“I’m telling you what I own.”--Stonehouse
It is August 2023. I have now been an ordained Zen monk for nine plus years.,I’m happy to report that I still know very little, but am gratefully going forward anyway.
There have been many losses, surgeries and a range of insights during these nine years, deteriorating health and many surgeries, losing my home and declaring bankruptcy due to medical bills, becoming dependent and unable to drive anymore, the death of my mother: those personal battles have been rocket fuel for my practice, helping me loosen some attachments, helping me melt my heart and teaching me compassion. Being human, they have also scared the hell out of me, caused me to go fetal and often could only, to paraphrase a Zen saying, grab my wife’s hand and walk through hell together.
It has been a raw classroom.
I’m still sick, still unsure and dependent, still a jackass. Now I’m losing my vision and am having some cognitive struggles.:Deep bows to all of it: I’m still here, and don’t want to be anywhere else.,As I sit and practice in this fire, I can’t be anywhere else.
“The most important thing to remember is the most important thing.”—Shunryu Suzuki
I sometimes wish I had remained a novice, or wish there was an option for permanent novice. There is so much to do at the starting line! I remember in the early days I was burning to be of use, to serve, to “help.” I still don’t knowmwhat that means, but I really didn’t know back then either. Now I just do the best Imcan for everyone around me, and try not to give it a name.
I sit, I clean the house and feed the cats, I read and hand-copy the sutras and other Buddhist texts (I’ve filled 17 100-page notebooks of miscellany that one day I will donate to the Collective or maybe some other order, the collection named after my choice of name for my Zendo, should have ever been realized: Common Sparrow.). I walk, chant, study (assorted poetry and texts, the Compass of Zen, Tao de Ching, and the Vimalakirti and Suragama sutras.
I still know next to nothing, and I’m comfortable with that—and uncomfortable, and that helps fuel the iron ball in my mouth. I haven’t been able tomconsistently have contact with you, so essentially I have practiced by myself.
Here our Sangha has stepped up. I’ve made several great Dharma friends, and have learned and shared the teachings with them. Given my health I’m unable to sit Sesshin or attend the annual retreats, so this access has been my lifeline.
I can’t in good conscience offer to teach or set up any consistent meditation classes, let alone start my own practice space. I may never be able to. But through my limitations and dependence I’ve have received illusion-blasting insights into the marrow of impermanence and in the hidden depths of mymattachments (due to health loss of career, home, car, life savings, partial vision, independence, sense of smell and taste, et-effin-cetera), and this has also helped me deepen my compassion and realize interdependence in ways that just would not have been possible without those experiences. I know my practice is real because I’ve held on to my practice thru the grief and anxiety and losses of the last five years, held on to chanting, to sitting—even if some days all I can do is get up, sit for ten minutes and then go back to bed for the day—to keep reading sutras and learning to develop & express genuine joy for the achievements of my friends in their lives.
Given my health, would I be able to cut it in a monastery with all its rigorous practice? Would I even now be able to run thru a series if Kung-and, given my cognitive losses? Probably not, but I love being a monk/priest. Not because of the name or the threads but because to me it represents my commitment to working toward a greater awakening, a greater commitment to all beings around me, no matter your own limitations. I see it as an offering of myself as a reminder to keep one’s eyes on higher insights, to do the hard spiritual practices to that help in those realizations, no matter what disability one has. I could do that without a robe, a title, etc. But I’m not; I’m doing that with them, most of the time, and I takethe responsibility that comes with it eagerly.
Hopefully my posts will show up regularly and that you find something in them to help with whichever of the ten thousand illnesses with which you struggle.