If you have been reading this column, perhaps you have noticed that it sometimes appears across from the Classified Ads. Perhaps this has given you pause.
Zen is a meditative tradition of high purpose and great antiquity. What is a column on Zen doing across from an ad for Happy Jack Skin Balm? (Happy Jack “promotes healing and hair growth on dogs & cats without steroids!”).
Zen is a late flowering of an even older spiritual tradition, whose foundational principles are known as the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. What is a column on Zen doing across from an ad for Brown’s Septic Service? (“Septic tanks pumped. Repairs and installations. . . Visa and MasterCard accepted”).
Zen is concerned with the interdependence of all living beings, the impermanence of all conditioned things, and the suffering caused by a fundamental ignorance of reality. It is especially concerned with the Great Matter of life and death. What is a column on Zen doing across from ads for a floral-pattern love seat priced at $ 350, “I Love Alfred” bumper stickers at $ 1.50 each, and power scooters at “ABSOLUTELY NO COST TO YOU!!”?”
Nothing, one might say. If this column ends up across from the classifieds, it’s because the editor of this paper, who was kind enough to include the column in the first place, had to put it somewhere.
A more accurate answer, however, is that Zen has everything to do with the classifieds—or, more broadly, with the mundane business of daily life. For unless one chooses to renounce our materialistic culture and become a monk or nun, Zen practice must somehow be integrated with a world where cats and dogs develop allergies, septic tanks need be pumped, and love seats are bought and sold.
To be sure, meditative training is traditionally conducted in tranquil surroundings, where the lights are dim and the distractions few. Sitting quietly in the zendo, or perhaps at home in a space reserved for meditation, we settle into stillness. We learn to rest in simple presence, or what Zen calls the clear open sky of awareness. Thoughts cross our minds, but if we do not pursue them, they pass like clouds in the clear open sky. And when our sitting ends, we return to our lives feeling cleansed and refreshed.
Such respites nourish us, and they are not to be discounted. But the deeper value—and the higher challenge—of meditative practice lies in the integration of our experience in meditation with our experience of everyday life. With practice and proper training, we can learn to quiet our minds. We can learn to be still. But with patience and persistence, we can also learn to maintain stillness in the midst of external hubbub and meditative awareness in the midst of emotional turmoil.
In his new book, The Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield reminds us that there are “two distinct dimensions to our life: the ever-changing flow of experiences, and that which knows the experiences.”* Cultivating the latter, we can learn to trust in “that which knows”: in an awareness that isn’t angry when we are angry or depressed when we’re depressed. It is merely present, sustaining us through joy and sorrow alike. Within that spacious awareness, pleasant and not-so-pleasant mind states come and go, as do the cats and dogs, the love seats and power scooters of our quotidian world. Aware of them all, we enlarge our sense of self. Embracing them all, we renew our connection with life.
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* Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart (Bantam, 2008), 42.
One Time, One Meeting 
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