Impermance Practice

Sansaku:  Impermanence Practice (Previously Unpublished)

4/24/21 – But written a year ago today.  It’s good to get perspective.

The Titanic is a symbol of impermanence, but so is a flame and a flow.  We’re on board and the fire is burning.  I practice looking back.  The future is a mystery.  Practice helps define who we are.  Dogen said, “Practice is the same as enlightenment.”  He’s added, “If you confront impermanence, the rest falls into place.”  I’ll bite.

The day will come; we’ll look back with 20/20 and never forget the year of the virus.  I’m choosing to remember.  It’s changed our lives.  I’ve rarely had a curfew and never a quarantine.  I’m as curious as a cat and the media can’t resist a good story.  What’s this doing to the country?

Chaos and rigidity.  Panic and fear, worry and thinking go wild.  The news is constant, obsessive.  There’s almost nothing else.  Trump’s virus.  Forever linked in history.  And besides obsessions, compulsions out the wazoo.  Rituals to purify and disinfect.  We’re mostly trying.

The virus is a symptom and a symbol.  It seems to be particular and goes after the old and vulnerable.  It’s intelligent and crafty.  We’ve chosen to shut things down.  It’s been going on a month and continues.  You never know what could happen.  There’s drama to the story.

Trauma and anxiety are easily over-learned.  Our collective fear ramped up on 9/11.  We didn’t grieve, we went to war.  The big boat hit an iceberg and the integrity of the structure was compromised.  With the virus, there’s water in the hold.  Integrity is lacking.  It’s the word.

The doctors prescribe social distance and washing your hands.  Don’t touch your face.  Isolate and don’t contaminate yourself or others.  The collective mostly listens and mostly stays at home.  But unexpected and unintended consequences happen:  sometimes good, sometimes not.  We’re caught in the balance.  Impermanence practice. 

Now I Have to Stay

Sansaku:  Now I Have to Stay

4/23/21

The nightly news pits Trump against the virus.  I’m not sure who gets the higher ratings.  What I wrote on this day last year.  A trip back in time.  It’s late afternoon in the front room.  Time to get a beer and sit.  Looking out the window at the butte and reading Nietzsche.  He wrote for readers not yet born.  I am one of them.

Ritual deepens the contrast.  Chaos on the news and geologic time out the window.  Once an inland sea.  In the shale are clam-shell fossils.  And millions of years later. the massive San Juan glacier and its terminal moraine.  Beer has never tasted better.  That’s a Zen thing.

I go through the day this way.  With the virus infecting our collective mind and body, the story’s vital signs aren’t stable.  It’s been five weeks.  Think about another five weeks or five months.  The need to stop spreading the virus; the need to deny.  The situation untenable. What would Nietzsche think?   The herd has come of age.

As I finish the sunset beer and consider the pandemic contagion, I remember the story of an old monk.   The beautiful monastery was high in the mountains.  When autumn grew closer to winter, the monks prepared to descend.  The old monk said, “I’m too crippled to walk back down; now I have to stay.”  His face radiant with joy.

The psyche is said to make deals.  Mystics learn to trade.  It usually means they have to live a certain kind of life.  Our house looks down on Main.  There’s so little traffic I can follow the sound of one truck.

I made a deal with myself, I wanted to live a ritual life.  I like what it does to time.  In return, I agreed to live small.  I’m not at all like the old monk who’s stuck because he’s crippled, it’s the virus and six feet away.  Now I have to stay.

One True Sentence

Sansaku:  One True Sentence

4/7/21

I’d never heard a teenager say of himself, “I’ll make a good sixty-year-old.”  When I was that age, thirty was over the hill and sixty, not even a question.  Now I’m nine years into the trip.    

Hemingway advised, “What you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”  Don’t hurry a good idea, but if you do, take the long way.

What kind of a geezer do I want to be?  For one, the goal is now.  I’ve waited all my life for this, I just didn’t know.  Almost like childhood, maybe better.  I don’t have to ask, “May I pleased be excused from the table?”  It feels like skipping school.  No fear of missing out.  Calling in well, staying home from work.

Closer to eternity than ever.  It looks like a draw-back.  Why Buddha says, “Don’t compare.”  A time of letting-go, the give-away, subtraction.  The very end, supposedly a kicker.  Time concentrates at the velocity of light and that’s what it looks like, time stops.  The bright light.

The logic of slowing down is obvious.  We don’t save time by driving as fast as we can through life.  Would you want to hurry beauty or love?  Twenty-four seven, an inhuman pace.

My bucket list: Waking early in the morning, watching dawn put on her clothes.  And today she’s heavy on dark blue mascara.  Later waking Chyako.  My bucket list tomorrow: Waking early.  Waking Chyako. 

I tried to buy my freedom cheap.  First at twenty-four and then at forty-eight.  Still green, not ripe.  A half-baked potato.  Wanting to do what I wanted, I didn’t conform; but having to do what I had to, made a deal to be a good sixty-year old.  One true sentence.  Best slowly.

Re-Buffering

Sansaku:  Re-Buffering

4/4/21

A friend on a walk said the word, “I’ve been a buffer.”  I’m not through with it yet.  I finally looked it up in my small desk dictionary.  Noun and verb, a relatively recent etymology.  Re-buffering applies to streaming.

Railroad cars have buffers to absorb the shock of coupling or collision.  Buffers cushion, shield, protect; they’re reserves against misfortune.  And chemically, “Any substance capable of neutralizing acids and bases in a solution without appreciably changing the acidity or alkalinity.”

Scientists are drawn to anomaly and in a similar way I’m drawn to synchronicity.  It’s an unexpected and meaningful coincidence.  The emphasis on meaning.  An overlap between consciousness and reality.

When they happened in group, profound.  She asked who knitted my headband.  I told the story.  Her mouth opened wide.  She’d gone to a private boarding school and he a year older, a favorite of hers.  Not a minute later, a knock on the door.  He entered and said, “I was just passing through and thought I might catch you in dream group.”  The group was stunned.  He asked why.  You had to have been there.

What’s the deal with buffers and buffering?  Why now?  The word has come like a dream.  Old age comes to mind.  I’m in the gap between the third and fourth quarter of life.  After that, sudden death.  Don’t dilute.

Garon discovered an anomaly when he diluted a metal solution and it became more concentrated.  This shouldn’t happen, but did.  He called the phenomenon anti-buffering and came up with a quip: “The solution to pollution is not more dilution.”  Shifty meaning.     

Future shock and toxic news, climate change catastrophe.  Buffers hold the balance, sensitive yet tolerant.  At the moment, re-buffering.

Un-Buffering

Sansaku:  Un-Buffering

4/3/21

On the laptop screen a photo, Glacier Gorge in Rocky.  Longs Peak and Keyboard of the Winds.  I didn’t recognize the shot at first; then it hit the mark.  It’s taken from the spot we buried some of Irma’s ashes.

When you choose the inner way, synchronicities begin to happen.  I’ve come to expect what can’t be expected.  I asked Garon about the book he’s writing.  I’d tried to describe to a friend and failed.  The word I was looking for was buffer.  When he explains, I understand.

The irony, if I try to pass it on, I’ll mess it up.  Blood needs to keep a stable Ph of around 7.4 and a little too high, acidosis, and a little too low, alkalosis, we die.  Bicarbonate and carbonic acid are buffers that hold it constant.  Already close to my limit.

I haven’t seen or heard the word buffer in ages.  Not that I’m aware.  But almost immediately run into this:  Jung wrote that religion is a buffer against having a religious experience.  And buffers keep reality in check.  In a deck of buffer cards, ignorance is trump.

My near-sighted eyes are aging.  I went to the eye doc yesterday and we talked about cataract surgery, new lenses.  My view of the world would change.  My lack of vision a buffer.  It protects.  More metaphor than fact.  There’s much I don’t see nor want to.

Last year, an April Fools fantasy.  Trump in front of the camera.  He messes up his hair, opens his shirt and sticks out his belly.  And laughing like a Buddha shouts a joyous, “Gotcha.”

It’s a replay of what happened in college.  My first year in grad school.  The college paper fooled me good.  They printed that Nixon confessed. Was spilling all the beans and coming clean.  Un-buffering.