Tag Archives: buddhism

A Son’s Gift

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As we turned the corner in the grocery store, my five year old son walked a step ahead of me, clear about where he was going and full of intention.

Making trips to the grocery store isn’t my favorite activity, and the number of cars in the parking lot told of a large crowd inside – but I didn’t mind making this Christmas Eve outing. As we drove to the store, I watched my son clutch the dollar bill that he had pulled from the old tea container on his dresser, preparing to contribute it towards his big brother’s Christmas gift. I listened to the assured way he spoke, without revealing everything to me, about what he had decided to give to him.

He marched confidently most of the way down the toy aisle and stopped. This one, he said, pointing towards the shelf. I followed the direction of his hand and saw the blue box of eight matchbox cars. He pulled it from the shelf with both hands, bringing it to rest against his winter coat as he examined it closely, then turning towards me as I caught up, hopeful I would approve his choice.

It was the same gift his brother had gotten for him the year before. The same gift he had loved. I remembered him opening it Christmas morning, how he couldn’t imagine his good fortune at receiving a box of eight new cars, all at once. What could speak more clearly of his love for his brother than wanting to reciprocate, a year later, with the same?

Yet, as I stood there with Robin looking up at me, all that ran through my mind was how to get him to choose something else. His brother True is seven and a half, and hasn’t played a lot with cars and trucks in the last year. I knew he would be gracious in receiving the gift, but it seemed an awful lot of cars if he wasn’t going to spend much time with them. And at $12.99, well, it felt like a lot.

Let’s look around, I said, see what else is here. I suggested the small Lego sets that were in the same aisle – True loves Legos, doesn’t he? I suggested card games and even some smaller sets of cars. Robin dutifully obliged and examined that the alternatives I offered, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I knew it. I could feel the way the big set of cars pulled on him, even as we stood at each different shelf, motionless. He dismissed all the other options without words and returned back to pulled the box off the shelf. As he did, I thought I saw my opening in the form of a box just behind, a sort of combination track and ramp for matchbox cars that could be set up from a table to send cars flying. He’ll go for that, I thought, as I pointed it out it to him.

He looked, but didn’t take long. No, he said, I want to get this one for him.

He wasn’t demanding – just trying desperately to show me his sincerity, sincerity born from the warm feeling that still lasted from the previous Christmas, and his desire to share that with his brother, to get him the perfect gift, just like the extra large box of tea he had picked out for his mother.

Every bit of me could see that, could feel it, yet for some reason still struggled against it.

You don’t want this? I asked, holding up the track again. You could have races to see which of the cars you already have goes the farthest. I tried to paint a different picture than the one he had composed, the one he was holding dear. No, he replied, this one. Don’t we already have those cars? I flailed. No, he pointed out, these are different. He’ll love these.

There was nothing left for me to say. I could have flatly said no, that the set was too expensive. Or told him I didn’t think True really wanted eight new matchbox cars. But I couldn’t do either.

So instead I did something worse.

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Buddha Nature

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Dear ones lie still,
near and peaceful,

yet quiet has settled too deeply,
darkness persistent, final —

can these shallow breaths
be the full completion of Dogen;

sudden loneliness,
truly buddha nature;

restlessness,
realization;

misgiving,
it?
 

Shiny Rocks

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I’ve gained nothing
from the practice,
instead losing some
of what I used to have.

What I looked for isn’t here.

Still fearful,
bitter at separation —

but, too,
softened against the day
and quicker to tears.

My daughter’s pockets
are filled with shiny rocks,
just like mine.
 

Antique Doors

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I salvaged a set of antique doors
that were piled in a yard
close by the ocean
with other detritus
from a torn-down house.

Hoping the owner would let me take them,
I talked with him
and listened to his stories
about who had passed through them,
what rooms they had separated.

It isn’t easy to find ones just so,
with the hardware still intact.

Perhaps if I hold on to them,
I thought,
and shape them here or there,
they’ll fill up gaps —
shut out the draft from the
old ice-box pantry,
dampen the kitchen noise that drifts
so easily up the stairs
when our children are sleeping.

But I wonder
if I will have time to use them,
or if someday
someone will come
and collect them from me.
 
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Saving All Beings

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I was very late coming home from work last night – it was after 11 o’clock, and the whole family was asleep. I thought for a moment, as my wife turned over when I entered the room, that she might be awake in our bed, but she was quiet and still by the time I joined her. And so when I awoke this morning, I was anxious to see them all. I knew that the kids would have to run off to school soon and I would have to return to work, but I looked forward to the short time we had as I walked down the stairs.

Which made it all the more painful when, minutes later, I took the box of cereal from my son’s hand as he poured it, and sent him away from the breakfast table.

I would tell you that I long for simple moments of being with my children, times when notions and expectations drop away. I had just such an opportunity at the table this morning, as my boys found themselves possessed by silliness – each look from one brought the other practically to tears from laughter. Their voices rose as they called to one another, taking turns making faces just subtle enough to hold the expression for the few seconds it took to send his brother back over the edge. Knees knocked against the underside of the table as cereal squares spilled and milk droplets dripped off of their spoons.

I had the opportunity to witness and join them in this playfulness, this joy. Instead, I found myself simply wanting it to end. My body pulled back, my breath quickened. They laughed. I tensed. I told them that it wasn’t time to be silly and reminded them about their table manners. I sent them away.

I suppose there are legitimate reasons to help my children shape good table manners; in our relative world, they are important. But what am I teaching them about their laughter? And it goes beyond the table. My boys’ joy often finds its expression in moments that are loud and frenetic, unconstrained by any adult’s ideas about how it should look or sound. As they laugh and jump, as they delight in any noise they can make, they are meeting the world, living fully in what is offered. Unfiltered. Present.

In receiving the ten Grave Precepts of Buddhist practice, I vowed, recognizing that I am not separate from all that is, I vow to take up the way of not killing. This precept is often applied to the choice of whether or not we eat meat, or how we respond to a mosquito in the bedroom. But it also speaks to asking my boys to calm and quiet themselves, to experience and express their joy differently than the way in which they have found it. What dies then?

In receiving the Pure Precepts, I vowed to save all beings. But when I ask them to be something different because their expression of themselves is impeding the quiet I was hoping for, what does my response mean to them? What do they make of that experience when the world presents something so real, and their father tells them it isn’t right – not right now, not right here?

What am I teaching them about their laughter?

Back at the breakfast table this morning, I sat alone and wanting the moment, like many before it, to be different. Not because it was too noisy, but because it had now grown far too quiet. I went and spoke to my son and asked him back, telling him I knew he could use his best manners while he finished his breakfast.

At dinner later in the evening, he told me that he had tried to buy a gift for me at the school holiday fair. It was a baseball bat that was engraved with World’s Greatest Dad. He had seen it the day before and brought his money into school. I looked at him in silence for a moment as he finished telling me the story, about how they had sold out by the time he got there. I asked him to come sit on my lap. He had trouble sitting still, as still as I would have liked after another long day at work. But you can’t always sit still when you’re busy saving all beings. Or at least your Dad.

A Small Book of Poems without a Shelf

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Clutter has built up
around the edges of the room.

Facing the altar,
I can not see it,
but the gravity
of its accumulation
pulls me backward
toward the west window.

It isn’t much –
an iron, a board,
and hangers from the morning;
my daughter’s cloth cuttings
spilling from a box she has
decorated in tissue paper;
a small book of poems
without a shelf;

remnants awaiting
places to fit
just so.
 

Fatherhood and the Five Remembrances

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As a part of our sutra service at the temple, we regularly chant the Five Remembrances. Intended by the Buddha to ward off an impression of permanence in our current existence, these ancient words remind us that we are of the nature to die, and that we cannot escape separation from those who are dear to us.

It is stark reality – but it isn’t while chanting at the temple that I feel the weight of this realization.

Last night, in the brief interim between the frenzy of the day and the full silence of night, my wife and I were talking about our children. I commented about the way in which our youngest son had greeted me when I arrived home from work. He ran to me with a stack of coupons he had cut out of a junk mail flyer from the local warehouse store. We stood in the middle of the kitchen, the table being set, the oven opening and closing, his brother and sister whirling around us. He wanted to sit right there, right then, and show me. Later on, I wondered aloud to my wife about what had held him there. Was it the coupons themselves that he was so eager to share? Was it his pride in the careful cutting? Or was it just the chance be together, no matter what was at the center of it or what was going on around us?

My son is always reaching into my back pocket, looking for my phone to take pictures. He takes snapshots of crayon boxes, books on the floor, our feet together on a stool, cookies cooling on the counter, and toy dragons on windowsills. Pictures of each room, doorway, lamp, and family member. Hundreds of them at a time. It clogs the memory on my phone, and we try not to have our kids spend too much time with electronics. But I always give in when he asks. Each time I hear the shutter click, I feel his joy and his presence in that moment.

So when he was perusing and clipping these junk mail coupons earlier in the afternoon, my wife remembered, he had paused when he came across a camera. Could I get a camera, he asked her. She replied that maybe he should put it on his Christmas list. She showed me how his eyes brightened as he offered, Or maybe I should get a phone.

I could see his face in my mind as my wife finished this story and as I walked toward the kitchen to make the next day’s coffee. I could imagine his deep pleasure at the idea of having his own phone with which to take endless pictures. I reveled, as I reached into the cupboard, in how much I adore him.

Then, in the time it took to pull down the box of coffee filters from the second shelf, the warmth of that adoration was swiftly swallowed whole by the remembrance of change. My change, his change. The remembrance that I am of the nature to die, of the nature to be separated from him. From everyone. From everything. The feeling sank deep into my gut, an impossibly heavy mixture of sadness, anger, and confusion.

Some say the words of the Five Remembrances help them to live in the present moment. I didn’t have the sutra in mind then, but I did make an effort to stand in the kitchen and accept all that was being offered, that koan pulling deep inside me. Mostly, it was a moment filled with wanting desperately to go and wake up my son, to watch him walk about taking pictures, then sit closely and talk about the ones we liked best. Would it matter how tightly I held him?

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old.
  There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health.
  there is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die.
  There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me, and everyone I love, are of the nature of change.
  There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My deeds are my closest companions.
  I am the beneficiary of my deeds.
  My deeds are the ground on which I stand.

Lineage

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The lineage scroll from Jukai rests,
tucked in the flickering shadow,
behind the incense bowl
and grandmother’s Buddha —

cold rattles the window and hardens the floor.
 

The Lure of Accomplishment

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My teacher often says that Zen is not a self-improvement project. And it isn’t. But it has changed me. I have noticed that I spend a lot less time planning my career, thinking about my degree, or fretting about how much money I’ll end up with. For that matter, I’ve pretty much let go of any idea of enlightenment beyond what I already have. Yet it seems that I still get caught up in trying to accomplish things – they’re just much smaller.

My mother stopped by on Sunday to spend some time with the kids. She and my daughter sat animated at the kitchen table, chairs pushed close together. They were piecing together a plastic cup, sponge, string, and some googly eyes, making a toy my daughter first made when she was she was five or six years old. If you wet the sponge, squeeze it tightly around and slide it down the string just so, it sounds an awful lot like a gobbling wild turkey.

(I am completely enamored of my daughter’s love for this sort of thing. She’s almost 10. I sometimes catch myself realizing that I expect her to be older by now, and that I’m so happy she’s not. But that’s mostly another story.)

This was just the sort of moment that I complain about not having the chance to witness or be present to. The possibility of being with my family, absorbed in something together, absorbed each others’ company. Except that I didn’t join them. I stood right there, leaning up against the butcher block counter, thinking about getting the lawn mowed one last time before winter, about getting the family budget balanced, about the need to roll out insulation in the attic and fix the broken glass in the window up there.

So much to accomplish.

There is real suffering in the desire for the moment to be something other than what it is, for it to be simpler. And there is a sense of impossibility in these moments, too. Graciously accepting what a moment has to offer could mean dropping away my own concerns and being fully present with my wife or child. But it also must mean accepting the part if me that feels the conflict, that part that is pulled away by a nagging mind wanting to do and to accomplish. In the world of emptiness, one isn’t better than the other. In the world of form, of fatherhood, of the kind of impermanence that means childhood years are short, I sure know which one I prefer.

For all of the regret that I might muster on my drive to work or in the quiet hours after bedtime, though, that moment in the kitchen has already passed. Zen practice is very reliable in that all that it asks me to do is to sit down. Perhaps there is no answer to the lure of accomplishment, either, but to sit down – or stand up, or run around – and play when someone comes asking. The small change may come. Or it may not. But I’ll be there.

Mismatched

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in the midst of sitting
at the temple,
my mind began
to compose a poem

about how across the hall
in the dokusan room,
which i could see from my seat
in the zendo,
the chairs are all mismatched.

i don’t know what happened to it.