Original Face

“Show me your original face, the face you had before your mother and father were born.”

It is a Zen koan.

The circumstances of our lives lead to this and that, and on, and on, in all directions. And when we hear of the direction some people’s lives take, we have to wonder. For example, how could an old man go into a dance hall and kill a bunch of old people, his peers, while they were doing nothing other than just learning to ballroom dance? What brought him to such a state of congealed anger that he could do something so terrible?

When I am looking forward to my children’s future and the lives of their children and then looking back to when they were new babies, and then thinking of all the life that was before, all the family stories, all of that, and trouble and struggle and sorrow well I know anything can happen.

And yet here I am. Here you are.

My house of cards will be swept away. It has been swept away before, more than once. And it will go along with the last breath of air from my lungs, just as it should. Trying to try to carve any history in stone or lock into a belief for the future, horrible or wonderous, these things are all delusions and all evaporate in the brilliance of this moment.

“Original Face” is not your face or my face. It’s not even what we think of as Buddha, or Jesus or God. It is when this house of cards falls away and we wake up as a human being here, before all our thinking about it.

I woke up this morning early, thinking I would try to sleep longer because I have a busy day ahead. I’d not been sleeping and was just mulling over things, lying in bed. In the dim light of my room, through the bedroom door I saw, in the dim light of the living room, the framed photo that hangs on the wall in the dining area.

Suddenly I saw my life, viewed from one room looking at another room and through that room to another, on and on and ending with a photograph hanging on a wall that I couldn’t even see. It might as well have been a portrait of an artist, or a pipe, or temple.
But I understood.

So, I got up and did what needed to be done. And then I wrote this.

Words about dying and not dying

I went to bed last night thinking about my granddaughter who is at an age when a kid likes things to be cut and dried. At least that was what I have observed from the many four-year old’s I’ve known.

Right now, she seems interested in death. She asked me if I would die. She knows her other Grandmother died. The cat Penny died. She even made-up song about “Dieing Dead”. So I told her everyone dies but usually not until they are old.

She asked me, “Why are you old Nana?”

“I’m old because I’ve lived a long time.”

“Because you haven’t died?”

This is why I love four-year-olds. They will address the elephant in the room. They will even play with that elephant.

In the spirit of playing with the dead elephant in the room, I came up with the following list of reasons people die, maybe not for a four-year-old but to just put things in perspective for myself.

Reasons people die:

• Sometimes because they’re old and their body is just worn out,
• Sometimes because they’ve been really, really sick and their body can’t work any more.
• Sometimes, even though their bodies might keep going a long time, they need more and more medicine and care and even if they have those things most days it still just hurts too much, in their body and in their emotions and they want to die.
• Sometimes because they think they’ve done everything that they could in their life and there isn’t much more and no one they love to do it with, and that is harder for them than not dying. This happens too often even though sometimes they’re still young and don’t know that things are always changing. And if they can just hold, on for bit more things can change for them too.
• Sometimes it’s an accident that is nobody’s fault.
• Sometimes there’s a war or a disaster and they can’t get to someplace safe. (Sometimes the war and the disaster happen in their own house.)
• Sometimes it’s because they are reckless and do dangerous things, or angry things, or stupid things.
• Everyone dies. But it is important to remember, if you are reading this list, you are alive and you have breath in your body. Even if it catches as you inhale. Feel it.  Even if you say to yourself, “this is a sad breath” or “this is a difficult breath”. You can Be Present. It is a wonderful thing peculiar to being alive.

I think about people I have loved who have died. I can remember the sound of their voice and how it felt when they walked beside me, so clearly, I can talk to them and feel comforted.

The hardest part of loving some one who has died is missing them. So, thinking about how some might suffer when I die makes me sad. But when I think about those I’ve loved and when I remember them and experience that feeling of closeness, I can hope the same for any who might miss me.

I try to share laughter as much and as often as I can with everyone so they will remember that sound more than anything else. As for the rest, not my problem.

This is how I think of my death on a good day:

I enjoy naps. I really feel good just lying down and falling asleep in the middle of the day. And I’m never scared about bad dreams because everyday my nap comes with a soft sort of dream that is in all my favourite colours. During these naps I don’t know what is going on in the world around me at all, and when I wake up, I feel happy.

I have no reason to think that my death will be any different though I don’t really think I will wake up in a different place. But maybe… And perhaps I’ll wake up to the news of my death (?!) and then chose to ignore it and go back to sleep.

I hope my last thought won’t be that others will grieve greatly. Maybe if they read this they will realize they shouldn’t.

My death won’t be for a while. Yay! So there’s time to work on not suffering in life, even if it sometimes hurts, which sounds crazy, but there you have it. Work on it. Right now. As they say in Zen “don’t waste time”.

Why Do You Write?

Libby Sommer, Author

‘Samuel Beckett, answering a hopeless question from a Paris newspaper – “Why do you write?” – said it was all he was good for: “Bon qu’a ca.” Georges Bernanos said that writing was like rowing a boat out to sea: The shoreline disappears, it is too late to turn back, and the rower becomes a galley slave. When Colette was seventy-five and crippled with arthritis she said that now, at last, she could write anything she wanted without having to count on what it would bring in. Marguerite Yourcenar said that if she had inherited the estate left by her mother and then gambled away by her father, she might never have written another word. Jean-Paul Sartre said that writing is an end in itself. (I was twenty-two and working on a newspaper in Montreal when I interviewed him. I had not asked him the why of the matter…

View original post 51 more words

Remix Metaphors to Change Perspective

Just came across this philosophical application of quantum entanglement. I have been, late in my life, considering how metaphor can have significant effects on perception. Mostly because I have begun to appreciate that the greatest disability one can have is one of perception.

Having my own limitations, neurological, cultural, historic and situational, I know it’s not a matter of simply, building a ramp, overpass, changing my rhetoric, hairstyle or allegiances or zapping my brain, chemically or otherwise.

Using the example of building a ramp may be a good way to overcome stairs for someone with a wheel chair. But seeing a ramp as an elegant rise to an entrance changes the REAL handicap of seeing someone with wheels as being different.

“Metaphors are just metaphors”  but to loosely quote Jonathon Keats, “…what happens if you apply it (a metaphor) literally in your life…Much of the discussion of quantum physics happens metaphorically (because it’s so weird). When applied to different ways we can relate to each other…much of the way we relate to each other on a day to day basis doesn’t work so well…taking the quantum realm, the metaphors used to explain how quantum particles interact and applying those metaphors literally, in our lives, we may realign the way in which we live.”

I have no idea how to use this in my mini book “Words Made of Glass” but because I walk around and surf the net with the story in my head I find I notice things that sort sound like what I’d like to do with the story.

I had an artist friend once who would blurt out wonderful observances. He lived in cabin on 100 acres of Cambrian Shield in Quebec. He said he noticed that once he saw a yellow flower in the woods next thing you know he saw them every where!

Doing Anything Creative Like Writing Fiction:

The business of writing is like riding a wild horse through a desert WHILE NAKED, without a saddle, one hand holding a fragile egg, the other a bunch of the horse’s mane.

You have to be Brazen because you are naked.

You have to be Skilled so you won’t fall.

You have to be Crazy because, who does this?

And you have to be TOTALLY COMMITED to delivering the fragile egg that is your creativity UNBROKEN to the one who will love it, the one who needed it.

I actually wrote this years ago about trying be an artist back in the day, but it applies to anything creative. There are lots of ways to do lots of things, but creativity is a wild horse and being brazen, skilled and crazy, in equal measure go a long way to keep you going. But staying committed and not getting broken, that’s hard. Like everything, if it is not about satisfying our own egos, if the intent is reaching someone, we have a chance of getting through the many deserts.

Celebrity

There is a lens to our awareness of others that we constantly have to adjust for context and proximity. For example, the personality of a comedian is one that often explodes the personal to mythic proportions for laughs, and as the audience grows, the message changes because the audience and impact also changes and the comic must take responsibility or create derision. But, as ego also inflates with the kind of surreal success of celebrity (often) it tends to shut off empathy. The very thing that gave them insight when they started, becomes their blind spot. And those they love, loved and lost, suffer in that darkness too. It is a trajectory we see often in those we once considered “great”.

one or the other bad thing

Sometimes people just CHOW DOWN ON HATE, like wild dogs and there’s not much you can do but find a place where they can’t get you. Because, when I think about it, only one or the other bad thing will happen: If they get you they will tear you to pieces OR, and this is worse, you’ll join them.

The Stone in My Shoe

We forget that often the history we remember is the one that we are told, and that it ignores a lot of divergence, a lot of diversity. And yet, we celebrate the “genius, the artist and the philosopher/poet” who rises above the common story repeated to us about identity. Because they are special? No. I think it’s because they’re who we really are, each of us, when we are not afraid to live the lives this marvelous earth has given us.

Not everything is possible, but awareness of our potential is.

And Now that I Am

Its hard enough raising a child who is born wanted by two parents, surrounded by family and friends who are in harmony, have the resources, will, maturity, and the time, living in a society at peace, with a history of social justice, tolerance and inclusion. *Its hard enough* If that scenario ever exists.

Now strip all that away. Add pain, fear, loneliness, lack of resources, housing insecurity, income insecurity, no history to recall on to find hope, no one to call at all. Knowing your baby, the one you had no choice but to bare and birth, was just excuse for that society to further grind you down to being nothing. You and your baby. Just in case there was a slim chance of you reaching towards a fair share of what is good.

And now think of the crying. A mind, body and if there is a soul, that too, being stretched to the limits of existence while a tiny developing brain wraps itself around continuous want and neglect, sucking on the dry teat of hypocrisy, of an ideology that used your abstract beginnings for its politics. If this brain develops enough to speak it can only say:

“I was not and then I was, but only as part of your agenda. AND NOW THAT I AM I am NOT WANTED. not really, you BUY ME nothing more than A GUN.”

There are worse things than terminating a pregnancy. Everyone knows it. We come closer to caring for each other when we give access to safe abortions to those who need them.

Desmond Tutu and the Dali Lama

I did Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s “Forgiveness Challenge”. https://interfaithsn.org/forgiveness-challenge/ At least I started it, but when I signed up, many years ago, I was still so contracted by anger that I knew it would be very difficult. But at least by signing up I put myself on a road. However, “forgiveness” is a very Christian idea and I am not a Christian.

Over the years (I don’t consider myself a Buddhist either) my Zen practice has matured and many things that were held in a fist of hurt have fallen by the roadside without much effort. I realize that whether we call the loosening of contention “forgiveness” or not, there is no freedom in hate and anger.

As human beings we can be lost and suffer and cause suffering. We can and will always see the rise of tyranny, selfishness, violence and contracted states, but at some point, we come to understand the road we are on and know we can’t pretend to not choose to continue it or to leave it.

There is a movie that will be free on Facebook on June 2nd made by Desmond Tutu and the Dali Lama called “Unite for Joy” about their wonderful friendship.