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Wrens’ nests

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , on 30 April 2025| 1 Comment »

In the opening lines of his poem “Gauze,” Ted Kooser, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, asks a provocative question: “Can a man in his eighties, with cancer, / be happy?” In the remaining lines, he provides a tentative answer:

                        It seems that he can, cutting

            yesterday’s gauze dressing in pieces

–

            to scatter over the grass for the wrens

            who’ve come back again after another

            long winter and are building their nests

–

            in his birdhouses built with old boards

            that he salvaged in happiness, which he

            hammered together in happiness too.

If Kooser’s response to his own question sounds surprising, even startling, it is probably because it runs athwart conventional assumptions. In contemporary Western culture, old age is not commonly regarded as a time of exceptional happiness. On the contrary, it is often characterized as a kind of sunset: a time of loss, regret, physical indignity, and relative incapacity. Likewise, a critical, if not incurable, disease would seem incompatible with a general mood of happiness. Kooser’s pivotal use of the verb seems suggests that even he cannot quite believe what he is experiencing.

            From the vantage point of Zen teachings, however, Kooser’s experience of happiness amidst adverse conditions is not all that unusual. It seems entirely plausible. This is because Zen teachings sharply distinguish between external events and our internal responses. The former are often well out of our control. The latter are often a matter of choice, however conscious or unconscious.

            Usually, this distinction is framed as the difference between pain and conditioned suffering. Pain is what happens to us. Conditioned suffering is what we inflict upon ourselves through our reactions and responses, as when we catastrophize without sufficient evidence or engage in fearful speculation. Classical Buddhism likens the pain attendant to harsh external conditions to an arrow piercing our bodies. Our negative, conditioned responses are like a second arrow shot into the open wound.

            With respect to aging, anyone of a certain age can confirm that the first arrow and its impact are all too real. Beyond the maladies already mentioned, there may be cognitive impairments, the risk of taking a life-altering fall, or the eventual need for joint replacements, to name a few. These and other infirmities can make the lives of elderly people challenging, to say the least.

            At the same time, we have a choice. We can deny, resist, exaggerate, or otherwise worsen our afflictions.  Or we can acknowledge them, seek treatment, and, if possible, accept them for what they are. If the former response is akin to the second arrow, the latter affords at least a possible end to conditioned suffering.

            With respect to illness and disease, true acknowledgment and acceptance may be a far more complex and difficult matter. And it is also an individual one, dependent on temperament, overall health, and many other variables. For those with high pain thresholds and a cultivated tolerance for the uncertain and the unknowable, it is one thing. For those with neither, it is quite another.

            What Ted Kooser’s poem distinctively reflects is an open and curious but realistic sensibility discovering, as if for the first time, that happiness can co-exist with the realities of aging and the presence of a serious illness. It is not as if he is fully accepting either. Rather, he is implying that what Zen teachings would call contentment is ultimately not determined by externally imposed conditions. Its sources are within.

            For Kooser those sources would appear to include the pleasures of making and making do with what is at hand; the sense of being an integral part of nature rather than merely an outside observer; the exercise of imagination in returning a manufactured, disposable fabric to the natural world; and, not least, the neighborly company of wrens, one of the most comely and sonorous of North American birds.

—

Read the full text of “Gauze” in Raft (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Ted Kooser’s most recent book.

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An unexpected lightness

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 19 March 2025| 4 Comments »

In the summer of the year 2000, I had the good fortune to be spending the month of June in Ireland, where I was teaching Irish literature to American students at Trinity College, Dublin. One sunny afternoon, as I was walking down Nassau Street in central Dublin, I stopped to browse at a sidewalk bookstall.

Enclosed in wooden trays were dozens of used books, including hefty, well-worn volumes on Irish history, culture, literature, and topography; slim, tattered collections by obscure Irish poets; dated anthologies of Irish drama, short stories, and essays; and biographies of such luminaries as Michael Davitt, Michael Collins, and Éamon de Valera. Finding many books of interest but none I cared to buy, I was about to leave, when another book caught my eye. Lo and behold, it was a book of my own: my verse novella, Midcentury, which my Irish publisher, Salmon Poetry, had released three years earlier.

Midcentury is a book-length, blank-verse meditation, narrated by a middle-aged American lexicographer living alone in Ireland in the nineteen-forties. Down on his luck and overly fond of Irish whiskey, he is seeking solace in the Irish landscape and Ireland’s wartime neutrality. His dominant themes, interwoven through six, interrelated sections in the manner of a string quartet, include impermanence, dispossession, forgiveness, the roots of language, Ireland’s tragic history, and his own spiritual deracination and renewal.

I began the  the first section, “The Word from Dublin, 1944,” while in residence at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. The remaining sections were written in multiple venues over the next three years. I completed the book in 1995 while staying at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Annaghmakerrig), the Irish writers’ retreat in Co. Monaghan. Before I had even begun this project, I might add, months of historical research into mid-twentieth-century Irish history and culture had laid its foundation. And there it was, my magnum opus, for sale on a Dublin sidewalk for less than a pint of Guinness.

“All conditioned things,” the Buddha is reported to have said, “are of the nature of vanishing.” Where books are concerned, those conditions include the vagaries of publishing, marketing, aesthetic fashion, critical opinion, and time itself, which can be cruel to unprotected ink and paper. With obvious exceptions, most authors should not be surprised to see their books vanish or be forgotten in due time—and often sooner rather than later. (With Midcentury I’ve had better luck: according to WorldCat, the worldwide library database, the book is currently in 89 libraries, here and abroad). No matter how many hours went into the making of a book, it can disappear quickly and with scarcely a trace, taking with it whatever ephemeral acclaim it might have accrued. In his poem “Provide, Provide!” Robert Frost puts the matter succinctly: “No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard.”

What I am speaking of, of course, is the reality of impermanence, which the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has called the “cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice.” For Frost, the remedy was to “make the whole stock exchange your own,” which might increase the chances of having interested parties at one’s bedside as the end draws near. “Better to go down dignified,” he advised, “With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all.” From the perspective of Zen teachings, however, the issue is neither so materialistically defined nor so easily resolved. Nor is impermanence something we can deal with later. It is immanent, if not always apparent, in things as they appear to us in the here and now. And, as Fischer puts it, “to understand impermanence at the deepest level, and to merge with it fully, is the whole of the Buddhist path.” Mindfulness, the central practice of Zen meditation, is “not a way to cope with or overcome impermanence. It is the way to fully appreciate and live it.”

That is more easily said than done. A lifetime of Western conditioning militates against it. But having practiced Zen for more than three decades, I can report that eventually one can get the hang of living within, rather than outside, the reality of impermanence. And should that happen, you may find yourself experiencing an unexpected lightness of being. As the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh often noted, we suffer not because things are impermanent but because we expect them to be permanent when they are not. Truly releasing that expectation can lift a self-inflicted burden, offer a fresh way of seeing, and open a gate to the next new experience. And for Zen practitioners who are also creative artists, living in alignment with impermanence rather than habitually resisting it can both facilitate the process of artistic creation and make it far more enjoyable. “Long live impermanence!” Thich Nhat Hanh, a poet and the author of more than a hundred books, delighted in saying, with only the gentlest irony in his tone.

Norman Fischer, When You Greet Me I Bow (Shambhala, 2022), 99, 102.

Photo: “At the Bookstall,” by garryknight (Creative Commons)

 

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A chair in snow

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 24 February 2025| 1 Comment »

One afternoon not long ago, as I was walking in a local gym, I watched a student shooting hoops in an unusual way. On the fingertips of his right hand, he held a basketball. In the palm of his left, he held a cell phone. After taking a single-handed shot, and before the ball had even hit the backboard, he turned his attention to his cell phone. Repeated over and over, his toggling had a rhythm of its own. But it also divided his attention, which could not have been good for his game. And, unwittingly, he was repeatedly flouting a cardinal principle of Zen practice.

In Japanese Zen, that principle is known as ichigyo zammai, which means “doing one thing at a time.” As Zen masters ancient and modern have often reminded us, by giving full attention to whatever we might be doing we not only develop our powers of concentration. We also cultivate the grounded, peaceful state of samadhi: an equanimous, non-reactive, and natural alignment with the flow of reality. “Combust yourself entirely,” a familiar Zen saying, encapsulates this root tenet of the practice.

In classical Japanese poetry, the practice of ichigyo zammai undergirds that most familiar of Japanese poetic forms, the haiku:

A solitary

crow on a bare branch—

autumn evening.

— Basho

In this miniature word-painting, the duality of subject and object dissolves in the meeting of poet and crow. Rather than utilize the crow as a metaphor or symbol, Basho amplifies the bird’s singular presence. What might have been an act of ego-centered observation becomes a moment of life-centered, selfless contemplation.

In Western poetry, which tends to regard encounters with the natural world as occasions for moral, metaphysical, or psychological reflection (“I wandered lonely as a cloud”), there is no exact equivalent of the Japanese haiku. But a parallel may be seen in a sub-genre of lyric poetry known in German as the dinggedicht and in English as the “thing-poem.” As those labels suggest, poems of this kind concentrate on a single thing. And often the poet establishes, in Martin Buber’s famous formulation, an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship with the object at hand.

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther,” for example, the narrator’s consciousness merges with that of a panther confined to its cage. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” the narrator’s sporting, anthrocentric frame of mind morphs into one of reverence and awe. And in the poems of such Zen-trained American poets as Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, and Jane Hirshfield, the narrators typically treat their objects of attention with deep respect and disinterested regard.

Such is the case in Hirshfield’s poem “A Chair in Snow,” where the narrator contemplates a snow-covered chair, focusing on the quiddity, or “whatness,” of her subject. After observing that a chair covered with snow ought to be like any other object “whited / & rounded,” she distinguishes it from all other snow-covered objects primarily by virtue of its function:

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

 a chair is shaped for just one thing

 

 to hold

 a soul its quick and few bendable

 hours

 

 perhaps a king

 

 not to hold snow

 not to hold flowers

For Hirshfield, there is something melancholy in this scene. “[A] chair in snow,” she notes, “is always sad.” Presumably, this sadness stems from the chair being isolated and out of place in an alien environment. But the chair’s stark displacement is also an essential component of its singularity.

As a young woman, Jane Hirshfield spent eight years in Zen training, first at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California’s Ventana Wilderness and subsequently at the San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch Farm. In 1979 she received lay ordination in Soto Zen. Reflecting on those early, intensive experiences, Hirshfield, now in her seventies, has remarked that they have influenced her life and work ever since. In its concentration, its intimacy with its subject, and its spirit of inquiry, “A Chair in Snow” vividly confirms that claim.

Beyond that, Hirshfield’s poem represents a quality of sustained, one-pointed attention that is growing increasingly rare in our culture, where millions of people experience their smart phones as vital appendages and frequent scrolling-and-swiping as a necessary, if not obsessive, activity. As Chris Hayes, in his book The Siren’s Call (Penguin, 2025), has noted, attention has become a commodity, which the titans of social media compete to manipulate and otherwise control. And the fragmentation of attention is fast becoming the norm.

To those pernicious social trends, the daily practice of ichigyo zammai offers a potent antidote. By their very nature, the twin disciplines of doing one thing and concentrating on one object at a time settle the restless mind and calm the anxious heart. And for those young people I have observed jaywalking across busy streets, their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on their cell phones, this venerable practice might prove as life-preserving as it is timely.

—

To read the full text of “A Chair in Snow,” see

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56174/a-chair-in-snow.  

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And yet, and yet

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , on 20 March 2024| 9 Comments »

ISSA 2

In 1973, the writer and Zen practitioner Peter Matthiessen and the field biologist George Schaller undertook an expedition to the High Himalayas in hopes of sighting the elusive snow leopard. Before departing for the Tibetan Plateau, Matthiessen consulted with his Zen teacher, Eido Shimano Roshi, at Dai Bosatsu Zendo. Drawing upon a fundamental Zen teaching, Eido Roshi advised his student to “expect nothing.” By adopting that attitude, Matthiessen would enable himself to be open and attentive to whatever he encountered. Rather than regard his expedition as a means to an end, he might treat the experience as an end in itself.

Eido Roshi’s advice may well have been sound, given Matthiessen’s slim chances of sighting so rare a creature as the snow leopard. As a guideline for living, however, “expect nothing” might best be viewed as a wise maxim to bear in mind rather than a practical motto to live by. We human beings, it’s fair to say, are hardwired not only to expect but also to hope for and fear specific outcomes. Should we attempt to banish our expectations, we are more than likely to fail. As a realistic alternative, however, we can resolve to take note of our expectations as they arise, acknowledging both their presence and their largely speculative nature. And we can endeavor to remain cognizant, moment by moment, of the ongoing tension between the time-honored wisdom of Zen and the recalcitrant realities of human nature.

Nowhere is that tension more concisely expressed than in this haiku by the Japanese poet and Buddhist priest Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

             tsuyu no yo wa

             tsuyu no yo nagara

             sari nagara

                        –

            The world of dew

            is only the world of dew –

            and yet, and yet

The first two lines of this haiku allude to a central tenet of the Buddhist tradition, articulated in these verses from the Diamond Sutra:

            Think in this way of all this fleeting world:

            As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

            A dewdrop, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

            A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Through a concentration of metaphors, these verses remind us that all conditioned things are subject to change. All are impermanent. What we may conventionally view as solid and lasting is no more permanent than morning dew. The image of a “world of dew” evokes this foundational premise of the tradition in which the poet-priest Issa was trained.

“The world of dew” also reflects a cardinal principle of Japanese art and poetry.  According to this principle, known as mono no aware, the transience of the things of this world is both a locus of their pathos and a source of their beauty, whether those transient things be cherry blossoms, bubbles in a stream, or our own brief existence on this planet. Beautiful, ephemeral things are moving and beautiful because they are transient. A visual artist as well as a poet, Issa was steeped in Japanese cultural traditions, and as his haiku demonstrates, his aesthetic was deeply aligned with the convention of mono no aware.

But Issa was also a husband and father who had experienced profound losses in his life, including the deaths of his first wife, several of his children, and, shortly before writing the present haiku, the loss of his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to smallpox. Introducing his haiku in his travel journal The Springtime of My Life, he recounts that devastating experience:

Her mother clutched her cold body and wailed. I knew her heartbreak but also knew that tears were useless, that water under the bridge never returns, that scattered flowers are gone forever. And yet nothing I could do would cut the bonds of human love.

In popular iconography, Japanese Zen is sometimes viewed as a meditative version of samurai culture: a practice marked by “detachment” and the stoic repression of feeling. Contrary to that popular conception, authentic Buddhist practice—and the Zen-based practice of haiku—foster direct engagement with external realities, particularly the realities of impermanence and death. Rather than turn away, practitioners are admonished to make those realities objects of contemplation. At the same time, the practice also encourages continuous awareness of (and non-attachment to) one’s changing moods and feelings, however pleasant or painful they may be.

Hence the last line of Issa’s haiku. Occurring just after the “turning” characteristic of the haiku form, the repeated phrase “and yet” acknowledges the emotional dimension of his present experience: the upwelling of grief triggered by the death of a child. And though it leaves much unsaid, this repeated phrase leaves little doubt as to its meaning.

“The deepest feeling,” wrote the American poet Marianne Moore, “always shows itself in silence; / not in silence but restraint.” As silent and restrained as a poem can be, Issa’s haiku is all the more piercing for its reticence and all the more affecting for its restraint. If you would live wisely, it seems to say, expect nothing. And yet, and yet.

    —–

Image: Kobayashi Issa

Her mother clutched her body: Sam Hamill & J.P. Seaton, The Poetry of Zen (Shambhala, 2004), 172-3.

Marianne Moore,  “Silence,” in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Macmillan, 1972), 91.

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