Courage and Zen
One of my favorite teachers is the Rev. Bill Clark, who used to be the minister at the UU Congregation here. Thanks to Alicia for sending me this link (accessible to those who have QuickTime and can listen to MP3 downloads) to a wonderful sermon of a little less than half an hour in length, on the subject of courage. If you don’t have the half hour or the technology to listen to it, here’s the part I love best:
“Courage is not merely manifest in the face of danger but is a way of living one’s life, always and every day.”
At about eighteen minutes in, he quotes Adrienne Rich, who suggests that with perfectly ordinary courage, we “reconstitute the world.” Building on what she says, Rev. Bill continues, “Courage is not in relationship or reaction to fear or danger…. It’s the simple ability to restructure and rebuild one’s life. It is to start again, living with the quality of courage.” Amen!
To start again. Those of us who meditate repeat that phrase to ourselves hundreds of thousands of times. We sit. We focus on the breath or the tip of our nostrils or the top of our heads. Our minds begin to drift. We start again. “Training the puppy,” Jack Kornfield calls it.
Leonard Cohen, the Canadian songwriter, poet, and painter who is now 72 years old and still kicking butt, starts again. A few years back he spent five years living in a Rinzai Zen center which is far more austere than either of my choices, I can tell you! He spent five years in the Zen center and then emerged to find that his business partner had made off with everything he had owned. So he had to start again. There’s a wonderful (written, not aural), rather hilarious interview with him when he was still in the Zen Center, by Pico Iyer here (and the link, quite oddly, offers the interview TWICE, which is yet another form of starting again). What I love about this piece, and I guess what I love about Leonard Cohen, is the self-deprecating awareness of our human absurdity. Iyer quotes Cohen: “These problems [having difficult relationships, worrying about money, wishing for success of one kind or another, wanting to avoid suffering] exist prior to us, and we gather ourselves, almost molecularly, we gather ourselves around these perplexities. And that’s what a human is: a gathering around a perplexity.”
Lovely. That’s why it takes “living with the quality of courage” to start again. Always, every day, start again. Start again with a sense of humor. Start again as a generous, patient, kind, listening presence for whatever arises, especially for other people’s stories. (Oh–hey, if you haven’t done so, check the comments to the post “Guarding the Stories” for Jessie aka JetGirl’s wonderful story!)
Start again as a bodhisattva. Start again after being freed from whatever imprisoned. Start again to be more mindful. Start again to be more fully present. Start again to be here. Now. Start again…. Right now I need to start again at the final dismantling of my current household. Moving day is tomorrow, at 8 a.m. Wow! I love this. New beginnings give me such a thrill. I love moving into clean spaces with fresh paint still drying. Always, in the beginning, anything seems possible.
Tags: Books and Movies, What does it mean?
Kendall
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