Letting everything be as it is
January 2022, bring it on! As quarantine and the ongoing pandemic may make life feel like one long slug through a hazy unknown, past angry citizens and through one natural disaster after another, there is something bubbling up to the surface. Do you feel it? Something is wanting to be born, and birth is messy. We truly don’t know what is going rise out of the ferment. In this disquieting unknown we can build a wall around that which we consider ours and hunker down, we can throw up our hands and do nothing, or we can look around us and see where we can apply our love. If we choose to apply love to the volitle situation, the Zen Peacemakers 3 tenets; not knowing, bearing witness and compassionate action, provides us with terrific guidelines to help us stay sane in the midst of it all.
Starting with not knowing, remembering the koan:
Not knowing is most intimate.
In Zen intimate is another word for awakened. When we experience things directly, without added judgements and classifications, our knowing is as close as the pillow is to our head at night. We don’t lie in bed thinking, “This is my head and this is my pillow. My pillow is made of cotton. It’s from Bed Bath and Beyond.” We just sink into the experience of comfort and ease. Intimacy is experiencing everything directly, whether the sensation is pleasant or painful-no matter. We put aside those definitions and the sensation is just a sensation, the feeling is just a feeling, the thought is just a thought. We are not separate from our experience. From that place we can lay down fear and see the world around us more clearly.
From not knowing we move to bearing witness, letting everything be as it is. We let the imagined walls that make us feel separate dissolve. While bearing witness we travel past good and bad, past definitions and stories, and just notice thoughts, feelings and sensations from the place of oneness that not knowing showed us. We start with easy stuff, like bearing witness from the comfort and safety of our meditation cushion then move, bit by bit, to bearing witness in more and more challenging circumstances. Zen Peacemakers offers bearing witness plunges in places like Auschwitz and week long homeless retreats on the streets of cities like New York and San Francisco. But we don’t need to go on retreats to find the places where our hearts can open. Right in our communities there are things that are challenging to stay open to.
Compassionate action naturally arises out of bearing witness. We are not trying to be good or do the “right thing”. That approach will burn us out rather quickly. We just respond to what is in front of us with an open heart and any action rises up from that place. If we put our hand on a hot stove we automatically pull it away. We don’t think, what is heat? Where does it come from? How can I turn the heat off? We just pull our hand away. We are called to a community meeting, we go. We see a hungry child, we feed them. When we’re awake and aware right where we are we see what needs to be done and we do it. This does not mean that there is no planning. Yet even the planning is intimate because we are really there as we map out our strategy. We are not separate from the action. The cook feeds, the tailor sews, the scientist prepares the slide. We hear what we are called to do and we do it with full presence in one graceful movement.
None of us know what the future holds. When Joan Baez was asked by a reporter, “What if all the work you do to end war is futile and war prevails?” Her response was (I paraphrase), “We may put an end to war or we may not. Either way, I am living a life that is in integrity with my values and that is a good life.” We may not know if we can save democracy or save humans from self-created extinction but we can add our love and presence by acting with compassion right where we are.