Deep Listening

It's been too long, friend. Strange and hard and wonderful things have happened in my life since the last post. I've continued to enjoy the honeymoon period with my love, and consequently I've been working on being the best partner I can be and also thinking about what that means. I've had a bout of my recurrent illness, and I was in the hospital for a week. I've been recovering well, and I'm grateful to have health insurance and a job that gives me sick leave for this sort of thing. My birthday, and my mom's birthday, and mother's day have come and gone. And I recently learned to weave and to make simple backstrap looms.

I haven't had much contact with my Zen teacher lately due to my illness/recovery and circumstances affecting our schedules, and I miss him. He has a wonderful way of balancing the iconoclasm and freshness of Zen with Truths as they are presented in other Buddhist traditions in ways that are not in conflict. For example, I sometimes feel tension between the viewpoint of Zen schools that have stopped even talking about enlightenment or the four noble truths and teachings about liberation as they are presented in other Zen schools and lineages of Buddhism. I can eek out a point of view in which there is no conflict, but he does it with much more ease. I know there are benefits to both ways of looking at things, but easily fall into a mindset that necessitates choosing one approach or the other, whereas he sees them as not different.

Yesterday, my Dharma brother Rev. Lawrence Do'an Grecco and I gave a Dharma talk on deep listening to the Queer Sangha for which we teach. I'm sure he'll throw a link up to the audio in the next few days, so check back. It was a wonderful thing to reflect on. I was inspired to suggest it as a topic by a chapter on listening in Norman Zoketsu Fischer's book Taking our Places; a Buddhist path to truly growing up. I highly recommend this book and Normal Fischer in general.

I'm also looking forward to meeting someone I've been interested in for some time and with whom I seem to share much in common: Barry Magid- psychoanalyst and one of the Dharma-heirs of Charlotte Joko Beck. We're going to get coffee later this week.

I've been taking this time lately to pull back from some commitments and to do some deep listening inwardly and with some nears and dears. I think this may be what this season is about for me. I will try to post more often though