“Food Is Very Important”

[Image: “Bark Studies #1,” by John E. Simpson. What is the single most significant feature of the tree depicted in this image? Of everything you see here, what — which crevice, which ridge, which color tone, white or black or gray or sepia tint, which individual pixel — what “counts” as the single most important? Now pretend that what you see here is not just this image, nor even the entire tree itself, but the whole world. Now ask yourself those same questions. Whatever your answer, does your answer hold a lesson within it? If so, is that lesson more important than any other… or than any single pixel in the image?]

Certainly as The Missus and I live out in the world at large, we come across one thing or another which we consider important: noteworthy, appalling, annoying, beautiful, and so on. And we know, at some level, that “importance” isn’t either-or or black-and-white — it’s not the flipside of, say, utter irrelevance. It’s just a point in a continuum, in a context: the context of the moment…

But anyhow, in thinking about that the other day, I came across the following Zen story:

It was the summer of 1971. I was living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center—the first Zen monastery in America. Its founder and resident teacher was Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who had come from Japan to America to teach meditation to Americans, mostly young. One of those young Americans was Robert, well known among us as a nonstop talker and a fervent proselytizer of brown rice as the perfect spiritual food.

One afternoon I came across Suzuki Roshi and Robert in the courtyard, and Robert was, as usual, talking animatedly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Suzuki Roshi, that brown rice is the perfect Zen food? Isn’t it the perfect balance between yin and yang?” The brown rice diet was trendy in those heady counterculture days, and we served it every day in Tassajara’s meditation hall. Suzuki Roshi was unusually accepting of our counterculture ideas, and rarely criticized us. In those days, brown rice was rarely eaten in Japan. White rice was the norm. For all I knew, Suzuki Roshi was eating brown rice for the first time at Tassajara.

“Don’t you think brown rice helps us attain enlightenment?” Robert was saying.

Suzuki Roshi listened to Robert talk on for some time without saying anything. Finally, when Robert paused for breath, Suzuki Roshi said quietly, “Food is very important.”

(Lewis Richmond [source])

I laughed to myself. And then I flipped over to a section in whiskey river’s commonplace book, where the anonymous blogger records some of their favorite (and no, not necessarily the “most important”) quotations and clips among the ones they’ve posted. Like this one:

The process of practice is to see through, not to eliminate, anything to which we are attached. We could have great financial wealth and be unattached to it, or we might have nothing and be very attached to having nothing. Usually, if we have seen through the nature of attachment, we will tend to have fewer possessions, but not necessarily. Most practice gets caught in this area of fiddling with our environment or our minds. “My mind should be quiet.” Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is nonattachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us (that is, if we are attached to them) – then they create disharmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient zazen we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments: they rule our lives.

But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smooths out and finally—where is it? What was it?

(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])

“Huh,” I thought. Maybe the whole concept of interestingness masked an unhealthy attachment — a “this, not that” attachment not unlike Robert the monk’s fixation on one type of rice vs. another. And then I kept reading:

First Step

Beginnings
are sometimes foggy.
The path is not always clear.
The end of one begets another.

To begin, put one foot
in front of the other.
Your foot knows where to land,
the one that moves forward first.
Forget about the best foot.

Just put it out there.
Stop traffic if you have to.
Go home if that is where it leads you.
Go back to work
if that is where your foot falls.

You don’t have to
go anywhere
Just rest.
After you step,
take another.
Forget about the weather.
Step
Step again.

(Robin Heerens Lysne [source])

The first step: important, yes. Yet no more important than the step after, which in turn is neither more nor less important than the one preceding or the one following, and ultimately, no step more important than any other…

Our 2021 odyssey, such as it is, will include (I think) another five stops after we fly back to our car at the end of our current two-week break here in Florida. This will put us in Las Vegas in mid-December, as we’ve been hoping… None of those intervening stops were on our bucket list of “must-see” places — they’re just on a more or less straight line west from our car’s current location to Vegas. We expect each stop will, yes, differ from the others. But I’m going to resist assigning them relative importance (ha).