CxD #181 🌻😇❤️
1. Two of the most profound books I’ve ever read are Nothing Special and Everyday Zen by Joko Beck. A few weeks ago, the third book by Joko, Ordinary Wonder, was published posthumously.
One of her central teachings was for peple to label thier thoughts. She found we all have our own repeating patterns of thoughts, and the patient, often redundant work of becoming aware of these patterns through labeling can help us see our core belief and the basic stragegy that derives from it. Once we clarify this, then we slowly develop the skill to see when these patterns arise. She paoints out that whenever we are upset, we have a good clude that our patterns are in action.
A second magjor element of her teaching is that the continued work of studying and unraveling our core belief occurs in large part through resting in our often tightly held body sensations in order to unmask the rage and pain within. She emphasizes that we have to do this bodily, experiencing sensations thousands and thousands of times. The thoughts become like bubbles, either clung to nor amplified with a subsequent train of other thoughts. The body sensations become just that: sensations that are experienced and gradually weaken. Then moments of the joy, regardless of what is going on, appear, unmasked.
2. Here is a short 30-minute documentary film about Joko. It is so full of wisdom and character that several viewings are encouraged. If you’ve never met a “Zen Master” before, here’s one of America’s very best.
3. In loving memory of K.F.
The Writer
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
4.
What is a saint?
A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.
It is impossible to say what that possibility is.
I think it has something to do with the energy of love.
Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.
A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago.
I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.
It is a kind of balance that is his glory.
He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.
His course is a caress of the hill.
His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance.
Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.
His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.
He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.
It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
~ Leonard Cohen, from Beautiful Losers