Dispatch #22: Don't Despair About Despair

Breathing In, Breathing Out

Dear Spark Zen Readers, thank you for being here. Thank you for your attention and patience with my slow start to the New Year, which is always busy at the monastery. I spent my day off yesterday writing this post to remind myself of my vow to save all beings so that they may know peace. I had to say something today, even as incomplete as this post feels, about the twisted irony of commemorating the birth of one of the most powerful, spiritual, and influential civil rights leader with a man who is his antithesis. Stay mindful, stay peaceful, bowing from the monastery, Rev. Shōren Heather

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Here at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, we are thirteen days into the traditional 90-day monastic ango. The Japanese word ango translates into English as “peaceful abiding.” Thus far, these first two weeks have felt anything but peaceful. There is a raft of reasons for this, some internal and local; others, external and political. Since I can speak most intimately about my experiential world, I’ll start with me and end with we.

I spent the holi-daze traveling to and fro in a vapid version of TRAINS, PLANES, AND AUTOMOBILES—sans the trains. I shuttled between the monastery, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the monastery, San Francisco, and then back—finally—to the monastery. Whew!

All this hustle-and-bustle over three weeks was discombobulating for someone who had spent the previous 90 days in a leaf-strewn valley listening to the bauble of the creek, the cackle of woodpeckers, and the silence of mountains.

The “other world” is how we often refer to the land of news, noise, traffic, and tariff talk. Since June 2008, when I first arrived at Tassajara, I have lived almost as many years in this mountain valley as I have in the other world, what most people refer to as the “real” world: one of sensory deluge and senseless violence, innumerable distractions and insurmountable divisions, insatiable consumerism and inculcated competition. Our collective consciousness and global “society” have been steeped in and shaped by predominating systems of oppression and injustice.

Even though I have the privilege of living in this breathtakingly beautiful monastery, which sits at the end of a 14-mile, winding and rocky mountain road, it’s impossible for me to escape the causes and conditions of our capitalist-imperialist country. It’s impossible for me not to feel despair for the suffering and anomie in these Divided States of America.

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All (people) are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be . . .
This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

―Martin Luther King Jr.,Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, written after his arrest for violating Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations

Most mornings, I spend close to four hours sitting silently on a black cushion and staring at a white wall. Although my body is still, my mind flits hither and thither. A wandering mind is a suffering one, and during these two weeks, many moments of despair have agitated my wandering mind and stationary body.

Of course there’s much to despair about; however, when I believe the veracity of dismaying thoughts, the despair intensifies and reifies itself. The projections spin, spiral, and swirl. Allowing my mind to run amok reinforces the tendency of mind to proliferate and proliferate until there’s too many obscurations to see reality as it is. I become trapped behind a wall of conceptualization.

Giving credence to impermanent and delusive mental afflictions creates a substantial sense of a “me” who’s in control of what I’m thinking, feeling, and doing. The practice of Zen is to be with and breathe through distressing emotional sensations or “heavy-handed thoughts” without identifying with them, without buying into their narratives, without making concrete conclusions about reality based on arising/passing mental phenomena (aka: thoughts, concepts, images).

Don’t despair about despair.

Zen is not about hiding our heads in the sand. Zen is not about being a Pollyanna or a Pandora. It’s about maintaining presence of mind in the present. To be with whatever arises as fully as we are able—to feel my cold hands and nose; to wonder at the sparkle of the stars; to hear the gravel crunch under my shoes; to see my breath spirit to life in the dark cold.

And to be with the uncomfortable and distressing emotions when thoughts arise about the millions of people who are celebrating Trump’s second inauguration today; and to remind myself that every single person suffers; that the MAGA supporters are not the other, are not my enemy. Their suffering is my suffering. Their liberation is my liberation.

My vow as a Zen priest(ess) is to not harbor ill will, to do my utmost to save all beings so they dwell in peace. Although this vow feels unattainable, I have to hold it close to my heart-mind otherwise the weeds of despair take over and fester into anger toward and demonizing of the “other.” As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his 1956 sermon “The Most Durable Power,”

"Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."

Today, instead of bending the knee to despair, I will sit upright, and breathe in the despair and suffering, and breathe out Dr. King’s legacy of love, justice, and peace for all beings.

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