[Image: “Riverside Detritus,” by on Willrad Von Doomenstein (a pseudonym???). Photo found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!]
Over the past few days, whiskey river shared a portion of a talk (italicized portion) by a Zen Buddhist teacher. In this apparently verbatim transcription of the talk, the teacher is speaking of the human mind’s awkward and ultimately self-defeating tendency to cling to — and to be clung to in return — by any problem it encounters. He recites a Buddhist koan offered by another, more ancient teacher, named Chao-chou:
As you’re sitting on your cushion [during meditation], if you grab onto anything, if you push anything away, suddenly everything you touch sticks to you. It’s like Br’er Rabbit and the the tar-baby. If you start hanging onto your thoughts, you can’t let go of them. If you try to push them away, you can’t let go of them. So there you are stuck holding onto the tar-baby. We see, too, the emptiness of the things that we’re attached to. How a thousand things fill the mind, but none of them is substantial or real. A thousand passions arise, but if we don’t act on them, they fall away, too. Amazing that something that seemed so important suddenly is not so important. Our weariness that seems as if it will overwhelm us suddenly is gone and we are full of energy.
“The Great way is not difficult. It just avoids picking and choosing.” There is a Taoist flavor to this saying. The sense of following the water path through life: the water if it runs into a stone, it just makes its way around. The water is clear and has no attachments which is why we have a little bowl of water on the altar.
Chao-chou has brought up this saying which he was very fond of and he often liked to bring it up. And then he said that as soon as we speak, that is picking and choosing. If we are clear, we hang onto the clarity. This old student doesn’t even hang onto that. Do you still hang onto anything, or not? So we could say that the greatest method of meditation is that whatever comes up, just don’t cling to it. Whatever comes up, let it go. If you can do this, you’ll find the way home very quickly. But it’s hard. Things stick to you.
(John Tarrant [source])
As you probably know if you’ve hung around here at RAMH for the last few months, The Missus and I have been on a road trip. The travels — so far — have taken us up the eastern coast of the United States: from Florida, through Georgia and South Carolina, and then on up to destinations in North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut. By definition, these days anyhow, a “road trip” necessarily involves a car. But the car, like the travelers, is subject to the forces of chaos. And so it was, in early August, that we found ourselves suddenly and unpleasantly, well, carless.
Without getting into the details, of which there are many, imagine the complications:
- a driver, licensed by the state where the driver lives;
- a car which is “owned” by that driver…
- …even though the record of ownership — the title — is held by a bank which loaned the “owner” the money to purchase the car…
- …and even though the car is insured by yet another company in the case of an accident…
- …and even though the driver’s state of residence still connects the vehicle, uniquely identified, to the driver, by way of yet another document: the registration
To be sure, none of these by itself is necessarily a complication… unless the car and driver are involved in a wreck which crosses state lines. Like, say, in our case: our insurance company totaled the car in North Carolina; we purchased a replacement car in North Carolina; and we financed the new car’s purchase through a different bank than the one which had financed the wrecked car. And all of the required paperwork was nailed down by the dealership — in North Carolina — who sold us the replacement.
…until the day, this week, when we found out that no, there had been no nailing-down. Somehow, although we were already making payments to the bank and the insurance company, we had no legal claim to the vehicle in which we were traveling around.
The nailing-down has begun. In the meantime, we’re still in motion, just praying (to the extent we ever do) that every other driver on the road then will be even more cautious than we are. And in the same meantime, I’m waking up almost every night, with little tar-baby scraps and smudges clinging to my mind through all the sleep cycles, imagining dreadful scenarios — scenarios in which the tenuous paper trail we’re building (across hundreds of miles, among a half-dozen institutional landmines), suddenly collapses and renders us not only homeless, but without transportation… in our seventies, with nothing like a social or family net to catch us.
No, it’s not helpful to be so bedeviled. It’s probably not healthy, losing so much sleep. But I am not like water (yet?) about such stuff. I bump into an obstacle and I come to a standstill; I circle it, examining all its jagged edges, feeling my way around the crevices and hollows of its shape, trying to imagine how each possible thread of reedy disaster can be skirted or even woven into gold.
It occurred to me this morning, in fact, that the metaphor I’m seeking is not a solid object like rock or a tar-baby. Even if I have (as I have not) “mastered” myself to be like the water, there’s still the detritus problem: even, say, just a cup of flowing water carries along in its course countless bits of trash. Each little broken twig, each seed and leaf, every drinking straw and scrap of torn candy wrapper, they’re all just flowing around the damned rock with me. How do I shake my hyper-awareness of this?
Sigh. Like the Magic 8-Ball says: Answer hazy. Try again later.
Marta says
I knew some of this but not all of it. Hope things have smoothed out more than a bit.