Zazen

Many years ago, before it was big business, I learned

Transcendental Meditation. I did it for years, but I 

never trained to teach it to anyone else – and it’s a 

secret training; I couldn’t pass it on anyway, not just

from personal experience. Gradually I lapsed from 

my own practice.

my mantra

that sang in my mind

falls silent

So then I learned something simpler, which is just 

to pay attention to your breath – and when your 

mind wanders, bring your attention, gently and 

without struggle, back to your breath. Over the 

years, I taught a lot of people. But gradually I 

lapsed from my own practice.

sitting still

ten minutes is too long –

modern life!

 

Now I’m reading a book called ‘A Tale for the

Time Being,’ where an old Buddhist nun teaches

her great-grand-daughter how to do zazen. It’s 

even easier than what I’ve been teaching, and I 

only need do it for ten breaths at a time. I adopt it 

at once! I don't think I can possibly lapse from just 

ten breaths at a time.

briefly

being in this time –

enough

Notes:

As explained here, Zazen is not meditation.

The book is A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki.

To summarise / paraphrase the instructions from the book:

It's usually done cross-legged on a zafu cushion but it's OK to sit on a chair. The main thing is good posture, no leaning or slouching. 

Put your hands in your lap, stacked so left hand is on palm of right. Your thumb tips meet on top in a kind of circle, level with your belly button. Relax, hold really still, focus on your breathing, not making a big deal about it but just noticing it. Notice everything that's going on, inside and out of you, including your breathing.  If you find you're getting too distracted, count your breaths: 
Breathe in, breathe out ... one.

Breathe in, breathe out ... two.

After 10 breaths, start counting at 1 again.

It's natural for a person to think, so when you notice your mind has wandered, don't freak out. Just drop it and start again from the beginning.

It doesn't say do it for ONLY 10 breaths, but that's how I began and it still felt great. Then I spontaneously started wanting to go longer, and even have begun feeling like bringing my legs up into a cross-legged position!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Shared with Poets and Storytellers United  for Friday Writings #87: What Pleases You? This piece references one of my very oldest pleasures, reading, and the very newest, sitting zazen.

Glimmers

‘A glimmer is the exact opposite of a trigger–it is some kind of cue, either internal or external, that brings one back to a sense of joy or safety.’

Gold light radiating from that orb in the sky just before sunset.

Looking into the face of a beloved friend – here now, or pictured.

Immense trees filling the sky; or really, any trees. Truly, all trees.

My best-loved books: just a glimpse of one's cover and I want to hug it.

Memories, of large and little joyous moments, filling my long life.

Everyone I ever loved / all those who loved me (cats and dogs too).

Reconnecting often with poetry, flowing into or from me.

Sunshine; sparkling silver rivers; soaring mountains; sweetness in the mouth;

sudden storms with swift, searing lightning; stillness; the suchness of the this.

Inspired by Rommy’s prompt for Friday Writings #86 at Poets and Storytellers United. I decided to do this as an acrostic. Then I decided to make each line an American Sentence (17 syllables). Then I realised the letter S needed two lines. Note: They wouldn't work as stand-alone American Sentences, however, as each line depends on the mental inclusion of the word 'Glimmers' which it is defining. I'd need to rewrite them. I'm happy to leave them as they are, to make one whole poem together.

The Writing Prompt

Be inspired by a great opening line – a compelling, 

fantastic opening line — she said, quoting 150 beginnings 

of novels.  But it’s lines of poems that spring to my mind. 

‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,  

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;’

or, ‘The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.  

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. 

The road was a ribbon of darkness over the purple moor,  

And the highwayman came riding — Riding —’

And I wonder what it is in me, that thrills to these dramas 

of violence.  I cast my thoughts further, and find

‘Break, break, break, On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!

And I would  that my tongue could utter The thoughts

that arise in me’ or, ‘The wind doth blow today, my love,  

And a few small drops of rain; I never had but one true love, 

In cold grave she was lain’  — moving away from violence

but retaining tragedy. Why don’t I go for softness, beauty?
But I suppose an arresting opener needs some drama.

I always found, ‘Let us go then, you and I’ enticing.

Sounds like fun, adventure, without all the death and such.

But then he goes on, and it turns out he’s inviting me to see

‘the evening … spread out against the sky Like a patient

etherized upon a table;’ ugh! and then into ‘sawdust restaurants’

and ‘one-night cheap hotels’. Or there’s Yeats, also talking 

of departure: ‘I shall arise and go now ….’ heading for a sweet 

and peaceful place, soothing. But possibly boring.

When all’s said and done, I think I’ll stick to Byron, Tennyson 

et al, with all their thumping heroics and wrenching doom, 

rather than Eliot’s squalor (though his too is an opening line 

that sticks in the memory) or even Yeats’s soporific retreat. 

In real life I might be timid and law-abiding. Let literature 

thrill me with calls to adventure. Let it stir my blood! 

Oh, ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea 

and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by …’

Quotations, in order, are from:

'The Destruction of Sennacherib,' Byron
'The Highwayman,' Alfred Noyes
'Break, Break, Break,' Tennyson 
'The Unquiet Grave,' Anonymous

'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' T.S. Eliot

'The Lake Isle of Innisfree,' W.B. Yeats

'Sea-Fever,' John Masefield

Written for Friday Writings #85 at Poets and Storytellers United.

Losing It

Some losses are worse than others.

My Scorpio earring disappears, absent

from my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Before I turned it into an earring, I wore it 

as a pendant. Maybe that was safer.

My son David found it when he was nine

on the dirt bottom of the deep pool 

at Howard Springs in the Territory, 

surfaced and handed it straight to me.

It might have been there hours or years.

The copperplate inscription on the back said, 

‘To Roy, with love from Les. (No information.)’

Eventually I had it smoothed off, leaving

the back of the disc plain. On the front,

the Scorpion is raised, bas-relief, in silver.

This earring brought me a dear friend

when I stood next to her in the checkout line

at Coles twelve years ago, and she –

a stranger then – said, ’I’m a Scorpio too!’

‘Only thing to be,’ I replied, and we began.

I hate it being lost. I feel it’s my magic earring.

(I wear it with a silver pentacle in the other ear.)

It’s somewhere the house; I haven’t been out.

Oh, wait. To the letter-box. It’s dark now, I’ll check 

tomorrow. I ask the angels: ‘Help me find it soon!’

Next morning: I did once find a 'lost' earring on the ground by the letter-box. Not this time.

Next afternoon: Whew! It turned up! In a place I would have thought so impossible that I now believe the fairies were playing a game with me. Not the first time, over the years, that missing objects have emerged later in absolutely impossible locations. This time, a friend said 'a little spell' for me — and I know she is one who is favoured by the fairies because of her gardening and love for Nature.

Writing the Prison, Yet Again

 (re my memoir about conducting poetry workshops in Pentridge in the early eighties)

For months and years

I’ve been writing the prison,

that place of darkness

which haunts me still.

An exorcism? A record?

A witness statement?

There are times I want to 

stamp on the memories,

feel them crunch under my boots

like broken glass – traversing 

yet again the stages of grief,

arriving again at anger.

But that’s temporary.

Let me instead celebrate

in these recollections

those who did not succumb 

to the institutional boot 

on the neck: those

who refused to break,

reassembling their own fragments

over and over again,

spitting them out as poems,

mending their shattered segments

with lines of gold, of light.

Written in response to my own prompt for Poets and Storytellers United's Friday Writings #84: to be inspired by the phrase, 'Broken glass crunching under the boot steps.'

(My soon-to-be-published memoir begins with a long poem – quite different from this one –  called 'Writing the Prison'.)