writing - Edward Espe Brown

Labor Day, September 6, 2021

Dear Dharma Companions,

How are you doing? In this blur of a lifetime? Where has it gone?

More than fifty years ago in the Buddha Hall of the San Francisco Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi told an eager, but exhausted and struggling group of young Zen students on the morning of the third day of a seven day sesshin: “The problems you are now experiencing will continue…for the rest of your life.” Laughter filled the air.

We had thought that we could steer our way clear! That with some enlightenment, some savvy wisdom and starry compassion, we would not have to suffer like this in the future. Right?

Funny thing though, the first Noble Truth still applies: the “wave of the 10,000 things” cannot be controlled. We will not be attaining invulnerability anytime soon.

Instead, if we are lucky, we may come to practice making our home on the fundamental ground of our vulnerability—being open and responsive to connection with one thing after another, “studying carefully and seeing what we can find out.”

Or we may continue to aim for that elusive control, where we settle down in being right, being good, being holy or spiritual, staying out of sight. There are innumerable ways of establishing command, each with its own logic: If I do what’s right, I will stay out of trouble. If I’m good, I will not be punished for my mis-behavior. If I am holy and spiritual, surely the world will not hurt me, but will benefit me with more favors. If I stay out of sight, I will not be in the line-of-fire.

How well has it worked? Most often these efforts turn out to be Rumi’s: “You miss the garden because you want a stray fig from a random tree.”

You’re so busy behaving correctly you miss the possibilities inherent in the realm of vulnerability: connection, love, freedom, buoyancy—Rumi’s, “let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really want.”

Was that safety or boundless being?

Here’s another poem by Rumi:

A True Holy Day

An accident gradually gets accepted

as something that needed to happen.

Sickness melts into health.

There’s nothing worse than staying congealed.

Let your liver dissolve to blood.

Let your heart break into such tiny pieces

that it cannot be found.

The moon orb wanes, then for three days,

you could say that it cannot be found,

that the moon has grown so close to the sun,

that it is nowhere…

and everywhere!

A true Holy Day

for a man or for a woman

is the one where they bring

themselves as the sacrifice.

When Shams* shown his light

from nowhere

I felt a Holiday without limits begin

Where once was just a person.

*Shams was Rumi’s beloved spiritual companion. Coleman Barks, who has worked so hard to translate Rumi into English says, “They spent months together without any human needs, transported into a region of pure conversation.”

In other news at the invitation of the residents, Margot and I are primarily living at The Land in Philo, California.

I invite you to join me Sunday through Thursday mornings via Zoom for meditation (details on calendar page).

All are welcome. No charge!

Also on this coming Saturday, September 11, we will be having a half-day sitting from 7:00 am – 12:30 pm Pacific. Again, details available on calendar page, and all are welcome without charge.

In memory of 20^th anniversary of 9-11, we will offer prayers and blessings for the safety and well-being of All.

Blessings,

Edward

May 2021

Wishful Thinking Fails Again

**from The Complete Tassajara Cookbook (Shambhala, 2009)**

Once during a cooking class I found myself holding a pan of biscotti in one hand while I opened the door of the oven with the other. Since the top shelf of the oven was occupied by a pan of lasagna, I aimed the biscotti for the unoccupied bottom shelf. “Let’s get these cookies baking,” I thought. However, a second thought followed quickly after the first: “If you put them on the bottom shelf, they’re going to burn.”

What to do? There ensued a lively inner monologue enumerating the necessary steps: Close oven door, find somewhere to put biscotti down, open oven door, remove lasagna, find place to put lasagna, move top shelf up one notch, move bottom shelf up one notch, replace lasagna, close door, get biscotti, open door, place in oven, close door. What a nuisance. It hardly seemed worth it.

“Forget it,” I thought. “Let’s get on with it. They’ll be okay this time.” In they went.

These are a cook’s famous last words: “This time they’ll be okay.” Sure. This time the oven will understand how awkward and inconvenient it is for me to do all that switching, placing, lifting, reaching, and it will go out of its way to accommodate me. The oven will make a special effort not to burn the cookies to compensate for my not making a special effort to arrange things differently. This time, undoubtedly, the oven will be forgiving and make allowances for my laziness. Only this time, the cookies burned on the bottom.

Once I used some vanilla sugar at a friend’s house to make a birthday cake for my father. At least I thought it was vanilla sugar, since it was a white granular substance with a vanilla bean in it, and when I dipped my finger in it and licked, it tasted like sugar. Yet tasting the cake batter after creaming the sugar with the butter and adding the eggs, I found it extremely salty. And going back to the jar with the vanilla bean, it tasted like salt. Big surprise!

Not wanting to waste the butter and eggs, I decided to go ahead and finish making the cake, thinking rather wishfully that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad once all the flour and milk and seasoning was added. It was. It was really bad, not at all what a cake should be. That was a strange birthday celebration.

The ability to believe in wishful thinking right up until you smell the smoke or taste the cake is really a wonderful trait in many ways—naïve, trusting, childlike—but the food may be an uncustomary and undesirable shade of brown or black. The taste may bring tears to the eyes.

Although I still find it painfully annoying at times, the universe (including ovens and other cookware) does not arrange itself to pick up after me. Things are the way they are, regardless of how I would like them to be. If anything, it seems that the universe is conspiring to wise us up to our own wishful thinking. Would you wish it to be any other way?