Shinkai

It is Day 5 of this seven day sesshin (intensive Zen retreat) at Tahoma Zen Monastery here on Whidbey Island. It is evening, with the last traces of sunlight slowly melting into night outside the zendo. It has been uncharacteristically clear throughout the retreat, with hints of spring warmth in the afternoon sun that falls back into the chill of a winter night within minutes of the sun going down.

 

There are fifty Zen students from seven countries packed in the zendo on their cushions. No one has moved a muscle for an hour, and after five days of sustained stillness the silence has seeped all the way down into our bones. We have dropped into a place outside the usual confines of time. As the Zen saying goes, we are listening to a silence louder than a hundred claps of thunder. At the end of the hour a bell rings, filling the room with its lingering reverberations. We all bow and unwind our tired bodies and sore joints, lumbering up to a standing position. It is time for kinhin, or walking meditation.

We file in an orderly line out the back of the zendo onto a wooden deck that circles around the outside, then through the zendo again, forming a circle that we have repeated dozens of times during the sesshin. This time, as I cross the threshold into the cold night air, I find myself staring at the barest sliver of a moon. I gasp at the beauty of it, thinking what a gorgeous New Moon it is. Turning the corner on the deck, the moon drops from view, and I suddenly realize that something is very wrong. My mind falters for a moment. Wasn't the moon full last night? How could it go from Full Moon to New Moon in one day? Maybe my eyes played a trick on me. But when I pass back out onto the deck, there it is again; a fine sliver of light etched against the faint circle of a darkened moon.

Gradually, as I move along with the line of gently swaying shoulders ahead of me in the darkness, my mind rises to the meaning of this apparition. I have been ambushed by a full eclipse of the moon that I had no idea was coming. It is just past the point of eclipse, and the returning crescent of light is "bent to the shape of the cold", as the Zen poet Issa once wrote.

 

And it is cold. Thick frost has greeted us each morning this week, and Harada Roshi holds to the strict rules of Rinzai Zen training that he brought with him from Japan. That includes no socks or hats in the zendo, regardless of how cold it may be. So it is bare feet that meet the frozen slabs of wood as we pass repeatedly back out onto the deck with each round of kinhin. I feel my body stiffen each time in resistance to it. Then I remember the words of another Zen teacher, Katagiri Roshi, who used to say "Eat the cold.", when he saw his students evading the chill of the Minnesota winters. "Eat the cold.", I say to myself, and consciously relax into the sensation of bare feet against cold wood. I do my best to turn toward the sensation, invoking curiosity, feeling it's sharp tang without trying to push it away. Suddenly it is no longer pleasant or unpleasant. It is just a sharp tang reaching in to massage my feet and neck and shoulders.

       

It is the same thing with the pain in my knees during long meditation periods, or the waves of restlessness and boredom and frustrated desire. There is no end to them, but I am invited again and again to receive them with kindness and hospitality, rather than hostility. It is a process of aligning myself moment by moment with the truth of my life, rather than turning away from it in a vain effort to get things my way. This process of alignment is never completed, and is always carrying me deeper into the marrow of living.

It is also this process of alignment on the cushion that makes my Zen practice such a crucial part of my Circling Home year. The journey inward toward insight, equanimity and self-compassion lies at the very foundation of my homeward pilgrimage. There is no exaggerating the importance of opening our hearts to the reality of what is, however painful or confusing that may be, if we are going to seriously take on the dysfunctional habits of living that have dragged us now to the brink of climate catastrophe. The two journeys, inward and outward, are not different, and both are equally important.

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"Who is Shinkai?", Tom asks while a group of us are having tea with the Roshi. It's been a few years since he sat a sesshin, he's heard the name bandied about, and he doesn't know that this is the name the Roshi gave me in my lay ordination several years ago. "I've been wondering who Shinkai is myself.", I respond, evoking a warm round of laughter that feels good after all the silence. This is one of the few times during the week we are free to talk.

Shinkai means literally "mind of ocean", or more precisely, "heart / mind of ocean". Harada gave me this name because of my years of work on the water as a wilderness kayak guide and commercial fisherman. As far as he is concerned, I have no other name. "Kurt" no longer exists. I am Shinkai now, pure and simple. It is a matter of karmic affiliation. I have never used the name outside of the monastery, but each sesshin it grows on me a little more. After a full week of being called nothing but Shinkai, I start to think it actually is my name. It's a very mysterious process of growing into some part of a new and wider identity. Like so many other aspects of this arcane tradition, I resist it and try to hold it at arms length, but little by little it seems to be having its way with me. 

The Roshi stayed for three days beyond the sesshin before returning to Japan, for those who wanted to continue with a less rigorous monastic schedule and ongoing daily interviews. I chose to stay for two of them. It was a wonderful way to cross back over the threshold into my regular life, and to renew friendships with fellow students in a relaxed post-sesshin atmosphere, easing the whiplash that often accompanies this tricky passage from Shinkai back to Kurt. Maybe some day the two of us will live in greater harmony more of the time. 

I'm working on it.