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| Chitting potatoes |
Rev. Dainei, my Dharma brother, chose the following quote as the footer for a recent email:
It is necessary for us to keep the constant way. Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. If you become too busy and too excited, your mind becomes rough and ragged. This is not good. If possible, try to be always calm and joyful and keep yourself from excitement. Usually we become busier and busier, day by day, year by year, especially in our modern world. If we revisit old, familiar places after a long time, we are astonished by the changes. It cannot be helped. But if we become interested in some excitement, or in our own change, we will become completely involved in our busy life, and we will be lost. But if your mind is calm and constant, you can keep yourself away from the noisy world even though you are in the midst of it. In the midst of noise and change, your mind will be quiet and stable. -- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (emphasis added)
The more time I spend with Zen, the less I know about it. Maybe you have had this experience as well. I'm going through a phase of making it to a fair number of sits, thanks to teleconferencing. Sometimes we chant, have dedications and bows, and so on. I'm grateful for these opportunities, as they do seem to help with centering.
I come most alive in the in between times, cutting chard and lifting a few potatoes, then sitting at the hut's "kitchen" table with cleaver and chopping block. I cut up potatoes, garlic scapes and chard stems, with some dried chili pepper, and steam them for fifteen minutes or so, meanwhile chopping greens (chard leaves, dandelions, a cabbage leaf maybe, some clover buds and self-heal) to put into the steamer in the last minute. I drain these and stir in some olive oil, soy sauce, chili powder and sesame seeds, briefly offer the bowl at the altar, and dig in. Have with water or "yard tea" -- currently dock, ash leaves, fennel, herb Robert, self-heal and camellia leaves -- and, after a while, go check some chitting potatoes and water the garden beds and young trees from the rain barrels.
This routine requires very little if any thought, and also very little if any thought suppression. There's no aim here to "become enlightened."
Strangely enough, what has sold me on the effortlessness of "concentration on our daily routine" is that I'm in the early stages of cognitive decline. Memories and words are getting harder to access. Since I don't have many responsibilities nowadays, there's little cause to be stressed about it. Loss becomes not so much "oh, I lost that" and something more like "this is what there is right now" -- which is of course the entire universe.
My youngest, who lives with us (he's 42) also goes out and "just gardens." He remembers to stop by the strawberry bed on his way back to the house. He finds me resting in my chair and holds up a ripe strawberry. I open my mouth and he pops it in, like a starling feeding its chick. This is the nothing zazen is good for.
--shonin