Before Buddhism there was water, my first religion. I hold myself a child of her creation, come from her dark womb of non-separation, non-differentiation we Buddhists call oneness or interbeing. Womb song, a song of love, warbled in my water-filled ears before time was born. Still I float on my back in the gurgling sea as if to go home. I glory in frothy white wave blossoms crashing on all the shores of this one living world. In the glassy translucence of a wave before it breaks, I sense my nature. The longing to voice what is too deep for words is felt by many of us.
It is also a longing to remember from what we come. As William Wordsworth wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” As Buddhists we are told to take heed and not squander our lives. Nor should we hoard them like dull pennies. We strive to awaken to our luminous nature. Yet sitting in open-eyed contemplation requires its own raw discipline when the urge to escape what is, is so great.
Now the question rises, How are we to mirror heaven in these dark hours raining down the poisons of greed, ignorance, and hatred? It’s a struggle for me when I see all the harm being done to the most vulnerable among us. How are we to respond as spiritual beings? For each of us, no doubt, it’s different.
I find my mind turning often to Roshi Kodo, my beloved teacher, now deceased. Roshi Merle Kodo Boyd was a quiet trailblazer, the first African-American woman in the states to receive dharma transmission in Soto Zen Buddhism. I had the astoundingly good fortune to find Kodo when I most needed her (through Lincroft Zen Sangha in New Jersey, my home).
Still I see her settling in her robes, tucking her hems under Just so as she knelt, sitting on her zafu and zabuton, composing herself to give a dharma talk. Our dharma sister, Koshin, (since deceased) would enter with Roshi’s tea, bow to her, remove the lid from the Japanese cup, and place it in front of her with solemnity and joy. Together our sangha would recite the gatha on opening the incomparably profound, infinitely subtle dharma, hungrily awaiting whatever Roshi might offer, each talk speaking to each of us in its own way. I believe I could listen countless times and hear something I had not noticed before because her teachings were and remain inexhaustible.
It seems, looking back, that during my outings I often ran into Roshi. After pedaling my seaside bike trail after work, I’d stop for a beer and seafood nosh, and there would be Roshi eating lobster. Or attending a poetry reading, there she’d be in the audience. She met me at an anti-hate rally after some unknown person or persons had strewn racist, anti-Semitic flyers around town. She came from a lineage of engaged Buddhists, both ZCLA and its offspring, the Zen Peacemaker Order. And coming from Texas before desegregation, she understood the need to resist racism and other forms of hatred. It is no accident that her dharma name Kodo means Constant Way for she was unfaltering in her commitment to her practice and our sangha and those suffering from inequality. To say I revered her and her way is an understatement. I basked in her presence. In these globally troubled times of ours, compounded by my own personal challenges, I especially long to drink from the gourd of her wisdom by remembering.
I stumbled upon Lincroft Zen Sangha and Roshi at a time when I felt as if I were free-falling. This happened after my father’s death. It had come swiftly, without warning. I was both heartbroken and relieved that he died, in Buddhist terms, a good death, without long suffering, without regret, with courage and peace. He was ready to shed his body, and his readiness helped me accept his passing while I grieved. What I couldn’t accept was the subsequent, equally unexpected rift in my family of origin, the ugly shape it took, how anger blistered each of us. I had never felt so alone without the support of my family of origin. I needed a landing place to come to terms with my life as it was that moment.
In my first dokusan (face-to-face meeting) with Kodo Roshi, I felt her deeply compassionate listening and her great love holding me. Never had I experienced an exchange like that with a stranger. The calm container of her being completely received me and my suffering. I left that meeting knowing my challenge was to become a container big enough to hold my life as it was, both my own and my family’s suffering, with compassion. How to get there was another thing, but Roshi invited me to keep showing up. I took that to mean to the cushion of meditation, to the muck of my own life.
I don’t suppose it hurt that both Roshi and I were clinical social workers, trained as psychotherapists. We understood the intersection of Buddhism and psychotherapy. Both require introspection for transformation. Both require clear awareness of one’s own mental processes and how they give rise particularly to destructive emotions and behaviors that perpetuate suffering. I can only say that in meditation I sit listening to the torrent of my thoughts until they become a stream gurgling nothing of importance. For the most experienced meditators, it is said that breath sweeps mind clean. For someone in free-fall, as I was, settling on the cushion is grounding. Thoughts grow quieter, sometimes even silent. Insights arise. Calmness and joy, even in the midst of sorrow, enter. So, we settle like a mountain, a breathing mountain. I experienced being the calm eye of the storm, or the eye that sees all and still manages to love, and by loving, is loved.
Sanity finds a home in a spiritual community devoted to practicing silence and deep listening, a community that earnestly believes in the interconnectedness of all beings on Earth and beyond. And where there is genuine listening, fractures can be mended. Harmony can be restored. Practicing with my life is proving it.
