I have been working regularly with gratitude practice as a part of a wider series of awareness practices. I’m so grateful that we exist at all, and well aware of all the reasons we might not be here. How astonishing it is that these molecules have come together to give us this conscious awareness of each other, this power of creativity and insight, this possibility of continuing the evolution of form in the universe. I am touched by everything you will bring forward, grateful for your self-reflections, your honesty, your openness and sharing. I’m moved by your curiosity, your care, your discipline, attention, and energy. I am honored to have the chance to be with you as a part of this learning community for a part of your senior year. It is an experience that I know I will enjoy and one where I will get to learn so much about so many things. Thank you for your offerings to this short written piece, and thank you for the care, interest, and integrity that you will offer all year long as we take up this work together.
Even now, after teaching for many years at Friends’ Central, my experience of this practice is ever changing – each day, everything is new, looks different. The breadth of what arises in the space of teaching keeps growing for me, and I find an ever increasing sense of unity, of connectedness, and of meaning in every detail. I love so many different things – plants, insects, clouds, apples, sunlight on moving water, tropical fruits, carved wood, jasmine, fireflies, islands, July, moonlight, woodsmoke, Paris, fountain pens, fossils, ferns, touch, Corelli, conversation, coffee, friendship, sleeping, waking, trust, shadows, melons, honesty, eggs, fog, raspberries, the sound of crickets, snow, truth, color, voices, the ocean, diversity, illusion, morning, evening, cilantro, lightning, writing, redwoods, long lists….
I am grateful to all of my teachers, to so many who have given me so much at different stages in this journey. I practice as a Zen Buddhist in the lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi, a Japanese Zen teacher who came to the US in 1959; I have a dharma name in the tradition of Zen practitioners that I use in that community; it is Ango, and it means “Bliss Awakening.” I was ordained as a priest in this tradition in December of 2012 and I continue my training and development in relation to that role and what it means in my life. I am very interested in both complexity and simplicity. I enjoy reflecting on paradox and polarities and resting in the middle way, in the stillpoint. I am curious about all of the different perspectives we can hold and the ways that the perspectives we take create our experience of what we know as reality. In the summer months, I teach in a different setting, working with the framework of integral thinking applied to education, ecology and community. I am on the Board of Directors for a Canadian non-profit called Next Step Integral. As an organization, we believe that some of the most important work before us involves helping to foster the development of human consciousness and awareness at a critical moment in the history of the planet. For five years we have offered intensive experiential seminars in the Pacific Northwest to explore and share the potential of an integral approach to being in the world.
I am deeply interested in creating opportunities for people to grow and explore the depths of knowing and being. I think of our botany class as a kind of laboratory, a pioneering space, an exploration of what is possible in a place where a group comes together with the highest intentions around individual and collective learning. And above all else, I am grateful to be here with you, connected to this school community and all of its past present and future. Below are a few other notes from earlier who am I offerings to botany students…
2009-10:
No preferences, radical acceptance, deep compassion, wide embrace, full awareness, skillful work with purity, with energy, with love, with gratitude. Non-grasping means falling into the water. Non-attachment means the clouds blow by, the rains fall, the sun dries up the pond. Balance and the middle way mean not moving, not standing still. Brilliant colors arise in the darkness and in dying we find the undying ever present. Mud on my cuffs, cut grass on my socks, bites on my neck, we settle in and watch the sky clear, rest in what simply is, rest as what simply is. At September’s arrival there is just this: blueberries and kombucha, a monarch and fleeing green Chlorochlamys, rain on the tin roof, glow worms and shooting stars, the smell of carrots and silage, a flight of five crying killdeer, the hand cranked radio bringing sound into a dusty wooden darkness. Our work is thus perfectly before us, in each task and each moment, opening to this extraordinary possibility. I drift on a raft built of bones and spider silk, burning in the sun. At night the starfish kiss my toes in the tossing murky waters. We bring the ocean home in a thimble and have only a few drops of salty water, but out there, the wind blows us across the swells and we fall into the depths vast beyond comprehension. Who are we indeed – suspended in the place between dreams and emptiness: All This too.
I am Rumi and the whirling dervishes, spinning through the Masnavi, fish calligraphy. I am the hanging scroll: mu shin, enso: perfect brush strokes of black ink on light paper. The moon behind a cloud, the first light on an alpen summit, the sweet, sweet taste of passion fruit, the smells of cedar smoke, chocolate, jasmine, hot pine bark, the tiny waning crescent moon, red rock canyons, kelp and dulse in salty fog – there am I, present as infinite form and substance. I am suffering and hunger, loss and desire, in distant and forgotten places, longing for peace, for rain, for release. I am with those who are lonely and afraid, who have been separated from those they love, who are in pain, on trial, imprisoned. I am with those who are elated, ecstatic, in love, overjoyed. I am within each moment of discovery, of self-awareness, of revealed truth. I have always been there, even before these concepts of freedom and imprisonment came into existence.
I need nothing, possess nothing, understand nothing. I am vastness and emptiness that knows no knowing. I am infinitesimally small, tiny, without significance. I am the Gift and the boundless appreciation and gratitude for that which has been received.
No more meanings! My pleasure now is with the inner sun, the inner moon. No longer two worlds signaling each other. Shapes do not come to mind. This giving up has nothing to do with exhaustion. I walk from one garden into another, waves against my boat, ocean flames refining as fresh as flowers and fish calligraphy. Let’s see what they’re writing. No more the presence! Green itself begs me dive in this that Shams has given. ————————————————————————-2008: I become more plural and more singular every season, steeped more fully in apparent paradox and connected more deeply to that reality where the seeming contradictions evaporate. I am more aware of the presence of knowing mind and not knowing mind, and converse openly with many voices, each of which offers one perspective out of many. I am less fully embedded in passing time, more fully connected to many selves past present and future, as well as that exquisite place where self and other truly meet.
I increasingly feel my self to be the amalgamated presence of all those teachers friends and writers who have shared wisdom and experience with me, as well as the long lines of ancestors who faced challenges before me and prepared the ground for our existence here and now.
Sometimes when it rains, I am the wind blowing the droplets sideways on their way to the ground; sometimes when the sun sets, I am the mountains that reflect the light in shades of purple under the salmon colored clouds. Sometimes I cannot be found anywhere:
“However many great sages and wise ones we suppose have assembled in the mountains, ever since they entered the mountains no one has met a single one of them.”
And sometimes I can be found everywhere. I can be found in music, in Corelli’s concerto grosso, opus 6, number 10 in C major. I can be found in stained glass in Pittsburgh and Paris, and in moth-pollinated flowers lit by a waning moon. I am often found in Rumi, in a few words or in the deep in the flow of an epic.
Any Chance Meeting
In every gathering, in any chance meeting
on the street, there is a shine, an elegance
rising up. Today I recognized that that
jewel-like beauty is the presence, our loving
confusion, the glow in which watery clay gets
brighter than fire, the one we call the Friend.
I am with my children and your children. I am scattering like light across the oceans and continents. I am a brief fiery trail in the dark night sky, bright, piercing and momentary as an Orionid meteorite.
The river remains at one place, flowing under the bridge, running high or low, altering its course ever so slowly across time even as each molecule of water passes by so quickly its location is ever changing; some water molecules have flowed down this river course before and roll again through the rocks and stones to the sea.
