Dear Sangha,
In this time of great suffering around the world, what can we do to alleviate it? Some of us protest, some of us donate, some of us comfort, some of us write and compose and paint and dance, some of us pray and chant, some of us (all of us?) are at a loss for what to do. Our practice offers us one important key: I am here, right now. Just this.
The “peaceful dwelling” of Ango is a reminder of this, that dwelling in “just this,” just this anger, just this sadness, just this helplessness, just this joy, just this boredom, just this exhaustion, just this contentment, just this anxiety, just this… and letting each come and go of its own accord is peace.
Twenty-five years ago, a searching, despairing, at-the-end-his-existential-rope twenty-three year-old finally pressed the buzzer of an apartment building on Washington Place after having walked by several times over the past few weeks and chickening out. Being buzzed in, the skinny, dreadlocked (hard to imagine now! Lol) young man entered, walked up the stairs to the second floor, and entering an apartment at the end of the hall found a smiling bald woman in flowing black robes sitting on a stack of zabutons who offered him a cup of bancha tea. He showed up convinced he was sick and Zen would make him better: a better person, a better son, a better partner, a better worker, a better student. Just as the Village Zendo moved from one place to another to another to another to another, that twenty-three- year- old moved too from being a bookseller to a horticulturist to a farmer to a teacher to a writer to a professor, from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley to the Bronx to Ohio to California, often consoling himself that he was getting “better” or devastated that he was getting “worse.” For years I stepped away from practice with the Village Zendo precisely because I thought I was “worse” and not worthy or “better” and not seen. What sickness!
When Enkyo Roshi asked me to be Shuso, it had been years since I had given up on my secretly harbored hope of the recognition. And that’s probably why it came when it did. My practice in recent years has shifted from “better” and “worse” to just enjoying what’s here, and somehow that has made all the difference. I still don’t feel ready, instead feeling as if I am just on the first step of a journey, even twenty-five years after setting foot on the path. I may not be ready, but I no longer feel like I need to be “better.”
I hope you’ll join me during this Ango in walking together, encountering all of ourselves and the world, all our shared and individual joys, anguish, desires, fears, clarities, and confusions. Perhaps you, like me, feel the world’s sickness – war, inequality, climate chaos. Let’s construct a Peaceful Dwelling out of our lives this summer with just what is and see if there isn’t medicine in just that.
Sincerely,
in gassho,
Seiryū