the immensity

“From the lying mirror to the movement of stars
Everybody’s looking for who they are
Those who know don’t have the words to tell
And the ones with the words don’t know too well”

~Bruce Cockburn

the real-true-fact is that there is no answer. so here it is:

.authenticity

.potency

.emptiness

.issan-gee says: authenticity is potency, potency is authenticity. emptiness is the heart knowing no separation; what could be more authentic? what could be more potent?

.authenticity-potency is a symptom of the realization of emptiness. the potency in that transformative realization is the most powerful nascent energy ever unimaginable.

.do you experience the inability to grasp where you are at any given moment?

.don’t know too well.

.without effort of any kind the immensity actualizes, vast, inconceivable and mysterious.

Here is a jewel from Mugen’s Tokudo reflections:

Tokudo: 2 Tokudo 2 Furious: Tokudo in the City

I’m writing some of this as I watch The Relic, a movie from the 90s in which an anthropologist is transformed into a horrific monster by way of his research and subsequently terrorizes a museum full of people in Chicago.  It’s not very good, but I like monster movies and it has Tom Sizemore. The moral of this tale, if we’re so generous as to say this film is a cautionary morality tale, is that the search for knowledge is treacherous for both the searcher and those around them and often yields unpredictable results. 

I’m finding my own misguided search for knowledge to be fraught as well.  As I continue to sit with what’s coming up during meditation and dreams, I’m finding the fear and loneliness I’ve written about in the past giving way sometimes to a feeling of deep hurt. As in the past, I want to pin the hurt to something, maybe something from when I was a kid, maybe something to do with my family, who knows.  But in a recent dream I was given peyote and told to walk on a desert path under the night sky, it was a path lined with desert plants and it led into a black void. I’ve often found great comfort in embodying this void in dream group and Zenho’s exercise of “going to sleep,” finding it boundless and containing all things, including my struggles. But I turn away from the void in the dream, back to something familiar and safe.  On my return, I find myself laying on the desert floor completely covered with snakes that are like a blanket. I’m aware of what it feels like to lie on the earth and the snakes are comforting, the feeling of the earth on my skin is firm and real, and this is new for me in dreams. I’m more familiar with dreams of swimming underwater and the feeling of freedom and vastness it often offers. 

So I have been staying with the snakes lately, touching the earth. Staying with that feeling and the snakes, that deep hurt has emerged a couple times and also something new. An awareness that I look outward to other people and also to having answers to be with this hurt and soothe it.  But often people can’t be with my hurt and sometimes aren’t willing to be, I myself can’t be with it and am not willing at times.  And this is an unfair demand maybe, to expect someone to be with my hurt or their own, as much as I am attached to the idea that these are the kinds of experiences that bind us together more closely in common humanity. Other people have their own shit to deal with, things they’re aware of and things they can’t even see, lurking in the blindspots we all have.  And as for having answers and the search for knowledge…that has not ever served me well and it continues to serve me poorly, even as I try harder to collect and store answers.  The intellectual answers I arrive at, I’m finding more and more often that they’re meaningless in and of themselves. They’re hollow shells on which I can build a mighty tower of ideas I invest value in. It’s a tower where I feel safe but am agonizingly distant from just being with the snakes and the earth.  I’m aware that I came even to Zen and later to Zenho to fix this hurt and find answers and solutions, even though I had little or no awareness of the hurt being there at the time.  The hurt feels related to the loneliness and anger I’ve written about in the past, maybe underneath it, maybe running alongside it, maybe woven together. 

That is where I’m at now. As these things arise, I’m immensely grateful that I have you all and the sangha is a place that encourages these expressions and conversations. I love you all. 

SCHEDULE 2/12- 2/18

MONDAY, 6:30AM, ZAZEN AT TEA HOUSE, DAVID OPENING

MONDAY, 7PM, DREAM KOAN AT THE TEA HOUSE OR ZOOM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81182899201?pwd=UVU4MnJhMG1ZUGJaOHhaSndwQ2dYQT09

TUESDAY, 6:30AM, ZAZEN AT THE TEA HOUSE OR ZOOM, WITH ZENHO. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86265616603?pwd=WHZEQWNDQnZPS1VicDl6VVlEdmxFZz09

WEDNESDAY, 6:30AM: ZAZEN AT THE TEA HOUSE OR ZOOM WITH ZENHO
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89605039197?pwd=VTVubW5pUnBCNFBqQjBieERvNDd5QT09

THURSDAY, 6:30AM: ZAZEN AT THE TEA HOUSE WITH ISSAN 
DOKUSAN WITH ISSAN SENSEI

FRIDAY, 6:30AM: ZAZEN & SERVICE WITH ZENHO AT THE TEAHOUSE 

DOKUSAN WITH ZENHO SENSEI

SAVE THE DATE: MARCH 18

~JUKAI DAY~

At the Tea House, 8:30 AM

FAMILY AND FRIENDS WELCOME!

POTLUCK TO FOLLOW AT ISSAN’S HOUSE

deep peace & great love,

Zenho & issan-don’t-know-too-well-Gee (auteur)

a poem from Zenho:

The Sun has just gone

down

The earth has just gone up

Either way

I take off these tight

sunglasses

a poem from Noah:

Forging a process

A knife in a

Furnace

Waiting in faith for

More faith 

I am I am 

I am 

I say to myself 

And sometimes I 

Land in that beautiful groove for a 

Moment