Now We're Cooking

Not much to say, but a short space to say it in helps.
Watched an intriguing documentary movie two nights ago. "How to Cook Your Life" centers around the Tassajara Bread Book author, Roshi Edward Espe Brown, his approach to life and food. I thought it worth the hour-and-a-half.
I read that book back in the 80's and it got me back into baking bread. The Gruel Bread recipe is infamous in my wife's eyes!
But take a look, if you're so inclined. The little poem about the duck in the ocean is worth the ride just by itself.

More Moon on Water Stuff

Autumn River Song



The moon shimmers in green water.

White herons fly through the moonlight.

The young man hears a girl gathering water-chestnuts:

into the night, singing, they paddle home together.



Li T'ai-po

tr. Hamil

Li Po

I Woke Up

So, I woke up and there was a deer barrelling down the road right for me and I just sat there wondering where I'd been. A month, more than a month, and here we go.
I did make a voyage, one of intended celebration, to chi-town for a niece's wedding, long overdue, to a man she loves. And we stopped at dutch-oven-ville in Oklahoma and ate rich with the southerners.

Slowly, slowly, still the rhythm of the practice. Been sitting with my incense, attending to the mudra, while the little ones come out of the baseboards and watch in their wordless way.

It occurs that my last blog posting mused about the taking of others' lives. Now, I must muse more. This sunday past we took ten chicken lives; we butchered them, respectfully we believe, offering the corn meal, expressing our gratitude, trying to speak in slow and quiet tones, sharpening the jugular knives to a fine point. There were tears there, no doubt, but also the gut joy of the carnivore.

So, it occurs to me that perhaps one solid way to love life is to be actively engaged and aware in its taking. Hey, there's the edge. Or, as Willy the Sheik once said, the rub. That to be or not to be quandry. His Hamlet worried himself dark with fear of the afterworld. I worry myself dark with fear of this one. And maybe, our worry is misplaced in the same spot. The same place. Here and hereafter, really that much different, or two shoes on the same foot?

Let's bless these ones that give quietly their blood or their sap that we may live gratefully a while longer. Ah, Gentle... blood...letting... go.

Dead Duck Eyes

It's a dead duck that brings me here. Two ducks. Sunday, that once-ago day of rest found me butchering two young male ducks, muscovies, good carnivore that I am.
I did so....repectfully. Offered the corn meal, expressed gratitude, bismillah, scalpel to the jugular.
Firewood/ashes...firewood/ashes. Pondered the koan with blood on my overalls, blood on my hands.
Killing is a spiritual moment. It must be so. As a keeper of animals, it inevitably comes to this, and I admit my carnivorous desires. But that spark that passes, living a moment ago, now this moment flesh and bone, that's the holy algebra.
X-?=Y, so ?=Y-X, is that how it works?
As we ponder our firewood/ashes koan, I am reminded of the mystery religions I feel a part of, how they turn on the reversal of this notion that death is not life, life not death. Suddenly, miraculously, life becomes ducks becomes death by my hand.
Didn't I learn in sunday school: Christ rolls the stone away, death is overcome?
Meanwhile, on a windy day in New Mexico, those ducks' eyes don't close. Have they solved the great Genjo-koan with the help of this bloody blade?

Genjo-koan is some heavy lifting with the palm of my mudra hand....

I hope that when I am dumb-struck next time I have the decency to bow completely.

Last night finishing chapter of Dosho's book on Katagiri-Roshi, I was moved by this: sitting for non-attainment. Body, Breath, Mind (in the palm of my hand--yeah, right!) embroiled or dancing the dervish of no attainment.

Bow-wow! I gotta' go sit again and visit that conundrum. Boom, boom, boom, that's what the heart says. Could it be that the body is not-pure because it still has to breathe? If only I could still that breathing, could I not exist in stillness for ever?

Bow-shot across the bow of the skimming keel: better go sit again and visit the sacred conundrum, no?

stuck on stillness, still stuck

"Because I could not stop for death,

He kindly stopped for me," she said.

Last couple of episodes zazen the stillness issue has been arising. A passing suggestion, hint of wisteria perhaps: "...if only you were still enough, the task would be complete...." that kinda' thing-being.

Yes, Dosho, very spot on, stinkiness already with the godliness. No place to hang our holy hats. Standing on the threshold, hat in hand, that's what we say of the pitiful supplicant, the beggar at the door.

I practiced, as a young man, and fairly diligently, Islam. Not the new-age sufi stuff so common here in the '70's (nothing against it, mind you, not now), but the "real thing" the orthodox Islam, we called it, sunni version. For five years, very devout, prayer five times a day in the prescribed form, learning Arabic, memorizing the Qur'an.

On the sixth year, I revolted and fled back to my hippie peers. But that five years of practice still affects me some thirty-odd-years later. I still hear Allah echoing through my inner spaces, I see the calligraphy of Islam when I am in full prostration, forehead on the ground.

All this to say I don't know what, but that our practice does form us, overtly and quietly in that big inward chasm. I read again Dogen-zenji's words this morning after practicing the mind-in-the-mudra sitting. While sections remain stubbornly obtuse, there were those moments of clarity and compassion. Clarity like the sun at dawn, glimpsed through the corners of the eye. Compassion that Dogen was right there then and speaks to us right here now.

Allah be Praised!

The most important point is ...... the moon does not void the water; the water does not dampen the moon. Let's get busy with that mudra mind and worry not that we will disappear into the muck of the frog pond. Whaddya' say, two-dimensional rubber mind-breathers?