This Saturday morning, November 2
10 AM to Noon at Creek Bend, 7528 Jenkin Place
Meeting Koans
With Sarah Bender and friends and newcomers
Today, friends, I’m feeling somber, and it’s Hallowe’en.
We have a number of wonderful koans about death, and dying, and loss, and of course they are really about living, because that’s what we who can read this are doing; we aren’t yet doing that other thing. Or are we? As we remember, in this season of encroaching dark, our inextinguishable loves, we feel also the deaths that are always with us and a part of us, moment by moment. And so there are many instruments and many voices in this All Souls band.
And, wisely, because the heart is actually wise this way, we reach for love. We reach for each other. Alone and together we remember those we’ve lost with tenderness, with humor, with astonishment and sometimes with rage; with regret, even despair, all faces of love which won’t give up being wild just because the object of our love is dead.
Together we face this grand mystery. We feed each other sweets and dress up outrageously and revel in it.
So I’m picking one of our koans for this, but in this week where I am grieving for and with friends, every fire, every war, every cruel form of murder for profit and every sad unraveling of the mysterious tissue of a life is also standing in its own place and calling for love, and it seems to take poetry to touch how beautiful this life of losses is.
So I’m sending a koan and a poem and will be bringing more poems, but never mind. Whatever reaches out to grab us is what we’ll meet. As the poet Jared Carter said,
To improvise, first let your fingers stray.
Each time you start, expect to lose your way.
So here’s a koan:
On the first day of the month Bukkō, Teacher of the Nation, developed symptoms of an illness which he realized he would not survive.
He wrote a note to officials and old friends to tell them that he would take his departure on the third day of that month. Just at dawn on the third day he wrote:
Buddhas and ordinary men are equally illusions.
If you go looking for the true form, it is a speck of dust in the eye.
The burnt bones of this old monk embrace heaven and earth;
Do not scatter the cold ashes to mountain and sky.
That night he changed his robe, sat in meditation, and wrote:
Coming, and no more going on:
Going, and no more returning.
With a mane of a million hairs, that lion appears:
With its mane of a million hairs, the lion roars.
and here’s a poem from Denise Levertov
O Taste and See
The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see
The subway Bible poster said
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
See you Saturday,
Sarah