This is Getting Old (23 page)

In his poetic essay “The Genjokoan,” Master Dogen wrote, “A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims, there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air.”

When I get unhappy about something in my life, I think: “Wait, no, this isn't the right life, it isn't what I want, I need to find the edge of this life and leap over the fence into a different life.” But that's not how it works. My life is vast. I can't find the edge of it, just like a fish in the ocean or a bird in the sky. There's no getting out of this life, this ocean, this sky, except by dying. If I try to change oceans, I'll never find my way or my place—there's no place else to be but here, in the big mystery of it.

It happened that only a few days after visiting my granddaughter I visited an old friend in his eighties who lives in an assisted living facility. He's a Catholic priest and monk who has dedicated his life to solitude and spiritual study. He's well read in multiple spiritual traditions, including Zen, and he is an important mentor to me. For many years he has been leading me in an ongoing conversation about prayer, mysticism, and spiritual inquiry, through correspondence as well as face-to-face visits.

He's not well physically, he's weak, on oxygen, and confined to a wheelchair, but his mind is fine.

He told me, “If I've died before, I don't remember it, but I recognize what's happening—that's where I'm going.” Years ago he had a coffin built for himself by a carpenter he knows. It stands upright in his little apartment like a roommate, a reminder, keeping him company. He sits at his table and looks
out the window at a pear tree, and watches its leaves turn, and fall, and bud again. He watches the seasons, the whole universe, in that pear tree. He reads, he prays, he receives an occasional visitor. Like my granddaughter, he is completely present in his life. Like Dogen's fish, he is swimming around in his ocean, and there is no end to the water, even in this tiny apartment.

Moments after I entered his room he was talking to me about Isaac of Ninevah, the eighth-century Syrian hermit, whose writings he had been reading when I came in.

Like my granddaughter, he, too, is singing his version of ring around the rosies, dancing until he falls down and turns to ashes.

In between that toddler and that old man is a span of over eighty years—and most of us, in those intervening decades, tangle ourselves up in knots over the things we don't have that we want, and the things we have that we don't want. We run around trying to fix things, in our personal lives and in the life of the planet. It's a good thing we do, because it's actually our responsibility to fix things; we need to fix the plumbing, for example. The toddler and the old monk aren't fixing the plumbing. They need us to take care of them, but we need them, too, to remind us that everything is already taken care of.

I like to think about how we are completely held by the atmosphere in a literal way. The air that surrounds each of our bodies, that flows in and out of our lungs, is not nothing. It's thick with molecules, and it fills up all the gaps and cracks between us and the other bodies and objects around us: the furniture, the walls of the room, the trees outside, the buildings. There's no empty space. The air is fluid, making room for us, so that each of us inhabits a nook that is exactly our size and shape. The air kindly moves with us when we move. It's like those soft rocks you can find on the beaches of northern California that have tiny mollusks living inside them in the holes they made for themselves. We're all connected, molecule to molecule. I'm held by everything that's not me.

The last meditation retreat I attended was beside the ocean, and while I was sitting I listened to the surf. The surf is the sound of the ocean breathing. It's never still. Sometimes the sea is so loud and crashing that I crave a little silence, and so I listen for the silence between the waves, but just as one wave recedes from the shore, flowing back down the sand into the ocean, getting quieter and quieter, just before it gets silent, the next wave always breaks. The ocean never stops breathing because it's alive. As I sit on my seat in the zendo, following my breathing, I follow the breathing of the ocean, too, and I begin to breathe in rhythm with the ocean.

The sound of the ocean is the sound of time passing, the sound of one moment giving way to the next. Each wave, each moment, is a gate that I pass through into the next moment.

And even if I'm not sitting by the ocean, one wave of my life is still followed immediately by the next, with no completely quiet place in between.

I love the vow: “Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.” I keep giving myself away to the next moment, and the next moment receives me. I just have to step through.

Acknowledgments

I
AM GRATEFUL
to my editors at Shambhala Publications: to Dave O'Neal, who encouraged me to write the book in the first place, and to Emily Bower, whose skillful and supportive responses have helped me give it shape.

Many thanks to Ellery Akers, Sarah Balcomb, Mary Barrett, Andrew Boyd, Susan Butler, Louise Dunlap, Barbara Gates, Fanny Howe, Bonnie O'Brien Jonsson, Linda Norton, Susan Orr, Bob Perelman, Nora Ryerson, Prue See, Barbara Selfridge, Gail Seneca, Francie Shaw, and Jeff Sharlet for their editorial suggestions. Thanks to the members of my Crones Group, Melody Ermachild Chavis, Annette Herskovits, Cheeta Llanes, and Judith Tannenbaum, for thinking and talking with me in a focused way about getting old, and to all my other friends and relatives who have been part of that ongoing conversation. Thanks to Blue Mountain Center, Glenstal Abbey, and the Berkeley Public Library for giving me beautiful places to work.

Credits and Permissions

The poem by Izumi Shikibu in the chapter “In the Shade of My Own Tree,” translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, is from
Women in Praise of the Sacred
(p. 59), edited by Jane Hirshfield, copyright ©1994 by Jane Hirshfield, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The poem by Sumangalamata in the chapter “In the Shade of My Own Tree” is reprinted from
The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha
, p. 59, (1991) by Susan Murcott, with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California.
www.parallax.org

The haiku in the chapter “You Can't Take It with You” is from
One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ry
ō
kan
, translated and introduced by John Stevens, First edition, 1977. Protected by copyright under the terms of the International Copyright Union. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA.
www.shambhala.com
.

The quotations from Dogen in the Introduction, “Where Did I Put My Begging Bowl?,” “For the Time Being,” and “This Past Life” are from
Moon in a Dewdrop
, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (San Francisco: Northpoint Press, 1985).

The quotations from Robert Aitken and Alice Hayes in the Introduction are both from the Winter 2001 issue of
Turning Wheel
(p. 21).

The Dogen quotations in “Leaving the Lotus Position” and “In the Shade of My Own Tree” are both from Dogen's “Fukanzazengi” in
The Heart of Dogen's Shobogenzo
, trans. Masao Abe and Norman Waddell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

The quotation from May Sarton in “In the Shade of My Own Tree” is from “Rewards of a Solitary Life,”
New York Times
, 1990.

Verse at the beginning of “Exchanging Self and Other” is from Shantideva,
The Way of the Bodhisattva
, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Shambhala Publications, 2006), verse 120, p. 126.

The story in “Grandmother Mind” about Dogen's student is told by Taisen Deshimaru in “With Grandmother's Mind,” published on the website of the New Orleans Zen Temple,
www.nozt.org
, and originally published in Deshimaru's book,
Le Bol et le Baton
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).

The quotation from the Prajna Paramita Sutra in the chapter “I Wasn't My Self” is from
The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines
, translated by Edward Conze (Portland, Maine: Four Seasons, 1973), p. 135.

Excerpt from
Taking the Leap
by Pema Chödrön

eISBN  978-0-8348-2101-9

 

1

F
EEDING THE
R
IGHT
W
OLF

A
s human beings we have the potential to disentangle ourselves from old habits, and the potential to love and care about each other. We have the capacity to wake up and live consciously, but, you may have noticed, we also have a strong inclination to stay asleep. It's as if we are always at a crossroad, continuously choosing which way to go. Moment by moment we can choose to go toward further clarity and happiness or toward confusion and pain.

In order to make this choice skillfully, many of us turn to spiritual practices of various kinds with the wish that our lives will lighten up and that we'll find the strength to cope with our difficulties. Yet in these times it seems crucial that we also keep in mind the wider context in which we make choices about how to live: this is the context of our beloved earth and the rather rocky condition it's in.

For many, spiritual practice represents a way to relax and a way to access peace of mind. We want to feel more calm, more focused; and with our frantic and stressful lives, who can blame us? Nevertheless, we have a responsibility to think bigger than that these days. If spiritual practice is relaxing, if it gives us some peace of mind, that's great—but is this personal satisfaction helping us to address what's happening in the world? The main question is, are we living in a way that adds further aggression and self-centeredness to the mix, or are we adding some much-needed sanity?

Many of us feel deeply concerned about the state of the world. I know how sincerely people wish for things to change and for beings everywhere to be free of suffering. But if we're honest with ourselves, do we have any idea how to put this aspiration into practice when it comes to our own lives? Do we have any clarity about how our own words and actions may be causing suffering? And even if we do recognize that we're making a mess of things, do we have a clue about how to stop? These have always been important questions, but they are especially so today. This is a time when disentangling ourselves is about more than our personal happiness. Working on ourselves and becoming more conscious about our own minds and emotions may be the only way for us to find solutions that address the welfare of all beings and the survival of the earth itself.

There was a story that was widely circulated a few
days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that illustrates our dilemma. A Native American grandfather was speaking to his grandson about violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart. One wolf was vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, “The one that wins will be the one I choose to feed.”

So this is our challenge, the challenge for our spiritual practice and the challenge for the world—how can we train right now, not later, in feeding the right wolf? How can we call on our innate intelligence to see what helps and what hurts, what escalates aggression and what uncovers our good-heartedness? With the global economy in chaos and the environment of the planet at risk, with war raging and suffering escalating, it is time for each of us in our own lives to take the leap and do whatever we can to help turn things around. Even the slightest gesture toward feeding the right wolf will help. Now more than ever, we are all in this together.

Taking the leap involves making a commitment to ourselves and to the earth itself—making a commitment to let go of old grudges, to not avoid people and situations and emotions that make us feel uneasy, to not cling to our fears, our closed-mindedness, our hard-heartedness, our hesitation. Now is the time to develop trust in our basic goodness and the basic goodness of our sisters and brothers on this earth; a time to develop
confidence in our ability to drop our old ways of staying stuck and to choose wisely. We could do that right here and right now.