More Still On Flowers And Weeds

By the way, I’ve been updating somethings over on the right sidebar, especially the offerings in 2009 right here in beautiful ex-urban White Bear and also my travels for the book.

We’ve got just one more Dogen study session until March and most Thursday evenings from now until then we’ll be having open zazen (that means anybody can stop by, just shoot me an email) and tea afterwards.

Okay … now some more on Genjokoan from the session this past Thursday.

No matter what you say about it, flowers fall when lamented and weeds flourish when disliked.

This is my brother’s translation of the fourth line. There are a couple points that stand out in this rendition.

Second point first. Don’t colonize your emotional life with bullshit about how you think Zen students should feel.

Take this morning for example. I stayed in bed until Bodhi just had to go outside to pee, then had breakfast with my son, walked in the woods with Bodhi (photo is of the enso tree with fresh snow), and watched some videos on YouTube with my daughter. Then I got to sitting about 10:30am. I mentioned to both kids that I’d be sitting so “keep it down.” Note the lack of specificity in the request. With teens I’ve found “keep it down” must be carefully operationalized for anything approximating cooperation. Something like “Keep the volume at or below 3 bars.”

Now I’ve sat in all kinds of situations and I notice that I sometimes say to beginners, “Noise doesn’t both me.” However, as I started sitting the volume from upstairs started to creep up. My daughter was listening to Immortal Technique hip hop and my son to Green Day punk heavy metal. Grrrr.

So like Dogen might have said, “…a cacophony of loud quasi-music when pissed….”

That’s it. That’s the teaching of this line and the first point: no matter what you say (to yourself or others) about it, a cacophony of loud music when pissed.

Snow makes enso tree.

No need to go into psycho-emotional babel trying to manipulate feeling. Caution: the teaching isn’t to act out these feelings, of course, we’ve got the precepts for that.

The practice is to live life to the full without limits on our emotional life.

More Still on Flowers and Weeds