Irons in the Fire

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments.

The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.'

While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, we collect more tasks and responsibilities that stretch out over time or will need to be done in the future, along with the task's we've already begun. Each becomes an iron in the fire, until we are overwhelmed by anticipation.

The irons, the things we need to do, but can't do right away but must eventually complete, the things we start but can't or won't finish, build up in the fire until we become overwhelmed, knowing we will have to abandon some of the irons to burn or abandon the iron we're working on.

Blacksmiths have a way of dealing with too many irons in the fire. They keep some of the irons out of the fire until they are ready, until they've hammered the irons they're working on. Maybe there is some way in life to keep some of those irons beside the fire, waiting, until the ones you're hammering are done, and the ones in the fire are ready. I'm going to try to mentally pigeonhole those tasks and responsibilities, setting them down beside the fire, but out of it, waiting their turn.


By the way, I've learned (to my surprise, since it is such a traditional, low technology craft), blacksmithing is an art that can teach us a lot of important lessons. It teaches that some things can only be learned through experience. Getting good at smithing requires using the hammer. It requires creating a muscle memory of simple moves, before you can make more complicated or sophisticated ones. It requires building up sufficient muscles before you can wield the hammer effectively. It is impossible to become a blacksmith just by being an educated person and following a series of instructions in a book cold turkey, at least not without going through the actual practice of making things. Blacksmithing, is a lot like Zen, it requires practice to realize.

I don't mean the kind of practice your piano teacher had you do as a child, although that is related, but the kind practice that means actually doing something, not as a study, but as a reality. You could purposefully make simple things to teach and strengthen your muscles, but the point is that you have to do it in order to learn it, to realize it, to gain the benefits of it. Talk won't get you there. Reading won't get you there. Knowing won't get you there.

A can of snakes and haiku

The Zen master Dogen says we ought "to be actualized by myriad things." I take this to suggest sympathy with the haiku and its process of creating, a poetic form centered on paying attention to things, allowing something to become 'ensouled' or noticed, and thus actualized. The haiku form it itself, has as its purpose to actualize things. For haiku does not exist to tell you about the poet's experience, but to recreate the poet's experience in you. Simply, a haiku is a "canned" actualization, like those joke cans of snakes, where when the hapless victim opens the can, a fake snake jumps out. It is as if the poet saw a snake, then made the joke can and gave it to you as a way of experiencing the fright he felt upon first seeing the snake.

(Who was Dogen? He was a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master, and the quote is from a well-known passage from Genjo-koan).

Koans, Cavaliers and Facebook

We are raised in a culture that teaches us to always look for answers or winners. We are taught to expect the purpose of a question is to find the answer. We expect the goal of a game is to win. In Zen practice, students are given questions to ponder in the form of stories, called koans. I was taken aback when I realized the purpose of the koan was not to find an answer to the question, but to measure the progress the student has made in understanding zen. It was a shock, for this rational and scientific minded person, to consider there might be some other purpose to a question than to find the correct answer. Although one can find cheat sheets with common answers to zen koans, there may be no correct answer to a koan. The answer, although interesting, is not the important point of practicing with a koan.

A koan is a measure, just as for those who believe in 'fortuna' culture (a common belief among Virginia cavaliers was that each person was born with a certain amount of forunta or good luck, which could be modified by charms), games of chance are measures of how much fortune one possess. The aim of games of chance, such as dice, is to discover how one's own fortune measures up to the other players, not to win. Sometimes a zen student will supply a stock answer to a koan, but the experience is missed if you get the answer to a koan from a cheat sheet. A koan is there to help understanding. When Helen Keller learned the meaning of "water," she experienced a profound moment of realization, which ordinary children might never experience when learning the name for water. If she had used a cheat sheet, she would have only learned that water is water and not that cold, liquid on her hands was water, her understanding, if you could call it that, would have been divorced from experience.

It was a new concept for me to absorb, how people are interested in tests telling them something about themselves, measures of who they are, yet I should not have been surprised, since such quizzes are popular on Facebook, such as what are your guilty pleasures, what would you do if you could go back in time, what superpowers would you choose, and the ultimate question is probably How Well do you Know Me?

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Zen Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala Monastery

Tom Davenport, filmmaker, has released part one of his video Bodhidharma's Shoe: Zen Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala Monastery.

Part one of a two part documentary on an American Zen retreat at Bodhi Mandala Monastery in New Mexico. A seven day intensive retreat is called a "Sesshin" which means to bring the heart/mind together. The experience of a sesshin is transformative and intense, but there are dangers -- both physical ones ( I ruined my hip, for example) as well as spiritual ones (like believing that the Zen Master is a saint or a god). Zazen of this intensity changes you and a lot of good flows out into the world from it (as long as you take yourself lightly and have a sense of humor). But requires that we (the sangha) all support each other. I doubt that anyone could do this alone.

Tom Davenport, a old timer at Zen in America, who got a lot of help from his friends, tells the story of a novice's entry into zen, and says of the experience "...thinking back to those days, we did not really understand what we were getting into..." The video is on Revver.com because of the higher quality video. Or YouTube if you prefer:

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART ONE

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART TWO

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART THREE

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART FOUR (END)

Sorry about the links, but some controversy erupted over the film and I will have to get back sometime to correct the links.

Drafts of American Zen

Independent filmmaker Tom Davenport has been working on a film exploring the daily rituals of zen practice during a meditation retreat. The film contrasts a series of drawings about zen monastic life in Japan many years ago with images from current practice in the United States. He has posted drafts of his film in segments on YouTube.

1. American Zen Part One
   
2. American Zen Part Two
   
3. American Zen Part Three
4. American Zen Part Four
   

Weaving the old drawings through the daily life of zen practice helps the uninitiated feel comfortable with the mysterious happenings depicted in the film. The depiction of a novice's entry into this mysterious world helps us feel secure entering it. Seeing the events and people depicted in the drawings match those before our eyes gives us a sense of continuity. Between the narration and the exotic but familiar scenes, the film goes far to dispel the mystery of zen practice and acquaint the viewer with the history and practice of zen in America.

The internet has made it possible for people to see filmmakers at work, like the way one can watch glassblowers working at the local craft fair, out in the open as they work their miracles where everyone can see. Whoever is interested in filmmaking, can watch the process or participate in the debate as a film is edited. Whether that is a good thing or not, I will leave to posterity to decide, but it is one more way in which the network changes they way things are done.

God's Peculiar People

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People, which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, which is a traditional feature of Japanese culture, arising from the pre-literate period in which the willfulness principle operated. It is not dissimilar to the attitudes of Pentecostals who reject the natural world to keep one foot in the spirit world accompanying the natural.

This "abandonment of the world" appears similar to Zen's entreaty to abandon worldly things as causes of suffering, and entry into a spirit world of meditation, which can be likened to the "unspeakable joy" that Pentecostals feel upon receiving the "holy ghost" and their general happiness derived from their faith. The levels of blessing Pentecostals strive for seem to echo the levels of attainment in zen.

(In addition to Elaine's book, you can watch Joy Unspeakable on the Folkstreams website).

In Haiku, the tree and the person, are not very separated

I was talking with filmmaker Tom Davenport today and the discussion turned to my observations of a tree outside the window of my apartment, which over many years I have observed to display fascinating changes and cycles in response to climate. The conversation turned to haiku as he likened my noticing a leaf falling outside my window on a quiet day to haiku. I was startled when he said "in haiku, the tree and the person are not very separated."

This is an idea very close to Zen. I won't go into the details of Zen belief here, but one idea of Zen is that individuals can reach a state where they feel as if there is no separation between the self and the things making up the world around them. Scientists and Zen masters may debate exactly how and why this feeling arises in the human mind, but what is interesting is the possibility haiku may represent a kind of expression or record of this kind of merging of the individual with things. I found myself agreeing with his observation. He helped me see where the haiku does in a way bring the haiku writer and the tree very nearly together.

The haiku represents the tree very differently than a Western poem might. A poet might say "I sat under a beautiful tree one day..." but a haiku might say "golden tree; a leaf falls; I hear." The haiku tends to describe the subject and the perceptions of the haiku writer, and in so doing the tree becomes less separated from the person and the person a little less separated from the tree. The example is sketchy, but I think it gets to the heart of the difference between the haiku tradition and what is commonly thought of as poetry.

The poem uses the tree as a symbol. The haiku does two very strange things in comparison to the typical poem. It takes a photograph of the tree...in that it describes the tree instead of using an adjective like "beautiful." By describing and naming what is beautiful about the tree, all readers of the haiku can reconstruct the experience of the haiku writer in the same way a photograph reconstructs the scene for which we were not present. The other thing the haiku does is tell use what feeling was evoked by perceiving the tree. In haiku, words represent the tree as itself. Natural events are represented as they happen, and does not try to tell a story. Haiku avoids telling a story.

When it succeeds, poetry is said to communicate what it is like to be alive in the world. In the Western tradition, it achieves this only while sustaining a great deal of separation between the poet and the subject of the poem (the poem tends to deconstruct the tree more than reconstruct it, in that it does not leave the tree alone, but must apply adjectives to it). In the haiku, the writer and the natural phenomena are joined in the act of happening and perceiving, brought together and recorded as if by a camera. The haiku becomes a kind of photographic record of this merging of perceiver and the perceived.

I remembered reading some years ago to avoid adverbs and adjectives in haiku, because they lead to opinions placing things in context, so that by avoiding them "the haiku is left with images of things just as they are." (http://www.ahapoetry.com/haiku.htm 2005) A strong similarity to photography exists in the haiku. I am left to wonder if the photographer and subject are not very much separated once entangled in a photograph, perhaps they do steal men's souls after all.