And Yet

 

The Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) wrote the following poem after his two year old daughter died:

tsuyu no yo wa 

tsuyu no yo nagara 

sari nagara

This world of dew

is a world of dew.

And yet ... and yet ....

Later, commenting on this poem, he wrote, "I knew that it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and scattered blossoms are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply cut the binding cord of human love."  

Last week I lost a dear friend, who died after a full life at the age of 98.  I was lucky enough to be able to be with her the day before she died, holding her hand, breathing with her and quietly singing old jazz standards that both she and my mother and I had loved.  She and my mother had been best friends, and when my mother died 35 years ago, she became a second mother to me.  The two women had been pregnant at the same time, and both gave birth to daughters:  me and my oldest friend.  We four were all together when my mother died, and here we were again, only the three of us,  as one of us again passed from this world to whatever lies beyond.   As she lay dying, she kept saying, "I've been here a long time!" 

So many parts of this experience reflect the teachings of Zen.  We were facing impermanence and death and loss, and at the same time crying together and feeling our love for each other.  This world of dew, where everything vanishes like dew on a leaf in the morning sun, is indeed a world of dew.  There's no arguing with impermanence.  As much as we'd like it to be different, everything comes and goes.  So my friend was once alive, and now she is no longer on the planet in bodily form.  

Issa's "and yet...and yet" is the other side of this logical understanding.  We cannot "cut the binding cord of human love."  Our hearts break regularly.  As the recently deceased songwriter Stephen Sondheim sings "Sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood."  It's just the way it is.  And yet...and yet.  

I miss my friend, and will continue to heal from her passing as time goes on, and her death recedes further and further into the past.  But she lives on in my heart, as do all my other loved ones who have left me in various ways.  Impermanence goes hand in hand with love and connection.  It's a mystery -- the great paradox of living a life in Zen -- facing into whatever arises and being as present as possible.  

Oh Western Wind!

Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow

The smalle rayne downe can rayne?

Cryst yf my love were in my armys,

And I yn my bed agayne!

--Anonymous (16th centruy)

Last night the wind howled everywhere around the Temple, moving trees and downing branches.  The wind chill temperature reached down to -20 F (-30 C).  When the power went out briefly around midnight and then returned, the energy surge rang the doorbell and made all the appliances that beep make their small insistent sounds.  

My thoughts, as I tried to get back to sleep, drifted back to seeing my first Zen teacher, during a similar late winter windstorm at a sesshin, out on the porch that surrounded the zendo.  He was standing still, looking out over the forest that surrounded the little temple that we had rented for the retreat.  I went out to stand next to him, and we stayed that way for a while.  As he left, he whispered the poem that begins this writing, but in modern English:  "Oh Western Wind, when will you blow, the small rain down can rain?  Christ if my live were in my arms and I in my bed again."  

It's a poem of longing, for the western wind to blow winter away, to bring the spring rains, to return to the intimacy of the comfort of a companion and a warm bed.  I don't really know what my teacher, now long dead, was thinking, but I remember that moment vividly in my own heart, as an expression of the power of a strong wind to blow away whatever must go -- not just in the natural world, where we can feel the power of a winter wind, but also in our minds and hearts, burdened by distress and sorrow.  

Ultimately, everything must go, even this season of uncertainty that envelopes the planet.  What will come next?  For now, we trust that it will be spring soon, but beyond that, who knows?

Santiago by David Whyte

Path to the Sea, Nova Scotia 2019

I recently saw a video of David Whyte reading this amazing poem about the journey that all of us who have committed ourselves to liberation share.   As the poet sings, "no matter that it had to break your heart along the way...so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago." 

Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like a person and a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.

David Whyte