My Book Club – Year #1

The book club I joined last spring isn’t “mine”. It celebrated its 20th anniversary last summer, and several of the original members attended the party. I am simply the latest addition to its ranks. And I’ve been trying, month by month, to figure out what it means to me, whether I like the books that are chosen (which I feel duty-bound to read, but which most definitely do not want to buy), and whether I feel like I “belong” and am benefiting from the experience.

To start this tale with my first appearance at the club’s monthly meetings in March 2022, wouldn’t do justice to the full story. My friend and neighbor for the past 32 years, Dick L., invited me to join the book club 5, maybe even 7, years ago. I begged off then. “Too busy with work. Come again when I retire.” Little did I know what that might mean.

My last days of teaching college chemistry arrived in May, 2021. Aside from continuing requests for letters of recommendation, I was finished. My grades had all been submitted. I had no summer students under my wing. After I cleaned up my office, I would be a Free Man, free to go on long bike rides, to bounce my grandchildren on my knee, to reacquaint myself with the my long neglected flute and recorders, maybe to travel, certainly to read. Except for one thing. Covid-19. By March 2020 I didn’t go anywhere without a mask. My meditation groups all met online, not in person. Dinners out, movies, concerts, college events, even getting together with friends – all these activities had vanished and who could say when they might ever return? Aside from weekly shopping trips, my wife and I stayed at home, available only to our children and grandchildren.

And then, at the beginning of 2022, Dick came calling. His email asked, “Would you still be interested in joining our book club?” I will skip the weeks of Q&A around the group’s Covid-19 precautions that followed. By the 2nd Wednesday of March, 2022, I was ready to make my first masked appearance, but I couldn’t eat dinner with a mask on and so off went the mask. We subsequently met online once or twice when Covid levels were high, and outside when the warmer weather permitted, but otherwise, once a month 7-10 “mature” men of a certain age (I’m one of the younger ones) gather around someone’s dinner table for roughly 2 hours to eat, to discuss what we have read, and to choose a book for the following month.

I have yet to host a dinner. Every 2nd Wednesday of the month, when the clock has ticked 4:00 pm I have had to race over to the local New Seasons to buy a bottle of wine, a salad, and some kind of small side dish that I hope will please a few people. Minutes later, my bike parked in our basement, I am flying through our house, looking for the book-of-the-month (which will usually lie closed throughout our discussion), a Covid mask, my phone and wallet and reading glasses, and a bag in which to stuff everything. Just before joining Dick for our journey to the house of our club host (Dick and I drive together), I kiss my wife as I head towards our back door, silently reminding myself that this is the only dinner that she and I will not share this month (so why do I feel like I am abandoning her?), and trying not to interpret her few words of farewell as disapproval (the notion that I might be returning with God-knows-what virus inside me is all too clear, even if it isn’t expressed).

Or, maybe, a trace of resentment. She is the far and away the Champion Reader in our family. She has reliably finished several books every month, all of the years that I have known her, whereas I have usually struggled to read more than 5 or 10 pages a day. It doesn’t make any sense that I am in a Book Club and not her. And now that she has endured several of my lively descriptions of our monthly meetings, she is also asking, Why do I remain in the Club? And that is a question that I can’t answer yet.

The “gents” (that’s how I refer to the others) are all nice folks. Ready to greet one another with a smile, and to insert a personal, usually humorous, anecdote into the discussion. I’m always well-fed and some of the gents can make magic happen in their kitchens. But the discussions themselves? I took virtually no English courses in college, and high school English was mainly designed, or so it seemed, to help students with basic reading and writing skills. So I feel like I come to the gents without any personal experiences that might inform me of what a book discussion should be like, what takeaways/rewards I should look for, and what kinds of topics and statements should be avoided.

Which isn’t entirely true. For over nearly 15 years I have been meeting periodically with a group of zen meditaters, women and men, to discuss books, poetry, teachings, and articles. My experience there is completely different. We rarely cover more than a few hundred words (if that) in any of our discussions so it can take us a year to read and discuss a smallish book. The obvious point of our discussion, although never expressed, is to gain personal insight into whatever topic we are reading about, and to open our hearts to one another in the present moment as we seek mutual understanding. And, finally, there’s never any food.

Let Go? Hold On?

This blog fell into my Lost Baggage zone a couple of years back. From 2007-18 I had obsessively recorded some thoughts and recollections on every book I read and even some important life experiences and memories.

Then, beginning in summer 2019, I began putting my attention elsewhere. I produced only 4 posts over the past three years. The birth of my granddaughter and my daughter’s childhood encounter with Morse Code, both made it online. So did some thoughts on two books that I had started, but never finished, One Hundred Years of Solitude and How To Watch Soccer. But those efforts hardly registered in my conscious (confession: I had to look all of them up just now to see what, if anything, I had contributed to this blog). Mist and Mold was slowly turning into the internet equivalent of lost baggage, maybe appearing from time to time on someone’s web browser, but mostly accumulating dust on a file server somewhere, forgotten, ignored. (An aside – My inactivity never raised any questions at WP’s marketing office. I regularly receive emails advertising blog-related opportunities.)

How to explain my apparent lack of interest in this previously satisfying journal? Encounters with unsatisfying books, unexpected demands from family and work, all of these played a role. Surprisingly, so did my encounters with some very good books, ones that I finished, loved, but still haven’t written up. Can the emotions inspired by the good writing of others be a cause of writer’s block? Yes. Definitely.

Whatever obstacles had stood in my way through 2019, things took a quick turn for the worse in early 2020 when COVID-19 came along. Like many employers, mine moved directly from “wait-and-see” to “run for the hills!” without warning. Suddenly all of my time was being spent in moving my courses online mid-semester. Even when the semester had ended, I needed to continue planning for fall and helping my colleagues plan too. (My responsibility to them stemmed from the fact that I had made the unfortunate mistake of choosing the 2019-2020 academic year to become department chair and division chair.) COVID-related duties had become a tidal wave that I couldn’t outrun. So, after spending hours every day stuck in front of a keyboard and computer screen, I sure as heck wasn’t going to try and unwind by spending a few more hours there.

But I finally retired a year ago. Old projects like Mist and Mold are getting dusted off and reevaluated. Do I still have an interest in keeping a journal? And what about the books I have read since 2018. Do I write about them or do I just let them go?

Dear Buddha, You have taught us that clinging is a source of suffering (dukkha). Help me to understand my clinging. Is it my merely my sense of duty to my blog, to the stack of already-read books in my office? Or is it something deeper? Is it my self-image that I am clinging to?

I don’t have an answer yet, but maybe one will emerge as I go along. For now I’ll live my life. Write. Or not. And pay attention to whatever happens.

A Tale for the Time Being

“Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.”

This greeting, the opening sentences of Ruth Ozeki’s novel, give no hint of the darkness that lies on the greeting’s other shore. Nao, a Japanese teenager, speaks from the pages of her diary, and will on the very next page unveil a young life filled with shame and torment. Her parents, the love-hate pillars of many a teenager’s life, are emotionally distant and dealing with their own not-so-private suffering. The friends that Nao had grown up with during her Silicon Valley childhood have, after Nao’s sudden return to Japan, dropped her in two or three taps on their Facebook pages.

But Nao’s diary is not simply a diary of hurt. It is also the slowly unfolding story of her great-grandmother, Yasutani Jiko, “a nun and a novelist and New Woman of the Taisho era” and Nao’s growing relationship with Jiko. (Two footnotes accompany this text in the book. Footnotes in a novel? Odd, but their presence cheers me. For the past 6 months I have been adding one footnote after another to the book I am currently working on. I tell myself, practicing my side of a debate that I expect to have one day with my impatient co-author, that if a novelist can write a footnote-sprinkled bestseller, surely two computational chemists can plant footnotes in their textbook?)

Jiko’s presence, her story, and even her teachings on zen, will save Nao eventually. I say this with fingers crossed, glancing at Jizo in the corner, but I can’t really know for certain because Nao’s diary has a story of its own. It has washed up on the British Columbian coast of Canada, part of the great wave of tsunami debris that washed up on North American beaches in the years following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. (A fair bit of this ocean debris, Japanese-lettered fishing floats, packing containers, and more, greeted my wife and I on several of our walks along the beaches between Arch Cape and Cannon Beach, but we haven’t seen anything new for a year or two now.) The diary was kept in a plastic Hello Kitty lunch box (probably as a hiding place and not as a message in a bottle), and the lunch box has done its job, immaculately preserving the diary within. Has time been as kind to Nao as it has been to her diary?

Nao’s diary is rescued by Ruth, a novelist living along Canada’s sparsely inhabited Pacific NW. Torn by Nao’s predicament, Ruth turns amateur sleuth, trying to find Nao’s whereabouts, even navigating her way between the different universes imagined by the many-worlds version of quantum mechanics. (Even without a nod to quantum mechanics, I can identify with Ruth. Like her, I live in the coastal zone of the Pacific NW. My sights and smells, my weather (and the wardrobe that comes with it), the seasonal rhythm of my life, are almost the same as hers. And like her, I have a book to write and I routinely neglect this responsibility, filling my time between waking and sleeping with other tasks, almost any purpose-driven activity really, that sticks its head up and says, “deal with me – I’m important.”)

Zen at War

It should go without saying that when you join or start something new, no matter how old and experienced you are, or how long it has been around, you don’t know squat about what you’re getting into. College, love, children. I didn’t know beans.

This goes for religion too. I’ve been a lifelong skeptic when it comes to spiritual matters (thanks, older brother!), so I always figured I couldn’t be fooled because I basically had no interest or faith. And I had tested this theory many times. Growing up in California in the 60’s-70’s-80’s I was surrounded by Hebrew school teachers, Jesus freaks, and New Agers. Ram Dass (then known as Baba Ram Dass) and Werner Erhard each spent several days on my tiny college campus trying to get our attention. But wherever I bumped into a guru, I took a look, pressed my “that’s crazy!” button, and moved on. So I didn’t think I was “joining” anything when I began practicing meditation a decade ago.

Update: Just saw a review for an entire book on this very theme, “Bow First, Ask Questions Later” by Gesshin Claire Greenwood.

Speech & The Eight-fold Path

Note to self: some references on Right Speech and The Eight-fold Path

Another note to self: you talk too much. Work on that.

Is awareness personal?

Me (student): Is awareness personal?

Teacher: No!

M: But it feels personal.

And so it goes, back and forth. A conversation that, in one form or another, has driven students to sit face-to-face with their teachers for hundreds of years.

This was not the first time I had been down this rabbit hole. Awareness felt personal, like something happening inside my head. This time, however, the conversation took a surprising turn. After reminding me one more time that my idea of awareness taking place somewhere inside my brain was a delusion, my teacher continued:

T (pointing to the wall): Where is awareness of the wall?

M (silent)

T (placing his hand on the rug): Where is awareness here?

M (placing my hand on the rug and pondering): But the thought comes in so fast.

T (bowing): You have passed your first koan.

Looking into the Darkness

I’ve been feeling my age more and more these days, feeling slower, more creaky, and less interested in coping with all of the things that keep others busy. My older friends assure me that I am not yet ‘old’ which is comforting, I guess, but it is comfort of a very meager sort because I feel like they are telling me, in not so many words, that its all downhill from here.

So what should I do? Shrug? Ignore what can’t be controlled? Get on with my ‘life’? Which is to say, act like the other 99.99% of the people on the planet at any given moment and pretend that I (and my so-called possessions) will live forever? Why isn’t my zen practice delivering pat answers to these questions?

I don’t have any answers, but I did find inspiration from two articles that popped into my inbox this morning: The Supreme Meditation (Larry Rosenberg, Lion’s Roar, 10 Mar 2017), and Dead Like Me (Ira Sukrungruang, Lion’s Roar, 10 Mar 2017). These writers are facing death head on so why shouldn’t I give it a try?

Ancestors

Do you have time for a story? No? Not even a short one? Never mind then.

I became acquainted with this Philip Whalen poem when I heard it read by Barry Magid (podcast, Ordinary Mind Zendo). I’ve been walking many of the paths Whalen traveled (Portland, Reed, San Francisco, zen) and now we meet again.

“Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis” by Philip Whalen

I praise those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                         splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                         caricature of Teacher

    on paper held together now by little more than ink

    & their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

Saved. Next time my mind starts digging a hole, I’ll try to remember that those ancient folks already solved my problems for me. Just look behind the busted wine jars.

Thanks to Mud & Lotus for sharing the poem and calligraphy.

Hirshfield on “Basho as Teacher”

The links between Basho (1644-1694), haiku master, and zen have occupied many a scholar. I recently came across a fairly old Tricycle (Spring 2002) article by poet Jane Hirshfield, “Basho as Teacher,” in which she articulates Basho’s core teaching as interconnection.

David Budbill on Nonseparation

A zen friend sent a gift my way: David Budbill‘s poem, “The Three Goals”. I love its blend of lofty spiritual ideal and humorous, compassionate reality. Enjoy.