Why I Won't Be Celebrating Thanksgiving This Year

I feel like a a wet blanket (or maybe, given the weather here, like a wet Northwest winter day) saying what I'm about to say, as all over America people brine their turkeys, greet their out-of-town guests, stock up on beverages and prepare for the great American celebration of food, family, friends, and abundance. 

I can't do it this year. I just can't. 

Instead I will spend this Thanksgiving fasting from sunup to sundown. I will spend the day in prayer, remorse, and grief for the 500-year ongoing genocide on this continent, most vividly represented by what is happening just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation as I write this. 

I will also spend the day in gratitude for the immense courage and resilience of the original peoples of this land, some of them camped out right now in the North Dakota winter, protecting the earth for all of us, surrounded by the full paramilitary might of the police. I will be praying for their safety and their victory, this unprecedented gathering on the plains of North Dakota of over 300 tribal nations.

This week the Morton County police, in their ever-escalating violence against unarmed native people in prayer, turned water cannons in below-freezing weather on hundreds of people, soaking their clothes until hypothermia set in, firing rubber bullets at heads and limbs. Nearly 200 people were injured in one night. 

December 29th will mark the 126th anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where US soldiers killed close to 300 Sioux men, women, and children under their control, leaving many to die in the snow (and 20 soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor for their part). Some of those who died were Hunkpapa Lakota from the Standing Rock area. 

These are the words of the famous Lakota holy man Black Elk, who witnessed the massacre: "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation's hoop is broken and scattered."

The great Standing Rock leader and holy man Sitting Bull had been murdered by native police at Fort Yates on the Standing Rock reservation two weeks before the massacre, on December 14th, 1890, only 25 miles from where people are gathered on a bitterly cold night right now.

Can we honestly believe that there these events are not connected, are not speaking to one another? The events of seven generations ago, police killing one of the greatest Indian leaders in North America, soldiers surrounding people who were actually complying with their orders and killing them in cold blood? And now descendants of Sitting Bull standing unarmed and nonviolent in front of North Dakota police officers in full riot gear, guns pointed at holy men once again? Traditional women on their knees praying while being tear gassed and shot?

This must stop. We must find a different way forward, one that does not end with original peoples dying in the snow, does not end with another victory for American "progress" and the hoop of Indian nations broken again. One that does not end with death and more loss, for all of us. If Standing Rock is lost, something in us as a nation dies, the moral heart of our nation. So my fasting is for our nation as well.

When I went to Standing Rock earlier this fall, I went partly because I sensed that something important was happening there, a new way of being, the rising up of native peoples out of the ashes of nearly successful genocide, joined by thousands from around the world in a new wave of solidarity and hope. And that's the way it felt there, the most life affirming, spiritual, powerful event perhaps of my lifetime. But we are doing it again. It looks like we are playing out the old story again, of cowboys and Indians, of the soldiers with their guns and the people of the land in the snow. The story that played out in thousands of ways all across this place we now call home, that we celebrate each Thanksgiving.

If I'm wrong, and history changes its tune, I will be happy to join the festivities next year, the tables groaning with goodness. 

Until then, I take heart and inspiration from this video by a young woman of Diné (Navajo) and Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) lineages, Lyla June, who reminds us, "We are fighting to replace our fear with love....The only weapons that are useful in this battle are the weapons of truth, faith, and compassion."

I want to close with my prayer. 

We call out to the four directions

and to the power of life that flows through all things

to protect the lives of those at Standing Rock

to soften the hearts of the police so that violence is renounced

to awaken in our government officials the force of conscience

and to answer the prayers of people everywhere

and particularly the prayers of the traditional protectors of the Missouri River,

the Hunkpapa Lakota of Standing Rock,

that the black snake pipeline dies forever

on the plains of North Dakota

never to be revived.

Of Trees and Sweeping

Day 5 at Tsubaki Grand Shrine (to read about why I'm here, read Entering Another World, my last post). Over the last few days I have been gradually transformed from my usual black-clothed Western self into "staff" at Tsubaki - first a white cotton jacket with the kanji (Chinese characters) for Tsubaki Grand Shrine over my Western clothes, then, yesterday, multi-layered full Shinto robes, all in white, that took a sweet young woman priest, Sakaka-san, about twenty minutes to put on me (today I was on my own, and no one has laughed, so I must have been successful).

The triumphant moment after getting me dressed, Sakaka-san in blue

I have never in my life worn all white, even at my own wedding, so it's an interesting transformation and experience. It helps that I've worn Zen robes for years (all black, of course). The only really horrible part of the costume were the zori - the traditional Japanese sandals with a thong between the toes - for whatever reason, they are instruments of torture for me. I tried walking around in them yesterday, trying not to grimace in pain with each step, and today I just wore my own shoes - black, of course - over the tabi socks and tabi sock protectors! Gaijin (foreigner) prerogative. I win points for knowing how to use chopsticks and how to sit in seiza (kneeling on one's feet and legs) and actually get up after service rather than falling down because my feet are asleep, so I figure not wearing zori is just fine.

I also have white gloves for cleaning. As a Zen student, I am familiar with the importance of cleaning as a spiritual practice, and my theory, after five days here, is that the Zen obsession with cleaning was something that came from Shinto, an example of religious syncretism.

Ochiai-san told me, the first day, that cleaning is integral to Shinto. Every morning we clean, before the morning service. As a sort of honorary junior priest, I join the priests in sweeping outside. Imagine several acres of shrines and gardens, linked by gravel paths and stone steps, set inside an old growth forest of ancient cedar and cypress, with a multi-layered canopy, and imagine how much falls to the ground overnight - branches, leaves, pieces of bark. By the time the first visitors arrive, nearly every square inch of gravel and stone has been swept clean. I will never walk around a temple or shrine again, blithely strolling on perfectly raked gravel, without considering that someone swept that gravel, that morning.

But I love sweeping. If they let me, I think I'd do it all day. Last night was very windy, and so there was extra detritus everywhere. I was delighted, because I knew it couldn't all be swept up before service, and I begged to go back out and sweep more. There is a great simplicity and satisfaction in sweeping, after all the complexity of my usual life. The brooms are twig brooms that effortlessly remove the light leaves, leaving the tiny pea-gravel gravel behind. I think of all the people who will visit today, and who will walk up the swept stone steps to bow at the shrines, or the subtle happiness they might feel in being in a place that feels so taken-care-of.

Walkway leading to the shrine for Ame no Uzume no mikoto, where many weddings take place

The high point of my sweeping this morning was beneath a camellia tree that overhung a small outdoor shrine. The camellias are still in bloom, and they are truly trees here - twenty, thirty feet high, or higher, forming a secondary canopy beneath the taller trees. The red flowers littered the ground, and I swept them up into a great beautiful flowery mound. Tsubaki means "camellia" - well named!

I've been doing a lot of reading about Shinto, and an important concept is purification - bringing back to harmony what has gotten dis-harmonious. Cleaning is a form of purification of the environment, bringing harmony and beauty to what is around us, just as I felt that my sweeping was a gift to everyone who will walk the paths of Tsubaki today. Anyone who has tried the "tidying" in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo has probably felt this, at least for the moment that your closet was organized before entropy took over again!

I have been really struck by the way both Tsubaki and Ise (and the great Inari Shrine I visited in Kyoto on my last visit) are inside forests of ancient trees. Ochiai-san told me that the original shrines were not inside buildings at all: they were groves or stones or mountains.

The holiest place here is a patch of ground beneath the trees with three small stones, a place you could easily walk by as a tourist and think nothing of. This is the place where the grandson of Amaterasu, the "goddess" of the sun, came to earth, met by Sarutahiko-no-okami, the guardian kami who is enshrined here. In fact, behind that little patch of earth is a huge mound, in an otherwise flat area, and even though Shinto shrines generally don't have graves, this is the grave of Sarutahiko-no-okami.

Approaching the entrance to Tsubaki Grand Shrine, it is easy to be distracted by the shrine building where the "car blessings" take place. Only in the last day did I notice that there is an enormous tree in front of the building, with a shimenawa (braided rope) around it that signifies the presence of kami, and a tiny shrine at its base, and then I read that the tree is highly significant for Tsubaki. When I looked closely at it, I realized it is a huge old fir, perhaps Abies firma (momi fir), a kind of tree I haven't seen elsewhere here, where there is mostly Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) and cypress (Chamaecyparis).

The shinbuku tree at the entrance to Tsubaki

This tree is a shinboku, a sacred tree invested with kami. The little shrine at its base is there to honor the kami of the tree. And I had walked by it for four days! We are so trained to think that the sacred is inside a sacred building, not in a tree, no matter how massive. But when I really looked at the tree, awe is the word for what I felt, the definition of kami - "what evokes awe."

When I was in Japan before, we visited a small village with two of these shinboku trees- two Japanese cedar trees that were nearly 2,000 years old, each with their heavy shimenawa. flanking the path to a shrine building. If I could guess, I would guess now that what came first were the sacred trees, and only later a shrine was built that honored the kami of those trees.

Of course, almost all the trees I have mentioned are on the IUCN Red List, because Japan is a small country, and there are not many great forests left. In fact, the rebuilding of Ise and other ways that traditional culture uses the traditional woods of Japan, are an issue for the survival of the native trees. As I read in this Japan Times article about the preservation of hinoki cypress forests, the wood used at Ise: "We have to balance the protection of our environmental heritage with the protection of our cultural heritage."

Where is that balance? Perhaps one day there will be shimenawa around entire forests, protecting them from our human appetites.And yet, yesterday I sat drinking green tea in the beautiful traditional tea-house on the grounds of Tsubaki, built of all traditional materials, gazing at the tokonoma, the alcove with a seasonal scroll and flower arrangement, my spirit felt held within the simple materials of the house -- wood and clay and paper. Later I watched the white-clad artisans who are renovating a part of the tea-house, keeping alive the endangered art form of Japanese carpentry. There is something sacred in this too, and careful. I can't pit tradition against the environment - I want tea-houses to continue, and the knowledge of how to build them. I want the 2,000 year history of Ise Shrine to continue, with all it sustains.

Perhaps if we treated trees and wood with the same care that the priests sweep the gravel paths of Tsubaki each morning - well, we would live in a very different world.

Tokonoma at the Tsubaki tea house

Entering Another World

Japan! Three days ago I crossed the international dateline for the third time in my life, flying back to Japan three years after my first trip here. Last time I was part of a group of Canadian Zen students, the token American; this time I am traveling alone as this year's recipient of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine Scholarship, an award from the Unitarian Universalist Association and Tsubaki Grand Shrine, given to one UU seminarian each year: a chance to be a guest of one of the oldest and most important Shinto shrines in Japan. Shinto is the indigenous religion and way of life of Japan, predating Buddhism in Japan by many centuries.

early morning at Tsubaki

Two days ago I was met at the airport by Ochiai-san, an English-speaking Shinto priest at Tsubaki (which means "camellia" - and a few of the camellias are still blooming here) Grand Shrine (or jinja in Japanese). I will be here at Tsubaki, staying at the guesthouse of the shrine, until the 23rd of March. From the 23rd to the 30th I will be visiting Kyoto and Kamakura, also on my own. 

Tsubaki Grand Shrine is an extraordinary place, and their generosity to me is also extraordinary, truly welcoming me into all aspects of life inside the shrine. I am aware that very few people, Japanese or foreign, have such an opportunity, and I will try to share it with you, as best I can, as I write here over the next two weeks.

Stone lantern and ancient tree, Tsubaki 

Tsubaki celebrated its 2,000th anniversary a few years ago - yes, that is the correct number of zeroes! - and more than a million people visit this shrine, nestled at the foot of steep, forested mountains, each year. They come to honor the kami, to pray, to ask for blessings, to get married. Four couples were married just today, a sort of river of bridal parties, gorgeous kimonos and western suits intermingled. A small army of shrine employees take care of everyone: nearly thirty priests and miko (shrine maidens), and cooks and guesthouse workers, presided over by Guji-san, the 97th chief priest of the shrine, and his wife, also a priest and the daughter of the 96th chief priest. 

A wedding party, led by a miko, walking to the shrine from the guest house

The kami are central to Shinto, sometimes mistranslated as "gods" in English. I think I should just quote from the Historical Dictionary of Shinto, since understanding kami stretches the bounds of the English language. I am quite sure we do not have an equivalent understanding. Here is some of what the dictionary says: "...a unique force or power in nature, animals, or people that engendered attitudes of reverence, fear, or gratitude in those who perceived it...anything that filled a human being with wonder and awe." Japan is sometimes called "the land of the kami". 

Kami can be forces of nature (fire, water, wind), old trees, mountains, divine beings (Ameterasu omi-kami, the kami of the sun and the principal kami of Japan), and even great human beings, after their death. Until the end of World War II, the emperor of Japan was considered a kami. Kami are enshrined in particular places. Tsubaki, for instance, is important because it is the main place where Sarutahiko-no-okami, the guardian of the Japanese land and safe travel, and his wife Ame no Uzume no mikoto, the kami of dance, are both enshrined. It is also believed to the place where the grandchild of Ameterasu descended to the earth, welcomed by Sarutahiko-no-okami, and so it is deeply resonant for Japanese people as a place of origin.

Sarutahiko-no-okami and his wife Ame no Uzume

Kami often have an animal messenger, and for Sarutahiko-no-okami, the messenger is the frog, so there are whimsical frog statues all over Tsubaki.

Stone frogs 

Kami can help human beings, and so people come to places like Tsubaki for blessings and to ask for help from the kami. The kami can also bless weddings and children, so there are many weddings here. There is also a deeper sense that the human being can come into greater harmony with the kami and with life itself through purification practices. Here at Tsubaki, the practice of purification by water, misogi, is central, a ceremony where people stand beneath a sacred waterfall. People come from all over Japan to participate. People also come to have their new cars blessed and purified, which makes sense to me! I watched the ceremony yesterday - on the weekends about a hundred cars a day are brought to the shrine for blessing.

Tsubaki priest blessing a very small car

You might wonder why in the world there is a connection between Unitarian Universalists in the US and a very traditional Shinto shrine in Japan, and why Tsubaki would support and host a UU seminarian each year. 

I'm still learning about all the reasons, but there is a spirit of interfaith commitment here that goes back decades. Tsubaki is the only Shinto shrine in Japan with foreign branch shrines (one in Granite Falls, Washington, that I visited last summer) and Tsubaki priests have a long history with the International Association for Religious Freedom and with a beloved Japanese Unitarian minister who died at the age of 106 several decades ago, Shin Ichiro Imaoka - most UUs in the US are not aware that there is a long history of Unitarianism in Japan. 

Tsubaki also had a connection with Ueshiba Sensei, the founder of the peaceful martial art of aikido, which is now practiced around the world, and with the practices of a form of esoteric Buddhism/Shinto called Shugendo. In fact, the former head priest rebuilt a Buddhist temple on the Tsubaki shrine grounds in honor of the founder of Shugendo, En no Gyoja, very unusual for a Shinto shrine. Buddhism and Shinto have always been intertwined to some degree, since Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 5th century, but during the Meiji period and the advent of "State Shinto" in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was an effort by the government to clearly separate them. But I see, being here, how much overlap there really is, even in some of the forms of Zen that I know so well.  

Buddhist temple on the grounds of Tsubaki Grand Shrine

For my part, as a Zen Buddhist practitioner and biologist, when I was considering applying for the scholarship, the chance to learn about the other major spiritual tradition in Japan, one that influenced Zen in many ways, and that also has a deep relationship with the natural world - well, it was irresistible.

My very first day in the country started at 8 am with Ochia-san ushering me in to meet with Guji-san, the head priest of Tsubaki, attending the morning service with the shrine staff, then Ochiai-san taking me to Ise Shrine, about an hour away, the most important, holiest Shinto shrine in Japan, where Amaterasu omikami is enshrined, the kami of the sun, the principal kami of Japan, and the female ancestor of the Japanese imperial family, Ise is enormous, its lands encompassing an area about the size of Paris, much of it wilderness. Shrine forests are one of the few places in Japan where ecologists can see what the original forests may have been like.

Ise trees

Pine garden, Ise

The buildings of Ise, all 125 shrines, are rebuilt and recreated every twenty years, exactly as they were before, along with all the ritual treasures - swords and fans and drums - everything. This rebuilding has been going on for centuries, and it keeps alive many traditional arts and artisans. 

You might expect that the most important Shinto shrine in Japan, where the emperor comes to preside over ceremonies, would be grand and gilt-covered, but instead the buildings feel timeless and simple, with massive thatched roofs and smooth polished beams of light-colored wood, surrounded by courtyards of white and black gravel stones. I really felt the affinity with Pacific NW native architecture there, and I feel this a lot, in Shinto. I think it would be extraordinary to bring native elders here. If you would like to see some photos of the buildings at Ise, click here.

Sacred sakaki branch at Ise

But the best part of Ise for me was visiting the area of traditional shops on the way to the main shrine, crossing the Ise River on a beautiful bridge and then sitting on a veranda overlooking the river eating a kind of sweet made only in Ise, red bean paste - though it looked purple - on the outside and mochi (rice) on the inside, the tea water heated in enormous kettles over a wood fired oven. 

I haven't been in many places in Japan where all the buildings are traditional, tile roofs (many of them bright blue here - I have a bit of a tile roof fetish, so the roofs made me very happy) and the streets just wide enough to walk, filled with cheerful-seeming Japanese Ise visitors, like being somewhere on a festival day - no sign of foreign tourists, except me. It was magical.

I had a feeling that the little place where we stopped for sweets and tea (they served nothing else) had been serving customers for hundreds of years, pilgrims and visitors to the shrine. I often find that there is a moment when I "arrive" in a place, and I arrived in Japan on that veranda overlooking the river, eating Ise sweets and drinking Hojicha tea with a Shinto priest! 

So here I am, in a country that unexpectedly captured my heart last time I was here, with its grace. Nonetheless, it does feel like another world, and right now I am swimming in near-total cultural immersion. I haven't spoken to another native English speaker since I left San Francisco, and despite my best intentions to study Japanese this winter....well, I didn't. And oh, I am regretting it! 

I am surrounded by kind and friendly people, but I can't communicate with most of them, other than a few basic greetings and smiles and bows. I am in a fascinating religious environment but am often only guessing at what is going on. I know this is the experience of many Americans traveling abroad, monolingual as we tend to be, but it's hard on me. I want to connect, and to communicate, but I am so limited. 

Finding one's feet in another culture always feels like a spiritual exercise to me - a practice of surrender, letting go, being willing to be foolish and lost - hard practices for someone with pride and a sense of competence when in her own culture. So I am immersed not only in a deeply traditional part of Japan, but in my own struggle to be here. So much to learn! More later. 

Florence at Ise

   

Final Shuso Note: Perfect In Our Imperfection

It's been almost a week since the shuso ceremony - and the end of the Everyday Zen fall practice period - on Sunday the 28th of October. The image I have, when I think of the ceremony now, is of a brightly colored, flower-bedecked boat full of revelers, gradually receding toward the horizon, the music growing fainter with each day. I have feelings of poignancy, amazement, and gratitude, slowly fading as I take on what's next in my life. I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico now, about to help a dharma friend lead his first seven-day retreat, sitting at an old wood desk in an adobe house surrounded by pinon pines and junipers, a long way from the California coast and the my dear companions on the path there.

I thought I would try, for those of you who have never seen a shuso ceremony,to describe it, as best I can, though some of what it is won't fit in words. The ceremony is the culmination of a traditional Zen practice period, or ango, a time of intensive practice and training. It is also the culmination of a time of training of the person who has been chosen as shuso, or head student, for the practice period. It is a doorway, an initiation, and an intimate dance between the shuso and the people in the practice period. What is required of the shuso during the ceremony seems, from the outside, to be nearly impossibly difficult. Not only does the ceremony require elaborate choreography, intense concentration and memorization, but the shuso must also :show up" authentically and spontaneously in response to deep and searching questions.

Our ceremony with Everyday Zen was held at the beautiful Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate bridge, at the end of a day of meditation. We rent space on an old military base just above the ocean beach. All day long you can hear the waves and birds and foghorns.

The ceremony is exceedingly formal and intricate.It starts with a procession into the hall, led by a person ringing a small, high-toned bell, then the teacher, who is walking with an immense black staff, then the teacher's attendant, then the shuso, carrying an ornate Japanese fan, then the benji (more on the benji later) who carries a smaller staff and a book wrapped in cloth, then a person at the end with a pair of wooden clappers. As they walk, there is an impressive set of sounds: the "ding" of the little bell, a pause, the "clack!" of the clappers, a pause, and then an answering deep "boom" of a drum from within the meditation hall. All punctuated by the sound of the teacher's staff as it hits the ground.

I've sat in the meditation hall as a student for many shuso ceremonies, and hearing the approach of the procession is an awesome experience. You know the shuso is walking toward something frightening and wonderful, and that he or she is in the procession, arriving, arriving....

In the hall, all the people in the practice period are seated in a tight block, their cushions or chairs right up against one another. On the other side of the hall is another block of people: former shusos, all of whom have been invited by the current shuso to the ceremony. In my case, the former shusos were senior people from Everyday Zen and from The San Francisco Zen Center, people I have lived with and practiced with over decades. In addition, other friends came from around the country to witness the ceremony. On either side of the altar is a cushion: on the left of the altar, the teacher's cushion; on the right, the shuso's.

Shuso fan, photo by Wendy Lewis

After the usual Zen bows, everyone sits down and the teacher's attendant carries the book all the way around the blocks of people from the teacher to the shuso, walking very, very slowly, while the Heart Sutra is chanted. When he or she arrives in front of the shuso, they bow together and the shuso takes the book (still holding the fan in one hand: the fan is never put down for the duration of the ceremony). Traditionally, the first koan from the Blue Cliff Record record is read, "Bodhidharma's Vast Emptiness," but in Everyday Zen we read another koan from the Record of the Gateless Gate  (this isn't the translation we use, but is the closest one I could find online):

Zhaozhou asked Nanquan, “What is the Way?”  Nanquan said, “Ordinary mind is the Way.” Zhaozhou said, “Shall I try to direct myself toward it?” Nanquan said, “If you try to direct yourself toward it, you will move away from it.” Zhaozhou said, “If I don’t try, how will I know it is the way?” Nanquan said, “The way is not concerned with knowing or not knowing.  Knowing is illusion; not knowing is blank consciousness.  If you truly arrive at the Great Way of no trying, it will be like great emptiness, vast and clear.  How can we speak of it in terms of affirming or negating?”

Zhaozhou immediately realized the profound teaching.

Then the shuso gets up and slowly, slowly walks, carrying the book, the other way all the way around the hall, around the blocks of people, to the teacher (there are a lot of these long slow walks during the ceremony). The teacher and shuso exchange bows, the shuso bows to the people in the hall, and then the teacher hands the shuso a long wooden staff, the teaching staff. Once again, slowly, slowly, the shuso walks with the staff held horizontally in both hands at eye level (trying desperately not to hit anyone in the head) all the way back around the room to the shuso's seat.

The benji, who is a person in the community who has been side-by-side with the shuso through the whole practice period,stands up and reads an original poem to start the question and answer for the ceremony. My friend Anne Connolly read her poem:

a wandering monk returns to these shores
in the gathering fall light
shakes her sleeves — “empty!” — she says,
and then in a neat dharma trick pulls out
mirrors brooms imposters fools
centuries of women ancestors tumbling forth
with curves like you’ve never seen on form and emptiness
and fierce compassion offered for our awakening.

Now let us hear the shuso!

Then I recited some memorized verses, while sitting and holding the staff horizontally: 

This is the dharma staff, five feet long. Once a black snake on Vulture Peak, it became the Udumbara flower. Sometimes it is a dragon, swallowing heaven and earth; sometimes a vajra sword, giving and taking life. This staff is now in my hands. Though just a mosquito biting an iron bull, I cannot give it away. Dragons and elephants, let us call forth the dharma! Give me your questions! (And the shuso turns the staff vertically and pounds it on the floor: bang!)

Then, starting with the benji, each person in the practice period (in our case, about 50 people) asks a dharma question, and the shuso responds. The dharma question is short, but is meant to be a real question, from the person's own life and practice. And the shuso has to respond, with heart and authenticity. At the end of each question, the shuso hits the staff on the floor. It is all very dramatic. After the practice period asks questions, then all the former shusos ask a question. Altogether, about 75 people asked me a question in the ceremony.

This is where I learned the most important thing from the ceremony. Answering these questions is impossible. How could any person know "the answer" to someone's deepest question? How could the shuso show up completely for person after person after person? There's no way anyone can do it. But here's what I learned, the great secret: "I" couldn't do it, not on my own. The only way I could do it was with the help of everyone in the room and in the container of the ritual. In a sense, we all did it, though maybe, if someone was a casual observer, it might appear that "I", Florence, did it. There was this tremendous flow of mutual support and love in the room, and in that field this impossible thing was possible. It was like enacting a miracle, or, as Norman Fischer wrote once, "like a group poem." Everyone making something very beautiful, together.

After the questions, there were more walks around the room, more bows, more handing of objects back and forth, and then congratulatory statements from various people, the former shusos, the teacher, and, in my case, my other teachers: Bruce Fortin, who is my current Zen teacher; Jeff Kitzes, my long-timer therapist and a Zen Master in the Korean Kwan Um Zen school; and James Baraz, one of the founders of Spirit Rock, a vipassana teacher, and my very first teacher when I began practicing in the 80s. Having Bruce, Jeff, and James there was extraordinarily sweet. All three of them are men who lead with their hearts. 

And of course, the teacher of the practice period, my teacher for more than twenty years, Norman Fischer, without whom I would never have found the path of Zen, never ordained, and never had a chance to be shuso. Norman and I have been through so much over these many years: the years he, as a relatively new teacher, came up to lead retreats in the Pacific Northwest; his time as abbot of Zen Center; my divorce and illness; the beginnings of the Everyday Zen sanghas; misunderstandings, working together, mutual support, mutual frustration, my needing to step away from the formal role as his student, his forgiveness of me, my forgiveness of him.... Somehow, the practice period and the ceremony was big enough to hold all of what we have been over so many years, with grace and clarity. 

Near the end of the ceremony, the shuso says these words, after profuse apologies for all the mistakes he or she has made:

"Let us continue to practice together in this lifetime and times to come, perfect in our imperfection. 

Isn't that just it, in all relationships, in life itself? "Perfect in our imperfection"? It's in moments like the end of the shuso ceremony, and in these words, that I remember, vividly, clearly, why I am a student of Zen. Humble, wild, poetic, connected, and full of heart - that's the Zen that called me more than two decades ago, and that still calls me, every morning, to the black cushion and the ongoing mystery of the path.

Anne C., Sue M, Norman Fischer, me, ARobin O., Mary Ann S, just after the ceremony. Photo by Ren Bunce.

Finally, I just have to say to anyone reading this who was part of the Fall 2012 Everyday Zen Practice Period: Thank you for your practice, for your support, for your love, and for walking the path with me. I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life. "May we continue to practice together in this lifetime and times to come!"

The Shadow of an Anchovy

My mother-in-law's family were poor peasants, and they would tell the story of being so poor that instead of having meats at the center of the round of polenta, they had a single small anchovy hanging over the center, casting its shadow. They said that the shadow of the anchovy was all they had to bring a little richness to the polenta.  

                                                                                                          -  Peggy Haines-Capelli

I was in Italy at the end of October and beginning of November, in the provinces of Tuscany, Umbria, and Le Marche. I was more than a traveler there: I was named for Florence - Firenze to my mother and those who knew me as a child - and my childhood was woven with the narrow streets and convent cloisters, churches and olive groves of Firenze and Tuscany, as I traveled back and forth with my art-historian single mother between the surreally different worlds of the American Midwest and Italy.

Fields, vineyards and villa, Setignano

From the time I was five until I was fifteen, we lived in Florence for part of every year. I went to kindergarten and fifth grade in Italian schools. I spoke Italian. Some of who I am came from that life, so far-away and mysterious to my American school-mates. I hadn't been back in many years, and this trip was a poignant, sweet chance to be there again with my mother, while it is still possible for both of us.

Although Italy is wealthy now, when I was a child - thirty, forty years ago - Italy was poor, third-world poor, and we were poor too, despite (or maybe because of) our bicontinental life.

The convent on Via Giuseppe Giusti

When I was small, we lived in a convent pensione across the street from the archives where my mother did her research. She couldn't afford child care, so in the early morning, when I was still asleep, she would go out, buy a roll and jam, sneak back in and leave it by the bed for me. When I woke up I would find my roll waiting for me, and for the rest of the morning, until lunchtime, I would lie in bed, get crumbs all over the sheets, and read, endlessly.

If I really needed something, the Italian nuns were down below, cooking in the big dark kitchen, cleaning the already-shining floors in the mostly empty main rooms, or cultivating the garden behind the building. I remember eating zucchini flowers for the first time, deeply comforting pastina in brodo with grated parmigiano on top, hard Tuscan bread. A great treat was a single Baci, the chocolate and hazelnut "kiss" made by Perugino, or an aranciata, an orange soda.

When we lived in Italy for longer times, we rented an apartment from an English doctor who owned a farmhouse in the hills to the west of the city. The contadini, the traditional Italian peasants who worked the land, lived down below us, next to their animals. Every morning I would wake to the sound of the cart and white oxen going by below our windows, slowly, slowly, with much shouting.

Two white oxen in the Tuscan hills

Our back windows looked out over a quintessential, "romantic" Tuscan landscape: hills, olives, dark spires of cipressi (cypresses), stone walls, the old stone village of Pian dei Giulari perched along one side of the valley, just down the road from us. What was concealed was the poverty, the backbreaking work, the deep knowledge that knew how to rebuild the stone walls, how to prune the olives, how to breed the oxen, how to survive. Now most of the contadini, as a culture, are gone, gone to work the well-paying jobs in the cities, and the absentee landlords struggle to keep the vineyards and groves alive without that deep and unacknowledged wisdom.

Sheep and stone trough

I remember, vividly, walking as a child on a country road and looking down into a farmyard where a contadini family was gathered around a round of polenta. Polenta was peasant food - no city restaurant would have dreamed of featuring it on a menu - and it was formed into enormous flat cakes, as wide as a circular table. It was cut with a string into wedges (this fascinated me), and each person at the table would eat their wedge toward the middle. In the middle would be whatever protein the family might have, and whoever could eat their wedge most quickly would get more of what was there.

A meat shop in Norcia - yes, those are boars' heads

While we were in Italy this time, we spent time with Peggy Haines-Capelli, an American art historian whom I knew and loved as a child and who, unlike us, chose Italy as her home and country. She eventually married an Italian journalist, and is now a widow. She told us the story of her husband's family and the anchovy as we sat around her round table, eating food we had brought back from our trip into the mountains of Umbria: famous tiny lentils from the town of Castellucio, pecorino cheese, salame called "mules' balls" from Norcia, with a white center of lard - a feast somewhere between a picnic and a high tea, rich with the stories of our trip to the wild and mysterious Monti Sibillini, the mountains of the sibyls. When I heard Peggy's story, probably in mid-bite of something delicious, it felt like a koan: what is the taste of the anchovy's shadow?

Quinces in farmer's market, Florence

While I was in Italy I was puzzling over the particular flavor of Italian life - the tremendous soul and depth that can be felt in the simplest village piazza or in the most elegant Florentine coffee bar. There is an appreciation of the sensuous things of the world, which, far from seeming superficial and materialistic, actually feels life-affirming, ancient, hugely sane. How do they do it? And how is it, that with all the force of modernism and wealth and speed, it is still alive, a heart at the center of things, something that can be tasted in the olive oil sitting on a trattoria table or in the syrupy intensity of a morning one euro espresso at the train station? And this story, of the anchovies...I think it's a key. I think it's a teaching story, perhaps for all of us.

Chestnuts, hazelnuts, fennel, honey in a farmer's market, Florence

We live like gods, these days. Not necessarily happy gods, but gods nonetheless. Few of us can imagine the poverty that would have a whole family only able to eat what is essentially ground field corn and water. No doubt life was hard, even sometimes hellish, for that family gathered around the polenta and that single, hanging anchovy. It drove the man who would become Peggy's husband to spend his life dedicated to defending the poor and oppressed.

House for a cat, Narni

But there is also something quintessentially elegant and clever in the story of the anchovy's shadow, although I can't quite put my finger on what it is. If there is only one anchovy to bring a little something to your polenta, what do you do? Can you appreciate the shadow of an anchovy, its salty, fishy scent perfuming the air as you eat? Can you raise your empty glass to your neighbor? Can you laugh a little, at yourself and at life, which is only providing this one little fish? Can you take what you have, a little or a lot, and make a feast? That's what it is - it's something about creating a feast out of famine, out of so little, a kind of grace, in both senses of the word.

View from hermitage, San Euitizio in Valle

That's what I feel in Italy, when I'm there: a soulful, embodied willingness to live, whatever comes. Maybe it's my projection on the place and its people, but I don't think so...I feel and see it with the part of me that was formed there. And as the country teeters on the edge of economic collapse, after so few decades of relative wealth, I think, "Well, maybe they'll be fine. Maybe they haven't forgotten how to live, under those designer clothes and behind those smart phones. Maybe they could teach the rest of us a few things about living."

"Life is too short", graffiti on a rural wall

And as I imagine a loaf of Tuscan bread, just water and flour and yeast, that intentionally hard crust to protect the soft interior, no salt because who could afford salt - and then I remember how profoundly GOOD it is, in its simplicity, in its poverty - it gives me courage.

If we are all (or most of us) going to get poorer in the future, which seems like a distinct possibility, let's do it with class. Let's celebrate the shadow of the anchovy.


This essay is dedicated to Signor Mauro Meniconi, the proprietor of a roadside porchetta van in rural Umbria, and one of the secret saints of the world.

For more photos, go to https://picasaweb.google.com/Firenze33/Italy

Running the Edge of the World

Tokeland, Willapa Bay Southern Washington Coast ---

For the last sunny week or so I've been running barefoot on the big beaches to the north of here. Running's new - it's been a long time since I've been well enough to run - and running barefoot along the wet shiny salt-spray-and-wind edge of the continent is wholly new. The sand is packed hard from the breakers, almost as hard as pavement, and the shorebirds dash wildly into and out of the waves, just as I veer inland when a big wave comes in. Otherwise I like to run where the waves spread out into a fine mirror for the sky, my feet splashing in the shallow sheet of water.

Everything is reduced down to just a few "things", almost not things at all - sand    ocean    line of dunes   shorebirds   terns    sun   sky. There's a sense of edge, but not a hard edge - a constantly shifting, literally fluid edge.  Running the edge of the world.

James Swan, in his record from 1851 of the earliest white settlement of this part of the coast, writes about traveling along this very beach from Grays Harbor to "Shoalwater Bay" (now Willapa Bay). Inland were huge dark cedar and spruce forests, deep bogs, steep hills - but a person could drive a coach and four horses down the hard-packed open sand. Washington beaches are still classified as "public highways" - a legacy of the time, not so long ago, when they were the only way up and down the wet and wild Pacific coast.

I say "this very beach" but the beach I've been running on is called Washaway Beach. It's the fastest eroding shoreline in North America. What is beach now was once land, just a few years ago. Hundreds of feet of coastline a year disappear into the ocean, houses that were once well inland now stand tipped nearly over the edge of the sandy bank, the entire town of North Cove (church, coast guard station, cemetery) occupied a sandy peninsula now entirely underwater, where Pacific waves break at low tide, the graves moved inland, bones and headstones and all. Where I run this year will be ocean next year, the edge moving inexorably inland.

So what beach do I run on? Do I run on James Swan's beach? Where is the edge?

This time of year the shorebirds are just beginning to return from their far northern nesting grounds, some to stay here for the winter, others to go south south south, unimaginably far south. They're tired. Today I saw a whole group resting beside the waves, little white balls of feathers, heads tucked in, a gull presiding over them. I run a long way around the shorebirds. The last thing they need is to have to fly unnecessarily, after what they've been through. I cringe when I see a dog on the beach, joyously chasing them.

Right now it's all semipalmated plovers and sanderlings, the plovers gazing meditatively off into the middle distance, the sandlerings running like wind-up toys back and forth from one good feeding area to another, flying up together like a school of silvery fish flickering in the air. It took me about a half an hour to move slowly slowly up to a group of sanderlings today, to get close enough to see what they were with my small binoculars, but slow enough not to spook them.

This is why I don't want to spook them - the plovers have just arrived from their nesting grounds in the Arctic and subarctic, and they're headed south for the winter. Some of them are headed to....hang on to your hat here....Patagonia. More of the sanderlings stay around for the winter, but they nest even farther north, only in the High Arctic above the Arctic Circle, and some of them migrate 5,000 miles or more to South America. This is serious flying for birds smaller than a robin. I don't even travel that far, wanderer that I am.

So the shorebirds and I share the beach, all of us travelers, here for a little while before we head south, and the beautiful Caspian terns fly overhead staring into the water and croaking "like a crow being strangled" (as a friend of mine described them). When it's windy the dry sand moves in a fine sheet across the hard-packed wet sand, and the effect is mesmerizing, like running in a shallow desert river.

There is a joy that can seize a person in a place like that, running in the wind in all that space and light. I'm not sure where it comes from, or why it arrives. The spirit grows wide, spreading itself out. There's nothing outside that brightness, for a while.







 


                                                                         

All At Once

Isn't it strange, the way so many things are happening at the same moment? At this moment,as I write this or you read this, an inconceivable number of events are occurring: someone is experiencing the greatest happiness, another the greatest grief; there is an avalanche cascading down a mountain slope and somewhere else a light rain has begun to fall; a small creature is being born and another creature is dying; a new star is forming, and somewhere another star is winking out, its light and heat fading away into darkness. All at once.

Yesterday and the day before I experienced this mystery with particular vividness. Thursday night I was reading from Wildbranch at a local bookstore with two of the book's contributors. It was a lovely night, and local friends came out to hear us. I shared a story from a reader of the book, who had told me that she had given up reading environmental literature because it was too depressing, but she had realized that Wildbranch was about love, love and intimacy with our world, and love is a more potent force for action than despair. I felt so happy about the book and what it offers, so happy to be sharing it and reading from many contributors.

I came home from the reading to the news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which had happened as we read. 

I was up much of the night, knowing that there could be a tsunami on the west coast of North America, and concerned for my little retreat cabin a few feet above high water on the Washington coast, my neighbor and her children, and my sweet friends who were staying in the cabin that night. I knew enough about tsunamis to know that they can cross whole oceans in a matter of hours without much diminution of their force. I knew that the county had called for an evacuation of all houses at sea level, including mine and those of my neighbors.

Several of us at the reading had arranged to go hiking the next day. The next morning I left for the hike before the time that the first major waves would come ashore. I had reached my friends who were staying at the cabin, and they had left and driven back to their own home, safely above sea level, but I didn't know what would happen to the cabin and the small community around it, all of which sits just a few feet above sea level on a narrow peninsula on Willapa Bay, a stone's throw from the open ocean and the roaring surf. I've always known that it is vulnerable to an event just like this one. Would this be the time?

Then, for the next few hours, I was hiking and looking at spring wildflowers, and I don't know what happened, except that the four of us on the hike fell into a kind of grace, one of those times of magical ease and beauty, unlooked-for, unrepeatable, perfect.

It was a clear, sunny spring day after rain, the air soft and subtly misty, the ground exhaling its moisture. Our trail started high up on Mount Tamalpais, then descended the open west-facing slopes of the mountain, views far out over the ocean, north to Bolinas and south to the very tops of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The grass - not just the grass, but everything, every tree, shrub, herb and moss - was deeply, brilliantly green, the hallucinatory green of March in the coastal hills. After a while the the trail entered the redwoods and turned upward again, following waterfall after waterfall back up the mountain, up mossy stone stairways.

Some of us in our little group of four knew each other well, over many years; others were just acquaintances. Two Zen practitioners, three writing teachers, one botanist. What we shared was our love of literature and the natural world, and this moment together. We talked and walked and admired flowers and mushrooms and the light through the redwoods. We took photographs and shared gingerbread and homemade coffee cake by the side of the creek. We told stories. We wandered on and off the trail. I left my walking stick by a flower and then it reappeared, leaning against a railing on an entirely different trail. The day unfolded with a kind of ease that only happens now and again, in dreams or, if we're lucky, for a few hours in waking life.

The whole time I didn't know what had become of the only place I can call home, whether the sturdy little white cottage underneath the Sitka spruce was filled with muddy water as I walked the hills, or still sitting quietly in the rain, unharmed and whole. Or what might be happening in Japan or elsewhere all along the edge of the Pacific. There was nothing I could do, but I didn't forget, and it gave a subtly different feeling to the day for me, a kind of strangeness that made the light more brilliant and the grace more poignant.

When I got back to town, many hours later, I heard from my neighbor that everything was fine. She talked about how the day had been for her, also not knowing, waiting, and the gratitude she felt for the simple gift of being fine, of having a house and safe children, of making a pot of soup and starting a fire in the woodstove. How often do any of us remember to be grateful for our lives as they are, in all their ordinary details?

Meanwhile, across the ocean, thousands of people are still missing. Tonight, as I write this, people are huddled in makeshift shelters, mourning their homes, their friends and relatives, their pets, the lives they once had - lives that can be rebuilt but which will never be the same. And I sit here, still bathed in a sense of well-being from my day in the hills, feeling happiness for what was not destroyed in my life. These things exist side by side, utterly connected and yet also independent of one another.

I read tonight that the Dalai Lama has asked people in Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile for more than fifty years, to chant the Heart Sutra 100,000 times for the people of Japan and all who are suffering disaster.

The Heart Sutra says "form does not differ from emptiness, and emptiness does not differ from form." Another way of saying it is that I am, at the same time, both an individual with a history and an experience that is uniquely my own, and completely connected. I am affected by an earthquake across an ocean from me, and yet walked the hills as others suffered and died. We breathe air that has been in the lungs of a lion, the stomata of 300-year-old coast live oak, the nose of Buddha, but when we breathe, only we can breathe our breath, this one irreplaceable, unrepeatable breath

And on the day I die, there will almost certainly be someone walking those hills I walked yesterday, bending to look at a wildflower, smiling at a friend, breathing in the clean ocean air. We will share that moment, not knowing each other, linked inextricably.