On Feeling Full

That is full; this is full;
     Fullness comes forth from fullness;
When fullness is taken from fullness,
     Fullness remains.
-- from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 

It's all energy, baby.  It's all good.  It's all right there. Just hold that paradox up to the sun and have a look at infinity.  Make yourself at home in what poet James Berry calls " a mighty nest full of stars."

Emily's Zen Beginner's Mind

In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki-roshi explores this koan:

In the beginner's mind there are many

possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

I spend my days working in academia, an environment where expertise is the coin of the realm.  People build entire careers around their reputations as experts.  For many of us it's easy to get caught up in the notion that one is one's expertise.  Thank goodness for Suzuki-roshi.  And Emily Dickinson, who also appreciates beginner's mind.

I dwell in Possibility --
A fairer House than Prose --
More numerous of Windows --
Superior -- for Doors --

Of Chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of eye --
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky --

Of Visitors -- the fairest --
For Occupation --This --
The spreading wide my narrow hands --
To gather Paradise

The more I read Emily Dickinson, the more I think she was probably a Zen Master disguised as a reclusive 19th century poet.

What I Meant To Say Was...

Jump in and let go.  Not hang on.  Let go. So, I made a rather poor word choice for the title of my last entry, though I intended the "jump in and hang on" idiomatically, as in "Listen and follow what I'm saying here, boy. Take the plunge into another way of being."   What Krishna is actually telling Arjuna is that this warrior living in The World needs to LET GO of desire, of ambition, of attachment, not hang on at all.  For instance, have a look at the following passage from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Bhagavad Gita.  Krishna says:

If a man keeps dwelling on sense-objects,
attachment to them arises;
from attachment, desire flares up;
from desire, anger is born;

from anger, confusion follows;
from confusion, weakness of memory;
weak memory -- weak understanding;
weak understanding--ruin.

But the man who is self-controlled,
who meets the objects of the senses

with neither craving nor aversion,
will attain serenity at last.  (2.62-64)

This detachment from the world of the senses, from desire and ambition, expressed here reminds me of a rather famous Wordsworth sonnet, "The World is Too Much With Us."  In it the poet mourns the dominance of materialism and ambition in the Christian west and expresses a Romantic notion of another world view, one in which Gods are manifest in Nature. Arjuna, meet William.  William, Arjuna.

The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
Are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
It moves us not.  Great God!  I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So I might, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Jump In, Hang On, Krishna Riffs

Suzan-Lori Parks is one of my favorite contemporary playwrights.  A few years back, she published a collection of short plays, 365 Days/365 Plays; she wrote a play a day for a year!  When she was done, selections from the plays were performed by theatre companies all over the country.  One can't help but admire the dedication with which Parks practiced her art every day, and the results are pretty remarkable, like one long improv jazz suite.  One of my favorite plays in the collection is the first, Start Here, in which the characters, Krishna and Arjuna, have a conversation about the illusion of free will and what it means to let go of our attachments in order to take up an unfamiliar path.  As in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna is the wise one, Arjuna the sometimes reluctant student.  While the characters are derived from an ancient text and the theme itself is eternal, the groovy language of the play is all Parks':  Check out this excerpt in which Krishna riffs, encouraging Arjuna to take the plunge into a new reality:

Krishna: Yr having 2nd thoughts.  I understand.  Everything you own, everything you are, everything you know is back there, right ? Yr not prepared, you think.  You forgot to pack yr toothbrush.  You forgot to lock the front door.  You forgot to turn on the machine.  You forgot to turn off the stove.  You may have left the bathwater running.  You dont speak the language of --wherever it is we're headed.
Arjuna: Right.
Krishna:  Hear that sound?
Arjuna: Sounds like leaves moving in the wind.
Krishna: Its the sound of writing. Theyre writing yr name in the Book.
Arjuna: My name?
Krishna: Why not yr name?
(Rest)
Arjuna: Im afraid. A little.
Krishna: Good.
(Rest)
At the start theres always energy.  Sometimes joy. Sometimes fear. By the end, youll be so deep in the habit of continuing on youll pray youll never stop. Happens all the time. But dont take my word for it. Lets go and youll see for yourself.
(Rest)
Get up. There you go. Breathe. Okay. Come on.

Doesn't Parks just make you want to jump in and hang on? Keep going! Remember to breathe!

Perfect Imperfection

On his good days, when Gerard Manley Hopkins was not so weighed down with the deep grief that comes from the heavy work of living on this planet, the poet-priest could render with incredible clarity the fundamental beauty of a world infused with divine perfection. I have yet to meet a person who does not enjoy his poem"Pied Beauty"; even readers who are not spiritually inclined appreciate the imagery and musicality, and more especially the way the poem's details teach us how to love the world and embrace its contradictions.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
     And all trades; their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                Praise him.

Image from Mr. Cordova's Trout Blog

Contrast, opposition and change create beauty and prompt the poet to honor the eternal paradox: contrast, opposition and change are constant and therefore divine -- stippled, fickle, beautiful, perfect, all.

On Purpose

I was trolling for some enticing tidbits of American literature with which to tempt my students into enthusiasm for what probably feels to them like dusty old writing by dead white guys who were never on Facebook.  I flipped the anthology open  and found just the right page from Thoreau, no mean accident, I'm sure.  Often quoted, yes to the point of cliche, but still worth visiting here is the following passage from Walden, Chapter 2, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For":

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation unless it was quite necessary.  I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life...

When we begin a yoga practice, it's not unusual for an instructor to encourage us to "set your intention to be present in your practice today."  I think old Henry David (who, by the way, studied the ancient texts of Hinduism and Yoga) offers some real insight on the matter.

We are All Avatars

In Louise Erdrich's novel Four Souls, the character Nanapush considers the existence of a reality other than the one we see. Many of Erdrich's characters have the ability to understand and manipulate mysterious forces originating in some other reality, so to enter this novelist's world is to accept that other worlds exist beyond the one most of us consider "real". (And indeed, isn't experiencing a fictional world itself already a sort of alternate reality?) In Erdrich's fictional world, certain individuals simply accept that other realities exist and seem to understand that perhaps we can move back and forth among them. Others only intuit the presence of these various layers of reality, and still others just remain clueless. Nanapush observes

Each of us has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life.  That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy.   She runs, she breathes, she cares for others, she mends their clothes.  You gaze into the water of your day and there your face floats back, serene, unguarded.  See! See! Beneath that thin smile you are smiling somewhere else.  Your hand moves and the hand moves below you.  Perhaps in another country more real than you are, in another life.

There's something a bit Platonic about this notion that the physical world, or what our habits of mind dictate as "real", is merely a copy of another world.   But Nanapush's description of a  two-layered reality also reminds me of tales from many cultures that suggest what we consider a "dream" world, is more real than our "real" world.  Dreaming time allows us a momentary glimpse into the myriad other possible "realities".

So, while Marie Ponsot's Denis "sees what is there to see", and my previous post used that line to decry our over-dependence on metaphor and symbol to create meaning, I find Nanapush's view a helpful counterpoint.  So, while we strive to see "what is there to see", we live with the paradox that there is, most likely more to see that what is there to see.