Back home now reflecting on our 5-day silent retreat a few days ago at Great Ocean Road in Victoria.
During the talks, we delved into some poetry by reading works by Rilke, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert and Rumi. An invisible thread seemed to run through these poems connecting the talks with the practice during the retreat. We could see how the practice of letting go of thoughts during zazen could be seen as an invitation to first recognize then take a step out of the conditioning of the mind. A process one could call unlearning.
These scintillating words of Jack Gilbert in the poem ' tear it down' echoed long in the mind:
'we must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.'
Departing from not knowing, returning to not knowing, makes the journey both beginningless and endless. Therein lies the wonder of not knowing where one is going while being intimate and in accord with the understanding that you need not be anywhere else other than where you are, right here, right now. Of this art of erring the great Chuang-tzu says; to come from nowhere turns anywhere you go into a place where you can dwell.
The depth of the practice of zazen, the just sitting, lies in its utter simplicity. Mind struggles with what is simple for simplicity is beyond grasp and mind is about grasping.
The practice of letting go of thought though bottomless is liberating; it opens both heart and mind as we sit through discomfort and resistance and start to sense the boundless space that lies beyond thoughts without excluding them.
Silence as the gateway to that space.
The clouds pass across the vast sky, at times obscuring it from our view. Without the sky, though, there would be no clouds. Clouds at times obscuring the sky is what thoughts do to the mind the time of their arising. They becloud it with hues of many colors. Clouds of thought drifting across boundless space is part of the doing and undoing of the sky.
In this celebrated poem, the great haiku master Matsuo Bashō captures this with sublime simplicity :
sitting quietly,
doing nothing;
spring comes, and
the grass grows by itself.~
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