But live

 As shonin approaches 77, she takes stock of her intellect and finds it ... gummy. The most one can hope for is that this is a peaks-and troughs experience, and she's going through a trough. But she knows, by interior inquiry more than from doctors, who tend to wave her off with talk of sleep apnea, that she's not getting enough brain food by day as well as night. She spends some time with her cannula, whiffing concentrated oxygen, and watches earnest videos by younger and brighter folks as the days wear on.

When there is some energy, she walks, cooks, gardens, gathers herbs and forbs for tea, plays at being doshi (altar officiant) for a tiny sangha. During the last peak, she read aloud some poems to YouTube.

It's a long, slow spring with April frosts, confusing for plants that have seen temps as high as 80F already. But she, and they, persist.

After all, what is there for the living to do, but live? 

-- shonin

In Place 55

 

The old woman adopts 

technology in the hermitary

and prepares to sit zazen

with people from everywhere

This image is from 2019, with no pandemic in sight. She discovers an online sangha and becomes involved, supplementing her local participation and broadening her considerably limited experience.

Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization for this and for that. This is not only practised while sitting, it is like a hammer striking emptiness; before and after, its ringing pervades everywhere. How can it be limited to a place? 

-- Dogen, Bendowa tr. Hoshin and Dainen

In Place 49

Once a month a silent retreat

with sangha, otherwise

every day no other sound

than wind, or rain, or creek.
 




The old woman's current community meets monthly at a rural home an hour's drive from her farm, to spend the day in group zazen and a few other practices. She's torn between her habitual hut practice and the notion that Buddhism requires company -- what even are precepts for in the middle of nowhere, alone? But every beloved poem by Han Shan, or Stonehouse, or Ryokan convinces her she's doing real work. As does the rain, as does the moon behind clouds.


    Movement isn’t right and stillness is wrong
    and the realm of no-thought is confusion 
    instead the Patriarch didn’t have no-mind in mind
    any thought at all means trouble
    a hut facing south isn’t so cold
    chrysanthemums along a fence perfume the dusk 
    as soon as drifting clouds start to linger
    the wind blows them past the vines

    -- Stonehouse (Shiwu) tr. Red Pine