a certain point in our practice there is no longer the least tendency to avoid this profound grief or suffering, nor to dramatize it, but only to welcome it into the fire of conscious being.  We are now free to engage with love the depth, dimensions, and subtleties of our own feeling states.  And as mature humans we are responsible for doing just that.  Otherwise they will remain unconscious and unattended, and dramatized in our approach to others and in our approach to God.  Put in other words, our unattended or resisted feeling states retain a solidity and a defining influence in our lives; whereas inspected and embraced they are – however daunting – mere shadows to disappear in the light of our love and consciousness, our true being.

Just sitting means just sitting as what we are, embracing and inhabiting all of it beyond light and shadow.  Otherwise we are not just sitting, we are shrinking.  And that shrinking, or contracting away from the fullness of being, gives rise to our endless round of “birth and death.”  As we open our feeling attention and fully embrace our emotional substrates, and as we drop the more superficial labels or self stories, the undertones of the emotions may become increasingly primal: aloneness, abandonment, betrayal, failure, separateness; vulnerability and feeling endangered.  The more primal the emotions become, the more powerfully transformative.  This is because our willingness to simply stay present and take the time to fully embrace them in consciousness is tantamount to embracing and hence obviating the very underpinnings of our own mechanisms of fear and separation.  As these emotional structures melt in our intimate embrace, the primordial and inherently ecstatic energy of being is freed to arise in its essential aspect.

The beauty of sitting, then, to come back to the poem, is that these states of being that normally captivate us – even the most profound states of separation, grief, or failure – those states that seem to “break” us, and yet, in so doing, are already beginning to illuminate our underlying truth or potentiality – stretch before our awareness as occasions for great intimacy.  Not to be avoided nor to be identified with, but to be engaged with the relish of a waiting lover, with whom a transcendent communion is possible.  Or like one of the great cats – these creatures of supreme fluency, grace, and power – and danger – whose growl, even whose purr, sounds like a rumble from the very heart of our created world, challenging us to join with the fluid dance of being, and to not fixate, objectify, or withhold ourselves.

Then that very core experience of separation or failure – now a lover inviting us to plunge – burns with the transforming fire of intimacy and surrender.  And the great rain of ecstatic union arrives from beyond the reaches of the mind and its polarities, across infinite space.

Here in the Ati

Spring returns again

to the Ati mountains where

spring has never left.

Winds of sun and snow,

the seasons dance like maidens

tossing scarves in air.

Our hearts are made of

the same clear blue as the sky,

the same gentle rain.

Here in the Ati

we don’t listen to the weather

channel.  Just smile.

Commentary: Here in the Ati

This year winter was layered thick in Maine.  The snow was so insistent (and still piling high at February’s end), that we locals knew it was one of those years it would stay piled into April.  But spring had its own plans.  A couple of effortless days of warm wind and rain in early March, and the snow was virtually gone.  Winter had liberated itself.

Our karmas seem to be piled high, sustained by our own beliefs and expectations.  Each moment seems to add a new layer of drama and captivity.  This is the weather “everyone talks about, but no one does anything about.”  It is the writing etched ever deeper, the knot pulled ever tighter.  But here in the Ati Mountains, we understand that spring is effortlessly self-liberating in each instant.  We know that all writing is on water.  And every knot is a slip knot.

Ati yoga is “the great perfection,” the yoga of self-liberating awareness, winter instantly resolving back to spring.  Throughout the playful cycling of the seasons, the rainbow-maiden dance of appearance, and the imaginary patterns of fixation, the distance between winter and spring remains: zero.

As for ourselves, we are not other than this same clear blue, the vast emptiness of sky, magically precipitating the gentle rain of compassionate activity.  Our heart is that very same primordial poet of the primordial smile.

Here in Maine we know how misleading a weather report can be.  How much more so if we don’t suspect it is we who have been broadcasting the weather channel and keeping the weather going.  Outwardly, it is important to clean up your mess.  Shovel your driveway.  Inwardly, know that self-liberating spring is the primordial weather, the primordial attribute of the heart/mind.  The weather of no-weather.  Then turn off the weather channel and hike with me into the Ati.  There, every place we put our foot down is a smile.