Surprised By A Moment of Zen

From SoulPancake: Watch what happens when people take an unexpected break in their day.

Intimacy with Your Own Life

Dawes Arboretum's Japanese Garden, March 19, 2011

Excerpt from "Unleashing the Mystery of Existence," Spirituality & Health, March-April 2013:

Kim Rosen: You have been a Zen practitioner for many years. How have your own spiritual path and your evolution as a poet been interwoven? Does your Zen practice teach you about writing poetry? Does your writing teach you about Zen?

Jane Hirshfield: They are left foot and right foot.

Zen is the taste of your own tongue in your own mouth. It’s a way to find something very simple that’s already present within you—a subtler, sharper, nondistanced, and nondistancing awareness.

 

Everything else emerges from this intimacy with your own life, this opening into attention. We become the instruments of our lives and become part of the orchestra of the larger existences that our lives in turn are part of.

 

The same basic attention and permeability are the beginning of poetry writing. Whatever I’ve done in both practice and poetry is a search for ways of seeing and speaking, of feeling and understanding, that draw from the limitless well of the limitless real. I’ll add, I always feel a slight dismay if I’m called a “Zen” poet. I am not. I am a human poet, that’s all. Labels just get in the way. The fundamental wildness and mystery of existence slip every leash we try to put on them, and both meditation practice and the writing of poems are leash-slipping acts.

This is What I Found Through Practice

Exceprt from "Susan Blackmore on Zen Consciousness," To The Best of Our Knowledge, December 9, 2012:

Steve Paulson: I want to take you back to your Zen practice, and one thing I find curious is when I was reading how you describe it, you say you actually are not a Buddhist yourself. You practice Zen, but you don't call yourself a Buddhist. Why did Zen hit home for you so profoundly?

Susan Blackmore: Well, go back to the 1970s. And imagine me in the end of the hippy era, in all my flowing skirts, and my "far out, man," and listening to The Greatful Dead, and Pink Floyd, and taking interesting drugs, and all of that stuff. And I had an extraordinary out of the body experience, and I was really obsessed with trying to understand the mind.

I was studying physiology and psychology at Oxford, and that wasn't giving me — I mean, it was wonderful, I enjoyed it — but it wasn't giving me answers on those kinds of things.

I went searching. I trained as a witch and I learned to read tarot cards. I did all kinds of stuff, and I became a parapsychologist and looked for paranormal phenomena and never found any. One of the things in that whole mishmash of stuff, is that I came across a Zen group and started practicing meditation. All the other things gradually fell by the wayside — through my research as well as through my ordinary life. The Zen practice was the only thing that survived. And I found it enormously helpful, not just in the kind of intellectual way we are talking about now, but in the whole way of living my life.

But the really important thing for me is that when I write about Zen and about meditation and about what I have found, I want people to be clear that I'm not saying this is what the Buddha said or this is what Buddhism says. I'm saying, this is what I think I found through practice that I've been helped through Zen to learn. 

---

See also: "Higher Consciousness," To The Best of Our Knowledge, December 9, 2012

Noticing Thoughts and Feelings

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times“This is where you actually use this. Notice the thought. That’s fine. Notice the anxiety. Notice the fear. Use the meditation to focus your mind...The only thing that is keeping the emotion alive is your own thoughts. You keep churning it over and over again. Your thoughts do not care about you. They only want to perpetuate themselves.”

~ Gary Snyder, a Zen Buddhist priest and the current director of Brooklyn Zen Center, from "Zen for High Schoolers: ‘Notice the Anxiety. Notice the Fear.’ The New York Times, April 15, 2012

Only Listen

Nothing's worth noting that is not seen with fresh eyes.

Bashō

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

Carl Jung

III A Glimpse of the Ox

If he would only listen to everyday sounds he would get it in a second. As for the senses: it was the cicada that made the ear! The thing itself is there no matter what we do. It is like the salt in water and the binder in paint. Rightly opened, the eye sees no difference between the water and the well.

The meadowlark sings, sitting on a branch. Warm sun, light breeze, green willows by the river. The Ox stands right there; where could he hide? That splendid head, those stately horns, what artist could draw their likeness?

Max Gimblett / A Glimpse of the Ox, 2005-08 / Sumi Ink, HMP American Handmade Paper

Oxherding is based on the Song-Dynasty Chinese “Oxherding Series,” a Zen Buddhist parable of self-discovery composed of pictures and verse. A contemporary American set of perspectives on this greatly venerated Buddhist text, the exhibition includes six collaborative artist books, a series of 10 sumi ink paintings by Max Gimblett, and 10 poems in Chinese and three English versions translated by Lewis Hyde. (Exhibit runs from Oct. 29, 2011 through Mar. 4, 2012 at the new Graham Gund Gallery on the campus of Kenyon College.)