zenscribe

Summer in the city.
I'm just going through the day, hot and sunny, blue-sky fine. What else is there to do?
Somewhere across the Atlantic, Madoff gets 150 years in prison and the talk is still about Michael Jackson. And not just across the ocean. How strange that the saddest man made so many happy. Did he know it, wrapped up and hidden, walking in place?
Like him or not, everywhere this death - because of how it is rippling through our minds - is a forceful reminder of our essential impermanence - white skin or black, thick nose or thin, rich or poor, young or old.
At the last breath, what else is there? What did all that effort come down to? Just the last breath. Always just the last breath, right now. Take it in and let it go.
There will never be another like it.

Living in occupied territory? Revolt!
Sit down and vacate with the Wild Flower Sangha.
Practice, study, experience the art of everything-is-practice. Beginners welcome.
Two summer retreats, in France and in Portugal:

Aug. 1-8, Portugal info and registration: wildflower.pt@gmail.com
Aug. 21-28, France info and registration: zenscribe@free.fr

Summer's good tonight.
Not a cloud in the sky.
The day birds are making their last calls, night birds not yet starting up.
One of the orchids on my table - the bonus plant, I call it, a root replanted from another pot - lost a blossom this morning. It was time to go.
Over someone's shoulder in the Métro I read that on this day in 1986 Maradona scored his hand of God goal against England in the World Cup. It's hard to say what victory meant.
Today, last I heard Iran was waiting. For what?
Again, it's hard to say what victory means.
As dusk slowly advances, is it day's loss and night's gain? Or night's loss and day's gain?
For me, it's a win-win/no-win situation: No loss, no gain; all lost, all gained, by night and day. A bonus plant.

It's Friday.
There was work today, so much that I didn't stop for lunch. On a television in another office, weekly prayers in Tehran seemed loud amid what has until now been mostly silent upheaval. I imagine crowds swelling with hope again, day after day, along tree-lined boulevards in soft Persian afternoons. I think of peacocks. I think of what could be and what could not be.
Then upon returning home I continue with other tasks.
After a time I can rest. A breeze slams the door. The sun emerges from behind clouds although evening nears. Feels like a promise kept: Summer, too, is near.
Must go out again soon. We have a weekly sitting date.
A line from an old Chinese poem says, If you live in accordance with worldly affairs, you will have no obstructions.

Happy Bloomsday, one and all!
Like Leopold Bloom 105 years ago today, you're the hero of this day.
Look around! It's all worth celebrating, morning to night.
As Molly said from beginning to end: Yes.
And with Stephen, remember simply: Cease to strive.
With a nod of eternal gratitude to that wily penman, Mr. James Joyce.

D.H. Lawrence said that the soul can get to heaven in one leap but that, if it does, it leaves a demon in its place.
It could also be like this: The soul that thinks it has made the leap to heaven can only see the demon it has left in its place.

Realize it's been a week since previous posting. Much coming and going (nowhere): In the Métro, in the streets, in the newspapers, on the radio and television, everybody's coming and going (nowhere), too.
A plane vanishes (nowhere).
Obama quotes the Koran: Keep your eyes on God and tell the truth.
What other truth than brilliant morning sun and then rain today? And now someone playing a fine woody clarinet.
It's all marvelously inexplicable.
Come upon this quote in Le Monde:
Être poète, c'est avoir une existence en perpétuel mouvement, vivre à la fois une naissance et une négation permanentes. (To be a poet is to have an existence that is in perpetual motion, to live at the same time a constant birth and a constant negation.)
So it is.

Welcome, O life!
A weekend of sitting and study practice around James Joyce's Ulysses
with Amy Hollowell Sensei
June 13-14
Paris

***
(version française ci-dessous)

***
Jung called it so profoundly an "Oriental" book that it constituted a bible for the West; the British and American courts called it obscene and banned it, as did Joyce's native Ireland for decades...
Ulysses, with its spiritual premise of acceptance of the whole of life (Bernie Glassman Roshi's definition of shikantaza), its everyman hero, the true-man-of-no-rank Leopold Bloom, set entirely "here" and "now," (Dublin, June 16, 1904), ultimately succeeds in "holding the opposites together," thus brilliantly manifesting through the ordinary lives of its three main characters (Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom) the Three Treasures of Buddhism - Buddha (oneness, Stephen), Dharma (diversity, Bloom) and Sangha (harmony, Molly) - and ending with Molly Bloom's irrepressible "Yes," the most resounding affirmation of the true nature of all things in the history of literature.

Information and registration (required by June 7): zenscribe@free.fr


***
VF:
Bienvenue, O vie!
Un weekend d'assise et d'étude autour du Ulysse de James Joyce

Jung l'a qualfié d'un livre tellement "oriental" qu'il était un bible pour l'Occident; les tribunaux britanniques et américains l'ont jugés obscène et l'ont interdit, et le pays d'origine de Joyce, l'Irlande, a fait pareil...

Ulysse, dont le thème spirituel est l'acceptance de la vie entière (la définition même du shikantaza donné par Bernie Glassman Roshi), dont l'héro est un homme ordinaire, le vrai-homme-sans-grade Leopold Bloom, et dont l'histoire se déroule entièrement "ici" et "maintenant," (Dublin, le 16 juin 1904), réussit à "tenir ensemble les opposés," ainsi manifestant avec brillance à travers les vies ordinaires de ses trois personnages principaux (Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom et Molly Bloom) les Trois Trésors de bouddhisme - le Bouddha (l'unité, Stephen), le Dharma (la diversité, Bloom) et le Sangha (l'harmonie, Molly) - et terminant avec l'irrépressible "Oui" de Molly Bloom, la plus résonante affirmation de la vraie nature de toute chose dans toute l'histoire de la littérature.

We just sit together.
It starts like incense smoke, a fine strand rising straight, direct, unmoving. Without warning it suddenly disperses, broken and scattered in a thousand directions, wildly, freely disappearing into the splendid chaos of what is, unseen, ungraspable, unknown.
Then the bell struck twice means it's time to rise.
Still, here, I am.

Today ceremony/ritual on "receiving" the precepts for T., "Terre d'Eveil."
I transmit what can't be transmitted to him and to all. Each becomes one and all, acknowledging this, our very life, as the natural expression of our essential awakened nature.
The ground of awakening (terre d'éveil) is nowhere but here, wherever you are at this very moment, here between "heaven/sky" and "earth." There is no between. There is no awakening apart from here.
You are the theater and the actor of this epic (tragedy? comedy? Waiting for Godot?) that is your life as the "way."
Which "way"? Only this one.
All the places, all the people, all the many "lives" and acts and scenarios are nothing, nowhere but here. They are you. Tu es cela.

Retreat notes, Day I, Les Longues Bruyères:
Brilliant sun all day, as if a blessing. For no apparent reason.
Slept restlessly, with strange dreams in the night. As if something hard didn't want to go away.
Long stretches of sitting, with birdsong, light wind, clouds outside the bay windows thrown open, drifting.
Willow the cat is blind now. She breaks my heart, going about her life without sight. I am moved to watch her look with her ears, nose, paws, whiskers. How alone and vulnerable she must feel, I think.
Or is that me?

Here, an "absence" is a "presence" enhancing the experience of what I call the no-escape-universe: quiet holiday street, sun dipping in and out of clouds, bag packed to go.
What next? The afternoon is everything, a burst of blossoms and leaves, asphalt littered with cigarette butts and a pink cup.
The doorbell rings. Time to move on, time moves on, toward three days of sitting.
The sky is always the same, but if a leaf falls, it is not.

Sitting here wondering about torpor at midday, pausing for no apparent reason amid translating work that I like.
I am turned to thoughts of what to say. Thoughts of having to say something.
Cars come and go outside. The cloud cover thins. Cat upset when moved. Voices pass in the street.
I am stillness passing in silence.
Just rest and cease, Keizan Zenji, an old Zen master, said centuries ago. Be cooled, pass numberless years as this moment. Be cold ashes, a withered tree, an incense burner in an abandoned temple, a piece of unstained silk.

As Henri Michaux wrote, l'abandon de l'empire de moi m'a étendu infiniment...
(abandoning the empire of me spread me out infinitely)
The obstacle that is me is no longer obstacle. Space is neither great nor small.
This is not exchanging one empire for another, however. This is not a closed infinity.
This cool spring midday clouding over is no substitution for the sun, radiant, in the early morning. What became of it, and of the hours in between?
Like me, they are shattered, gone, they are lost, they are found all around, ubiquitous at the desk.