This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everybody. I'm not feeling 100%. Great today, so if I sigh and moan, don't take it personally. It's just me. Yes, it's nice to see our younger Buddhas today. I have some poems for you. Are you ready for some poems? Well, it's all I got, so.

[01:10]

So imagine yourself going to sleep at night. Close your eyes for a second and imagine your mom and dad are putting you down to bed and closing the lights and leaving the room and it's dark. Here's a poem about going to sleep at night. All night long and every night when my mama puts out the light I see the people marching by as plain as day before my eye. Armies and emperors and kings all carrying different kinds of things and marching in so grand a way you never saw the like by day. So fine a show was never seen at the great circus on the green for every kind of beast and man is marching in that caravan.

[02:14]

At first they move a little slow but still the faster on they go and still beside them close I keep until we reach the town of sleep. This is another poem about sleep, going to sleep at night. This is called The Land of Nod. That's what they call the land of sleep, the land of Nod. From breakfast on through all the day, at home among the friends I stay, but every night I go abroad, afar. into the land of Nod. All by myself I have to go, with none to tell me what to do, all alone beside the streams and up the mountain sides of dreams.

[03:23]

The strangest things are there for me, both things to eat and things to see, and many frightening sights abroad till morning in the land of Nod. Try as I like to find the way I never can get back by day nor can remember plain and clear the curious music that I hear. So this poem is called My Shadow. Did you know that everybody here has a shadow? Did you ever notice? shadows. Yeah, everybody. You'd think there'd be one person without a shadow, but apparently everybody has a shadow. And this is a poem about your shadow. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, and what can be the use of her is more than I can see.

[04:38]

She is very, very like me from the heels up to the head, and I see her jump before me when I jump into bed. The funniest thing about her is the way she likes to grow, not at all like proper children, which is always very slow, for she sometimes shoots up taller like an India rubber ball and she sometimes gets so little that there's none of her at all. She hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play and can only make a fool of me in every sort of way. She stays so close beside me. She's a coward, you can see. I'd think shame to stick to Nursey as that shadow sticks to me.

[05:42]

One morning very early, before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup, but my lazy little shadow, like an errant sleepyhead, had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed. This one is about the moon. Everybody knows about the moon. I think the full moon is going to be in a few days, maybe Wednesday, Thursday morning, Wednesday night. So maybe you can go outside and see the moon and think about this poem, The Moon. The moon has a face like the clock in the hall. She shines on thieves on the garden wall. on streets and fields and harbor keys and birdies asleep in the forks of trees.

[06:47]

The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse, the howling dog by the door of the house, the bat that lies in bed at noon, all love to be out by the light of the moon. But all of the things that belong to the day cuddle to sleep to be out of her way. And flowers and children close their eyes till up in the morning the sun shall rise. And here's the last one. This is about swinging. Did you ever swing on a swing? So they still have swings, huh? Huh. I thought maybe they didn't have them anymore. And you know the feeling of swinging really, really high on a swing? Somebody pushes you and you go really, really high. It's a little amazing.

[07:51]

You look up and you can see. This is about a swing. The swing. How do you like to go up in a swing? Up in the air so blue. Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing ever a child can do. Up in the air and over the wall till I can see so wide rivers and trees and cattle and all over the countryside. Till I look down on the garden green, down on the roof so blue, so brown. Up in the air I go flying again, up in the air and down. So those are my poems for today. And now you're supposed to go out and play or something, right?

[08:53]

What do you do anyway after? What happens after? What do they do? You're writing poems? Oh, how fun. That was the plan to begin with? Well, there you go. Now you can write some poems today. And have fun. And get to know one another. And the sun is shining. Are you going to be outdoors or indoors today? In the garden. Oh, beautiful. Well, thank you for coming, everybody. And have a good time. from Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses. I don't know if people read them to their children these days, but we certainly read them to our children. They're a little, not contemporary sometimes, but they're really wonderful.

[09:59]

And since we're on the subject of poetry I thought I would, I'm going to talk today about a poem of mine. And I'll tell you how this came about. Bob Rosenbaum is a psychologist and a researcher in neuroscience and a lay Zen teacher from the Berkeley Zen community. And he decided to put together an anthology of essays about mindfulness. I guess he felt like there's so much written now about mindfulness, but he felt like there was something that was missing. So he wanted to put together his own anthology and he asked various people to write essays. And he asked me to write an essay, and I said, well, I can't imagine that I have anything whatsoever to say about mindfulness that everybody hasn't already said a thousand times, so I can't imagine what I could contribute.

[11:22]

I said, however, I could write about a poem. I could write about the mindfulness of writing a poem, the way of being aware in the writing of a poem. And I sent him a poem that I would write about of mine with full confidence that he would not think this was a good idea and I would get out of writing the essay. But to my surprise he said okay. So I wrote the essay which starts with the poem. and the poem is called Solitude, and it's a poem for May May Bursenbrugge. Plants are dreaming of me. In mythical realities I can hear them referring to things I've written in poems, but they are neither impressed nor unimpressed.

[12:32]

Downstairs in someone's room I hear a cricket song outside distant thunder. As I said, our lives are myths, so ordinary things like meals or perceptions are only symbolic. People can't communicate, and that's painful. Yet people merge instinctually, genetically, molecules of one flesh floating, precipitated out through pseudo-identities, lost, wander, bodies tuned to variable frequencies. Because they are equally beautiful, people and plants meld usually in meals and death and instinctually feel support and love, though there's only dreaming, no thinking, and there's no illness.

[13:41]

That's conceptual and based on a distended projection into the space between molecules while in fact every living thing constantly thrives in its own way. Still, I stayed in bed today, weekly, at the same time I was transported into those plant stems and purple buds being visited by earnest bees. Was I asleep or awake then? Were the purple buds, now flowers fully opened, aware of my dream-ing them, or was my dream as real as Mei Mei expected or deigned to describe in her text? That's this. I can hear the multiple buzz now, earnest. Again today I'm not feeling well, a feeling that's good in the way it's not the feeling I'm used to that could meet an expectation of a certain kind of activity I might wish to be doing, I'm thinking, but can't.

[14:52]

That's my memory jogging myself into action. deciding what I think I might want, wanting implying time passing from one state in me as if I were to the next. No experience is one experience. First, it's unregistered. Next, it's a false memory. Then I'm making a puzzle, assigning meanings. I'm assimilating you the various digesting consequences and reshaping though there's no agent. As with each leaf on that aspen tree there's repeating without repeating a finite number of possible shapes reiterated fractals nothing the same not even the same as itself. Identity having come much later like cuisine I keep thinking through something, since I can never think through nothing, though I can think of that word.

[16:02]

Anything is something, so thick and adamant facing me, expressive yet dumb like earth in my mouth, begging the question, so I become, thought fooling me in the meantime to be thinking me though I think I'm thinking it. All this leaking out of me or into me from the day's clear or diffuse clouds from the hills gravel on the road, large black beetle, bees, downy woodpecker, the sound now of machinery. There's a subtle vibration within or as silence that I feel as quiver in the hairs in my nostrils or small downy hairs on back of neck. Alone in it there's a fuller sense of being as if it were actually something or anything combined with nothing meaning silence or space.

[17:05]

As I was saying that I remember participating in or as little white pieces of torn paper fluttering down indoors or snow. I don't have to be naive to explain when I'm here you must be too. I noticed early on there was a difference in the room if someone were present or not that they'd draw me into an understandable world as a form of sharing to ease the anxiety that possibly there isn't anything filling in the immense hope with rainwater. There's no solitude. Otherwise, no social world, nothing to speak about. People always controversial with their opinions and needs.

[18:09]

They're moved exactly as water flowing onward moves when redirected by rocks or banks or slowed by silt. So there's only solitude. Yellow yarrow flowers cluster beyond them, flagstone and a cherry tree. Little bronze leaves twitch in slight breeze, making a language pattern I don't know, a natural Morse code of short and longer jerks. I ponder my pre-linguistic thought dances in tempo, then body shudders as these words my pen. Time isn't moving. While I gingerly absorb these flavors, my memory, a story that never coheres except I configure it, my belief cascades connection. Nothing in itself appears as object I can't identify but feel met and welcomed by space.

[19:19]

So that poem was written this past summer in July when my wife Kathy and I were in residence for almost a month at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe and we were leading a short Zen practice period. During that time I quite amazingly had abscessed teeth, which gives you a fever. You're sick when you have abscessed teeth. I had a fever a lot of the time. I was there and I was always on antibiotics. And while we were there, I had a chance to visit with an old friend, the great poet Meime Bersenbrugge. We had dinner. She gave a reading, happened to be giving a reading, and I went to her reading. And also I had her latest book called Hello the Roses, which I was able to read slowly and closely while we were in Santa Fe.

[20:38]

I don't know if you've ever been to Upaya, but it's really a beautiful place, architecturally gorgeous. Santa Fe is a lovely town. with the beautiful architecture and desert surroundings that I find particularly inspiring. The gardens at the Zen Center were full and vibrant in hot and sunny July weather. In my mind, what most characterizes a Zen practice period is the sense of silence and timelessness. Days go by always more or less the same as if a single day, each day punctuated by periods of zazen so that one is constantly going back and forth to and from the zendo many times each day. Walking paths become a metaphor for life back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, one long repetitive circular journey going nowhere.

[21:50]

So I'm saying all this to give you a sense of the mood and surroundings out of which this poem that I just read comes. For me, a really great poem is a poem that makes me write, that calls forth writing in me. So when I read the great poems in Hello the Roses, I was forced to write. and the poem Solitude is the result of that. Mei Mei's works in Hello the Roses seem to be deep meditations on thinking and perceiving and being in the midst of natural environments, direct experiencing of living among, with and as plants and animals. They come out of her quite unusual intelligence and sensitivity to the world.

[22:59]

When you meet her, Mei Mei speaks very slowly, very thoughtfully, her voice is quiet. You have the idea that her body registers sensations and currents that most of us are completely insensitive to. Writing my poem I felt in communion in some way through the trance in which the words of the poem were inhabiting me with Mei Mei or rather with the spirit she must have entered into in her composition. I wrote the poem without any idea of what it would be, where it would go. I wasn't trying to get across any idea. I wasn't trying to express any feeling. I just wanted to inhabit the space of the poem I was writing for as long as that space was given to me.

[24:11]

And I'm saying I wanted, but it would be closer to true to say that the poem, which as yet did not exist, reached out in its in-existence, wanting me to inhabit it, to bring it into another order of being. At any rate, I was compelled to write what I was writing, even though I didn't know what I was doing. But I felt, without thinking this at the time, Mei Mei's mystic spaciousness, felt the silence and essential solitude of zazen and practice period, which seemed to rhyme with it, felt and saw, heard, smelled, tasted, sensed in some way beyond the physical senses as well, the environment in which I was then situated. So this is how I usually write a poem.

[25:14]

With pen in hand, poised over a notebook page, I listen For words that appear in my hand and ear, I write them, one following another, phrase by phrase and line by line, each coaxing the next into physical recording. The process was, as it always is for me, immensely enjoyable and fully engaging and a necessity for my well-being in a world which doesn't make sense to me and which I find The more seriously I take it, the more troubling. Where do the words come from? I'm not sure. I have been speaking, listening to, reading, and writing within the English language my entire life. And the echo of all that, including the poetic tradition in which I'm writing,

[26:20]

postmodern innovative poetry, its sound and sensibility heard in thousands of texts must give rise to the words that appear. I'm wondering what is the condition of my mind when I'm writing poems? Maybe it's something like what Freud called evenly hovering attention. That is, my mind is open, poised, in a sense, because I am long conditioned to snap into a specific kind of attention when I put a pen in my hand and open a notebook to receive something. My attention is strong, but it isn't, as Freud indicates, focused. It's hovering and it's evenly hovering, open searching but not for any particular object or point.

[27:23]

When words begin to come, the focus shifts to shapes and senses the words begin to suggest and a more intentional mind takes over, yet one that is at the same time loose and relaxed, curious, not grasping, still willing at any point to go elsewhere than where it is at the moment. tending to go. Or maybe my mind in writing exercises what Keats called negative capability, the poet's capacity to completely let go and open into any space that appears zero in herself, hence negative, and therefore fully ready to take in whatever else presents itself in the moment. Keats describes this state in an often quoted letter to his brothers, the only time he ever mentioned the idea of negative capability.

[28:34]

And this is what he wrote. At once it struck me what quality went to form a person of achievement, especially in literature. and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously. I mean negative capability. That is, when a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Very famous words of Keats. Another way of describing my mind when I am writing poems might be that in the moment of composition I practice what Dogen calls not thinking, the essential art of zazen. By this he means, as I understand and have practiced, that there may be thinking coming and going, but the thinking is free and open, not driven by desire associated with self and its productions and needs.

[29:46]

The thinking just comes and goes without direction or goal. In this sense, my practice of poetry, like my practice of Sazen, affords me the chance to forget about myself and simply float in language, feeling, thought with an even and open sense. And in all of this I'm talking about the primary experience of initial composition. I always go back to poems later after I've completely forgotten the initial feeling. And the poem seems foreign to me to shape, alter, cut, add, or completely delete in a more deliberate way. Zen is inspired by the emptiness teachings which insist

[30:49]

elaborately and repetitively that there isn't anything actually. That everything that seems to be what it is isn't that. That all phenomena are evanescent, ungraspable, essentially dreamlike. So in Zen, mindfulness is of necessity improvisational, open to surprise and accident. Reality, it would seem, does not go according to previously determined plan or conform to a set of agreed-upon norms. Self, sorry, for Zen, as for Buddhism in general, the problem, the ultimate oppressor, is oneself. That which identifies with predetermined plans and deeply held norms.

[31:55]

Self that's socially conditioned, a product of its place, time and situation. Self is suffering and liberation is liberation from self. in terms of poetry, liberation would be liberation from self into the poem. The recent history of art is full of enthusiasm for this sort of thing. Early in the 20th century, the great jazz musicians invented a form that depended on moment by moment improvisation. Being immersed formally in the moment apparently served to liberate them from their suffering. And they were mainly African-American men whose psychological, social and economic suffering was truly crushing.

[32:59]

And they were the ones who invented the cult of immediacy. And this idea spread very quickly to all the other arts. And the value of improvising and authenticity in the moment of composition has probably been the dominant ideology in art of the last hundred years or so. There's no doubt that my lifelong practice of zazen has helped me as a poet. Before I practiced zazen, I was trying to express myself and my ideas in my writing. And I was trying to write well to achieve something of worth and note. And I was really bad at this. Mostly because as a young man my sense of self was fairly crude and unconscious and constantly got in my way.

[34:09]

So I spent more than a decade of tortured apprenticeship during which I wrote reams and reams of bad material that was really difficult to produce and basically made me miserable. When I began to devote myself to Zazen, almost out of desperation, I found that eventually I could enjoy writing, forget myself, and approach the work as adventure, surprise, as practice without needing to have myself at stake. So it strikes me that all this might be almost the opposite of what is commonly thought of as mindfulness practice. the self's effort to pay attention to what is going on so as to clarify, gain peace, insight, improve performance.

[35:26]

Mindfulness is often presented as the best way to maximize the positive effects of brain plasticity. Cultivating certain kinds of attention, gently and effectively changing old habits of stress and reactivity, I have no doubt that all this works, it's worked for me. On the other hand, the very earnestness of the effort to practice mindfulness could work against itself. One could try too hard and get in the way. Or even if you could avoid this pitfall, too much emphasis on goal and technique could well narrow the creative possibilities. Because of its emphasis on the emptiness teachings that I spoke about a moment ago, Zen seems not to promote mindfulness per se.

[36:26]

The Zen approach seems to be simply to let go into openness and see what happens. In Zen, as in the arts, what drives this attitude and what saves it from being mere sensation seeking or self-centered play or laziness is devotion and community. I know a lot of artists, poets and other artists, and they practice their art with a tremendous devotion. and they sacrifice a lot for it. And so they appreciate one another for sharing this devotion to an endeavor which nobody else appreciates quite the way they do. In the arts, the only thing worse than failure

[37:35]

which brings with it economic suffering and the nearly insurmountable difficulty in continuing is success, which fosters self-repeating and creative atrophy. And in Zen it's pretty much the same. No one gets any credit for personal improvement from doing Zazen. but those who are devoted to it appreciate one another for that very reason. It seems that whatever happiness or character improvement comes from the practice of the arts or zazen comes from devotion and community rather than through a more task-oriented cultivation of mental or emotional qualities. One of our sons, Noah Fisher, is an artist and social activist deeply involved in an almost total critique of our contemporary social order, especially the arts.

[38:58]

And he talks about this a lot, and as I've listened to him over the years, and have observed the lives of others and thought about it on my own, he's pretty much got me convinced. He's right that large institutions, floods and cascades of money and the insane pace of life in our late capitalist moment make it really, really difficult for the average person simply to be a person. Her soul is so swamped with the desires, dictates and tough circumstances of daily living in a highly competitive, developed and crowded world that it's just difficult for her to find her footing as a human being.

[40:06]

even the successful are in crisis these days, how much more so those who are up against it socially and economically. And if it's tough for young men who, if they're white, feel dishonored by their privilege and if they're not white, feel diminished by their disadvantage, it's even worse for young women who now have to be the best possible mothers in a world in which motherhood has been completely parsed out in every direction while simultaneously being better than men in career development and intellectual achievement. crippled in this frantic race toward greater and greater self-realization is any actual sense of just being somebody, just simply being somebody.

[41:23]

Even the arts and religion as worldly pursuits, which they are in part, become part of the insanity. The market subsumes them too, so that all artists and spiritual teachers these days had better be at least as good at marketing as they are at the free and open production of what they do. That's how it is now. Nevertheless, the moment of composition, the moment of meditation can still be, and mostly is, an open moment, a liberated moment, as probably everybody in this room knows, otherwise you wouldn't be here.

[42:33]

So far in my little essay here I haven't said anything about the content of the poem Solitude. And I'm not sure that I'm competent to comment on this. The poem does have some content and not all poems and not all my poems do. but that content arose from the free flowing of the words themselves rather than from any intention or theory on my part. And yet I suppose I can't not take responsibility for whatever the poem seems to be saying. The poem may well say things I don't agree with. Probably it does. And yet it is also unlikely that anything in it comes from too far outside the range of my own thinking, my own views about things. The poem seems to be saying that living, which includes thinking, feeling, perception, is not as it seems to be.

[43:51]

That identity and experience is much less discrete than we think it is. that things mix and merge, shake loose. And maybe Jack Spicer and William Burroughs were correct in believing that language is a virus unleashed on us from outer space. Or that a radio is playing somewhere in the distance that we take for our own thought. the poem actually seems to be making these kinds of assertions fairly plainly without much metaphor or colorful language, almost austere in its plain speaking. Possibly the poem, in saying all this, reflects the emptiness teachings I've been talking about. That nothing exists in its own right.

[44:55]

That nothing exists at all. Everything mixes and mingles and are not seeing this, are literally not being able to see it, makes the world flat, dull and impossible for us, a veil of tears. Whereas, in actual fact, we are plants and animals, sky and wind, and our thought is buds and birds. But that would be to reduce the poem to a species of or an illustration of a philosophy, which couldn't be right. On the other hand, after more than 40 years of Zen practice, it's extremely unlikely that anything I write, however unintentional, doesn't reflect these teachings somehow. One of my favorite lines in the Prajnaparamita Sutra in 8,000 Lines, which is a text about the emptiness teachings, is a line that's spoken by the gods who have just been listening to the teaching of Sabuti, the Buddha's great disciple who is the master of emptiness and friendliness.

[46:18]

That's interesting that Sabuti is the master of emptiness and friendliness. And Sabuti has just been teaching the gods that the Buddhas don't stand anywhere because there isn't anywhere to stand. And yet, he tells them, they are well grounded in their placelessness. And hearing this, the gods say to Sabuti, and I always love this line in the sutra, what the fairies talk and murmur that we understand, though mumbled. Apparently fairies have a tendency to mumble. What Sabuddhi has just told us, that we do not understand. Understanding, per se, whether it's understanding a poem, a person,

[47:24]

or a moment of experience is probably overrated. And worse than that, it might be oppressive. Openness, improvisation, letting go, immediacy, no mind, presence, whatever you call it, and none of these words is quite right, and strictly speaking, there's no it referred to, might require that we suspend not only our judgments, but even our understanding. That our capability be negative. Having no place to stand, we can finally be well grounded. So that's my essay on my poem.

[48:31]

I haven't sent it to Bob Rosenbaum yet, but I will pretty soon. Thank you all for listening to my talking. I really appreciate it. And I guess this great virtue of silence non-understanding, wonder, presence, awe, whatever we want to call it, is something that we really have to preserve, every one of us, for our own well-being and for the well-being of everyone around us. Because I think it is true, the world is getting more dense and space inner space, outer space is more and more at a premium.

[49:33]

So I'm very thankful to all of you for knowing this and knowing that you have to practice and I'm really thankful to Abbot Fu and all of you at Green Gulch for preserving this space for all of us. And no doubt it'll all be fine in the end. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[50:40]

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