Zen Judaism

Note: From one of those viral email sharings....

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip... Joy. With the second... Satisfaction. With the third... Peace. With the fourth... a Danish.

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy."

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes.

The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To Find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: Get rid of the motorcycle! What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

The Torah says, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." The Buddha says there is no "self." So, maybe you are off the hook.

The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain, though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away, yet shall you meditate and not stir until you have attained full Enlightenment. But first, a little nosh.

Blessèd Be.

"Everything perfect, just as it is" (Bah, humbug!)

CO-GrumpyGranny is writing about the challenges—and occasional successes—of living by the Buddhist precept: "Everything perfect, just as it is."

This was in response to Walhydra's sharing her own favorite Zen precept: "After enlightenment, the laundry."

Walhydra hates spiritual truths which involve being responsible for your own life (even though she knows they are true).

Here's what Grumpy Granny writes:

I decided that I would open up to it, and make a conscious effort to understand that even when things are stressful, even when they are HORRIBLE out in the world...it is all PERFECT.

There IS a reason for all this. We choose it.

We say it's because we're following "God's word" or whatever reason, but the bottom line is that we choose. We CHOOSE to hate and create chaos instead of peace. We CHOOSE to destroy rather than build.

Every single time, WE choose.

So, I am choosing. I am choosing to see the beauty and perfection in every single thing that surrounds me, from the mumbling doctor who drives me to distraction, to the beautiful quilt-block coloring that my grandson did for me for Christmas that hangs across from me as I type every day....

Grrr!

Walhydra says, "I don't wanna choose! I wanna blame someone else!"

Or blame the computer, or the customer service phone menu, or the gravity which makes the papers drop from her hands....

Grrr!

Basically, Walhydra is feeling very unhappy with her grouchy, achy old self lately. It seems as if she's having a serotonin deficiency relapse or something. All the "higher wisdom" she knows is worthless at present, because she just doesn't feel like following it!

"Boy! I can't wait till Imbolc gets here and everything that's been locked up in the dark gets released again...I hope...."

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Ourobouros

In a bored moment at the reference desk, 20 minutes before quitting time, Walhydra decided to play the "Google yourself" game.

One of the more interesting things she found was a link to a post by her old cyber-friend Sara Sutterfield Winn on the now-defunct Pagan Godspell. The post is called "On Perfection, Enlightenment…And Being Grumpy."

Here's a key passage:

If loving-kindness does not posit being some kind of ethereal Perfect being, but rather meeting yourself truly at the authentic point of yourself, then that’s what I want to pursue. If mysticism is a journey wherein the exquisite Beauty of the unconquerable mess of Life is made manifest in a scintillating point of Awareness, then that’s where I want to go.

Hey man, maybe I just don’t want to let go of being grumpy ever again. Or it’s possible that I’m just a lazy non-mystic making excuses for myself. When in doubt I think it’s best to consider what it might look like if all possibilities are true at the same moment. Then I get dizzy and have to sit down and giggle for a while. And then I don’t worry about it and have an orange instead….flushed with green fuse-light, oranges are so remarkably beautiful.

Wow!

This post showed up in the "walhydra" Google search because of the comment Walhydra posted:

July 28, 2007, Walhydra said,

Dearie,

Walhydra’s ambition…well, one of them…is to become the Bodhisattva of Crankiness. She hopes she doesn’t have to give up being imperfect in order to be perfect. Her favorite Zen aphorism is:

“After enlightenment, the laundry.”

In other words, we don’t change at all when/if we become enlightened. We just notice very clearly, precisely, sometimes painfully, how imperfect every thought, feeling, action, movement, etc., is…but also how it doesn’t matter so long as we let go and try again.

Or, at least, that’s her hope.

As she quoted in Walhydra’s Sadness recently:

Renunciation
is not about giving up
the things of the world,
but accepting
that they go away.

I love your raging delight in everything.

What a neat occasion of the snake taking hold of its own tail and rolling.

Walhydra figures she probably should listen to her own advice. DUH!

And she really, really misses Sara's blog.

And so it is.

Bléssed Be

Walhydra's sadness

Back in Walhydra's teen years, when she was still a closeted sissy-boy but didn't know it yet, she latched onto this verse from the Book of Job (5:7)—though it's probably actually a line she got from Linus Van Pelt of Peanuts:

Man is born to suffering as the sparks fly upward.

Even though Walhydra's suffering had been, till then, mostly of the generic teen sort—or, more accurately, the generic teen-closeted-sissy-boy-but-doesn't-know-it-yet sort—she thought that just knowing that verse made her feel somehow more mature.

A few teen years later, Walhydra stumbled onto poet Archibald MacLeish's modern version of Job, J.B. Fascinated by a performance of the play, she devoured the script and memorized a key verse which just leapt out at her.

The line is spoken early in the play by Nickles (“Old Nick” aka Satan) to Mr. Zuss (God):

I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
"If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even with the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could,
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water."

Granted, this verse is the beginning of Nickles’ cynical challenge to Zuss to let him torment J.B. And, granted, Walhydra didn't actually believe its despairing message.

Nonetheless, she recited the line to herself throughout her college years, as if it posed a challenge to her that her own adolescent faux-cynicism wasn’t yet up to understanding.

Looking back on this verse decades later, Walhydra now recognizes that the problem it speaks to has, in fact, driven her spiritual puzzlement for much of her life.

"It just doesn't work for me to believe that God (or Goddess, or Whatever…) causes suffering. Or even that He/She allows it.

"I know that doesn’t make any sense," she equivocates. "But the only evil I see done is done by human beings."

"So why doesn't God stop evil?" she imagines the gentle reader asking. "Why does God let anyone hurt or kill innocent people?"

Walhydra pauses. "Why does God let a hawk kill an innocent mouse or a tsunami kill thousands of innocent human beings?"

"That's not the same."

"It's not?" says Walhydra, amused to find herself playing the Socratic role which Goddess usually plays opposite her.

Although she can't pretend to be wise or enlightened—well, actually, she pretends both all the time—Walhydra has somehow come to understand that human beings are mortal, just like other animals.

And that suffering just happens. Not as punishment. Not as fate. Just as part of the mechanics of being mortal.

"I don't mean that we shouldn't care about suffering. That we shouldn't avoid or try to prevent suffering for ourselves and others."

She glances about warily, feeling somewhat awkward about channeling Goddess.

"I just mean that it happens anyway."

Or, as a Zen precept she often quotes says:

Renunciation
is not about giving up
the things of the world,
but accepting
that they go away.

So...somewhere between the theist Jew's sparks flying upward and the nontheist Buddhist's things going away, last week on the New Moon, Walhydra called her mother, Senior Witch, early in the morning.

The faithful reader will remember that Senior Witch had relocated to the home of Walhydra's sister in Pensacola, Florida, back on St. Padric's Day. Alzheimer's was making it unsafe for her to continue her independent, self-sufficient life in her home of forty-some years.

"I'm okay, but I'm feeling homesick," Senior Witch says, reciting the line with which she now begins every phone call.

Walhydra is feeling more than usually connected this morning, so she says without even pausing, "Yes, Mom. I think homesickness is just going to be a part of your life from now on."

There's a momentary silence.

"There's no way to feel good about losing your friends and church and neighbors back in South Carolina," Walhydra continues boldly. "I wonder who your new neighbors are?"

This gets a bit of exploratory conversation going.

The problem is that Senior Witch has declining hours of lucidity, declining hours when she can retain the mental focus and energy of an adult. That means even the best ideas—even the ones she embraces with enthusiasm when Walhydra shares them—fade into wishful thinking or forgetfulness before she can act.

What's left, Walhydra recognizes sadly, is to give her mother moments of affirmation or hope. Moments which Senior Witch will relish—and then forget.

"Mom?" Walhydra continues. "You remember that my brother drove down from Massachusetts to meet me in Columbia last week?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Well, he got there a day before me to clean your whole house from top to bottom, to get it ready to sell."

"Uh-huh?"

"And—" A lump starts in Walhydra's throat. "And he told me that it didn't feel at all like an empty house. It still felt like a warm, lived in home. Your home."

"Oh."

Walhydra is well into Quaker vocal ministry by now, saying things she hasn't even thought of.

"So...you have the sadness of having left your home behind. But you have left behind a home, not just an empty house, for the next family to move into."

"Oh. Oh. I'm so glad you told me that!"

"I thought it was important for you to know."

"Yes."

Recalling that exchange tonight, near midnight on Summer Solstice a week later, Walhydra suspects that Senior Witch may not even remember it. She knows that she will repeat her brother's message whenever she can work it into conversation.

And the line about homesickness.

And the line about new neighbors.

Like any adult, trying through repetition to reassure a child that the world is safe—even glorious, even wondrous!—to live in, with little green leaves in the wood and wind on the water.

Even though the sparks fly upward and we can't avoid having things go away and we all die.

This doesn't feel very good to Walhydra right now.

But it's not God's fault.

It just is.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.