empty your inbox

It’s Friday afternoon and my Outlook inbox at work is empty. Much like Master Dogen’s advice to prepare the rice today for tomorrow’s gruel, or Joshu’s advice to wash your bowl, I would recommend this practice whenever possible. I would also advise you empty out your mental inbox each day as well. Start each new day from scratch if you can. Wake up like your bed is on fire goes the Zen wisdom. Become reborn every morning. Don’t hold onto the past if you can help it. I had to yell at my five-year-old son last night because he wouldn’t come to the dinner table. He cried and I felt like an ogre. This morning, he hugged me and said he loved me. I hugged him back. All was forgotten. Don’t hold onto passing emotions and turn them into legends that inform your current behavior. In one hundred years, who will remember the point of your anger? Each day, empty out your physical and mental inbox. Wash your dishes tonight so that tomorrow your bowl will be clean.

networks of affection

I wish I could write like Rebecca Solnit, but I can’t so I’m just going to quote a few lines from the opening pages of her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell. To me, this is what true citizenship is all about, not about shouting people down and threatening “we surround them.” Listen:

“When Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he is raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself?…Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vacillate about taking on others, especially those expressed through economic arrangements-including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation-the keeping of one’s brothers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others…but if I am not my brother’s keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”

When I see what happened yesterday in Maine, when equality was defeated by bigotry and intolerance, and when I see the talking heads on cable TV shouting at us and one another, I wonder: Where are the networks of affection and affinity that are supposed to bind us as a society?

waiting for nothing

When I was at Syracuse University, I knew a budding writer named John.  He let me borrow a book called Waiting For Nothing by Tom Kromer. Kromer wrote about the homeless during the Great Depression, desperate for food and shelter. I never gave the book back, and can’t seem to put my hands on it today, but the title alone is evocative of a mood these days. More recently in the New York Times, Tom Friedman wrote that if unemployed people are just sitting around waiting for work, waiting for the jobs to come back, they are essentially waiting for nothing. These days, you can’t just wait and hope that your luck will change. You have to create something new. The landscape has changed forever. But what if what you are creating means nothing to no one? What if the world seems like one giant echo chamber? The Genius Grant isn’t coming, the check’s not in the mail. You might be brilliant, but no one cares. Too many voices in the wilderness right now. Too many blogs. Too many opinions. Too many experts. People are too busy surviving. Sometimes it just might be better to drop out for a while.

disaster utopia

Last night I attended a lecture by the writer Rebecca Solnit, whose latest book is entitled A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. I haven’t read the book yet, although I have read some of her others. Her premise is that far from human beings acting cowardly or panicking in times of natural and man-made disasters,  people instead end up acting incredibly courageous and compassionate, working together to form ad-hoc communities, and expressing their basic human goodness. Solnit suggests that in disaster, we can almost glimpse a kind of utopia, a place where we treat each other as we should. Our daily life makes it almost impossible to sustain this type of behavior, however. We remember the post-9/11 United We Stand mantra, and how quickly it faded when our president told us to go shopping. It is our identification of ourselves as primarily consumers first, and citizens second, that is at the heart of the tragedy of our current American public life. We’ve been told that we need to be selfish because everyone else is and the more I think about this, the more I understand that this is the driving force behind the current ultraconservative, right-wing talk show blather. The talking heads of the world would have us believe that they love this country, but instead they really just love themselves. If you start from the premise that it’s every man and woman for themselves and that we don’t owe each other anything as fellow citizens then you can’t even begin to approach public life in any meaningful way. Solnit suggests there are other lives than the private. Did we evolve this far as Americans just to demand our right to be left alone? She also said something that stuck with me: in disasters perhaps we discover our Buddha-nature. We all have Buddha-nature, but have trouble finding it or expressing it. We are already enlightened beings, compassionate and wise. If we would forget the self, as Master Dogen suggests, then the barriers between us would drop away and we could treat each other as the fully human beings we are rather than as the means to our own personal ends.

one thing well

It would seem that my recent posts are getting shorter and shorter. Maybe I’m distilling some collected wisdom down to its essence. I don’t know. In any case, here’s another quote I found stashed away in one of my document folders. I suppose it can apply to any creative endeavor, or just plain life:

“Do your best at each and everything.  That is the key to success.  Learn one thing well and you will learn how to understand the ten thousand things.  Ten thousand things are one; this is the secret place of understanding you must find.  Then everything is mysterious and wonderful.”

-Archery Master Awa Kenzo

empty-handed zen

Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed — that is human.
When you are born, where do you come from?
When you die, where do you go?
Life is like a floating cloud which appears.
Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.
The floating cloud itself originally does not exist.
Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.
But there is one thing which always remains clear.
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
Then what is the one pure and clear thing?

I’m not sure who wrote this, but I reread it from time to time. That one pure and clear thing, not dependent on birth and death, is what I have been searching for all my life. Can we find this pure and clear thing in the midst of our daily lives? That is the real challenge.

monday zen

Imagine this situation: The alarm goes off at 4:30 am. It’s still pitch black outside, and cold. You’re under three layers of blankets, warm in your cocoon. You should get up and go to the gym, that’s why you set your alarm, but today it’s Monday and that means it’s just too difficult. Why not just stay in bed awhile? Sound familiar? This is our daily dilemma. Not just whether or not to go to the gym, but whether to abide in inertia, or keep going. A Zen teaching I read years ago said that we should get out of bed in the morning as if our bed is on fire, and go to sleep at night as if it’s our final rest. The underlying message is that whatever we do, we do it fully and mindfully. To continue: So you manage to get out bed (at 6:00 am) but then you are presented with the fact that you have to perform about fifty small tasks just to get out the door in order to arrive at work on time. Then your car doesn’t start and while you are fiddling with some engine cables under the hood, you step in a pile of dog shit. Now you really wish you hadn’t gotten up that day. But what can you do? Just live and breathe right into that moment with dog shit on your shoe and keep going. Dainin Katagiri Roshi, in his book Returning to Silence, says, “In everyday life there is no excuse. One day you like your life, the next morning you don’t. Finally, all you have to do is just live. This is pretty hard and very painful because from day to day, you have to do something in this situation where you feel as though you cannot move an inch at all. You have to get up in the morning when you have to get up, wash your face when it’s time to wash your face, have breakfast even though you don’t like it, go to work and take care of your life…Nevertheless, right in the middle of this situation we have to be refreshed constantly.  In sickness, in despair, in hard work, in easy work, whatever it is, happy or not happy, you must be constantly refreshed. To be refreshed is to digest your life completely. This is Zen teaching.” So I ask you: Can you be refreshed with dog shit on your shoe, late for work with a car that won’t start? If you can, you see the Dharma clearly and are close to Buddhahood.

the empty boat

I am always thankful to the patriarchs and Zen masters of the past for their pithy stories that so often illuminate the situations we face in our daily, modern lives. One that comes to mind is the story of a fisherman on a boat in a river. He’s skillfully plying his trade when he notices another boat rushing towards him from upriver. The fisherman yells to the pilot of the boat to slow down, but to no avail. The boat keeps bearing down on him until at the last minute the fisherman has to jump into the river to save himself, only to notice that the boat that was about to kill him was empty. All day yesterday I was thinking of that poor six-year-old boy sailing alone in a homemade balloon thousands of feet above the Colorado desert, frightened out of his mind and half-frozen with hypothermia. And what instead was the reality? Balloon boy, empty boat. Are we also shouting at the invisible captains of empty boats?

save money, live better

You work in a factory that makes t-shirts. Wal-Mart informs your company that unless you can provide your product to them at a cheaper price, they won’t carry your t-shirts in their stores any more. And they’ve also contacted a rival company and told them the same thing. The ensuing battle forces your company to move their production overseas where labor is dirt-cheap, workers have no protection or health insurance, and environmental regulations are never enforced or non-existent. Your factory closes and the only job you can find is a minimum-wage  service job in a video store or a call center. You used to make good money, not an extravagant yearly wage by any means, but at least a wage that allowed you to hold your head high and know that you could responsibly support your family. Now you are trying to support a family on a paycheck that is at or below the poverty line. You come home from the video store , or the fast-food joint, or the call center, and you sit down on the couch to watch a little baseball on TV to unwind before you have to help your wife make dinner, wash dishes, do the laundry, help your kids with their homework, bathe them and put them to bed. You’re tired and frustrated because you don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills or where the next load of groceries will come from. Then a commercial comes on the TV, showing a happy suburban couple. The voice-over says “Save Money. Live Better. Wal-Mart.”

a letter from the president

This just popped into my inbox. Can any American really be angry about this?

Michael –

This morning, Michelle and I awoke to some surprising and humbling news. At 6 a.m., we received word that I’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.

That is why I’ve said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. These challenges won’t all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it’s recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.

This award — and the call to action that comes with it — does not belong simply to me or my administration; it belongs to all people around the world who have fought for justice and for peace. And most of all, it belongs to you, the men and women of America, who have dared to hope and have worked so hard to make our world a little better.

So today we humbly recommit to the important work that we’ve begun together. I’m grateful that you’ve stood with me thus far, and I’m honored to continue our vital work in the years to come.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama