On Leaving the Monastery Again, for the Last Time

Navigating the Waters of (Extra) Ordinary Life

I took this photo in September 2023 after shaving my hair off—my typical ritual after (re)entering the monastery. This is our idea of a hair salon!

---

Since leaving Tassajara exactly a month ago, I’ve been asked many times if I miss it. Yes and no. There are ways in which living in a monastery amid the mountains, creeks, and trees is much easier than residing in the “other world.” And there are ways that living in the 9-to-5 world is much easier than monastic life. However, the one constant about both lifestyles is I can’t escape the Two Truths of myself: the relative and the absolute.

Or as the always profound and poetic Japanese Zen Master Eihei Dōgen (1200-1253) writes in the “Genjo Koan”:

When a fish swims, no matter how far it swims, it doesn’t reach the end of the water. When a bird flies, no matter how high it flies, it cannot reach the end of the sky. Therefore, since ancient times, no fish has ever left the water and no bird has ever left the sky.

In this passage translated by Shohaku Okumura, Dōgen’s prose is layered with nuances that illustrate and reflect our complex and mysterious human lives. The “fish” and “bird” represent the world of form: the relative or dualistic world. Sometimes Dōgen employs the phrases the “10,000 things” or “myriad things” to represent the miraculous manifestations of our conditioned existence: me, you, trees, stones, houses, and laptops.

Each one of us embodies a particular actuality while swimming, flying, reading, and writing in the “ocean” and “sky” of emptiness: the absolute or non-dualistic world. Sometimes Dōgen uses the phrases “Buddha Nature” or “Original Face” or “the wisdom that runs through all things” to describe the ineffable, undefinable, and unconditioned source of the relative world.

We could also view the “ocean” and “sky” as the causes and conditions that comprise our daily routines. If you’re a fish, you’re swimming in water, looking for a mate, migrating if that’s your thing, scouring for your next meal, and avoiding becoming another animal’s meal. If you’re a bird, your routine is similar, but your element is vastly dissimilar. Whether a fish, a bird, a human, or an elephant, we each meet and respond (or react) to our specific element, from which we are not separate. How could a fish or a bird be independent from water or air?

Let’s start with the ocean I’ve been swimming in this past week. I’m staying with my sister and mother in Santa Clarita, CA. I’m swimming in the familiar ocean of family: I’m a 58-year-old daughter in relation to my 87-year-old mother and an older sibling to my 55-year-old sister. These relationships have shifted tremendously over the decades that we’ve known each other.

Being an older sibling to my sister now when she’s a mother and a wife is vastly different from when we shared a peach-colored bedroom in our childhood home outside New York City. When we were kids, I was her protector and mentor; she looked up to me and relied on me. For more years than when we were kids, we’ve been peers with our paths diverging and converging as adults; our life as siblings ebbing and flowing in the grown-up ocean we’ve swam in since graduating from college.

When I was a child, my mother was my protector and mentor, who guided me through the many challenging waters of adolescence and early adulthood. Now she’s the one who needs protection, the one who needs assistance similar to what a parent offers a child: clipping her toenails, helping her shower, cleaning her room, buying groceries. Oh, and navigating the complexities of the internet and the smart-TV—which my 13-year-old niece is much more skilled in than myself!

When I’m with my aging mother and my younger sister, I do my best to respond appropriately according to arising causes and conditions:

When the bird’s need or the fish’s need is great, the range is large. When the need is small, the range is small. In this way, each fish and each bird uses the whole of space and vigorously acts in every place.

Clearly my mother will always be my parent and my sister my younger sibling; however, if I were to continue to relate to my sister as though she were 10 and my mother as though I were 10, there’d be tremendous and expected friction. Inevitably friction does arise because we sometimes relate through old karmic parts of ourselves that have yet to fully heal. That’s what’s so illuminating and frustrating about spending time with our karmic family. Like Ram Dass said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

Adding to this mix is the previous ocean that I’ve been swimming in for the past 27 months: having lived at Tassajara as both the director and the head of practice. I’ve held many roles during the dozen years I lived there, and each of them has illuminated and transformed this karmic being in fathomable and unfathomable ways. It’s impossible for this present moment Heather to separate herself from those past identities. And, if I cling to the past Heather who embodied those roles and long for the monastic routine while I’m interacting with my family, more friction arises.

Unlike fish and birds, human relationships are messy. Though I’m not a fish or a bird so take my limited perspective with a shaker of salt. Because we homo sapiens are endowed with self-reflexive consciousness and imbued with emotional intelligence, we sometimes complicate the simple matters of human existence. Our capacity for self referencing often hinders our ability to find our place where we are.

A photo of my spouse Tanya (l), Senior Dharma Teacher Paul Haller, and myself on my head monk (shuso) day, right after the Dharma inquiry ceremony in April 2018.

Fortunately for fish and birds their consciousness does not create reference points. Unlike us human animals, they are not harangued and duped by “defiled thoughts from the past.” They don’t experience themselves as separate from their specific elements. They trust the water and the sky to sustain them. They don’t think about the fish or the bird they used to be. They don’t long to be some other species of fish or bird.

What would happen if a bird or fish resisted their particular element?

However, if a bird departs from the sky, or a fish leaves the water, it immediately dies. We should know that [for a fish] water is life, [for a bird] sky is life. A bird is life; a fish is life. Life is a bird; life is a fish.

Because we can imagine ourselves in some alternate reality we often are not “vigorously acting in every place.” When I get caught up in thoughts about how I’d rather be writing or exercising instead of cleaning my mother’s room, there’s a hairsbreadth deviation that’s created and the mind is lost in confusion. During these moments The Way, which is life, feels “as distant as heaven from earth.” Of course, we don’t die when we’re lost in our fantasies or identified with “defiled thoughts from the past.” However, this is a basic understanding of suffering: The First Noble Truth.

Unfortunately, as we Zen practitioners know, practicing meditation (zazen) doesn’t make us immune to this intrinsic function of human consciousness. When we extricate ourselves from the 10,000 things of 9-to-5 world and participated in a meditation intensive or even just daily sitting, we cultivate the mental faculty of attention. Over and over, we touch and collect that wandering mind and tether it to the breath, to sounds, to the physicality of the arising moment. Zazen is the relative human being practicing-realizing the Absolute.

This is what Dōgen exhorts us to do:

And we should go beyond this. There is practice-enlightenment—this is the way of living beings.

The practitioner is not separate from zazen; zazen is not separate from the practitioner: just like the fish and bird are forms that are distinct within emptiness and not separate from emptiness. The fish penetrates the water and the water penetrates the fish. And when we contemplate this further, how can this not be possible for human animals as well? Up to 60% of the human adult body is water; the brain and heart are composed of 73% water; the lungs about 83%; even our bones are composed of 31% of water. Water is indeed life! And so is air, fire, earth, space, and consciousness.

I confess that it’s so much easier for me to feel our profound connection and interdependence with the elements while living at Tassajara. It was like one continuous forest bath. Our symbiotic relationship with nature is so paramount and obvious at Tassajara because we cannot escape it. Just in the past few months, we’ve had several trees fall or lose large limbs. A towering sycamore crashed into the bathhouse, shattering part of the roof and obstructing the path. Fortunately, no one was harmed, and we could scamper over or under the trunk to enter the bathhouse.

Life at Tassajara helped me feel more elemental, less of a thinking human, and more of a being human. My body became re-sensitized to the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes of everyday existence. My to-do list was pared down to: sleep, sit, eat, work, move, bathe, sleep, repeat. The schedule made it such that I could not use my human tricks to manipulate it. Resistance is so apparent when it arises at Tassajara, and so much easier to see through as well.

I don’t want to pathologize this extraordinary and uncanny ability of homo sapiens to imagine because it has engendered extraordinary innovations. And, it has its shadow side: because we humans have devised numerous contraptions that permit us to swim in the ocean like a fish without drowning, fly in the sky without falling, and rocket through space without burning up, we are often duped into believing that we are not only separate from the environment, but that we are superior creatures.

One of the goals of monastic rigor is the reduction of our human egos to their rightful place in the universe, which is just as insignificant and significant as a fish or a bird. When the foundation of our lives is the practice-realization of the Buddha Mudra of zazen, we have ample opportunity each moment to wake up to the sky-ocean of Buddha Nature, the nature of which abides when I’m a monk and sit like a mountain, breathe like the wind, and flow like the creek. And when I’m with my spouse, and I swim like a wife; and when I’m with my family, and I fly like a daughter and sister.

---