This Is My Toothbrush

While I was at school for sesshin, as always, we had a daily work period, during which I cleaned bathrooms, an absolute pleasure when the alternative is sitting perfectly still on a hard folding chair. We had every kind of weather. The day we arrived, it was brilliantly sunny and 84 degrees. In the course of the week, there was a ferocious windstorm and dust storm that blew a skylight off the top of the zendo so that leaves came in. It rained briefly and heavily one morning. It snowed! One night when it was terribly windy, a roommate of mine who is very tiny put her arm through mine as we staggered in the dark back to our sleeping quarters.

The week was billed as being about the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, a Zen poem, and each day the teacher leading the sesshin gave a talk about some aspect of this. My favorite two lines in the translation we were using, of which there are many:

Complications are auspicious
Do not resist them

I liked this teacher. When he gave his first talk, he pointed out a scroll he had caused to have hung in the zendo and said, “My talk might not be that good, but I have exquisite taste in scrolls.” Another day he talked about noticing that he was feeling tense while brushing his teeth and how he counseled himself, “This is my toothbrush. These are my teeth. Everything’s cool.”

The two things he said that had the profoundest impact on me were the following. Paraphrasing, he said something like, “We want the entire web of causes and conditions from beginningless time to be different so that our karma will be different so that our elbow won’t itch!” When you put it that way, it does seem ridiculous to object to this or that thing that has arisen, but we—I—do it constantly, about the very smallest things. Pondering this, I got a sense of this vast web mixing, churning, ebbing, flowing, drifting, flowering, becoming. What has arisen in this moment, how could it be otherwise? There is nothing whatsoever to be done about what is already here. The good news is that there is also a vast array of possible responses.

The other thing was the idea of being lazy and of being a fool, like Ryokan, Zen’s “Great Fool”: not having to have a full set of detailed plans, not having to react to every little thing. Going along, just this, just this. How much time I waste thinking about some task I have to do in the future, reviewing a plan which I have reviewed literally 50 times before, and which is also already written down somewhere. So unnecessary. So many moments of life missed. But how splendid that in this very moment, I can be awake again. There is nothing preventing it. I found myself returning to the foundational practice of noting: “Thinking, thinking.” Seeing what is happening is all that is needed. It is not a struggle to achieve any particular state of mind. Awareness itself is the purifying force.

As the days passed, the mind’s reactions became more subtle: zoning out, thinking instead of perceiving, noticing that I was waiting for the pain in my shoulder to go away so my real life could begin. Reminding myself that this is my real life, just this. Noticing my view that if there is any kind of suffering, something must be wrong, which is not true. Feeling that I should have more control over matters, which is also not true.

And then four full days of sitting were over, and it was Sunday morning, and instead of oryoki and instead of two hours of sitting, walking and service, we had one hour, followed by a “convivial breakfast” in the dining room, and what a delicious breakfast it was. Roasted potatoes with a hint of chipotle, fried eggs, homemade muffins, some kind of sweet whipped butter, slices of pink pineapple. Seated next to a young resident, I had eggs and potatoes and was thrown into a dilemma: I had planned to have two slabs of pepperoni pizza after I got back to the sunport, but now I wasn’t sure whether to eat too much potatoes and eggs or too much pizza. (Answer: both!) Tasty problem, and nice chat with the resident, who said she didn’t know my name, so every time she saw me, such as during walking meditation, she said to herself, “There’s [certain movie star],” so I thought she was a very nice young lady indeed.

And then looking at Rebecca’s actual face, after all those hours of silently sitting, eating and walking side by side. Big hug. Plans to get together with the other two Bay Area chaplaincy students to work on sewing our rakusus for jukai ceremony a year from now. Rebecca lives here in San Francisco. As we sat down next to each other in a large circle in the zendo for a closing session of council, I whispered to her, “Let’s be friends,” and she smiled and nodded back.

When it was my turn to speak, I said that I would be taking away two things:

—How could it be otherwise?

—Complications are auspicious.

Back to the sunport, shuttle driver tailgating alarmingly at 75 miles an hour, pizza not quite as good as I had imagined; it was fantastic last time. Minor freakout two minutes before boarding when I notice I am in a back row of the tiny plane. Didn’t I have a seat right near the front? Can I make it all the way back to my seat without succumbing to panic? Though, remember: the farther you are from the front door, the closer you are to the back door. Pleasant surprise: It was still just 12 rows of four seats, but it was a different model plane that seemed much less cramped. Horrendous turbulence leaving Albuquerque. Congenial fellow sitting to me.

Another great thing about my five-day sesshin was that I didn’t hear one single word about Donald Trump the whole time.