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?

Genjokoan

I read the first fascicle of Dogen's Genjokoan last night and vascillated between moments of clarity and confusion. The clarity came in the images: moonlight on water, weeds and flowers, those palpable things. The confusion comes in the abstract language of buddhism, or is it the language of translated buddhism?

I like the first stanza's insight into gardens, how the weeds come when we don't want them, and the flowers don't always grow where we desire. Out in the Manzano Wilderness, near our home, the Dao plays out kind of on its own. That's where this flower in the picture comes from. I got to thinking, we should just "garden" the wilderness area, much like the aborigines did before my ancestors arrived on the scene with concepts of farming that included definite boundary lines. A softer interplay between the human hand and that which we call Nature.

Then again, I just came in to write this from pulling weeds in my little backyard garden. So, there you go again.

Head Genjokoan Ache

Holy Feces! And I rather mean it!

1) Evoking: No doubt about it...holding my shitbrain in the palm of my hand.

2)Puzzling: All words that come after "Genjokoan."

3)Connecting: An old russian-german once told me: "Sir, we live off the wind." It seemed a weather observation...now, much more, a weather balloon.

4)Naming: "Winding up a fan"

5)Actualizing: Place the world in the palm of my hand.

6)Seeing/bowing: Odd question, odd syntax--no bow....full prostration required.

As I've returned to this zenspeak world of late, the question has arisen a few times: Do stupid people study Zen? Or Do people who think they're pretty smart study Zen? Must say, a certain amount of dumbness (and I mean that in a positive way) may be an advantage. My first (and only!) book of poetry was so entitled: DUMB AS THEY COME!

If my premise is correct, then I may be well-suited to the way-seeking, the good Red Road, as we say here in New Mexico. Sure send my best to one and all.