My mother’s blanket chest
It’s late May in New York and today I switched over my winter clothes for summer ones. Soon it will be very hot. I clear out the sweaters and pants I’ve been wearing all winter from the top shelf of my closet.
I store them in my mother’s old Yankee blanket chest.
In order to make room for the winter clothes I take out the summer ones that are folded in with old blankets and assorted tee shirts. I wonder why I hold on to some things. Maybe one day I’ll be able to fit into a pair of pants that are a size too small or wear the blouse that never really worked but has a wonderful fabric.
I can’t bear to throw them away.
Today I found piles of well worn, white, long and short sleeved tee shirts and three or four ripped black yoga pants. Ripped at the seams where the legs meet the seat.
These are the clothes I used to wear under my faded Zen robe when I went to Dai Bosatsu Monastery for sesshin, a seven day silent meditation retreat.
The temperature in the zendo was often in the low 60s during the winter months and I put layer upon layer of these clothes on top of silk underwear plus a cashmere sweater to keep warm. The trick was not to move during sitting because the slightest breeze would get me shaking with the cold.
I miss those days. I miss that intense practice. I burned with a love for it that went beyond hot and cold, beyond body and mind. Those clothes, all worn and ready for next time, will probably not be used again.
After over 35 years of practice at Dai Bosatsu and now in my late 60s, I doubt that I’ll ever again have the wonderful opportunity to throw myself wholeheartedly into anything as exquisite, demanding, and wild.
Except of course this life as it is right now.
I will continue to keep those old tee shirts and ripped pants in my mother’s blanket chest – in memory and with a deep bow of gratitude.
Sabi
Kirei sabi – refined beauty and lonliness
Kirei suki – taste for refined beauty
Sabi – lonliness, lonely beauty
Yugen – mystery and depth
Living at Green Gulch Zen Center for a month
I can’t believe how fortunate I am to have been practicing Zen at Green Gulch Zen Center since 1984. This year I left the cold January of New York to spend three weeks at Green Gulch outside of San Francisco for the January 2015 Intensive led by Tenshin Reb Anderson. We spent most of our time in silence with much zazen – meditation sitting.
I lived in the authentic style Japanese tea house with tatami mats, shoji screens, and fusuma. On occasion I walked to Muir Beach, just a 45 minute hike away. Here are some visual impressions of my immediate environment.
I felt at home – like these last two phrases from Dogen’s Zazen Shin :
“Clear water all the way to the bottom,
A fish swims like fish.
Vast sky transparent throughout,
A bird flys like birds.”
The color of the mountains
This is one of my favorite scrolls. The words in English:
The color
of the mountains
purifies
the pure body
These words have been a favorite of mine for a long time. I remember a ten-day Vipassana retreat in the desert of Joshua Tree in southern California: it was spring, the mountains far in the distance were framed by the blue endless sky. I walked for hours outside in meditation – these words in mind with new blooming flowers carpeting the desert floor under my feet.
These words are with me now as they were then, but I usually associate them with spring or fall and hang this scroll in the tea room when the Catskill mountains across the river show different hues of color depending on the changing seasons.
I never thought about these words for winter until yesterday when I saw the mountains dusted with the first snow. What could be more pure than white? The snow, the early blooming narcissus, the white paper to hold the black ink?
Sei Shonagon has a list titled “Things worth seeing.” Indeed. But how about a list “Things worth being?”
