Shake and Shake

Shake and Shake August 5, 2008

Rummaging around the web for inspiration for a posting I noticed how today is Edgar Guest’s birthday.

During our recent Zen meditation retreat, one of our teachers, David Rynick quoted Guest in a Dharma talk.

You shake and shake the Ketchup bottle,
none will come and then a lot’l

I loved it, as did many of us.

In some ways it points to the gradual/sudden dichotomy that has followed Zen throughout its history, between those who emphasize the practice itself and those who point to those moments of profound insight where our ideas of self and other fall away.

I live in both worlds. The emphasis on practice as awakening is profound and true. We sit down, shut up, and pay attention. This is it. It needs nothing more.

It is the invitation of that ancient call to sit down and become Buddha.

There’s a koan. How is it that sitting down is becoming Buddha?

And I hear the ancients whispering in my ear, “just this. Just this…” Or, perhaps, Zen Master Edgar’s point: “you shake and shake…”

Which brings us to what happens sometimes, whether we want it or not.

Me, I’ve wanted it. I came into Zen practice out of reading such wonderments as Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen with its descriptions of people discovering the Buddha in their various moments of lived life.

You shake and shake the Ketchup bottle,
none will come and then a lot’l

I wanted that lot’l… It motivated much of my early practice. It hinted and beckoned, it winked from just off stage…

’till, somewhere along the line, it happened. For me the first intimation came in a Zen monastery, so many years ago. But many have followed, small and large.

And, I’ve discovered they’re actually the common currency of our human condition.

Ahh!

Is that so?

My goodness!

And, watch out, the ketchup is going everywhere!

And I’ve discovered these moments of a lot’l are very important.

They reveal the world to us.

And in a heartbeat they disappear, leaving a trace, a hint, a memory.

A bit of ketchup on the corner of the mouth…

And, once again, it’s all about shaking the bottle, sitting down and noticing, going to the coffee shop and being with a friend, taking care of the baby, encountering that difficult client at the office, or fixing the car…

The list is rather long, I hope I convey some sense of it…

It’s an invitation to how we live.

As another teacher of our Western culture, May West, is said to have said, “You only live once. But if you do it right, once is enough…”


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