Friends,
There’s a great Buddhist parable where a man shot with an arrow asks for someone to help him. Various leaders walk up in response: a teacher tells him the history of the wood and stone, the priest looks for theological reasons for the pain, the lawyer searches for the evidence of bow and arrow, and the Buddha walks up and helps him take the arrow out.
I’ve been reading lots of Buddhist books this past year (and even started attending a meditation center—a story for another time), and that’s exactly how I’ve experienced the writers below: a diagnosis for my malaise and direct advice for what to do about it.
So I wanted to share some of the wisdom I’ve found. It’s organized so you could read it in a linear way, but definitely pick and choose—look for what resonates, read it and re-read it, and see what might help you in your own life. For me, I feel relief reading these words, and I feel that gap between head and heart slowly shrinking, one day at a time.
Take care,
Michael
“The structure of our economy, our psychology, our whole social reality, is built around the unquestioned assumption that we are each of us separate, autonomous selves. Selves with endless appetites for consumer goods to set us off from the crowd, make us feel good about who we are, and give us a sense of identity. Selves that identify with a particular ethnic group, political party, or ideology. Selves driven by a sense of inadequacy, driven by the desire to be better, richer, or wiser people, driven by the need to prove their worth, driven by dark fears about the future and the fate that awaits us. What would happen if enough people saw through all that? If there was a critical mass for change?”
—James William Coleman, The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition
“We have made the ego into a wall and the wall doesn’t even have a door through which the interior and exterior could communicate! Suzuki taught me to destroy that wall. What is important is to insert the individual into the current, the flux of everything that happens. And to do that, the wall has to be demolished: tastes, memory, and emotions have to be weakened; all the ramparts have to be razed. You can feel an emotion; just don’t think that it’s so important. . . . And if we keep emotions and reinforce them, they can produce a critical situation in the world. Precisely that situation in which all of society is now entrapped!”
—John Cage, quoted in Kay Larson’s Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Lives of Artists
“This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows moldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving toward one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance. Zen, therefore, wants to open a ‘third eye’ as Buddhists call it, to the hitherto undreamed-of region shut away from us through our own ignorance. When the cloud of ignorance disappears, the infinity of the heavens is manifested, where we see for the first time into the nature of our own being.”
—D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series
“Writing is a way to connect with our own minds, to discover what we really think, see, and feel, rather than what we think we should think, see, and feel. When we write we begin to taste the texture of our own mind. This can often be frightening. We look around. There's no one else there. We come face to face with our own aloneness, sit in our own loneliness. It is hard, painful, but it is real. Americans long for this realness and often don't know how to get to it. . . . Wild mind includes writing with our whole body, our arms, hearts, legs, shoulders, and belly. This kind of is athletic and alive. We must get out there in the playing fields of our notebook. How do you enter wild mind? I don't think it's our job to worry about that or even to make that distinction. If we want to write, our job is to write, to surrender to our first thoughts, to write from our whole lives and to keep that hand moving, so that the whole lineage of writers rushes through us, like some great American river. Then let it be a great world river, too.”
—Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up In America
“For anyone living a spiritual life, the most important practice is openheartedness. But dealing with life with compassion and kindness is not easy. We tend to live in terms of ‘me.’ But if you're interested in the spiritual life, you will have to consider more than just yourself. . . . Compassion is like spring water under the ground. Your life is like a pipe that can tap into that underground spring. When you tap into it, water immediately comes up. So drive your pipe into the ground. Tap into the water of compassion. We can't conceive of what real compassion and openness of heart are, but if you tap into them, you can feel them. If you learn to deal with your life with compassion, magnanimity, and flexibility, you will become very tender, generous, and kind. This is all that is necessary.”
—Dainin Katagiri Roshi, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight
“Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”
—Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
"For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen" by Jane Hirshfield
Back then, what did I know?
The names of subway lines, busses.
How long it took to walk 20 blocks.
Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.
When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were grey-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half-dead, stones.
Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.
Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving,
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.
Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.
Why Contemporary Artists Are Embracing Spirituality in Their Work
Black Joy: Resistance, Resilience and Reclamation
Who wants to see this new opera on the spiritual abstract artist Hilma af Klint?
This guy memorized a chapter of Moby Dick—and makes me wonder how I can increase my memory