Anker's Away

All Sorts of Crap

Last Sunday we had another gathering. Before the gathering I spent alot of time thinking about what I'd talk about. A carryover from 20 odd years of being "the central figure". I hadn't felt that sense of obligation before a meeting in a long time. Sometimes I'd have stuff I wanted to talk about and sometimes I wouldn't. And that was fine because I had confidence that someone would have something to talk about, something they'd been thinking about, was curious about. And we'd be off and running. This time though I was worried that there'd be nothing, and I felt obligated to fill the emptiness.

I was worried that nobody would come, that nobody would have anything to say, that nothing would happen.

Jean decided to change time we have our gatherings. She changed it from Sunday morning at 10:00 AM to Sunday afternoon at 4:00 PM. She said more people could make it at that time. We'd been having our meetings at 10:00 AM Sunday for, like, ever. I didn't like the change and complained about it. My reason was that people expected our meetings to be at 10:00 AM and I was worried that they'd forget or just decide to do something else if we changed it to the afternoon. But the real reason was just that it messed with my routine.

I like practicing in the morning. As a YMD in NSA I remember Mr. Williams telling us to "win in the morning". At the time I hardly knew what mornings were and lost several jobs because of that. I changed my morning karma by going on a "win in the morning" campaign. While I continued to have difficulties finding mornings during the week when I really needed to, I went to early morning tosos on saturdays and sundays when I didn't have to. I eventually actually became a morning person.

Over the years I've become a "win in the morning, veg out at night" kind of person. My worry that a 4:00 PM meeting would not work was really just resistance to messing with the veg out part of my practice. I didn't want people hanging out after the meeting when I needed to do important things to prepare for work the next day. Things like watching the Simpsons, getting Sam to take out the trash, and watching Madmen.

Jean said that people were less likely to hang out on a Sunday night than they would be in the morning but I wasn't buying it. Externally I went along and we adjusted our weekend accordingly. Internally though I had this constant sense of dis-ease, impending doom, looming failure, things about to come apart.

Sounds pretty bad, huh? Funny though, I was ok with those feelings. There was a part of me which was obsessing about it but I was able to recognize it as a part. Resistance, tension, fear, pressure would arise within. Thoughts, reasons, narratives would be attached to them. Or thoughts, reasons, narratives would spin into my brain and resistance, tension, fear and pressure would arise in my body to go with them. I could see it all. I guess it was easy in this situation because I knew that the source of all that spinning was so trivial. But how many times have those obsessions arisen over trivial causes, built on themselves and become fullscale generalized depression or hardened anger spilling into every aspect of my life?

I don't know, but I know that it could have happened last weekend had I not been observing and defusing as it happened. The only time that it really became unconscious and spilled over to my behaviour was when Jean and I were playing pool on Saturday night. She beat me and I was just so angry so frustrated that I acted like a jerk. She went to bed without me. I stayed up and watched the beginning of Saturday Night Live. I saw Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and cracked up over the spoof interview. (Little did I know it was word for word what Palin had actually said, but I'm not going there, my blog is not political). Anyway, I went to bed determined not to be such a jerk, not to take myself so seriously.

The next morning we walked to the beach, did gongyo to the ocean. It was beautiful. Gray, misty, lonely and warm. I felt a deep sense of appreciation to be there with the flocks of birds and the humans scattered about. Then the crap started to arise, spinning into my brain arising within my body. Looking at the ocean, the waves rising and falling, the water disappering into the horizonless mist of the sky, a different thought arose. I thought of the gosho which says that the Mystic Law is like the ocean, able absorb all streams without increasing, able to absorb all poisons without being poisoned. I opened my mind to the sky and my body to the ocean. I let the warm gray mist flow into my brain and let the thoughts and feeling arise and fall back into the ocean. I felt like a channel, like the drainage which was flowing through a water treatment plant directly behind us, emptying far out into the ocean. I didn't know whether the thoughts and feeling were arising within me or flowing into me. And it didn't matter. All that mattered was that I was a stream flowing into the ocean and that so long as I let the water of the mystic law flow into me and flow out all sorts of crap would be carried with it.

And strangely, that channel carrying the waste water from Oxnard, through the processing plant and into the ocean, supports a beautiful wetland bird paradise as it flow into the ocean, and doesn't affect the water quality of our beach at all. Sometimes the wind carries a sulphuric smell from the processing plant, and it'd be easy to just sit around obsessing about when that smell will return, but the reality is that the wind carries the smell away as quickly as it arisies and what is left is the smell of the ocean and clean water flowing through the land supporting one of the largest and most vibrant wetlands left in Southern California.

I used that image all day as the time of the gathering approached and my obssessive thoughts and feeling spun and foamed like waves or whirlpools within me. I just kept reminding myself that I am not the foam, I am not the wave and I am not whirlpool. I observed and processed. I wondered if I'm the water flowing through the channel or the channel through which the water flows. Am I the ocean into which the channel empties, Am I the channel through which the water flows, or am I the emptiness without which flow could not exist?

That thought arose, I became attached to it and confused. So I opened my mind to the sky my body to the ocean and let that mystical crap which arose from that momentary sense of oneness and ease, to arise, crash, spin, foam and flow into the the boundless ocean of the mystic law just like the crap that arose from my petty, trivial resistance to a minor shift in my routine.

Posted by bill at October 6, 2008 02:07 AM