On Not Wanting To Be Somewhere Else

Mending Snow Fences 24"x20"

I have just returned from a snowy trek through the woods to visit neighbours, share a glass of wine (not literally, they gave me my own glass), sit in front of their fire, hear about how mindfulness practice has been life changing for someone, which always warms my heart. I spoke of something that has troubled me recently. (Sitting in front of a fire can have that effect on you.) In general it is the koan of "how can you live close by to someone and not know anything much about them?" More specifically I was speaking of  the death of another neighbour's son; people who live a stones throw away, whose lives I know nothing of, just the friendly hello, pat of the dog, only to see an obit in the paper about their son. The great  desperation of depression that caused a young man to take his own life just down the road. What strange lives we lead. What's that saying a joy shared is multiplied, a grief shared in halved. Privacy: the pleasure and plague of the modern world.  Outward smiles, inward tragedy.

Blue Air & Rust 16"x 16"

I listened to a talk this afternoon by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche on "Living With Joy, Dying In Peace." With a sly grin he noted that we westerners don't like to think or talk about death. We see only the loss and sadness in it, something we fear and prefer to ignore. It seemed like a surprising comment, that we see only loss and sadness. "Well of course." And yet he talked about it being a gateway to liberation. I think we must dedicate our lives to practice to get to this gateway.

Squirrel Nutkin's Secret 11"x14"

On the art front I am painting more. Weeds and grass grow less and many outdoor ills are hidden by the relentless downpours and surprise snowfalls. A lovely release into studio life. It feels like time has stretched out at the foot of winter, but that's just one of time's little tricks; speeding up, slowing down, pretending not to exist.

Always I start my studio time by kneeling in front of the wood stove, carefully crumpling paper and arranging kindling, head bowed, match struck. It's a kind of prayer, a prayer to the gods of warmth, a prayer that requires attention lest I end up with smoke and ash instead of fire. Short cuts and scattered attention are trouble makers in the fire department and many others.

The fire teaches me focus and attention. It sets the tone for the attention that needs to be poured into the work.  I am always learning and refining if I pay attention. Otherwise there is just smoke. Ah, the way is never straight forward. Mary Oliver says: "there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labour to come, for his adventures are all unknown."

The Other Side of The Mountain 16"x 20"

Last weekend I attended a weekend retreat with Howie Cohn. His delivery of the Dharma is at once complex and simple, uplifting, gentle and entertaining. He carries with him a haphazard file loaded with quotes and stories. I'm never quite sure how he finds the one he's looking for but he always does. Here's my favourite one from the weekend on self compassion.  He has written a little book called "An Invitation To Meditation" which at first glance looks a little light weight but after just a few pages you find it packs a mighty Dharma punch. I  highly recommend it for lines like this: "Imagine feeling calm and content wherever you are. Imagine feeling that your life is so complete -- right here, right now --that you do not wish to be anywhere else." It would make a perfect gift for anyone on your list that needs a bit of calm and relaxation in their life.

Elves In Their Workshop

Wishing you a wonderful turn of the year and holiday season. May you have the delicious luxury to spend some time contemplating  the year behind you and the one ahead. It is not necessary to offer you the fabled Chinese curse, because in fact we do live in interesting times. Perhaps it is some strange Pollyanna, ostrich like quality that has me believing that Truth always prevails. It takes a circuitous route, but never the less....

A Shrieking Gibbering Madhouse On Wheels

11"x14" mixed media on panel Your Heart From Space

On Sunday I had the great pleasure of doing a one day retreat with Buddhist teacher Howie Cohn from San Francisco (which he jokingly called Bagdhdad North, as he described doing walking meditation on Market St.).  We spent the day exploring "awareness". We sat. We walked.  And we noticed how we went about this. We noticed the stories we tell ourselves about what we do. "I'm bored. I'm tired. I can't do this.  My neck hurts.  Am I doing this right? Yada yada yada. We all have our own little 100 act plays that we never tire of running.

Sometimes if you look hard enough you get the feeling that you're entirely made up of stories, with some rather convincing footnotes. Mostly we don't notice our stories because they are so insidious but if we open to them we can notice how they colour our day and our lives.  Is that grey or hints of blue I see on your horizon?  Our stories can energize and encourage us or suck the life out of us before we even get out of bed.  They can make us sick, they can trap us in inertia. So it's interesting to just become aware of that hidden ticker tape that runs through our heads.

After lunch I was tired and so my concentration waned. Instead of just noticing what it was like (ah, this is what it's like to be tired, that would be awareness) I threw down a little story. "I didn't sleep very well last night. I'm so tired. I'm not getting anything out of this now. It's hot in here. My meditation was so clear and bright this morning. This afternoon is a waste." And when I went out to walk I went for a rehash  until I realized, "you know you have a choice.  You can carry on down the rabbit hole, Alice or you could stop right here and rouse some energy,"which I did.  I also realized this was not a foreign  movie in my world.  I often travel with my own personal rabbit hole, regardless of the situation.  In practicing awareness, not only do we get to breath and walk and notice how blue the sky is, but we get to see our habitual cloud patterns and land forms. Pema Chodron calls them propensities. And Howie reminded us, that this is the first step in the direction of freedom; seeing what we get up to.  Mostly we just get up to it, period, the end.  And mostly we don't like to look, because, well, because it's not all that pretty.

 Howie tossed out this quote to remind us about what goes on in the story mill of our minds: “Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. You are also no crazier than everybody else around you. The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation they have not."― Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

8"x10" oil & cold wax "Quarry Beach"

He reminded us that  how we see things is not necessarily how they are.  So little of what we experience is sensed directly.  Our perception is filtered through the tea strainer of memory and ideas. "Your mother is not the same as your ideas about your mother."  Does that seem obvious?  Maybe, but we don't often act as if this is true. It reminds me of how I bumble about in my communications with others, how I take my point of view for granted and how this can make me impatient and insensitive.

And at the end of the day when we all agreed on the value of awareness like it was some giant and tasty apple pie, someone asked "why is it so hard to practice then?" Howie offered suggestions that might be helpful including the importance of a like minded community of practitioners which he emphasized with this little tidbit:  "When you see geese flying along in “V” formation, you might consider what science has discovered as to why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following. By flying in “V” formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own. 

When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone — and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front. .

When the head goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point. Geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

When a goose gets sick or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out of formation, two other geese fall out with that goose and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly or until it dies, and only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their group.


Can you hear me honking at you?  Whatever you answered, you're right.

The 84th Problem

Buddha House 16" 20" on display at The Naam

How many problems do you have? Do you have 83 or 84? Or perhaps you have more? No matter how many problems you have, the Buddha thinks that your real problem is the 84th problem?

Do you know the story of the 84th problem? I know you do, I mean in your everyday life. I'm guessing that if I know it well, you probably have had a little dust up with it yourself. In fact I spend a lot of time wrestling with the 84th problem and I never manage to get it into a figure 4 leg lock, or is that a head lock?  So much for my wrestling skills. Whenever things go "wrong" according to how I think they should be the 84th problem has got me down for the count.

Here's a short version of the 84th problem. A farmer goes to see the Buddha because his crops have failed. He's heard that the Buddha is very wise and the farmer is hoping for some help. He tells the Buddha his story and the Buddha tells him he can't help him with that problem. The farmer then complains a little about his wife. "Sorry," the Buddha says, "can't help you with that."  

My kids, they don't listen to me or respect me enough."

"Sorry, can't do anything about that."

 The farmer offers a few more problems and then laments about the Buddha being so unhelpful. Finally the Buddha offers a little help, "Everyone always has 83 problems, one goes away, another one appears. What I can help you with is your 84th problem."

"What's that?" asks the farmer.

 "That you don't want to have any problems."

Now if we could just get over the 84th problem, we'd be fine with things as they are, whatever that happens to be. To just give up our wrestling match with life, that's the simple task. The simple task that's so hard to remember when things don't go "our way". It doesn't mean we never take action or that  we don't work for change. It just means we don't argue with what is. We don't need to reject this moment. And we don't even need to reject our rejection of this moment (a particular favourite of mine). We can just feel what it's like to reject, to wish for something else. "Oh, that's how it feels."

This instruction "to just feel what it feels like" was part of our work from the retreat with Howie Cohn on "calming the restless mind" and is a good antidote to the 84th problem. And I had opportunity to to do a little of this work yesterday. 

We're building a gate like structure to cover the entry to our open carport. The gate will hide our winter fire wood and other messy bits. I started the morning innocently enough, drinking my coffee and browsing through a design book for ideas. Before I knew it I was admiring all the beautiful homes and wishing mine looked like that, or that I lived in this one, and so on and so on. (I am a recovering design junkie).

This simple pleasant task of sitting in the sun looking at a book morphed into "wanting" and spilled over into an agitation, leaving a subtle unrest and dissatisfaction as I went about my day. In the past I might not even have noticed this domino effect but just felt vaguely unhappy. But now I could clearly see it's origins in the craving for a magazine house, one staged and crafted for a picture in a book. And yet the hangover of craving lingered. And I got to notice, "this is what craving and unrest feels like". I followed it's trail, as it had me looking for a snack, long before I was hungry, had me looking through a slightly darkened lense as I headed to my studio. But I digress from the 84th problem.  Or do I?

Freeing The Mind

Peace Is Every Step - Mixed Media on Canvas 24"x24"

Last Sunday, despite 30 degree weather, cloudless skies and beckoning beaches, 60 of us tucked ourselves into a room to learn how to "calm our restless minds" (the title of the day long retreat). And not one of us took the opportunity to slather on sun screen and bolt at the lunch break, a testament to our leader, Howie Cohn who delivers the dharma with an engaging mix of  informality, humour, humility, passion and wisdom.

Turns out the recipe for calming the restless mind lies in the "four foundations of mindfulness", one of those lists in the Buddha's cookbook. Our restless mind finds its birthplace in the fact that we spend a lot of our time either thinking about the future or the past. A lot of churning goes on (are we making butter up there?) as we imagine what might happen or worry about something that has already happened. As the Buddha suggested, a mind that rests in the present moment, neither resisting it, nor clinging to it, is free. In that moment when we are truly right here, with whatever is, the mind is calm. It is fully occupied in experiencing the moment, no space is available for anything else, whether you are tying your shoe or flying an plane.

Dreams of Lhasa Mixed Media on Canvas 12"x12"

And so we tested the Buddha's theory.  That's exactly what the Buddha wanted us to do, "to make it true for ourselves," not to believe it just because someone said it was so. We used the first foundation of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body to help us become present. We followed the breath, in all it's tiny nuances, long and short, rough and smooth, the space at the end of the breath, it's coolness at the tip of the nose, the rising a falling of the chest. And we watched our minds wander to stories of this and that. We called it back, like a dog run off in a thunder storm, reminding ourselves in that moment, we were back in the present moment, something to congratulate ourselves for instead of grumbling about how we had been off somewhere. We noticed our feet on the floor, our seats on the chair. The body with it's sensations and aches and pains, it's flutterings and itches, was constantly calling us home. We honed our ability to listen to that call. Presence and awareness was being cultivated in each tiny garden of the heart. All our lives we have been cultivating weedy patch of mindless wandering, like wild morning glory.

Howie asked us to zoom in a bit  as we experienced the present moment, to see if we could determine it's feeling tone. Was it pleasant or unpleasant or simply neutral? All moments have one of these feelings associated with them. And if we could do that, could we see what happened in the next split second? If the sensation was unpleasant, did it flip into some form of aversion, of not wanting it, of worrying about it. A woman described this beautifully saying she felt a flutter in her leg, which at first seemed neutral, then even pleasant as she made the association of a butterfly but then the mind went, oh, no what if something's wrong.  And all this in a split second.  We were getting to see the subtle ruminations and movement of the mind, getting to know our personal playlist. We got to see the connection between our experience and the mind state that arose. And Howie asked us the question, "What  use is this information?"

tiny bowl, charcoal and acrylic 6"x6"

Turns out we can use it to interrupt our habitual or "mindless" response to our experience. I have a choice about whether I want to go down the rabbit hole of worry when I feel a flutter in my leg, but only if I am aware of that little chain of events. If it just "happens" without my awareness I am doomed to suffer as I follow the flight path of wild mind. If I can feel the flutter with awareness and follow the chain of events that transpires I have a choice.

And it wasn't that we learned to calm our restless minds on the spot, so that they would never be restless again. It was about learning the process, the same way you might learn a yoga posture that you can practice at home. The more you do it, the more the subtleties of the posture open up to you. The more you practice, the better your form becomes, the stronger your muscles become. And so it is with mindfulness. We are practicing, training the unruly, restless mind. Just as we get to know how our particular body responds to and works with physical exercise, so we get to know the peculiarities of this mind that we inhabit in this lifetime. We get to see we have choices and that we can choose to simply experience this moment and be released from the ruminations of the restless mind. Freedom lies in the next simple breath.