Leap, and the net will appear

Tired, it's late. But I wanted to record the small insight I had today, still being dogged by the koan "Man up a Tree." (And not stopping to think about rewriting it as Woman up a Tree. Or Wun up a Tree. I am fond of Wun, a sort of anonymous template human.)

The thought came as an image while I was carefully steering through the parking lot at the health club, where people seemed likely today to get in wrecks. I visualized a man hanging from a tree, hanging by his mouth, remember, in his dilemma, and then I saw the grass just a few inches under him. Aha, I thought. The koan cleverly omits to say how high in the tree he is. So, no problem. Just let go and fall out of the dilemma. Land on the nice soft grass. Sometimes we make our dilemma so convoluted that this is the only way to handle it.

The image reminded me of a saying that floats around Zen circles, said to be written by John Burroughs: Leap, and the net will appear. Someone I know told me that saying inspired him to drop out of his career and fulfill his dream to study for the ministry. Well, as Suzuki said about the building of a Zen Center, a lot of bad things will come out of it, but maybe something good will happen, too.

Lying there on the grass, Wun could think about the symbolism of grasses in the Buddhist tradition as Robert Aitken described it:

If you do not cut off the mind road, then you are a ghost clinging to bushes and grasses. 'Bushes' and 'grasses' are shorthand for the many fixations that provide the ghost with identity - such as money and possessions, old resentments, and persistent habits of thought.

That's what I mean when I say, I've really got to get disorganized. Lose some of those things. The possessions are really the least of the problem.

Quicksand! and mundane reality

[photo: a golden]
There were a couple of staples of the simpler horror movies of my childhood: a dinosaur could eat you, something dead could come back to life, or you could drown in quicksand - this was a favorite of westerns, which always seemed to be the second feature. Possibly the good cowboy would throw out his bullwhip and the evil cowboy could grasp the tip and pull himself out, but it seems to me the evil cowboy would curse at being rescued and prefer to drown. So human!

Yes, I woke up thinking more about hanging in our dilemma, having posted about it last night before bed. The really strange thing, I thought, is that it is the struggle that kills you. This is exactly what happens with quicksand and, the internet informs me, most drownings. The human body is less dense than water or quicksand, which is mostly water; if you relax and lean back, you will float. Then you can paddle to shore, though you are going to have to move slowly to extract yourself against the vacuum you create. I liked everything about this as a metaphor. Relax, float. Move slowly and thoughtfully.

It is the struggle that dooms you. I am reminded of an elderly neighbor who kept nearly dying and being rescued, and finally decided against more emergency interventions a couple of weeks ago. Prepared to die, he went into a hospice facility, where he immediately felt a whole lot better, and is still alive. He had finally stopped pouring all his energy into anxious struggle.

What happens when you stop kicking around, struggling against reality? Floating is not so dramatic. And our personal take on the koan of our life will be unique to our situation.

It has recently been dawning on me that the truth is, I'm living on luck. My kidneys could fail any time, before research has figured out regeneration, before the wearable kidney is perfected, and doom me to complex, uncomfortable treatments. When I realized the truth of that, I thought, I really do need to watch my diet. The kidney diet is more complex than all Oprah's diets put together. You limit phosphorus, potassium, protein and salt. That sounds mundane and it is mundane, in the sense of being an everyday, routine thing. It is about specific, small actions: whether to eat pepperoni pizza, and if so, how much, and if so, how many Phoslo to take with it. And will all that salt (pepperoni) and phosphorus (cheese) and potassium (tomatoes) finally do me in? How many bites do I have to have to satisfy my craving?

The mundane. My favorite short story is "The Golden Mix" by Ira Sukrungruang (thus the photo). At the end of a dramatic realization of the nature of reality, the narrator . . . well, I won't spoil the plot. The action he takes is an ordinary task. That's really what we mean by living in the moment. We mean, the real moment, the space you're actually in.

Hanging in your Dilemma

A little while ago I decided to read through The Gateless Barrier - a basic collection of Zen stories and talks. I had pieced around in it the first time, and worked some of the koans with teachers, but Robert Aitken suggests you then read it right through, because his comments build on one another. And I was supposed to be off my feet this week, healing an arthritic flareup.

The last koan I expected to get interested in was "Kyogen's Man up a Tree." I never did like that koan. The basic idea is, You are hanging from a tree by your mouth. You can't reach a branch with your hands or feet. Someone comes by and asks you to tell him about Zen. You have a dilemma: if you speak, you fall and die. If you don't, you are abandoning your responsibility to others. What do you do?

Since I am a language person, I am sometimes struck by a certain word. And my experience is that Zen masters take care to be accurate. I have three translations of this collection, and Aitken is the only one who introduces the word dilemma. I recognized that prefix, di (two, as in dualism) and thought, There's a clue in this, so I looked it up.

In a dilemma, you have two choices, and neither one is good. That applied to the little puzzle. Then Aitken helped me out by telling us straightforwardly that what we have to truly hang there in that dilemma, be with it all the way. This is not so natural, is it? Can't you picture yourself writhing around, trying to make your way down the branch, kicking out, making throaty protests (without letting go the clamp on the branch that is definitely hard on the TMJs)? That is in fact what we do with our dilemmas. Sometimes it's not obvious; we may feel we are in despair over some event, a chronic illness or a lost love, but are in fact trekking from one healer to another or one bar to another, trying to find someone who can get us out of our fix. And there are always lots of people who think they can. They are even more deluded than the weary seeker, and they end up burnt out.

The first time I encountered the idea of giving over to your unhappiness or depression was in Parker Palmer's little book, Let Your Life Speak. There he recounted his own long clinical depression, and how he sank into a virtually immobile state, and slowly came to realize that he had a spiritual problem called despair, that his life was telling him, What you're doing is not working for you. He had been refusing to listen. He published this article before the recent vogue in confessional memoirs; it was a courageous act, and he has survived the stigma of mental illness to be an admired teacher and speaker.

What you do with a koan is just carry it, and I wasn't inspired enough by this one to get caught up in figuring it out. But I knew the koan was working on me this morning when I woke up to the thought, I've got to get more facts about kidney transplant. I've been on a waiting list for a year, grateful every single day that I haven't declined to the point of needing dialysis again. It's no picnic. Neither is transplant. Both carry all sorts of medical risks and uncertainty. But I hadn't been really hanging with the decision, but in the land of hope - hoping my kidneys would keep holding on until something else killed me, that I would never have to answer that phone call Yes or No (you have one hour to respond). In other words, I was really avoiding my dilemma with the mental tricks that we are best at. Maybe I'll never have to decide. (Maybe I'll win the lottery.) We are lucky when something or someone nudges us out of a delusion like that. Life is much easier when we open our eyes.