How silent is "silent"?

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm visiting Debbie and we are attending a UU-Buddhist silent retreat for the third year in a row. The instructions when we arrived emphasized that this is a silent retreat, and that attendees should take that part of it seriously: also, to be absolutely clear, there is to be no talking in the meditation room, nor in a room off the dining hall (wfor those wanting to eat in silence).

So of course most attendees seem to be talking with each other most of the time. Not, to be sure, during the posted meditation sits. And there seems to be a minimum of talking in the two rooms where it was explicitly forbidden. ("Minimum" is not the same as "none" in this context.) But in general the injunction to silence seems to be carried somewhat ... gently ... by most of the participants.

There's a part of me that wants to criticize them for this, but mostly I don't bother. It's not like I'm some advanced arhat who came here expecting to commune with the World-Soul, and who would have been able to do so if only it weren't for the ongoing conversations! I've got enough internal conversations going on in my own mind to match any of the others. And even if everyone is really committed to silence, it takes longer than a day to settle down. This retreat stretches across a weekend, no longer. So one shouldn't expect wonders.

My cough has been unpredictable. I can go hours at a time without coughing once at all; then suddenly it will strike and people ask, "Are you OK?" (Yes, I think I'm OK.) 

Mostly I have stayed out of long conversations, which is good because when I get in them I get muddled. 

I have been sleeping close to ten hours a night, and still seem to want an afternoon nap.

And last night in the middle of the night I woke up having to pee, and realized I had already leaked all over my pajamas. Mortifying. I told Debbie I'd need to borrow her washing machine when we got back to her home, and she pointed out that the retreat center has machines of its own. So right now I'm waiting for my pajamas to dry. As I say, mortifying.

No profound insights, I guess. But it is a good and pleasant place to be.  

Me and groups

Over the last couple of days, I've been thinking about how I relate to groups or organizations.

There's a story I tell myself that makes the answer sound easy: I'm a consummate outsider. I suffer from social anxiety. I'm shy, or an introvert. These are all stories I have told myself for years.

Of course this story is partly true, or I would never have concocted it in the first place. But it is not the whole truth. A number of recent experiences have made this clear to me.

Case One

Two nights ago (Thursday), I joined an online meeting of the leadership for the local Region of the professional society that I belong to. There are plenty of reasons I needn't have bothered. In the first place, I'm not even working any more. I joined the professional society two or three years before my local office closed. As you recall, I never found another job after that. I've been volunteering with this society as a way to keep busy, more than anything else. 

Also, I'm only in leadership in the most tenuous way. I was Chair of the local section for four-and-a-half years. (There's a rule in the society that limits you to two years, but, well, stuff happened.) But I was able to resign my Chair-ship at the end of last year. Fawn, whom I recruited to join our leadership committee as Program Chair, took over as the new Chair on January 1 of this year. I accepted a minimal role in the leadership committee because Fawn asked me to be available, to give her advice. And that minimal role means that I am invited to the monthly meeting of all the Regional leadership, because they want to make sure that there is at least one representative from each section. In case the Chair can't make it, someone else should still be there to report.

Fawn has made it to these meetings very reliably, all year. But still I show up whenever I don't have a conflict.

That's the first interesting question: Why do I bother?

The second interesting point—and this is what started me ruminating on the subject—is how other people in the meeting treat me. Of course they are used to seeing me. I showed up for these meetings for four-and-a-half years as Chair of my local section. My attendance at these meetings has now overlapped with the tenure of three different Regional Directors. I also notice that—despite the term limits—there are a few names that I keep seeing, year after year. I guess they must have rotated into new roles or job titles (as have I). But they keep representing their sections in these meetings. It's interesting.

But the moment that struck me, in the meeting two evenings ago, was when one of the long-time representatives (used to be Chair of his section, I think now he is Treasurer) started joking with me in a very obvious way, the way two old veterans might kid each other over long shared experience. Of course in the moment I responded by rocking back in my chair and laughing—we were on Zoom, after all, and I had my camera on so people could see my reaction. But in the back of my mind I wondered: If I am genuinely shy and introverted, how did I get into this position? I keep trying to avoid having to do hard work for this society, so how did I become a veteran that this man feels comfortable joking with?

That started me mulling. Then the next afternoon I acquired more data.

Fearing for your children's future

Tonight in the UU Sangha I attend, we started reading a new book for our dharma study, a book by Thich Nhat Hanh about Fear. So during the discussion period, people began discussing their fears. And I heard several of them express fear for their children or grandchildren.

Debbie, for example, is afraid for her grandchildren because her daughter Mattie, and her son-in-law (Mattie's husband), are such martinets, and always yell at their sons (Debbie's grandchildren). Debbie said she's not afraid of dying for her own sake, but she's afraid of the consequences for her grandsons if one day suddenly she's no longer there for them. (To be clear, there's no imminent threat. Debbie's in her early seventies, and she has various ailments that are consistent with her age, including periodic bouts of long COVID and atrial fibrillation. She also has celiac disease, that seems to be slowly morphing into a more generalized autoimmune sensitivity. But she's not on a timeline, with "X years to live"!)

But then another member is worried about his children, too. (I'm pretty sure I haven't given him a name yet.) His kids—a son and a daughter—are legal adults but just barely. They were both adopted out of a dreadful situation, spent their whole childhood being oppositional, and regularly make terrible decisions. So their lives aren't going well, to nobody's surprise. And he's deeply troubled by this.

I think there was someone else too, but I forget the details.

Of course this is common. At some level, everyone who has kids wants those kids to have a wonderful life, free of the spectres that so routinely blight the lives of Other People. That's why I was so upset at the idea that Wife was going to live with Son 1: I wanted him to be able to have adventures in his life (if he wanted them, of course) and I figured there would be no adventures if he were looking after her. As a secondary concern, I feared that living with Wife would ruin his relationship with Wife, although I figured that he was honorable enough he would never throw her out on the street. (Turns out that I called that secondary concern exactly.) 

Outtakes from a Day of Mindfulness

The UU Sangha that I belong to held a Day of Mindfulness today. Days of Mindfulness are a practice in the Plum Village tradition, which is the tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. Basically we got together for about six hours to practice sitting meditation and walking meditation. We also ate lunch together in silence, and we spent some time talking about what we would like to see from our Sangha in the future. Most of the attendees were regular Sangha members, but the event was open to guests as well, and we had two or four.

My point here is not to tell about the Day of Mindfulness per se, nor yet to talk about the aspirations that people expressed for the future. What I want to capture are a couple of the "outtakes"—moments that had nothing to do with anything else, but that I want to remember. And I guess the best way to remember something is to write it down.

The guest who stopped me was a woman
and not a man; but how can I pass up
the chance to use an engraving by
Gustave Doré?

One moment was sweetly serious. I think. A number of us arrived early to help set up. (In fact, because of technical difficulties with the Zoom link, we started late anyway.) Someone asked me to help set out tables in the other room. And as I was on my way, a woman put her hand on my arm to stop me. I don't know if I'll need to give her a name in the future, but maybe I can call her Laura. 

Laura was a guest, not a regular Sangha member, and a friend of Debbie. I didn't recognize her. But she said she recognized me! (Cue "the curse of the Tanatus.") Where had she seen me? She said she thought there was some kind of UU service I had attended many years ago. That's highly unlikely, but I might have been there for a special occasion. I attended Janet's Celebration of Life last year, for example. I volunteered to do dishes one time long ago when the Sangha was responsible for hosting some UU Congregation event. It might have been one of those occasions.

Why did Laura remember me? Or what was it about me that she recognized? That was the sweet part. She said I had a kind face—in fact, a very kind face. (Or "remarkably kind," or something equally extreme.) She said, in fact, that if we were both sitting on a park bench as strangers, my face is kind enough that she would end up spilling all her deep, dark secrets to me. Oh my heavens, really? Part of my mind wondered how many deep, dark secrets an elderly Unitarian lady could really have? But then I remembered that D regularly dressed in a style that was conservative, prim, and matronly. So maybe appearances aren't everything.

Hmm. If appearances aren't everything, then maybe Laura was misled in attributing all that kindness to me on the basis of my face. Oh well. The thought was nice while it lasted. 

The other story is shorter and funnier. During a break, Laura was talking to one of our regular Sangha members, an elderly woman whom I'll call Lynn. (I'm not sure how old Lynn is, but she must be at least a decade older than I am, and I'm in my mid-sixties.) They started talking about cats (because Laura was wearing cute cat socks) and Laura explained that her cat had recently died. She made a joke out of saying that she was still trying to get all the sympathy she could. Lynn started offering sympathy, when Laura went on to clarify that her cat had reached the age of seventeen years old before dying, a very respectable age among cats and one at which death is no surprise.

Right away Lynn shot back, "Seventeen years? I've never had a partner last that long!"

Umm, gosh. Is it just me, or does that count as TMI for other people too?

Oh well. We were all among friends, right?  

      

You know not what you say

People really don't think about what they say, do they?

(Wow, this is going to take a lot of background before I can even begin to explain what someone said tonight that hit me so wrong. I guess I better get started.)

The Setting 

You know that I attend a Buddhist Sangha once a week, practicing in the Plum Village Tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh (or "Thầy" for short) and affiliated with a local Unitarian Church. (I have regularly called it "the UU Sangha" and I wrote about it recently here.) Typically we practice sitting meditation, a little walking meditation, and then we read a text or watch a video and discuss it for dharma study. 

For the past several months, we have been reading Thay's book Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966. It's a good book in a number of ways, among them that it shows what Thay was like when he was a young monk, before he had acquired the aura of the World-Famous Great Teacher that surrounded him for much of his life. Tonight's reading finished the next-to-last chapter, and included the following story by Thay.

Last year I went to the British Museum. I was fascinated by the preserved remains of a human body buried five thousand years ago.... Every detail of the man's body had been preserved. I could see strands of hair, his ankles, each intact finger and toe. He had been buried in that position five thousand years ago in the desert. The heat of the sands had dried and preserved his body.... A little girl, about eight years old, stood beside me and asked in a worried voice, "Will that happen to me?"

I trembled and looked at this tender flower of humanity, this vulnerable child without any means to defend herself, and I said, "No, this will never happen to you." Having comforted her, I walked with her into a different room. I lied about something that Chandaka, the Buddha's charioteer, never lied about to Siddhartha.* [If you don't know the story of Siddhartha and his charioteer, you can find it here.] 

The Remark

After we finished our reading, we discussed it. One of our newer members—he joined just a few months ago—is a retired UU minister. I guess for now I'll call him The Reverend. He had already delivered himself of a short speech when we were all checking in, about the bombing of Iran on March 1. He explained that he opposed bombing other countries and that he considered his role now to be one of public opposition and activism.** When we came to discuss the reading, the Reverend immediately referred back to the story of Thay comforting the little girl in the British Museum. Then he said, "I want to take this as the text that I live by, from here going forward." He talked about how Thay spent so much time around small children: helping them, supporting them, comforting them, and encouraging them to see the beauty and the love in the world. And he concluded by quoting the very end of this chapter (a few pages later), where Thay writes:

I want to tell Steve not to worry about a thing. Tomorrow when peace returns to Vietnam, he will be able to visit Phuong Boi. Phuong Boi taught us what this love is, and Phuong Boi will share it with Steve in the language of wildflowers and grasses.... Flowers don't know how to hate. We will return to the circle of life as flowers, grasses, birds, or clouds to bring people the message of eternal love. Like the village children who, even in this time of war, sing:

"We will love others forever and ever, hand holding hand. We will love others forever."***

As the discussion progressed, many people said they found the Reverend's words inspiring. 

On not disappearing against the wallpaper

I don't know how to tag this post properly. The reference in the title is to a post from seventeen years ago (yes, really!) where I wrote, in part:

I always start new jobs as The Quiet Guy ... you know, the one who tries his best to disappear against the wallpaper? Despite this, it always happens -- at every job I have ever held -- that one day I am introduced to somebody who says, "Oh, so you're Hosea. I've heard so much about you."

This post isn't about a new job. It isn't about new circumstances, or being around strangers, or anything like that. It's just a rueful reflection on my relationship with leadership.

Sometime in the middle of 2021, right around the time my salary and benefits ended from my closed work, the elected Chair disappeared from our local section of the professional society I belong to. I don't think she "disappeared" in any sense requiring the police, but at any rate she stopped showing up to meetings or answering emails. And I was asked to step in: "Hosea, you're a nice guy and you come to all our meetings anyway ... can you take over as Chair?"

Be careful whom you help. I'm still the Chair of that section today, over four years later, notwithstanding a society rule that you can only be Chair for two consecutive one-year terms before you become ineligible. But nobody else wanted the job, and our Regional Director said it's better to overshoot the term limits than to have no Chair. Anyway I have been trying—this year in particular—to get someone else to take on the job for next year.

Fine, that's nice, but so what?

Silent retreat

This weekend, I'm on a silent, residential, meditation retreat with Debbie. It's just like the one I joined last year at this time; and at only a weekend it is shorter than the weeklong retreat we joined at the end of 2013. It's organized as a UU-Buddhist retreat in the state where Debbie lives.

A silent retreat isn't literally 100% silent all the time. There are instructions when you arrive, and there are occasional dharma talks. (This time around, we are watching videos by Pema Chödrön in place of dharma talks.) Also, there is a relaxation of the requirement for those who want to socialize quietly during meals, though there are still tables designated for those who want to eat in silence. And there are periods of "free time," which should be quiet but which are not policed too closely if you aren't disturbing others. But then there are meditation periods, when nobody speaks. And the whole campus "goes into silence" in the evening after the last meditation.

The purpose of silent meditation is that it allows you to watch your mind in action—particularly the repetitive scripts that keep us perpetually ill at ease—and in the run-up to this retreat I certainly had plenty to watch.

• I flew out to Debbie's place on Wednesday afternoon. Debbie spent the afternoon looking after her grandsons, and we had dinner with them and their father. (Mattie—their mother and Debbie's daughter—was late at work.) Debbie had to interrupt one of my stories because I was unaware that it was time for the kids to go to bed.
• Thursday was easy, with a couple of errands.
• Friday we drove to the retreat. So that morning Debbie decided that she had to vacuum and wipe down the entire inside of her car before we could pack it.
• Then we got in each other's way while packing—or rather, I got in her way, and we had to spend time talking about it.
• Debbie drives an EV (electric vehicle), so we had to plan the trip around where there were charging stations. There aren't a lot in her area. This part wasn't a big frustration, because I let her handle it. But it was an added challenge.
• Then there were other similar issues when we got to the Retreat Center, unpacked, and got through the first evening. If I avoid spelling them all out, that's partly because they were so trivial that they would bore you, ... and partly because they were so trivial that they would make me look really bad.
• It was all little stuff. But it was one minor irritation on top of another, all because I was running along my little tracks of automatic responses and—at least sometimes—she was running along hers. By bedtime last night I was very grumpy.

I slept long, ate breakfast alone in silence this morning, and hiked around the grounds for an hour. Then I joined the group to listen to Pema's first video, after which they rang the bell for silent meditation.

And oh—how delicious that silence was! After my grumpy and grumbling evening, after I blundered sullenly through the morning—the silence of that first sit felt like I could taste it. It was refreshing like cool water on a hot day. All of a sudden I felt, This is why I am here!*

I sat through the first two morning meditations. Then I skipped the thirs one to write this post instead. Now it's lunchtime, and maybe I'm a little less grumpy.

__________

* In fairness I should add that the other, later sits weren't all equally amazing. But the contrast that first morning was real.    

        

Another death

There's been another death this year, a woman I've known for a dozen years though not deeply. But for most of those years, I saw her regularly, once a week. I'll call her Janet, which wasn't her name in real life.

Janet and Debbie co-founded the UU Sangha that I attend regularly. During all the years up through when we suspended meeting because of COVID-19 in 2020, Janet facilitated every meeting, every week, except for the handful of times that she traveled to visit family. By the time we resumed meeting—first remotely, and then in a hybrid manner—her treatments for ovarian cancer had started taking a toll. So she was rarely there, and no longer led. Still, she was in everyone's hearts. This year Debbie traveled here (to Beautiful City, where I live) several times to visit with Janet and her family; and finally, five weeks ago, Janet died.

This is just some random UU congregation on the Internet, and not the one
Janet belonged to. But her Celebration of Life was easily this crowded.

The Sangha did an adapted Buddhist ceremony for the dead at our next meeting, and we are doing an abbreviated ceremony by Zoom once a week for the seven weeks thereafter. (Tonight is number five.) Last weekend the UU Church that hosts us (of which Janet was also an active member) held a Celebration of Life for her. In fact, Janet herself designed the Celebration of Life ceremony. There was a little Buddhist input, when the Sangha came up to the front to chant "The Three Refuges." And there was a walk through her life, with lots of photos. Several people stood up to talk about what she had meant in their lives. And there was lots of food. It was a lovely service.

Already some of the other members of the Sangha have started to think about their own deaths. (None of us is exactly young.) One woman has said she wants her service to look just like Janet's, and so she has started writing her life because nobody here knows anything about it.

Where does this leave me?

Vajrayogini

It's not really related to anything else we've discussed, but two or three years ago I stumbled across the most remarkable Buddhist deity. Her name is Vajrayogini, and that's a picture of her up above.

What's so special about her, besides the utterly mind-blowing picture? I think she might be a key figure to help communicate what I used to see in "high-maintenance" women.

Exercises in compassion, part 2

As I mentioned in the earlier post, the dharma teacher at this meditation retreat integrated his spiritual teachings with a political point of view. Occasionally this made his teachings sound distinctly un-Buddhist, like the time that he suggested that We often believe that our moral authority is proportional to the extent to which we cling to our views, and to our moral anger at the malefactors in public life. He spent several minutes describing this perspective, and seemingly warming to it. The attendees were lapping it up. Finally he said No, no, it's all false and this approach doesn't work. Clinging-to-views isn't a productive way forward after all. (But I wonder how many people truly heard him say that.)

But as he discussed these things, he introduced the concept of "pathological do-gooders," or "pathological altruism." This is when someone just can't stop doing things for others, or when someone does things for others with a reckless disregard for his own well-being, or indeed for any cost to himself at all. I think the teacher's motivation must have been that many of his listeners sub­consciously believe that to be their moral ideal. That's what they believe they ought to be doing! Of course that's crazy, but consider the audience. And much of the teacher's advice here was very sound and sober. He reminded us that "Caring is costly," and that if we cling too tightly to our ideal of eliminating all suffering everywhere, we will burn out. One of the most basic Buddhist teachings, after all, is that clinging causes dukkha, or suffering. So to the extent that he was able to wean people away from their fantasies of redeeming the world, his teaching was entirely orthodox and wholesome.

What caught my attention was one of his incidental comments. He may have been quoting another author—my notes don't say, and I don't remember for sure. But he pointed out that there is one circumstance—and only one!—where "pathological do-gooders" seem normal, and where it seems the most natural thing in the world to throw away all other considerations in order to help others.

That one, unique circumstance is war. (Then as an afterthought he included floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters as more or less equivalent.)

My first reaction was a sardonic smile: Gosh, could someone spin this into making a Buddhist argument for more wars? But then I began mulling.

In his classic memoir Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger describes that when World War One broke out, Germans greeted it with enthusiastic idealism.

Movies made after World War Two—movies like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)—treated as a commonplace the trouble that soldiers had returning to civilian life, because it lacks all the unity, cameraderie, ésprit, meaning, and purpose of life under fire.

Even an antiwar vehicle like the television series M*A*S*H could not help but celebrate the common purpose of the team at the (fictional) "4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" during the Korean War. The last episode, in which a ceasefire goes into effect and the characters all go home, is both celebratory and deeply poignant. 

And surely we have all heard stories of people who accomplished deeds of great bravery and daring in wartime, who rescued their team from certain death with no thought of their own safety, who nonetheless could never settle down in peacetime and make something of themselves. The image feels like it should be a commonplace. Isn't it?

War puts all conventional values in question. 

• Rank and status? Sure, they matter. But the man commanding an assault might be killed in the next moment; and any grunt with gumption and initiative can be given a battlefield promotion to take his place.
• Wealth and acquisition? Anything you have acquired can be lost just as easily. But unexpected loot can also be found. It all comes down to luck, although some people may argue that the valorous tend to be luckier than the cowardly.
• Comfort? As if!

So maybe it is possible to understand Jünger's talk of "idealism." Maybe I wasn't crazy a couple of years ago to argue that the experience of war really is the experience of "pure dynamic Quality" seen through a Social lens. Maybe when all life is being lived on the extreme edge, it makes sense that extreme, pathological altruism becomes the order of the day.

This is not an argument for more wars. But it does leave me with some sense of why certain authors have found peacetime petty and squalid and corrupt, compared with the moral purity they feel they have touched in war.

Maybe we, as humans, truly are made for war and catastrophe, not for peace and prosperity.

It's a conundrum. 

          

Exercises in compassion, part 1

A week ago, I attended a weekend-long non-residential retreat at the local State University. The theme was "Love in Turbulent Times"; based on my sense of the practitioners and the attendees, it could probably have been subtitled "How to Preserve Equanimity When the Bad Guys Won the Last Election." The dharma teacher tried valiantly to keep overt political statements out of his talks, but didn't really succeed. I wasn't surprised: I know this town and at least some of the local Buddhist community, so I expected that going in. And mostly it wasn't political, or not very.

He talked about compassion, among other topics, and this is one of the themes I found myself pondering. In particular, I remember when I first read Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart, Kornfield wrote that one of the ways to test whether your spiritual path is a healthy one is to check whether you have become more open and compassionate with time, or more isolated and hard-hearted? (I discuss this passage in this post from eleven years ago.) So I asked myself: Am I more compassionate than I used to be? And I answered, Partly yes. I think I am more compassionate towards people I know, like Wife or Father. Certainly I get angry at them a lot less. What's less clear is whether I am more compassionate towards strangers, and the dharma teacher seemed to put some emphasis on compassion towards strangers in his talks. (You could probably use this recent post to argue that my compassion for strangers is not high.) On the other hand, I wonder how often "compassion for strangers" counts as real compassion, and how often it is merely performative, in order to make the do-gooder look good? So I've got something to meditate on.

Then the morning of the second day, I was confronted with a concrete exercise in compassion! I got to the university early, and pulled into the parking lot. As I pulled in, I saw one party just walking away. They were elderly, obviously not University people, and obviously attendees of the meditation retreat. So far, so good. But when I got to the parking kiosk, I realized they had walked off without paying. More exactly, they had activated the parking kiosk, and had recorded their license plate number. But they had not actually fed the machine any money! I assume this negligence has to have been caused by confusion or ignorance; if they had intended to park-and-dash, they wouldn't have initiated the process. What should I do?

I thought about it while paying for my own parking, and for too many minutes thereafter. I saw three options:

1. Forget about the problem. In that case, campus parking enforcement would probably give them a ticket.
2. Write down their license number, and then ask around at the retreat "Is this your car? You need to go back and pay for your parking!"
3. Just pay their damned parking myself. (It didn't cost much.)

As I say, I spent way too much time thinking about this. In the end, I just paid for their parking. It seemed the easiest thing to do. (Strictly speaking, I guess it would have been easier to do nothing. But it would have bugged me if they had actually gotten a ticket.)

I do not know whether my decision was influenced by my rumination the previous day on the role of compassion in my life.  

Then the dharma teacher's remarks the second day sent my thoughts down a whole new path! See Part Two for details. 

    

Marie receives the Five Mindfulness Trainings

A day I never thought I'd see.

I've mentioned that sometimes—fitfully and irregularly—Marie will visit by Zoom the UU Sangha that I attend regularly here in town. She tells me she enjoys it, but she'll skip if she thinks she hasn't been living up to Buddhist principles lately. (Wait, isn't that like saying you won't go to church as long as you are still sinning? But I'm sure most churches would tell you that's exactly the time you should show up!)

The last few weeks we've had a guest joining us while he's temporarily in town, who is a Certified Dharma Teacher in the Plum Village tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh. This means that—among other things—he has the authority to transmit the Five Mindfulness Trainings to aspirants who want to receive them formally. (This ritual isn't quite the one he used, but close enough.) "Receiving the Five Mindfulness Trainings" sounds simple enough. But it commits you to recite or repeat them once a month, and to live by them as far as you can. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago he announced that he would be willing to transmit the Trainings while he was in town, if anyone was interested. Last week we watched a video about living with them, and tonight was scheduled for the ceremony of transmission.

I didn't really expect Marie to take up the offer, but she was interested. So we talked about it a little: what's the difference between formally receiving the Trainings and just knowing about them? I pointed out that when you receive the Trainings formally, you accept an obligation to repeat them once a month—preferably in company with a sangha—and to try to live by them, although it is understood that your compliance may not be 100%. How much difference does the commitment make? I reminded her of the conversation between Elrond and Gimli, during the Council of Elrond, as they assemble the group of Nine Walkers who will accompany the Ring south. Elrond says that everyone is going freely, and no one has any oath laid upon him except only Frodo (not to give up the Ring to the Enemy). Right away, Gimli objects:

‘Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,’ said Gimli.

‘Maybe,’ said Elrond, ‘but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.’

‘Yet sworn word may strengthen quaking heart,’ said Gimli.

‘Or break it,’ said Elrond. 'Look not too far ahead.'

Blast from the past: Gossip

This evening in Sangha we talked about gossip and I suddenly remembered a habit from early in my marriage with Wife.

It didn't start out that way. But for our Dharma study, we read the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. Then as we began to discuss them, someone (maybe I can call her Annie, in case she needs a name) commented that she had a problem with the Ninth Training.* Specifically, it's not that she thinks there is anything wrong with the behavior that it recommends—"We will … [refrain] from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence …. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure"—but that she has a lot of trouble living up to it. Fundamentally, she enjoys gossip! She added that she doesn't really know why she likes it so much, but there it is. It's just a fact of life that she has to deal with.

Of course I had (and have) no idea why in particular she enjoys gossip, and I didn't pretend otherwise. But the whole conversation put me in mind of the early years of my marriage to Wife. So when it came around to my turn, here's the story I told the Sangha.

Cheer up! We're all going to die!

Tonight at the UU Sangha I attend, we started a discussion about fear, and politics, and how to talk about them both. That is to say, our Dharma study was a reading of the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, and after we read them one member of the group started to discuss the Ninth one:

Aware that words can create happiness or suffering, we are committed to learning to speak truthfully, lovingly and constructively. We will use only words that inspire joy, confidence and hope as well as promote reconciliation and peace in ourselves and among other people. We will speak and listen in a way that can help ourselves and others to transform suffering and see the way out of difficult situations. We are determined not to say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people, nor to utter words that might cause division or hatred. We will protect the happiness and harmony of our Sangha by refraining from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence and always ask ourselves whether our perceptions are correct. We will speak only with the intention to understand and help transform the situation. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure. We will do our best to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may make difficulties for us or threaten our safety.

I'll call this woman Lisa, which is certainly not her real name. Anyway, Lisa said she knows she has trouble with this precept, because whenever she talks about politics (for example) her words never "inspire joy, confidence [or] hope." In fact, her hairdresser recently told her, "You always bring division, antagonism, and negativity with you whenever you come here." [The quote might not be exact.] Then she went on to say that she knows exactly why she talks this way—namely, that she is afraid. Lisa believes the worst about the political currents or possibilities in our country and world today, and she is afraid of all of them. (If you hadn't guessed, she is for example afraid of climate change and Donald Trump.) And this fear causes her to speak in very negative ways.

Then another woman—whom I'll call Liza (also not her real name, but her real name is very close to Lisa's)—said basically the same thing about herself, too. A third member of the group—a man, this time—got us off the theme of politics (thanks be to God!) but expressed a lot of anxiety about how his kids are turning out. His kids are 18 and 21, and only in the last couple of weeks have I started to hear any of the story. Admittedly it sounds grim, but I won't go into it now.

As I listened to all this, I was struggling with whether to say anything of my own. What I wanted to do was to teach, to instruct, to lecture. (You know, the kind of thing I do here so often and so effortlessly.) 

What's wrong with the Five Mindfulness Trainings?

Last night, the Unitarian Sangha that I belong to recited the Five Mindfulness Trainings. This is something we do every month or two. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are Thích Nhất Hạnh's recasting or interpretation of the Five Buddhist Precepts. They also serve as the entryway into the Order of Interbeing. (See also this link here.) So they are kind of a big deal for the Plum Village Tradition of Buddhism.

Overall, or at a high level, I don't really have a problem with the Five Mindfulness Trainings—that is, if you see them basically as injunctions to be a nice person and don't look too closely at the details. But you all know me by now. When have I been able to avoid looking at the details? And when you subject them to that level of scrutiny, … well … there are issues with them. Problems. Things that don't make sense, or that really should be worded a different way. 

Things that I can't fully agree with.

Now, any member of the Plum Village Tradition will be quick to tell you that the Five Mindfulness Trainings are precepts—often they take this to mean suggestions or advice—and not commandments, strictly speaking. In principle they won't insist that you stick to every jot and tittle; but they will tell you that the closer you can come to abiding by these, the less suffering you will feel in your life and therefore the happier you will be. Well and good. At the same time, I don't feel that most of them want to hear the flaws—the misconceptions or simple errors—that I find in them. So you're going to have to hear them instead.

Silence

I'm spending the week with my aunt and uncle, for the Thanksgiving holiday. Mother, Brother, and SIL are all staying with the other aunt. Both these households are in the same town, as are the households of all my cousins and their kids … basically everyone in the extended family except for me, Mother, Brother+SIL, Son 1, Son 2+Beryl, … and I guess Wife if you still count her. (In other words, this means everyone except those of us named "Tanatu.") But we're here this week: not the boys, that is, and not Wife. The rest of us.

What's remarkable to me is how quiet it is here. My aunt and uncle aren't unsociable. But for the most part they don't chatter needlessly. I talked with my aunt about public affairs for a little while over breakfast this morning. And when we all get together for dinner this evening I'm sure they'll both be part of those conversations too. But in between times, it seems like mostly they talk if there's something that has to be said. Right now my aunt is making a pecan pie in the kitchen while my uncle is cleaning up stuff she no longer needs. She just remarked, "I'll probably need that spatula." I think those were the first words spoken in the last five minutes. Before that I told her to let me know if I could help in any way, and she said "OK." Before that, the two of them coordinated briefly on tonight's dinner. But there hasn't been a lot of conversation.

Maybe we can all be outsiders together

There is probably no point to this post. Probably if I were sober I'd think of something better to write about. (Although I was sober all day up till now, and didn't write a word except on Twitter. So maybe not.) I guess you can read it and let me know.

Earlier this week, at the meeting of the UU Sangha I attend, our Dharma study was to read an essay by Ruth King about her experience of being Buddhist While Black. Then we discussed our reactions to the piece.

Kalyāṇamitra

I learned a new word in Sangha tonight: kalyāṇamitra. Thich Nhat Hanh uses it in the book we are reading. He glosses it as "a friend who is wise, a friend who has light—a true spiritual friend. This friend might already be very close to you but you haven't been able to recognize them." [Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, p. 146.]

Oh, … I think I recognize her. (Her, not them!) But I'm always glad to know a new word.

          

Becalmed, 2

Tuesday evening, the UU Sangha that I join was reading from Thich Nhat Hanh's posthumous Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet for our dharma study. (Yes, we were reading the same book six months ago. Good catch. We usually read pretty slowly.) And as we read it, I began to feel like the book was echoing themes from my earlier post of this name, but treating them differently. I began to feel like I should re-read the passage and think about it or meditate on it, because it might help me.

Of course I didn't actually do that. After Sangha was over I spent the rest of the evening far less productively. But my scribbled note to myself is still sitting on my desk, scowling at me. Maybe I should give it a try.

Hosea and Debbie go to Scotland

So, … how did the relationship fare, between us, while we were together in Scotland for two weeks? The short answer is, I think it was fine. On the one hand, we didn't fight. In the other direction, we didn't fuck. We kissed occasionally, but always with closed mouths. All the guidelines that I promised Marie we would observe, we observed.

But if you want the full flavor of the trip, … maybe I need to talk just a little longer to describe it.