Insight Trails

Practice: Look Down at Your Feet

By Jon Berry

EVERY COUPLE SUNDAYS, I DRIVE TO QUEENS to visit someone close to me who’s in a long-term drug-treatment program. It’s the latest stop in a downward spiral that’s taken him through a half-dozen detoxes, hospitals, rehabs, and shelters in New York City in the past nine months and, over the past 12 years, on a labyrinthine journey across the country for a cure that so far has proved elusive.

    But we don’t talk about the past. Maybe an expression of gratitude for the nurse in Westchester who gave him $40 to get to a hospital, and said "just pay it forward.” Or the woman who came across him in the street in Manhattan and called 911 to get him an ambulance; the guys in the shelter who kept an eye out for him; the nurse’s assistant who prayed at his bedside; the psychiatrist who offered to see him essentially for free when he’s ready; the cops, ambulance crews, social workers, and others who treated him with dignity when they didn’t have to.

    Or maybe the waitress who looked past the wear-and-tear signs of homelessness in his appearance one morning last fall when I took him out for breakfast – the grungy clothes, the urban grit on his hands – and greeted us with a cheery “what’ll you have, boys?” (Question to ponder: Does the Buddha wear a waitress’ uniform?)

    Mostly, for the hour or two that we have together, we just sit with each other. Not focus on the past. Or project into the future. Instead talk about the present – how we’re doing, what we’re reading, what our day has been like.

    I’m not sure this is what Sharon Salzberg, the Buddhist author and teacher, had in mind in her lecture on mindfulness at Tibet House in Manhattan last week. But what she said seemed familiar: Mindfulness means opening fully to the moment. We need to learn to let go of clinging to things we love (as if holding on hard enough will keep them from ever going away); sit with pain rather than push it away; not go to sleep or numb out on distractions when life bores us. Not fall into traps like thinking “it’s never going to get better.”

    Instead we are to engage in a balanced way with whatever life brings. “Learn the ‘letting-go’ muscle,” she said. When we slip, which, as in meditation, inevitably happens, “begin again.”

    Investing in the here-and-now fully (it’s not mindhalffullness) seems to be in the core of many spiritual traditions. It’s the essence of one of my favorite 12-step slogans (actually, one my friend turned me onto): “Look down at your feet.” Where we are is where we’re supposed to be. The most important lessons for us are not out there in the future, or over there where the cool people are. They’re right in front of us, in the quotidian rhythms of life – children, spouses, parents, friends, work, colleagues, the person in front of us in line at the bank. They can especially be in the places we never seek out – doctors’ offices, unemployment, visiting days at rehabs. 

    In seminary, I’ve learned that some of the deepest, most healing changes occur in the unexpected places. The road. By a well. A cave. Hardship.

“Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,

I praise you for that which is.

…I pray for whatever you send me,

And I ask to receive it as your gift.”

- Psalm IV, translated by the poet Stephen Mitchell

    I’m not by nature a transcendence-seeker. I agree with the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who wrote that he spent most of his life “avoiding transcendence” for the simple reason that “the shit hurts.” These kinds of experience ask us to change. Go to new places. Leave the comfortable. Let down our guard.

    I flinch a bit when I hear people say they’re thankful for their troubles because of how much they’ve grown spiritually. “Hey, take mine," I think. "You’ll grow even more.” But they have a point. The kindness my friend found in the group of guys he met in the homeless shelter changed me – how they looked out for each other so they wouldn’t get into trouble; bought each other slices of pizza when they came into a little money; swapped tips on negotiating the social services departments, getting a library card, finding hot meals at churches. I can’t walk by a homeless person now without offering a silent prayer.

    Others’ generosity, too. When a local cop was critically injured in a car accident on duty, I gave blood, wrote get-well cards, made donations, prayed. Experience has bonded me to an ever-widening community. The world has become sweeter, more precious, more of an adventure – when I remember to keep my eyes open.

    Life is a package deal. We don’t get a menu (“Yes, I’d like Pleasure, with a side of Pleasure. Dessert? No Pain.”).  And, as Salzberg says, life can “turn on a dime.” The next moment could bring a natural disaster. Or a full ride to graduate school. A dreaded diagnosis. Or true love.

    Or we could be like the woman I fell into a conversation with on the train home the night of the lecture (funny how life can put a coda on what we’ve just heard). Fifteen years ago, during a snowstorm, she decided to check in on a new neighbor and found, to her dismay, there was little she could do. The neighbor was deaf; they couldn’t communicate. She resolved to take a sign language class so she could talk with the neighbor. That led to another class. And another. Now she’s in graduate school to become a counselor to the deaf. All because of snow. 

    I used to think the beatifically smiling Buddhas my kids have bought me were beaming because they’d risen above the world. Now I see that they smile because they're connected to everyone. And everything. And, within this torn world, find joy.

Psalm IV

Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,

    I praise you for that which is.

I will not refuse this grief

  or close myself to this anguish.

Let shallow men pray for comfort:

  “Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.”

I pray for whatever you send me,

  and I ask to receive it as your gift.

You have put a joy in my heart

  greater than the world’s riches.

I lie down trusting the darkness

  for I know that even now you are here.

– translation by Stephen Mitchell

That’s I.T.

Sharon Salzberg has a new book, Real Happiness. Her series of lectures is continuing at Tibet House. She’s worth listening to (as a wise commenter inferred in response to an earlier post): down-to-earth, accessible, witty, droll, learned, laser-sharp, and an amazing storyteller. Check the Tibet House calendar.

For more on Stephen Mitchell’s A Book of Psalms, click here.

I’ve always liked Steve Earle’s ornery take on transcendence. After trying out various definitions – “going through something” brings to mind “plate glass windows and divorces”; “rising above” problems “smacks of avoidance as well as elitism” – he settles on it meaning “being still long enough to know when it’s time to move on.” He then adds: “Fuck me.” From the cover notes of Transcendental Blues.

More and more, I value the notion that all ground we walk on can be sacred ground – no matter if it’s in as church or synagogue, in the wilds of nature, a city street, or a hospital. Last year, I wrote a post on the theme. Here’s a link to it.

Practice: Tapping into the Mystical

By Jon Berry

I FELT LIKE A WATERBORNE VERSION OF THE "BEAR who goes with me” from Delmore Schwartz’s poem when I went for a swim the other night. The first five minutes of treading water with this clumsy, lumbering body seemed like an eternity.  
    But I pressed on – four strokes, breath; four strokes, breath – and eventually I began to move internally as well as through the water. I looked at my watch, and forty minutes had passed. Where had the time gone?

    That but-but-but hesitation melting into effortlessness is not new. It occurs many Sundays when I plunk down onto a bench in Quaker meeting. Skepticism – An hour? Of silence? – gives way to a deep, still stream that renews, resolves, and sends me back into the world.

    I periodically wonder if this stream courses through more of life than I recognize. Is “flow” – that pure state of focus and creativity at work, when I am lost joyfully in the task at hand – just a secular description of the mystical reverie I experience in Quaker meeting?

    Is an athlete in “the zone” – the sheer being-in-the-moment and time standing still around you – in a state akin to what the Friend a few seats over from me feels in meeting for worship?

    Would it bring down some of the walls between our workaday worlds and our spiritual lives if we recognized a kindred spirit – whatever name it goes by – at work (and play) in both places? Would we look at our colleagues differently? Make decisions differently? Look differently at all the “others” in our lives – secular vs. sacred, religion vs. "the world"?

    I have an engrained resistance to religious terms. Too often, they’re used for manipulation, position, and power. But I think that life on some level is essentially mystical. It holds mysteries that we can’t explain – from the edges of knowledge to our even being here (how did that happen). It holds the possibility of joy. Surprise. Wonder. Spaciousness. Moving outside time. Of deeper connection.

    My life works better when I recognize that this deeper flow is everywhere, and not just in “my” church, “my” meeting, “my” meditation spot. I think that’s part of the epiphany that’s beautifully described in the recent PBS documentary The Buddha (photo above). After years of torturous seeking after enlightenment, Siddhartha remembers sitting under a tree, as a child, on a beautiful day, and in that moment realizes that “the underlying fabric of this world,” with all its brokenness, “is joy.”

    That joy, to me, is not so different from the feeling that washed over me the first time I heard a Friend in Quaker meeting recite the wonderfully rhythmic prayer from early Friend Isaac Penington describing the “sweet experience” of spiritual surrender:

    “Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart, and let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is his portion.” - Isaac Penington (1681)

    It helps me to know that such moments of joy can break through at any time. That joy can take me by surprise – like the time a few weeks ago driving into New York City when we were directed to the onramp of the Willis Avenue Bridge by a woman traffic cop who was giving directions while dancing (yes, a dancing New York City cop).

    Or slip through my ear buds, when I listen to music both overtly spiritual – from Renaissance polyphony (like Huelgas Ensemble) to the second disc of Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence – to spirit-infused affirmations of life, from John Coltrane’s Ballads, to some of Duke Ellington’s solo piano pieces, to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s duets. 

    Sometimes I can help move myself into the stream. But here, too, it’s an idiosyncratic practice drawn from sources as disparate as my faith tradition to 12-step (the Serenity Prayer) to a mantra given me a few years ago by a Buddhist teacher while I was going through a hard stretch. That mantra, “Let this serve to awaken me,” now sits on the bulletin board at my job in a place where my eye easily falls while I’m starting to write.

    The point, I believe, is not how I get there, but that I get there.

 That’s I.T.

    For more on the PBS documentary The Buddha, including to view it, click here. The quotation in my essay is from Mark Epstein, one of the experts interviewed for the program.   

    For the full text of Delmore Schwartz’s poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” and its evocation of “the withness of the body,” click here.

    For more on Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence, which confounded the mainstream rock press (like his other albums on spiritual seeking), but inspired a devoted following among fans like me, click here. Click the album title for more on the other music, Piano Reflections (Duke Ellington), John Coltrane's Ballads,  Utopia Triumphans (Huelgas Ensemble), Ella & Louis, Ella & Louis Again.

    You can find bios and writings of Isaac Penington on the Web, but I think a better starting point for him and other Quaker writers is an anthology like The Quaker Reader.

Practice: A Spring-Seeking Blessing

By Jon Berry

THE GEORGE HARRISON LYRIC GOT THIS year right: Little Darling, it has been a long, cold, lonely winter. More snow. More bone-chilling days. More people I know going through pain, loss, hardship, and harrowing near-misses that there-but-for-the-grace-of-God could have been worse, than any winter I can remember.

    This morning I walked the dog up to the Aqueduct Trail to see if I could go out for a run there this afternoon. No go. It’s still a river of ice.

    But in nature there is more sun – almost two hours more a day than the first of the year. The thaw has begun. As always, it’s not fast enough for me -- nature’s version of the 12-step world’s most sweetly humbling three words, “in God’s time.”

    A day in the 60s, then snow. A spring-like downpour beats away patches of ice; I look earthward with expectation (a.k.a. a “premeditated resentment,” another great 12-step turn of phrase). Any crocuses?  No. The next day, cold blows in; the puddles are frozen again.

    It’s natural in this in-between season for a mind to drift forward, then back. After all, Nature is going back-and-forth. Maybe the trick is to follow Nature’s lead: Bring a bit more light into our interior lives each day. Force Spring into our hearts, like the forsythia and quince on the kitchen counter (thanks, Robin). Get outdoors when we can, but keep the stocking-hats and gloves handy.

    I sometimes feel a bit old to call myself a runner. My PRs are likely long gone. But there’s a new season to look forward to. A friend, Stuart, called from the city this morning to report he’d just finished a couple loops of the reservoir in Central Park, and, yeah, it was icy, but it felt good. “When are you getting out?” “Now.” “Go to it.” "Right."

     Three weeks to Spring. By the Equinox, we’ll have another hour a day of sun. Sunset at 7 p.m. Imagine. Soon I’ll be sing-songing Cummings as I slosh along the trail in mudluscious just-spring.

    Leatherman’s Loop, a 10k rite of spring at the Ward Pound  Ridge Reservation in Katonah, NY, is two months away. It’s is romp of a run, coursing through streams, hills, woods, and a mud flat that last year almost pulled my shoes off, then more hills, winding up at the “splashdown,” a water crossing that, depending on recent rainfall, can be shin-to-chest deep. You finish soaked, muddy, happy, dizzy with gratitude. What’s better than that?

    A blessing is given every year before the race. It’s a sublime moment. The thousand runners pawing at the starting line fall silent all at once, and Danny Martin, the Irish-born retired priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual counselor (he calls the race “a communion more than a competition”), gives the following prayer, a goosebumpily wonderful reminder of the grace of waking up to the world, perfect for this regrounding time of year:

Beauty before me when I run.

Beauty behind me when I run.

Beauty below me when I run.

Beauty above me when I run.

Beauty beside me when I run.

Beauty within me when I run.

I see Beauty all around.

In beauty may I walk.

In beauty may I see.

In beauty may we all be.

That’s I.T.

For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, including photos, stories, and information on signing up for future years’ races (sorry, 2011 was booked up long ago), go to the race’s web site. The blessing is in the FAQ section. Click here for more. 

To see how much more sun we’re getting each day, search the Internet for “sunrise sunset.” Or click here.

I didn’t realize it until researching this piece, but “Here Comes the Sun” actually did come out of a tough winter for George Harrison. The details are on the Wikipedia entry for the song. Or just go out and buy Abbey Road. It has one of the two best sides of a rock album that I know.

Last, for the full text of ee cummings' "In-Just Spring," go to the Poetry Foundation website (click here) and search by the poem's title.