Nambe retreat

The Gate
The Gate
However, this unusual line of the head-shaving
chant says that the Bodhisattva’s commitment to
mutual awakening is full of virtue which cannot be
defiled. In other words, we don’t create this virtue,
but neither can we destroy it. You can turn away from
this virtue and try to ignore it, but you also have the
choice to enact and practice it for the remainder of
your life.
This is the practice of renunciation, the commitment
to practice for the benefit of all beings, renouncing
the “self-centered dream” as the unconscious organizing
principle of this “drifting-wandering life.”
You have the opportunity to bring forward and
express this virtue.
By sitting zazen we enact renunciation. We take the
posture of a Buddha and relinquish all other activities
as we sit. We express what we can’t even
conceive of, our nature as a Buddha, and it is said
that the virtue of even one person’s zazen cannot
be comprehended. In Bendowa, written by Dogen
Zenji, he says: “…the zazen of even one person at one
moment imperceptibly accords with all things and
fully resonates through all time.” This is the virtue
which cannot be defiled. I know some of this may
sound strange or difficult to understand, but I am
hoping that is helps you begin to ask yourself some
important practice questions.
• Where do I cling habitually? What are the bonds
which are hardest to break.
• What am I willing to let go of and what am I not?
• How does my clinging get in my way or cause
suffering for me or others around me?
• Do I really have the faith that the Way of the
Bodsattva makes a difference in any was whatever?
• Can I imagine that some virtue is my deepest and
most enduring quality which cannot be
defiled?
• Do I really believe I will die?
Not know intellectually, but know!
I, like many of you, have had to deal with the recent
death of Mary Oliver. I find it hard to comprehend
that she is no longer living. Aren’t her poems ample
evidence of her existence?
At the end of one of her classic poems,
In Blackwater Woods, she writes:
Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this:
the fires and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
“Everything leads back to this.”
Love what you love as deeply as you can,
down to the bone.
This is an embodied, everyday vow of a bodhisattva.
Realize that your life depends of all other life. This is
why you must dedicate your life to others. This is the
understanding of renunciation and impermanence.
I am facing these practice challenges now. I left
Austin. I lost a lot in doing so. I thought I knew
something about renunciation when I was ordained,
in the images you see here, but I didn’t know it in my
bones in the ways I do now. And I know that there is
more to come.
My parents and friends are moving toward death.
I am moving toward death. I am aging and I am
having to make hard choices about what I can do and
want to do, and more importantly, what I can no
longer do. It feels like one long string of losses,
“whose other side is salvation” as Mary Oliver
assures me. Continually turning toward these
realities will save me/us from unnecessary
suffering, but there is a cost.
In the midst of his poem The Layers,
Stanley Kunitz writes:
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
“How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of
losses”? Sometimes it is tough to look back, as
I am compelled to do from my hillside here in
Hawaii. I am happy to be here. That is not the
issue, but do you ever wince as you reflect on your
past, feeling the sting of regret, the broken
heartedness of loss, the indescribable beauty of
special moments, the overwhelming gratitude
and grace of real love, or the tangle of loves and
losses which are inevitable? I have to take a
very deep breath and “gather my strength to proceed
on my journey.”
Practice helps.
Friendships help more.
Things I worked so hard to accomplish all my life are
now fading in the rear-view mirror. “I see the milestones
dwindling toward the horizon.” Things which
used to be calling me forward are now fading in the
distance, and the places and people which were
central, like a campfire is central to a campsite, seem
abandoned now, and, that exquisitely beautiful line,
so gorgeous and hard to bear, “over which scavenger
angels wheel on heavy wings.” I created a self, a life,
an identity, a story, a reality, and attached to it. My
“affections,” my attachments, evolved as my “life,”
are they are now scattered. What I thought was
permanent, or at least solid, has been shown to be
impermanent and flimsy. “How shall the heart be
reconciled to its feast of losses?” This is our question
Did you notice the grease pencil markings on a few
of the images on the contact sheet? Cassy could see
something in some of the frames once they were
printed. Focusing on a more narrow portion of the
whole was suggesting a new perspective — a fresh
story or a better story, or somehow revealing the
real story to her. I love seeing those marks. Some of
us write poetry, some photograph, some journal, or
paint, or sing. There are so many ways in which we
take what life gives us and then shape it into a life
journey that we imagine is going to be good and
real. Practice shapes our lives over time and
focuses our imagination in ways which reveal our
true virtue.
Without renunciation real life is not possible.
—Flint
Empty handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going —
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
Kozan Ichigyo, 14th century Zen monk
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