Sue Ellen
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Since I have no idea how to share photos, you’re going to have to take my word for it ;-). My little shrine is on a former bedside table (simple, Scan teak, with 3 drawers), and it’s been there silently present for quite a long time. It was only recently, however, that I started to really use it for daily meditation. I figured out that while my knees cannot manage sitting cross-legged, I can use an on-end cushion with hero pose without discomfort. So, yay. I put items on the shrine that have associations with every member of my (small) family, both living and deceased: a bronze elephant that was on Grandpa’s desk; a little mat Granny made as a child; a jar with shells my three sons collected and gave me over the years; an amethyst geode from my husband; a jade elephant my mother brought from China; a turquoise mala one of my sons gave me. There’s also a little brass bell bowl and mallet, a mist diffuser (used with or without oils), my framed Refuge Vow name, a watercolor copy I painted of Guan Yin, and three little battery votive candles (I don’t want to use candles in my studio room). I have elements of earth (metals, rocks), fire (the energy of the candles), and air plus water in the mist diffuser.
I also put a tiny shrine on the table in front of my favorite reading spot, with another little jade elephant, a tiny porcelain dish holding one of the electric votives, two special books resting on a copper bookend from my Grandpa’s desk, and a little tile to hold my tea cup.
I have found that opening my practice or reading time by tending to the shrines makes a container for the activity, makes it more special and focused somehow. And it brings me joy to let my gaze linger on the items I’ve included for their associations.
Sue May here, from Eagle River, Alaska. I’ve been an OHP member for about ten years, and have recently determined that sharpening my practice and understanding are a needed “tune up” at this time in my life. I recently participated in the Buddhism Beyond Belief course, which was excellent – I’m still contemplating many of the teachings. Right now I’m most grateful for elements of daily life that we taken for granted: clean, available water right at the tap; steady electricity (Spain, maybe not so much) when we push a little plastic thingy with prongs into holes in our wall; the ability to have “stuff” such as cars, a house for shelter, roads on which to drive, access to food and necessities; and other people in our world, known or unknown.
My practice is steady, 20 min. a day, sometimes shikantaza (Zen), sometimes breath awareness, in front of my small shrine, using the daily OHP prompts. It feels steadying, it feels as essential as brushing my teeth or putting on my watch. Even better, when I have the opportunity to meditate on zoom with Sangha, the miracle of a gathering around the world being together in the ether is golden.
Favorite books are hard to pin down. Any of the Louise Penny mysteries, my little e.e. cummings poetry collection from high school, Gift From the Sea – all inspire and bring joy. Favorite music – a tough question to narrow down, since mood and circumstances often bubble up different pieces. Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (especially the Brandi Carlile version); Imagine by John Lennon; Turn Turn Turn by CSNY are all favorites (and make me cry). There is a special place for Coltrane as well.
So that’s some of me. I’m happy to see familiar faces in this group.
Challenge accepted. I have done something like this in the past, leaving a favorite quote tucked into a library book. This time I chose a sentence by Rumi: “I wish I could show you when you are lonely in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.” I painted a little disc with watercolors, a generic figure staring into a dark field of Paynes gray blue (with some salt sprinkles for texture), with a glowing Gamboge yellow field behind them. I wrote the Rumi quote on the back and tucked it tightly into a library book, one of ten identical volumes in a book club kit, that I returned to the library. I made sure to insert it firmly since I’ve seen library staff fanning pages upside down for inserts. I think there were some racist or political inserts found in the past that they are trying to catch.
So now what? That kit will go to the big central library book kit storage to await the next book club that checks it out. The book isn’t a new one, so maybe it will be some time before anyone is interested. I feel a secret delight that some far-off day (or maybe next week) someone whom I don’t know will be part of a book club, pick up their copy and right there on page 107 they will find my tiny painting. This is great fun! I see a new stealth hobby. And if the reader finds the message personally comforting, all the better. Or they may toss it out, which is also fine.
I figured this would be the prompt, and I knew at once where I would go. My husband has mild cognitive impairment, and while he operates quite well in daily life, he gets thrown when the unexpected happens or if there are too many things going on. I have had many occasions to straighten out snarls that he inadvertently got us into, particularly in the online world where it is hard for septuagenarians to navigate, and so many opportunities to do real damage.
A case in point: he had filed a required government document earlier this year, as had I, but he got a notice this week that he had not signed it. This was an online filing requiring an electronic signature, which he could not figure out. As a result, he became agitated and started just hitting buttons on the website, cursing and fuming. I came to help and saw at once the need to pacify, to sit in the same place with him, to even out the energy of panic and offer myself as a team member. It has taken me a very long time to recognize that I need to keep a pace apart to keep from entering his frantic space. Then came the enriching part – I could gently point to the correct form link. I was tempted to bump him aside and do it for him, but I’ve found it’s important to let the situation unfold and allow him time and space to figure it out. This is very hard for me to do, since my patience is not always what it should be, and I just want to git ‘er done. He did find the form and button, but had trouble understanding what was needed. Again, I paused, which may be magnetizing since I was tuning into what was needed from me (that pesky patience again). And then it was done, fixed, made right, and I could let it go – really let it go without fussing at him or taking any credit. Destroying. Until the next time….
Tricia, as I read your essay, I noticed that the nightmarish quality continued to grow. I love your description as “full catastrophe.” Thank you for your vivid description and kudos for picking out some sort of sanity that works with the five families.
This is the hardest of the essays for me to date, probably because I have always struggled a bit with the five Buddha families’ classifications. I am also a wee bit cautious about segregating people with their complexities into any sort of rubric. But here goes. I was hiking at the Alaska state park where I work, and stopped to contemplate the late winter scene at one of our viewing decks. There’s a pond (lately expanded by a new beaver dam), in a valley between two 3000+ foot mountain ridges, surrounded by the spruce and birch of the northern boreal forest. The sky is cobalt blue with those tiny puffballs of cirrocumulus clouds drifting east. Snow-covered mountains and blue sky are reflected in the nearly still water, rippled only by an American Dipper bobbing and dunking at the edge of receding ice. It is still yet not motionless – a slight breeze shifts the spruce branches, chickadees chitter in their hidden boughs. No fish have returned yet, but there are slow-swimming salmon fry circulating deep in the quiet nooks by the deck pilings. This seems to breathe Vajra, with the water element, literally mirror-like and reflecting, brilliant and fresh. In this pause between seasons, it is my happy place.
I have to add this bit to my previous posting. I find that the Heart Sutra continues to burble up in my consciousness throughout the day. Interesting that we call it the “Heart” Sutra – the word “heart” is nowhere in the text (at least in this translation). If the title read, “The Sutra of the Pith of Transcendent Knowledge,” would we call it the “Pith” Sutra? Probably not. So the heart, the most inner, life sustaining, vital organ is key. The word brings the inexplicable and vast concepts the sutra explicates into the most intimate space. I know I need to contemplate this more, but it struck me that the wording is interesting.
Second thought, yesterday I found myself mentally spiraling about an online error my dear but somewhat cognitively challenged husband made, that cost us $150. I am trying mightily to undo the charges, but there are several vendors involved which makes it a bit complicated. I realized that my mind could not stop picking at the problem, it was like (as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described) stabbing myself with the second arrow, and no matter what I tried, couldn’t seem to stop fretting. I was frustrated and very sad. And then, the phrase, “The mantra that calms all suffering” popped into my mind – really, like a bubble popping. So I repeated the mantra, attending to the tone, the words and the synchrony with my breath that seems to naturally occur. And it shifted my mind, just a step back at first, but with increasing space from the problem knot. What a relief! Real life lesson learned.
Love your reflections, and the Lennon reference. I, too, have a strong sense that Patience is my most fertile field for growth. Perhaps generosity is foundational for patience, since there has to be a softening, an allowance for time and space to roll on in their own pace, which can only come from a feeling of abundance of both. I’m not sure I’m making sense, but impatience seems tight and squeezing of time and space to our will to control. There is no need to control when abundance eases control.
My very first exposure to the Heart Sutra was in 2018, at a spring retreat in Colorado. The shrine room held about 90 people, there was a drum and gong, and we were given copies to follow. I had never chanted before, but had sung plainsong in religious settings. What I recall was that the steady drum beat seemed to pound the series of “no’s” into my head, and that I felt a sense of despair. When we got to the line, “Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear,” I burst into tears, feeling some inexpressible profound relief. The experience was so powerful that I shied away from the text for several months. In 2019, Karl Brunholtzel and Susan presented the Heart Sutra (he wrote the book, The Heart Attack Sutra), that took it apart line by line. I still have my copy, tattooed heavily with notes in the margins. Every once in a while the phrases about emptiness and form slip into my thoughts, mostly to allow a change in perspective from perseveration to openness.
So here I am today, having infrequently chanted the text, now adding it to my daily practice. My first thought was that it sounds like music when chanted, and I felt that I could hear a sustained cello note throughout. Interestingly, I can still hear that tone after meditation. Yesterday, I decided to try incorporating the Heart Sutra into my daily two mile walk, but I only used the mantra line, repeated over and over for the 40 minutes or so I walked. After a couple of repetitions, I found that I’d developed a cadence, like soldiers, with a held “Om,” the rest of the phrase falling into a brisk rhythm, with natural breaths. It felt playful, even though I had a twinge of conscience that perhaps I was making light of a profound teaching. But then I returned home, and the chanted mantra kept spinning in my head, with all of its energy. But why can’t there be playfulness and energy? After all, while the cushion is the setting for stillness and the nuance of breath, real life is not really still. And if the purpose of the mantra is to train “sons and daughters of noble families,” perhaps it has to be part of the energy of training.
Beautifully put, Anna. I love the mixing of feelings and how love and grief are ultimately the same. I have been thinking of meditation as laying face up in a meadow of life and death – life in the grasses and flowers, and all the busy insect/bird/flora life above ground, and death in the dark soil that once was life. Susan once quoted Saul Bellow, something like “[knowing death] is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.”
This is a tough prompt. Everything that comes to mind seems too superficial or facile, but here goes. In looking at the aspects of relative bodhicitta, it seems all about the best intentions. Yes, we want to be kind, caring, compassionate and loving. Riding the waves of life in equanimity seems inexpressibly appealing, even delightful. But then the question arises: Who is forming the intention? Receiving the kindness and care (the giver as well as the receiver)? Who is riding the waves? I think that this is where absolute bodhicitta comes in. No one is doing anything to/for anyone else, no one is riding the waves, no giver, no receiver, maybe even no waves or ocean.
I once heard meditation described as sitting in the front row of a theater with dozens of little scenes/stories being acted out on an infinite stage, all thoughts and emotions that are tugging at our minds when we sit. Then the teacher pointed out that there really is no theater goer, no actors, maybe no stage, no theater – it’s inseparable and only imaginable in the way that you catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, that you cannot even name.
I love to research, to ferret out answers to complicated questions (nerd that I am). On this one, though, I have to pause, to allow whatever wisdom is out there to enter. And to be aware, receptive, relaxed while also alert – and maybe even joyful.
Tracy, what you are experiencing sounds overwhelming, and your feeling of terror seem like a natural reaction. You are spot on in embracing the counterintuitive wisdom that the only way to get past is to go through without resistance. Whew! Easier said than done sometimes. It reminds me of the Biblical 23rd psalm, walking through the valley of death. We’re all walking there, and knowing that we’re not alone on that path makes all the difference. Sending metta to you and all those who are being tossed in life storms.
My initial response to Right Livelihood was, “Pff, no brainer.” I’m a retired social worker, worked in the field of mental health for children, active duty military and veterans. Surely that punched my ticket. And yet. What about right now? My income is from the federal government retirement system and social security, with some investment returns as well. I was looking at one of the investment accounts as I worked on taxes, and paid attention (for the first time, I admit) to the dozen or so funds that were selected by some AI algorithm based on my “moderately risk averse” profile. Where was my money going? Off of whose activity am I profiting? Most of them are alphabet soup, but there are some that raised my eyebrows – Goldman Sachs!? Really? Are my modest investments supporting activities that harm other people, directly or indirectly? How do I tell, and what do I do about it?
I know that there are “green funds” where investments are vetted, but this is a trust that I had no say over since my late mother established it. Of course, there are also funds in the local credit union that they use for investments, from which I get a very modest interest. This tracing the money can become a rabbit hole in no time.
Perhaps the better question is how I spend the money from these resources. Buying goods and services is necessary and desirable for daily life. If I choose to buy locally or not to patronize companies whose policies I feel are harmful or dishonest, perhaps that counts in some way. That way, my money goes toward someone else’s livelihood in a way that is less harmful than the alternatives. But even that is not always possible. I live in Alaska, and we simply do not have many retail outlets that are available elsewhere. We have to ship in most of our food and dry goods – there’s just no way around that. But what I can do is to be aware – of my spending patterns, where my money goes, and my life choices based on Right Livelihood.
Anna, you make a solid point that the four reminders can certainly shift our perspective toward lightness and agency. When I was in clinical practice, there were some folks who had a distinct external locus of control, that is, they felt buffeted constantly by events around them. Sometimes they felt like victims, helpless and ineffective; sometimes they blamed every negative aspect of their lives on other people or events. In both cases, they lacked a feeling of making their own choices of emotions and behavior. It can feel intolerable to endure all of the external factors, like being sandblasted; however, if we can hold onto impermanence we can find experience. Even if enforcing impermanence comes by choosing to turn aside from media for a bit, we can feel less overwhelmed. And, we can be curious about that feeling of overwhelm – and know that others are feeling that, too.
