PRIVATE TEACHING | EVENTS | TALKS | WRITING
Hello friends,
I haven’t been here in a little while. In the Ocean Mind Sangha we just finished ango, our winter month-long training period, and there was a fair amount of teaching I had to do. It also coincided with some intensive writing I needed to do for an online class I’m taking, so I feel like I’m only now looking up and taking in the scenery.
Back in October I was accepted into a year-long memoir writing class, and not surprisingly, it’s taken up most of my writing time. But I’m not complaining—I struggled for years with this particular project and now I feel like I’ve finally got some traction. I write every day right after morning zazen, as the sun is coming up over the ocean and the world is waking, this being both my favorite time of the day and the most conducive for writing. It’s too early for phone calls and meetings, cleaning and
to-do lists, so my mind is spacious at that hour, and fertile. It’s strange, but for me, writing is a slog at almost any other time of the day—especially writing that’s very personal—and I can always find excuses to put it off. But in the early morning it flows easily. It’s almost as if my brain were colonized by doing once the sun is up, but before the day fully takes shape my mind is slowly coming into being as well, which means it’s more pliable and receptive. All of which makes me think that I do have a complaint after all: I wish dawn lasted two or three hours longer. I’d get so much more creative work done.
The process of writing memoir is a an unusual one, and revealing. The further I go into it the more I come to see remembering really as re-creation, our memories of the past inevitably being shaped by our present selves. As I write about my brother or my mother for example—both of whom are long gone—I write not only what I recall but also what I want them to be in my mind. I re-member based on a little of what I knew then, a lot of what I know now, and at least some of what I’ll discover in the future. The three times, and also my wish and the reality, become inseparable.
Sati (in Sanksrit smrti), is the Pali for “mindfulness” or “memory” and in the context of practice, it refers to the action of recalling or bringing an object to mind and focusing on it without distraction. I like to think of it as re-membering. In each moment we re-constitute reality out of nothingness, perceiving and making sense of what’s in front of us by bringing all of its past and all of its future to bear. In other words, the tea mug on the table in front of me cannot possibly be itself without every other constituent of reality around it—the table it’s on, the red anthurium sitting behind it, the PG Tips I’ve just drunk, as well as every cup of tea I’ve enjoyed in the past and will enjoy in the future, and the many selves I was then, am now, and will become. When I set out to write about the past, I can’t divorce it from this moment and everything it contains, and I inevitably affect what will happen in the next moment, and the next, and the next. In that sense, writing memoir is also a process of re-invention. I’ve always said that I write to understand, but now I see that I also write to shape—to re-member—in the best possible way, what is to come.
We are all gods in our own worlds. This is neither metaphor nor grandiosity. We’re all the writers, producers, and main actors in the drama—as in action, as in a “series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces”—of our lives. I wonder what our world would be like if we better understood our power. I want to think it’d be more peaceful, more harmonious, more... congruent, is the word that’s coming to mind. Both us and the world are whole from the beginning, Buddhism says. But if we knew that we truly do have the power to create and destroy, that we do it moment by blessed or frightening moment, perhaps we’d be more careful with that power, more tender, and also more bold.
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