Practice, Part Two

Practice, Part Two

From a Zen point of view there is only practice. Everything is practice. Every breath, every taste, touch, sound, and thought is practice when properly understood.

What does "properly understood" mean? That's the great question, the question answered only in our practice itself. We sit down. We shut up. We listen with all of our senses. As we do so, its as if we are on an escalator. As we rise, we drop away parts of our mind and body, we drop away the escalator. We drop away up and down, right or left. "We" drop away.

What is left is the gate itself: proper understanding or what is sometimes referred to as "Right Understanding." The full integration of body, heart, mind, and environment. We might call this oneness itself.

In this place of proper understanding our eyes are open, as is our heart and mind. It becomes possible for the other elements of the Eightfold Path to manifest. Without proper understanding we are adrift in a boat without an oar or rudder. When we step outside of our practice we view the world in parts, there is you and me, inside and outside, up and down.

Yet, as a continuing result of our practice we begin to appreciate the world around us much more deeply and certainly more directly.

Practice, Part One

Part One

With palms together,

Good Evening Everyone,

Tonight I sip a glass of wine, cheap red wine, and consider my life. I believe it is a function of being an elder, to sit idly by witnessing the stars, the sun and moon, the clouds and the breeze, and (for me) most of all, the night. My pet words are "morning light." I have used them to inspire not a few poems, an unfinished novel, and the hope that arrises with the dawn.

The practice of Zen is the practice of life itself. To sit still, if only for a few moments in the middle of a breath, and any chaos, thoughts or feelings that swirl around you and you respond like a duck floating on water, that is Zen. We too often think Zen is other worldly. It is not. It is as down home as Mom's Apple Pie or Judge Judy setting the entitled straight.

I have practiced most of my entire life. Sitting formally, chanting, lighting incense, bowing, shaving my head, (all well and good) but not so much Zen. Yet, at the same time, it is exactly Zen.

And the teachers of Zen? Most of the senior teachers I know are, indeed, senior. They either write or don't write, converse or don't converse. They are neither themselves nor their teacher. As a result, they are truly nobody. Perhaps a footnote to some, an angel to others and possibly an antagonist to most. It is one of our roles, after-all, to bring discomfort to the complacent; to jar our minds to the point where we lose our minds, all the while, bring us to life free once again in an all too structured and sleepy village.

End Part One