You Don’t need to Go looking for a Zen Master. He’s here, he is Now.

You don’t need to go looking for a Zen master. I have been thinking about this recently. The Zen master is here now, it is in all phenomena that looms up in your world, both within and without.The Zen master lives on that line between reaction and response. The Pause. I have been thinking about this recently because one, I’m given to weird flights of thought to begin with..and two, I was surfing thru  D’s amazing blog the other day and came across a post, which apologies, I cannot seem to find again, wherein he talks about his now passed on grandmother’s, (I believe it was his grandmother, again I stand to be humbly corrected) phrase that “the Dead don’t grieve that we know of.” Well, that kind of jumped out at me, and has been whirling around percolating ever since… Do the Dead grieve? Do they have moments of nostalgia? All nostalgia and futuritus..some of us are more orientated to one affliction the more so than the other, but basically it all seems to stem from one great cosmic loin you know, LONGING,desire..anything that prevents us from being right here, right now. Present and accounted for. How many of us could say that we are truly present and accounted for moment to moment? That we are not addicted to nostalgiks or consumed by futuritus? I want to learn to be in the now.OMG, I see so much craziness both within myself and others..from not being able to tolerate and have the peace of the now. To be unable to face what is in your face. I was thinking lately how I wanted a mentor, I’ve had various formal mentors of varying stripes over my lifetime..and it has hit me in the past two days that everybody and everything and every thought and feeling that comes my way is my mentor if I let it be. The good, the bad, and the ugly. that when I set anyone up to be my teacher above me, they are bound to fall eventually. That the teacher is everybody and everywhere, a thousand faces, whatever shows up on my dashboard . The teacher is my reaction to it. The teachable moment, when I put my weapons down, really and truly and let others be in my life as they are, and let myself be , moment to moment with THAT. How I am, how they are. Simple. We are never going to escape emotion, and who would want to, it’s part of the human experience, we are not going to escape attachment and longing this side of the veil, and who knows if we even escape it the other side of the veil, as Doc’s statement ends.. ” the Dead don’t grieve , THAT WE KNOW OF..” What if they do grieve, what if they watch us and grieve for our pain, our convoluted webs, and the rain is simply their big fat tears of grief for us, washing our faces clean? I don’t know. I don’t know if or where or how it stops.. I was thinking this morning about the most beautiful surroundings I found myself in a few years back when a couple living on the edges of the Old growth Cathedral forest in this renovated amazing trailer, renting it for a steal,invited me to spend some time there with them, and they were too strung always on drugs to really drink in the beauty around them, and I would get up in the mornings and wander onto the wrap around deck and listen to the songbirds and want so badly to have a place like that for myself, uncomprehending why they would medicate something, some old pain, whatever, we all carry it, so far out of them so as to not be in this awesome place. The awesome place is the Now. Of course I had an awesome teacher. I had a child who journeyed a full ten and a half years with me, both of us I believe with the full awareness that he could die at any moment, and you know that was the thing I feared the most, and then finally one day it happened. And I am still here. Oh my God, I loved that child like I have never loved before or since. All I had was the now, and the now was sometimes godawful and sometimes pure rhapsody. But mostly just gift. Maybe when I long and slip the bounds of the Now, in whatever situation, with whatever phenomena, or in whosever’s company..whenever I want something to be other than the way it is..not overall, but right here , right now, when I resist, maybe he does grieve for me. And says, oh mama, you haven’t learned the lesson yet.His heart breaking… I was thinking about how all was the now for him this morning, I was remembering him,he was almost blind, so everything was sound, and you could not creep up on that child on long shag carpet. His head would turn and breathing shift almost imperceptibly..he would be attending to the moment. I recalled the pain of leaving his hospital room late at night, when he was in, as he often was, and I would never creep out on him, I would always tell him I was going.. and then as I backed out of the room, my heart pounding I would watch his little face, listening, listening. The Now was all he and I had. He didn’t tell me he was going when he left for good..or maybe he just told me his whole life.. All I am trying to say this morning, is , stop trying so hard to live in nostalgia or the future, be right here now, now is the zen master, stop struggling so hard to conform everybody and everything to your will..let it all be..let them be, for god’s sake, let yourself be once in a while.. Everything and everybody is the Zen master, when you just let it be… Not to be confused with complacency or hopelessness..no not at all. I fought for my son’s life the entire time he was with me. Maybe he fights for mine now. of course this could all be brought to you by a case of food poisoning I have from gleefully consuming a sushi salmon roll yesterday. WTF knows. or that I have reacted into several things in my own world in the past 48 and been less than ohmed out about them. 🙂 kata karma, rock on love cat