Turbulence and Peace

Finding Our Way

[Zen meditation] is radically simple… No matter what you believe or think, this simple practice of sitting down in silence and feeling the present moment will have a powerful impact on your life… Sitting up straight puts you in a posture of full human dignity, which in itself will promote awareness and a sense of your own nobility… Zazen [Zen meditation] is, fundamentally, sitting with the basic feeling of being alive… embodied, breathing, and conscious… I feel that zazen is essentially creative. It clears the heart, returning it to presence, to zero, to emptiness, which is the ground of creativity… For me uselessness is the essential characteristic of all spiritual practice… You do it just to do it—literally uselessly. But its uselessness is exactly its usefulness!

– Norman Fischer, from What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind, a marvelous book by Norman Fischer and Susan Moon

As you can discern from my last three posts, the events of the last month in Palestine-Israel have affected me deeply. (Actually, all my posts beginning with the one called “War” back on October 10 have been in some way connected to events in Israel-Palestine.) It has been at times a struggle not to succumb to despair, anger or self-destructive urges, but to simply be present, to feel this present moment, to bear witness both to what is happening "over there" in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, and also "in here." Sitting in silence has been very helpful.

How to find the balance between not turning away, on the one hand, and tuning in to such a degree that it becomes a kind of destabilizing addictive torture? Each of us must find that balance from day to day, from moment to moment. Sometimes we may need to tune it all out completely. And at other times, life calls us to take it all in.

Perhaps a religious or spiritual practice can be profoundly helpful, especially one as simple as what Norman describes in the quote above. I’m actually starting to value the best and deepest aspects of religious tradition—the way it passes on the wisdom, helps to keep the essential message on track, honors the ancestors on whose shoulders we stand, and creates a community for both support and feedback and to keep the practice from being too insular and self-focused. I have always experienced religious rituals, from those in Zen, to Hindu bhajans, to the Catholic mass, as powerful art forms that reveal and bring forth embodied realizations. And speaking as someone who has tended to be unstructured, there is real value in structure.

Zen teacher Barry Magid writes in one of his books that to him, the word religious means, “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” I like that.

The last few weeks have been for me a strange blend of absorbing often painful and upsetting stories from Palestine-Israel, having numerous conversations about it on Zoom, by email, and in Substack comments—and then sitting down and at times having these very profound embodied experiences in meditation of everything being cloud-like (ephemeral, ungraspable, utterly natural, as suggested in the first John Astin video I shared in my “War” post back on October 10)—along with intense dreams. Alternating states of great peace and turbulence—everything seeming very real in one moment and utterly cloud-like and imaginary in the next.

Earlier today I watched an interesting conversation, sent to me by a dear friend and satsang teacher, between Sam Harris and Graeme Wood, and my understanding of the situation was shifted yet again: https://samharris.org/episode/SE981CECEA6 — I don’t entirely share all of Sam’s views, but it gave me a different perspective on the difficult situation Israel is in, as well as the one Biden is in, and vastly more empathy for both.

Then I had dinner with another dear friend. And then I watched a short movie about the life of Thich Nhat Hanh that surely relates, and I’d like to share it with all of you:

I also watched a new video of my dear friend John Butler, the Christian mystic, which I’d also like to share with you:

And then I sat quietly and listened to the gentle sounds of rain. And then I replied to two comments on my “Day of the Dead” post and wrote this post.

My intention now is to withdraw my focus from the events in the Middle East more and more, and shift it instead more fully onto what is central to my life, and what Thich Nhat Hanh and John Butler are both pointing to as well—silence, presence.

Tonight the clocks go back here, and then November 6 is the beginning of winter on the traditional Chinese calendar, the day when the winter energy begins to enter the picture. So, enjoy the beginning of winter (or summer if you’re on the other side of the glorious blue ball on which we are all riding through space).

I wish all of you peace and joy.