The Sentence

(Originally published January 22, 2015)

I was rereading my last entry and I can’t believe that final sentence.

I call it The Sentence.  I’ve read or heard a million versions of it: “In zen, when we x, we just x.” It is ubiquitous in zen books and talks and it pisses me off each time I hear it, especially when they whisper it in that soft talking-to-a-child tone that I like to  call The Annoying Zen Voice.

I sometimes use that voice myself.

I swore, though, that I would never use The Sentence. That was a bridge too far.

When we wash the dishes we wash the dishes. When we sit we Just Sit. When we shoot heroin into our eyeballs, we are literally just shooting heroin into our eyeballs.

Shut up. I hate you. You can’t pass off an obvious truism as meaningful spiritual teaching just because you said it in your Zen Voice.

My reaction is the same when I read it. It takes me three quarters of a second for my eyes to scan the words, but in that fraction of time I feel like I’m serving a life sentence in frustration and annoyance.

Sadly, my reaction only reinforces the very point the zen literalists are trying to make.

When I listen to the sentence, I am thinking, 'Don’t say it, don’t saayy it, Ahh! You said it and now I’ve no option but to dub thee Pretentious F**k, even though I want to like and admire you so maybe I’ll pretend you didn’t say The Sentence by treating it like an involuntary Buddhist verbal tic or a bunch of meaningless sounds the way I do when bureaucrats say “outcome-based synergistic strategic orientation” or dental hygienists say, “Floss more.”'

When more advanced trainees are listening to the sentence they are literally just listening to the sentence.

The Sentence is true, and I have used it. Written it on the internet even. Unironically.

I will now punch myself in the face. But not literally punch myself in the face.

I’m not THAT zen.

Swimming In Sand

(Originally published January 16, 2015)

I meditate sitting in a chair. Years ago, I read an article by Brad Warner saying meditating in a chair was not doing zazen, and I couldn’t understand why. One of his books, Harcore Zen, was my introduction to Soto Zen, so reading that hurt my feelings a little at the time.

I get it now…I think.

For me, and for a lot of meditators, we think of zazen as something we do with the mind. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens. Or bodies…well, they can just dangle there from off our brains like the string of a helium balloon. If that’s the case, what difference does posture make? Chair…lotus…standing on your head…it’s all the same.

As I’ve learned more about practice, and Soto Zen practice specifically, I’ve learned that not everyone agrees with that description. To them, what your mind is doing is irrelevant. It is the physical posture--back straight, legs in lotus or half-lotus-- that makes it zazen and not something else. The word describes a specific bodily act.

So to those people, to say we are doing zazen while sitting in a chair is like saying we are swimming when we’re running across the desert.

This is the point where the non-duality police show up in a screech of brakes and wail of sirens. Nothing is differentiated, they remind us. Zen is everywhere and everything. Truly, I tell you that sitting in a chair is no different from sttting lotus. The mind that swims is the same mind that runs across the desert.

If you‘re talking about mental states, that‘s true. You can have the same quality or attitude of mind sitting in a chair as sitting in lotus posture.  If you‘re speaking metaphorically or symbolically, you can describe running through the desert as “swimming across an ocean of sand.”

If.

Because it’s also true that a couple of monks in the Soto tradition have told me that in Zen, nothing is symbolic. Zazen is zazen. Sitting in a chair is sitting in a chair. Running is running and swimming is swimming.

When we bow before the statue of the Buddha, we might describe what we are doing “expressing gratitude” or “recognizing and acknowledging the Buddha-heart  within.” When these monks bow before a statue of the Buddha, they describe it as bowing before a statue of the Buddha.

Semantics?

Maybe.

 Then again, semantics is the point of having words in the first place. I can say “the world is my monastery” and mean it, but in order to come to that meaning I need to know that a monastery is a place where monks train and the world is that big blue thing spinning around the sun. We need make distinctions before we can move beyond them.

In zen, what we are doing is literally what we are doing.

Ceremonies

(Originally posted on July 21, 2015)

*1*

At the monastery, there are ceremonies.

I didn‘t trust them much at first. To me, they were the gateway drug to superstition and cult-iness. Ceremony is a shifty-eyed spiritual con artist; he starts out by asking you to chant here, bow there, and put your hands like so and the next thing you know your wallet is empty and your critical thinking skills are gone and you’re standing around in pairs passing out pamphlets on street corners or trolling inner city bus stations for teenage runaways.

I got over this discomfort. Between music, comedy, burlesque, and wrestling, I’ve been in some degree of show business most of my life. And what is a ceremony but the putting on of a show? There’s music and singing, costumes and props, movement and choreography. I decided the main difference between monks doing a ceremony and a Las Vegas chorus line is budget.

Also, the monks get up a lot earlier.

I thought this insight was pretty clever until one day when I realized that every person in the room was a participant in the ceremony in some way. We were giving everything we had into putting on a show…and nobody was there to see it.

I offhandedly mentioned this experience to a monk and he told me, “The interesting thing about our ceremonies is they aren’t really meant for an audience.”

And I thought, no audience.

No Audience.

No audience?

Then what the fuck are we doing them for?

*2*

A life in show business has left its mark on me.

I see everything I do as a performance. Being a comedian or pro wrestling referee, sure. But also being an uncle, son, co-worker, or partner. If there’s another person watching, then I’m onstage.

Sometimes that leads to questions. What is an Uncle’s role, exactly? I don’t have the same authority as a parent or the clearly defined role of a teacher, but I have a responsibility to be more than an adult playmate.

Similarly, how does one perform ‘being a romantic partner?’ To use just a small example, suppose my partner and I have talked about making healthier eating choices even though its something we both find difficult. Suppose we go shopping together and my partner throws a bag of cookies in the cart and looks to the other.

In that moment, what role is she looking for me to play? Am I a co-conspirator? A voice of reason? Someone who encourages her to be her best self or one who accepts her as she is and trusts her to make and live with her own choices?

I’m not saying I believe there’s a right answer. But most of the time I believe that there is a best answer, one unique to each situation and that the further I am from that best answer, the more I am failing at my role.

Many of my questions revolve around what role I am supposed to perform in any given situation. Once I find that out, I wonder about whether I am doing a good job at it.

Only recently did it occur to me to question my whole assumption that life is a performance in the first place.

*3*

An interesting thing about seeing life as a public performance is that it also affects how I see myself when I’m not in public.

I believe that the only things that “count” are the ones that somehow touch the lives of other people. When I am by myself, nothing I do makes an impact. In a solitary state, I am nothing but potential

The things I do by myself can have value but they are measured by how they impact my performances. The good things are things that will help me be a good citizen: A clean house.  A healthy body. Practicing the skills that will make me a better writer, comic, or crisis worker.

Anything is not improving me is fodder for guilt and shame: Playing video games? Wasteful. Lying on the couch? Shameful. Reading a book? Possibly acceptable…but that book better be useful.

The result is a whirpool of shame and anxiety that puports to motivate me but in reality, paralyzes me into inaction and then screams at me for not acting. Well, as much as a whirlpool can paralyze and scream, I suppose.

Fortunately, it exists only in my head. I work when I need to work. I enjoy my time off with reading or my nephews. The shame and anxiety sees that I have everything under control and slinks off, looking slightly embarrassed for having overreacted and caused a scene.

Still, there’s probably a less stressful way.

*4*

Performing isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it feels like a necessary part of being part of a community, a willingness to embrace my role whether or not I particularly feel like playing it.

As an introvert mostly what I want to do is read books and engage in quiet, solitary contemplation. I don’t WANT to go to family get-togethers, staff meetings, or music festivals.

There are times though, that the people I love want to do these things and they want to do them with me. Other times, it is part of my job. In any case, I know what these things mean to others and I know what they mean for myself.  So I go and do my best to smile and participate.

I worry writing this that people will read this and think that I’m talking about being insincere or fake. But there’s no pretense involved. I might want to do the activity but I do want to be there. I’m happy to be part of these things.

I suppose it might sound like a contradiction to talk about being happy doing something I don’t particularly want to do.

I think though, most people know exactly what I mean.

*5*

When it comes to Soto Zen, at least looking at the monastic tradition, I think there is a way to “perform” being a Buddhist. Certainly much of Buddhism seems to be tightly regulated--from ceremonial things like where we bow and the way we put our hands to everyday things like the way we position our utensils when we eat.

I imagine this extends outwards. There is a way to walk like a Buddhist, to sit like a Buddhist, even to speak like a Buddhist.

I don’t know what that way looks like, exactly. But I am trying to find it.

I don‘t think I’m the only one searching.

 One of the interesting things about the monastery was watching the novices perform ceremony. They aren‘t posing, not exactly, but watching them move, you get a sense of how they perceive their relationship to what they‘re doing. One novice embodies solemn dignity. Another scurries submissively across the meditation hall as if under the shadow of something incomprehensibly larger than s/he. A third powers determinedly forward, chest-first like a battleship plowing through stormy seas.

It’s a contrast to the older monks, whose movements seem familiar and comfortable without being sloppy or half-hearted. It seems less like a performance and more like the thing they happen to be doing at this moment.

It reminds me of comedy. I used to tell people I could tell how many years a comic had been in the business without hearing a single joke. All I had to do is watch how they carried themselves onstage. There is something physical in the way an experienced performer--even quirks and mannerisms have been transformed by time from distracting tics to reassuring friends.

Outside the dining room or the ceremony hall though, performing Buddhism is more vague.

On one hand, practice encompasses anything and everything. On the other hand, it is as the pointed and specific as the business end of a vaccination needle. What you’re doing now--whatever that happens to be--is where you practice. Maybe it’s typing. Maybe it’s the act of lying in bed waiting for the snooze alarm to go off. Maybe it’s as simple as breathing out.

And it happens whether somebody else is watching or not.

The Sounds Of Home

“Open your eyes/ Leave it all behind.”

            -Van Halen, “Light Up The Sky”

For the past week, I’ve been obsessed with Van Halen II. As its name suggests, it is the band Van Halen’s second album, released in 1979, when I was five years old. I own it on cassette, but it is buried in a storage room at my condo, which is currently undergoing repairs. I am on the other side of the city staying at my sister‘s house where she lives with her husband and two boys.

In any case, I can’t get seem to get Van Halen II out of my head. The *ting* of  the bell of Alex Van Halen’s ride cymbal before the guitar solo on Outta Love Again. David Lee Roth joyously celebrating the charms of Beautiful Girls.  The falsetto “Oooooh….baby,baby” on Dance The Night Away.

My brain jumps from one song to another over the course of the day polishing them over and over in my head. Regardless of the song though, the conclusion is the same: Van Halen II, I have decided, is the most perfect collection of music ever recorded. I want to marry this album. I want to buy a house with Van Halen II and bear its children. I want us to travel and grow old together. I want to lie in a hospital bed bathed in the golden light of the setting sun with a cracked cassette copy of Van Halen II holding my hand from a bedside chair.

Oh, and in other news, I’ve also decided to move to the mountains to become a monk.

Not that THAT has anything to do with anything. I only mention it because my Van Halen II love affair began the morning after I let the visiting prior of our group know my intentions.

It wasn‘t a graceful moment. Reverend Master was leaving for Vancouver early the next morning, so I was on a deadline. Except that because he was leaving the next morning people from our group were hustling and bustling about saying goodbyes and asking him last minute questions and wrapping up final travel arrangements for him.

I lingered for a while, and when no perfect moment arrived, I settled for the one I had. I ended up half muttering to him in the hallway outside the upstairs kitchen, “I think I want to be a monk.”

I’m not sure why, but after I said it, I felt afraid. I was overcome by a embarrassment, like I had admitted to wanting that was above my station. I felt like a child putting on his doctor father’s white coat and stethoscope and asking if he could come to work and perform open heart surgery.

I’m not sure how I expected the monk to respond. I thought he would say something like “are you sure?” or “Give me a call and we’ll talk about it” or even “hmmm.”

Instead, he did something I did not expect. He hugged me. Then he said “Okay” a bunch of times, not so much like he was approving a request but like he was a trying to calm a skittish horse.

He told me to hold my desire to become a monk lightly, and then we all tromped out the door. The last thing he told me was to get in touch.

Another monk, several weeks later, told me a similar story about his own experience expressing his monastic intentions. Like me, he blurted it out and didn‘t know what to say next or how the master would react. He described a similar sense of shock at hearing himself say the words, like he had just opened up a box and presented the world a gift so offer it . The next day, he told me, he and the Reverend Master went for ice cream.

I did not go out for ice cream. Instead returned to the guest bedroom in my sister’s basement. There I  lay awake listening to a frantic little man inside my head throwing open filing cabinets, scrutinizing fine print, and scattering documents around the inside of my skull, looking for a reasons why I had made a bad decision.

 He found nothing. I don‘t know how big or small a gift to the world my becoming a monk is, but I know it‘s something an offering I‘m willing to make completely and wholeheartedly. My brain is anxious, but my heart is at peace, and nothing can change that.

Sometime later in the night, I wake up to the sound of my youngest nephew crying.

There is something about the sound of a baby crying in the night. My heart wants to lever itself out of my ribcage, climb to the ceiling via grappling hook, and shimmy like an action movie star through the heating vents separating the basement guestroom from my nephew’s room upstairs. It wants to find its way into his crib and burrow in next to him, heating him with its warmth while beating a comforting rhythm. All is well. I’m here. All is well. I’m here.

When I come upstairs in the morning, my nephew is sitting in his high chair triumphantly waving his spoon. He is sporting a beard of yogurt and there is cereal in the wispy halo of his hair. His delight when he sees me lights the room like a tiny sun. We made it! We both survived the night! Terrible Dark Lonely Scary Tine is over!

When breakfast ends, I check my email to see if there has been any progress on my condo, which is currently serving as the rope in a three way tug-of-war between contractor, condo board, and insurance board that has slowed my condo repairs. I play Dinosaur Hotel with my four year old oldest nephew in a box that once contained a washing machine. Half an hour later, the boys are packed up and gone with their family and I’m by myself in the house thinking of impermanence.

I’m not thinking of impermanence because I want to be a monk. I’m thinking of it because children--with every whiplash mood change, spilled plastic cup, or unexpected interruption--are a living reminder that impermanence is all there is.

My sister’s house is not like my condo  and not just because her bathroom ceiling is water-free and not in need of replacement. My condo is mostly bare and no one but me ever goes there. My sister’s house is filled to the brim with things and also with life.

Now, with everyone gone, well, the house remains a mess, but with the kids gone, it’s a strangely still mess. Dinosaur Hotel, its cardboard walls marred with slashes of crayon stands crookedly in a patch of sunlight. Toys are scattered across the living room like stones in a Zen rock garden. Even the used tissue on the table assumes the quiet dignity of a fulfilled purpose. It’s chaos, and everything is in its place.

I’m filling the sink to do the dishes when a fragment of song breaks loose from some forgotten place in my memory and bobs to the surface of my mind: “I‘m a spark on the horizon.”

It takes me a few moments to identify the song: “DOA” from Van Halen’s Van Halen II. A crack in the cement dam in my unconscious.

The dam bursts and the rest of the album pours through.

*  *  *

It doesn’t last forever. It goes on for nearly a week, but…well, impermanence, remember?

But Van Halen II isn’t alone. No sooner has it faded than another music or movie obsession arises to take its place. Sometimes it lasts for moments. Other times each piece holds me in its grip for hours or days.

Gretchen Goes To Nebraska by King’s X. Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid Maad City. I spend an entire afternoon deciding I’m going to watch The Big Lebowski every day until it‘s branded into my brain. That way, when I‘m at the monastery, I can secretly watch the movie in my head whenever I need an escape.

My obsession right now is the Dixie Chicks album Home. My brother-in-law was playing it while I was sitting at the table with the four year old helping him cut paper and when Travellin’ Soldier on, I grew suddenly misty eyed.

Forget all that other music. Home is the most perfect album ever recorded.

I’m still thinking that ten songs later. I’m sitting in the chair by the front window. The baby is standing in the middle of the living room in his green one-piece fuzzy pyjamas with his hands in the air while he turns in circles to make himself dizzy.

I don’t need to go to the monastery. I don’t want to go back to my condo. I don’t want anything but to watch this boy turn in circles forever while Godspeed (Sweet Dreams) plays in the background.

Sorry, Van Halen. I was wrong.  It was the Dixie Chicks all along.

This is all I want. This is all I need…to sit in this chair and listen to the sounds of home.

Sinks & Surfaces

(Originally posted on August 3, 2015)

In a monastery, especially at first, little mistakes feel like big ones. I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because when we’re self conscious when we first arrive. The atmosphere is so ordered and quiet that we feel clumsy and out of place. We don’t want to be the ones screw it up.

Or maybe it’s because without big things to worry about the mind latches onto what it can. Instead of calming down, it just becomes anxious about smaller and more immediate things.

Whatever the reason, I hold this phenomenon responsible for The Great Bowl Crisis of 2015 that nobody but me ever knew happened. Here’s the story:

It is morning and I am in the kitchen putting away dishes. I am doing this because I know it is a job that needs to be done. More importantly, unlike many of the other monastery tasks, it is a job I know how to do. I can just go ahead and start instead of standing around waiting for instructions while wondering what to do with my hands.

There are many things in this monastery I don’t know how to do. There are also things I thought I knew how to do, but the monks want them done in such a specific, methodical way that that I am questioning if I ever knew how to do those things in the first place. Something as simple as wiping down the kitchen after mealtime--a job the monks call ‘sinks and surfaces’ is fraught with unexpected details.

As a consequence, I have been living most of these first few days in a state of constant uncertainty. My daily routine is endless variations of a) asking what I should do next b) being told exactly how to do that thing or c) standing around waiting for someone to tell me what to do next. I feel helpless and that feeling is grinding against my not-so-strong-to-begin-with sense of competency.

I want to be useful, damnit. Partly because I hate feeling like I’m a burden on people and partly because I’m flirting with the ideal of being a monk and contributing to the functioning of the monastery is my pre-postulancy equivalent of batting my eyelashes and wearing low-cut tops.  Look how good a monk I would be. I show up on time and do what’s asked and accept what’s offered and never ever volunteer opinions.

Sadly, I flirt like a junior high school student--enthusiastic but without really knowing what I’m doing and completely unable to discern whether it’s having the desired effect.  I compensate by hiding my self-consciousness under a mask of feigned indifference. I’m a forty-one year old teenager.

It doesn’t help that some of the tasks they give me are ones I’m completely unfamiliar with.  I spend one morning sanding a large piece of unfinished wood. I have no idea how long this is supposed to take or how I will know when I’m finished. Alone in the workshop, I rub the wood in vague circles with my sandpaper wondering how I’ll know when to stop.  Is this job supposed to take twenty minutes? An hour? Am I supposed sand forever until somebody finds me?  What if no one comes?

My god, I think as the second hand of the clock sweeps past the eight. What if I get so caught up in sanding I forget to go to lunch? Or I miss a crucial afternoon service? Can I be excommunicated for that? Do Buddhists even have excommunication? Isn’t that what happened to that one guy? Diva or David or something. Oh God, what time is it? Have I already missed lunch?

I look at the clock. The second hand is now passing between the ten and the eleven.

None of the other hands have moved.

Well, that’s a relief….wait, no, it’s a source of renewed agony: I’ve only been sanding twelve seconds?

Maybe the clock is broken. Hopefully, the clock is broken.

Oh no! What if the clock is broken! Late for service! Shame! Excommunication! Dishonoring the ancestral line! Disappproval transmitted across a hundred million myriad kalpas. 

Devadatta. That was his name.

Maybe I should pop up to the guest house and check the clock there.

Experiences like this are why I like putting dishes away.

Putting away dishes is my rock amidst a sea of uncertainty. I know these dishes need to be put away. I know where they go, and I know I’m just the man to put them there. I am a Dish-Putting-Away champion.

So that‘s what I‘m doing. I’m getting a nice rhythm going and thinking, I hope the monks are noticing how mindfully I‘m putting away the dishes, when the plastic tray I’m pulling out of the rack catches the edge of a heretofore unnoticed bowl and sends it spinning off counter towards the floor.

Here are the three thoughts that go through my head.

1) Maybe no one will notice.

2) Maybe the bowl won’t break.

3) If the bowl does break, maybe it won’t be that big a deal.

Here are the three things that actually occur:

The bowl (1) hits the floor with a resounding BANG and (2) vanishes (3) leaving the entire corner of the kitchen lightly blanketed in tiny, razor-sharp ceramic shards.

I blink confusedly at the space-formerly-occupied-by-bowl(I’ll be damned--form really IS emptiness) and then turn to see everybody in the kitchen looking at me.

On the outside, I say in my junior high school nonchalance/equanimous novice voice: “Does anyone know where I might find a broom?”

On the inside, the junior high school student in my brain runs out of the room, locks itself in a bathroom stall inside my skull and bursts into tears.

And so instead of helping put dishes away or making breakfast, I spend most of my morning picking up shards of glass with the help of a novice monk. It’s slow and painstaking work. We have to pull plastic containers full of utensils from the shelves and go through them looking for bits of ceramic.

I am humiliated. Not only am I not being useful, I‘ve dragged a monk into my uselessness. Instead of doing what she‘s supposed to be doing, she‘s stuck helping me. I am worse than useless. I am a net negative. Not only am I bringing nothing to the table, I‘m taking the things people are bringing to the table and sprinkling broken glass onto  them. They make merit; I season it with murder-dust.

This is not the only awkward thing I do during my three week stay. I drop tools and mishandle wheelbarrows. Cleaning the counters, I use the wrong soap, which I’m told is very bad. One day I forget to close the curtains in my room before doing my morning yoga stretches which leads to a correction from one of the novice monks that I imagine is as embarrassing for him as it is for me.

Over time though, I notice I’m not alone.

The monks and lay people make mistakes just like I do. They drop things, lose their place in chants, and fill the kitchen with smoke because they forgot to check which windows were open and which ones were closed before lighting the dining hall fireplace.

I notice two things from all this. One thing I notice watching the monks make errors isn’t that they make mistakes, but how they make mistakes.

They admit their errors. They ask for help. They apologize when necessary. They move on. They treat each mistake as a thing to learn from or not to do again as opposed to a reflection of their personal worth or competence.

The second thing I start to notice is that the world is bigger than our victories and failures. We are neither the Hero nor the Villain of the Universe. To get caught up in our personal stories is to lose sight of the way we‘re a thread in a larger tapestry. Being able to see past that, even a little bit, transforms my life from massive and overwhelming to a part of something richer and more complete. In those moments, I feel both smaller and vaster. My life is less important, but more meaningful.

Those moments don’t last forever. Whether it’s seconds, minutes, or hours later, eventually my brain latches on to some new source of excitement or terror.

I’m okay with it. There was a time I believed in enlightenment--that one day I would suddenly ‘get it’ and be forever free of fear, doubt, and insecurity. Now I’m starting to recognize those fears, doubts, and insecurities as being as much a part of my life’s rhythm as peace, faith, and serenity. I will be fine as long as I remember just because I experience them, doesn’t mean I have to let them drown me.

This is training. Remembering and forgetting what is important. Stormy seas and calm waters. Sinking and surfacing.

For as many kalpas as it takes.

Watching the Playoffs...No, REALLY Watching the Playoffs

(Originally published on May 19, 2015)

I haven’t had a chance to watch the NBA playoffs, so I’ve been reading the day after recaps on Grantland and Deadspin.

I thought I was following the playoffs, but it occurs to me now that I’m not.

What I’m doing is following the stories of the playoffs.

I haven’t seen any of the actual games. I’ve seen the articles of people writing about the games.

They tell me the Los Angeles Clippers are a bunch of whiny, flopping crybabies. They tell me that James Harden and the Houston Rockets are ruining basketball. They tell me the Memphis Grizzlies’ Tony Allen is a national treasure and that the Eastern conference is such a train wreck, it isn’t even worth following.

And I believe them.

I am now cheering against the Clippers and the Rockets. I never had an opinion of the Memphis Grizzlies before, but they sound good. I have no interest in what’s happening in the East.

But only because that’s what I’ve been told. I haven’t seen enough to form my own opinion.

I’m not seeing the games. I’m seeing stories.

It’s a subtle but crucial distinction.

I can find out the score online as easily as I can having watched the game. I can learn which teams won and which teams lost and look up the statistics for each player.

I can learn ABOUT the game. But that’s not the same as watching the game. It’s DEFINITELY not the same as being on the court and playing in it.

I can apply this same distinction to the rest of my life.

And so I ask myself: am I participating in my life or am I telling stories?

Have I learned the lessons I tell people I’ve learned or am I just telling them I‘ve learned--hiding the same old actions behind shiny new words?

Am I living my relationships with my partners, my nephews, my family, my co-workers? Or am I experiencing them through the stories I’m telling myself about those relationships.

Am I really watching the playoffs?

I want to be someone who deals in reality, not stories.

So today, I’m turning over a new leaf.

While my nephew plays upstairs and the sun shines and birds sing outside, I text my friend to say I’m not going to make it over today, sit back on a couch in my mother’s basement with a remote control in my hands and turn on game seven of the Rockets-Clippers game.

After all, I wouldn’t want to miss anything.

Undercover Monk

“It is futile to travel to other dusty countries, thus forsaking your own seat.” - Dogen

Sometimes I imagine myself as an undercover monk.

I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I’d like to talk about one of the biggest words in the English language, perhaps THE biggest word--and it‘s only two letters long.

That word is ‘if.’

It's a tiny word, and yet it is big enough to screen out the entire universe. It obscures our sight like a blindfold, putting up a smokescreen against the truth.

And it's blindfold we put on ourselves.

If they'd just stop putting things on my plate, I wouldn't feel swamped at work.

I'd exercise more if I had more time

If he could get his anger out of control, none of this would be a problem.

Those ifs distract us from the heart of what we are saying:

I feel swamped at work.

I'm not excercising.

This is a problem.

I play the same if game with my spiritual training. I fantasize about becoming a monk. If I was a monk, I think, my training would be so much better.

Why aren’t I a monk? Why more ‘if’s, of course.

If the monastery were closer. If my nephews were older. If the meditation group here didn’t need me and if I could get my visa situation figured out and if maybe there was an exception in the monastic vows where I could be a monk but also still have sex whenever I want with whoever I want and maybe tell dirty jokes in a comedy club and go salsa dancing once in a while…

Look! People would say as I led my partner into a turn while my robes swirled around me. A dancing monk. He’s serene and wise, but also funny, exciting and a little bit sexy. He’s a living example of how Zen Buddhists can be relevant to contemporary fast-paced modern life while still remaining grounded in centuries of tradition. We should train too!

If I were a monk,

If.

I’m not a monk.

The monastery is not closer.

My nephews are the age they are. They are getting older by the moment, but so am I.

I can’t be celibate and sexually active at the same time.

For the longest time, I convinced myself that those things were obstacles, and I was right. But I was right in a different way than I believed.

I believed that my distance from the monastery and monks meant I didn’t get access to the kind of teaching that would really help my training. I believed that until I became a monk myself and was able to live a life free from distractions, I might as well not bother.

I trained, but my efforts were always stitched through with a subtle thread of hopelessness. To me, training was like stand-up comedy--if you really want to be among the best, you have to be willing to give up everything else. I wasn’t doing that, so there was no hope of me reaching the heights I wanted for myself. And if I couldn’t be among the best, what was the point of doing it at all?

At a certain point I came to the realization that if I was serious about training, I was going to have to be my own monk.

Monks aren’t special because they’re special. Monks are special because they are no different from the rest of us. They’re human beings--subject to birth, old age, sickness, and death--and they’ve decided to train anyway.

If they can train, we can train. If they can be a living example, then so can the rest of us.

It’s not about the robes and the monastery. It’s about the mind.

In volume 1 of Roar of the Tigress, Reverend Master Jiyu says: “Love God, do your own training; love the Cosmic Buddha, do your own training. Love Allah, do your own training.”

Maybe that same idea applies as much to the material as it does to the spiritual. Maybe the idea extends to our every experience: Love your family; do your own training. Find your job frustrating; do your own training.

Which brings me to Undercover Monk.

It’s a thought experiment, more than anything. I imagine that I’m a monk, but I have to keep that a  secret. I’m not allowed robes or a monastery. I’m not allowed to tell anyone I’m a monk, and my training has to happen in secret. I’m assigned my job and my relationships and I have to go about those things as best I can. I need to pass a lay person while training as a monk.

How what such a monk behave? If I were in such a position--cut off from the monastery and deep behind enemy lines--how would I train and be an example of training in the world, without blowing my cover?

I think of those things and try and do that.

(This is a revised and updated version of a post that was originally published on October 30, 2014)

The Hungry Ghost [fiction]

(Originally posted August 8, 2013)

The skin of her bare back glows as she fastens her jeans, and for a moment I have the thought that I'm watching a ghost.

I've known this woman for a few years now.

I've learned not to call her. She comes when she wants. Sometimes a couple weeks in a row. Other times months pass. Then a text, five words, always the same: When can I see you?

From what little I know about her, her life looks perfect from the outside and she takes great pains to keep it that way, like a plastic wedding cake behind a pane of glass. Beautiful. Perfect.

Inedible.

Some people want to have their cake and eat it too. Not her.

She has her cake, but cannot eat. She would rather the world admire her perfect, plastic cake while she quietly starves.

I guess that's where I come in.

Her husband is seeing other women. He knows she's seeing other men, and he doesn't care.

She says she doesn't care either.

Now and then, she talks about leaving him. Not now, because Christmas is coming up and he needs to be at the parties. Not yet, because they would have to sell the house and she doesn't want that.

But soon, she says. One day.

And then she'll ask about the broken antique typewriter on my coffee table or  to tell me my walls are too bare. She'll ask me to tell her a story about comedy or what I think of her new bracelet.

I'll answer truthfully and think of perfect, plastic fake couples perched on top of perfect, plastic fake cakes.

She talks about traveling. About wanting to grow strawberries. About all the things she'd love to do but isn't doing because work is too busy. Sixty hours a week she puts into it, she estimates. But things will slow down in a couple months, and she'll have time for herself.

She's been telling me that since the day I met her.

I trace the lines on her face with my fingers.

I keep her secrets and allow her to come and go as she pleases.

 Her life is about containment, staying in the box she made for herself. That's not bad; it's what most women do. What most PEOPLE do.

They find a way to live with being hungry.

I listen. I tell her the Truth. I make her laugh. I do what I do best. After, I hold her until her breathing is slow and deep.

She's smiling when she leaves. She seems calmer, more at peace. She looks years younger. It won't last but she deserves happiness and at least it's something.

Me?

I'm content.

I pad to the bathroom on bare feet enjoying the sensation of my toes flexing against the floor. My chest feels warm and open, my heart still, my lips bruised and tender.

It's only later, much later, lying in bed in the dark that I notice a pinprick of feeling in my stomach, barely noticeable, a will o' the wisp of sensation as half-formed and transparent as a phantom.

It whispers: I'm still hungry.

Now You're Talking: Reflections on Right Speech

(Originally published, May 16, 2013)

My nephew knows only three words: “No,” “OK,” and “That,” and yet I find communication with him easier and less stressful than with most adults.

Why is that?

Three words come to mind.

Honesty. Simplicity. Immediacy.

I could say more about each of those things but it feels wrong. The words themselves say everything they need when I stop and listen. To add more would make things muddier not clearer.
Maybe my question is the problem.

Maybe the question isn’t “why is it so easy to communicate with my nephew?” Maybe the question is: “Why do I find communicating with others so hard?”

Or even better: “Under what circumstances do I communicate well?”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

* * *

A number of years ago, I volunteered at a phone-in crisis center covering everything from suicide to domestic violence to addictions to relationship problems. Over time, I noticed something remarkable.
Almost everything I said--regardless of the actual words or type of sentence I used--fell into one of a very small set of categories.

I was either a) soliciting information or b) affirming what I had heard c) providing education d) building hope or e) focusing the caller. Even out of those five categories, eighty to ninety percent of my time was spent in the first two. Furthermore, anything I said that DIDN’T fall into one of those categories usually ended up derailing or knotting up the call unnecessarily.

The categories themselves don’t matter. What’s important is I knew the intention behind everything I said.

Most of life isn’t like that. There are a lot of reasons we might say something. To share information. To ask for help. To make ourselves or others feel more comfortable. To prove ourselves right or to convince ourselves our choices are justified. Or sometimes just to pass the time with another person.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these intentions. But I have noticed sometimes we speak before we know what our own intentions are.

We state facts when we’re really asking for help. We ask for information when we want reassurance. We defend ourselves before we even consciously realize we feel attacked. We say we want input from others when the only advice we really want to hear is that it’s okay to do the thing we’ve already secretly decided we want to do.

Or sometimes we intend more than one thing at the same time. Sometimes we don’t intend anything--we’re just uncomfortable with silence. And sometimes we know exactly what our intentions are…but we believe we have to hide them because we don’t believe people will ever willingly give us what we need from them.

It’s hard sometimes to make our way through the thicket of our own intentions, let alone figure out someone else’s.

But on the Distress Line, the intention was always clear. To listen.

We weren’t there to solve anybody‘s problems. Our role wasn’t to offer advice. The wisdom behind the Distress Line was that people are experts on their own lives, and given a listening ear, they could sort things out themselves. We didn’t have to lead them out of the dark. All we needed to do was hold up a candle for them and let them find their own way.

I loved it. I worked hard at it. I tracked every call and kept notes for myself on every shift, and I came to a strange conclusion: The less I said, the better. Callers knew what they wanted and needed. The ripples on the surface of their lives settled just fine on their own; there was no need to stir things up again by sticking my oar in the water.

I became relentless about paring down my calls, trying not to utter a word more than necessary.  When I did speak, I discovered timing mattered more than the words themselves, staying in the flow of the caller’s own rhythm, minimizing my intrusion into their world while helping them see parts of that world from new angles. If I did my job right, I felt, they shouldn’t even know I was there.

Essentially, I was doing what my nephew does now--pointing at things and asking, “That? That?”
Some people say crisis line workers do nothing. In a sense, they’re right. I believe the better a crisis line listener gets, the less she does, but the better she gets at doing those things.

Maybe that’s the secret: Say less things better.

It‘s simple. It‘s elegant. Yet what made it so amazing is there were so many ways to do it well.
Other volunteers routinely amazed me with the things they said, with the questions they thought to ask. My journal was filled with ideas I overheard from others, things I would never have come up with on my own. As we grew in experience, each of us developed our own style, a way of relating to callers that was uniquely our own.

A crisis call is all about the caller, not the listener. Yet somehow, each of us found our own style. It wasn‘t about us, yet we still made it our own, turning something most people see as passive and static into something dynamic and beautiful, our own invisible form of personal expression.

We learned countless ways to do nothing.

To me, that’s beautiful.

* * *

Comedy isn’t like the Distress Line. In comedy, specific words matter.

Unfortunately, as those of us who do it regularly have learned, we don’t know what those words are until we say them out loud in a room full of people.

You can write and rewrite jokes to your hearts content. You can edit them and pare them down, or spice them up with details and new ideas. You can spend hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to craft the perfect joke.

But until it comes out of your mouth in front of a crowd, you have no idea what you have.

Most of the time, it isn’t so bad. I’ve written a few jokes that I’ve been uncomfortable performing. I’ll look at the joke and think: This isn’t the joke I wanted to write
.
Yet it’s the joke I have. So the question becomes: Am I willing to say these words in public and see what happens?

Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. Often, that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is what happens on stage between the jokes. Something happens. Instead of bursting into laughter, the audience just stares. A heckler pipes up. A bachelorette party gets loud enough to disrupt the show. The microphone fails or the lights go out. A woman leaps on stage, runs over, and hugs me. These things have all happened.

No matter how tightly planned the set or how rehearsed you are, things arise and the audience waits to see how you react.

One of the most honest places in the world is the stage at a stand-up comedy show. You aren’t always truthful, but it’s impossible to lie. A performer’s level of confidence, commitment, and preparedness always shines through. Your personality is never more open and on display. Both literally and psychologically, there is no place to hide.

In such cases, there is only one thing you can really do: open your mouth and trust whatever comes out.

There isn’t time to think of the right thing to say. There isn’t time to even think of the funniest thing to say.

You just have to let go and see what happens.

Often what happens isn’t funny. Sometimes things come out that don’t make sense, make the situation worse, or turn a crowd off.

But the more you do it, the better at it you get. In fact, the ONLY way to get good at it is to do it and to keep doing it, even in the face of missteps. You learn to let the words come out. You aren’t trying to shape them. You aren’t trying to be funny or not funny. You just say what you say, notice the reaction, and learn from it. Eventually you get to the point where even if you say the wrong thing, you can open your mouth again and whatever comes out next will lead you back on track.

I don’t know how this improvement happens. I’ve seen it a hundred times in myself and other comics, and I still can’t explain it. But it DOES happen.

And the first and only step is to get eliminate the filter between your brain and mouth.

Easy, right?

No?

No. Not for me either.

* * *

Where did that filter come from?

I‘ll tell you where it came from in my case. It came from me being sick and tired of hurting people with the things I say.

I’ve never done it on purpose. I just have an unfortunate tendency to say the worst thing in the worst words at the worst possible time.

I’ve been hauled into offices by supervisors for things I don’t even remember saying. I’ve started fights between boyfriends and girlfriends with an offhand comment. There are half a dozen moments in my life I cringe just thinking about. Yes, people are responsible for their own feelings and their own reactions, but…Dan, why did you have to be such an asshole?

After a number of such incidents over the years, I learned to stop trusting myself. I learned to not speak. I did more than put in a filter. I built up a wall.

I spent a lot of time in silence. Unless I knew the exact right thing to say, I said nothing.

Then I started stand-up comedy and had to learn to take that wall down all over again.

The scariest thing about removing the filter was worrying if I could ever get it up again. Could I be one person on stage and then go back to my job, family, or friends, and not end up staying stupid or hurtful things again?

As it turned out, I couldn’t.

Instead, I learned something better.

I learned about paying attention.

It wasn’t about going back to censoring myself. It wasn’t about blocking my speech. It was about being aware of the specific situation I was in and adapting my honest response accordingly. It was about noticing where I was and taking in the facial expressions of the folks around me and monitoring my own tone, volume, and words.

The Distress Line taught me that when speaking, simplicity and purposefulness matters. Comedy taught me that when speaking, honesty and immediacy matters. The lesson I learned bringing this back into my everyday life was that context matters.

And that’s where it finally dawned on me:

Right speech doesn’t come from knowing how to talk. Right speech comes from learning how to listen.

I still don’t know how to talk to people. There are times I don’t trust myself or believe that others will respond positively to what I say and that lack of trust distorts the way I express myself. Not big distortions. Little ones. But little things can become big things sooner than you‘d expect.I’ve come to accept that, and realize that I can talk to people anyways.

I still don’t know the right things to say. What I’m discovering instead is that there is no right thing to say. There are millions of things, and sometimes the right thing is what happens to be there when you trust yourself, let go, and make wanting the best for people your focus.

I still spend a lot of time in silence. But instead of being quiet because I don’t know what needs to be said, I’m silent because I’m starting to understand that often nothing needs to be said.

It’s a work in progress. My rule of thumb these days is to look for discomfort and move towards it. If the quiet is making me uncomfortable, I stay silent. If I feel anxious at the idea of speaking up, then I know it’s probably time for me to say something.

Except with my nephew. Somehow around him, communication seems to happen just fine.