Shadows and Light

Q: “Which part of the future is real and which is not?”
A: “The unexpected and unpredictable is real.”

– Nisargadatta

A little over a week ago, seven of us were sitting here meditating in my living room (“the zendo” whenever we have a residential retreat). I noticed my cat Izzy sitting in front of me staring at the play of shadows and light on the ground. Transfixed, her little orange ears pointing straight out parallel to the ground, there seemed to be a process going on in her system to resolve some of that movement she could see into a three-dimensional shape she could catch.

I saw the human condition in that innocence and ignorance - assuming, and looking in a way that is fundamentally mistaken. Unlike a housecat, humans have the capacity to break through this ignorance. The cost is only everything: an innocence that will never be regained, and a clarity so true that it repels most people, even while it also makes one’s everyday options more obvious and one’s responses more skillful. 

We have an opportunity Izzy doesn’t have - to disambiguate between ideas and experience, although few make much of this opportunity. Once a meditator discovers that things are not what they think and not as they seem, but clearer, more simple, and more extraordinary, they will be at a crossroads: settle, or surrender. Settling will feel like the safe choice, while surrendering means going wherever the path leads, without ever knowing where that will be. As the saying goes, “better not to start; once begun, better to finish.”

I’ll head to the temple again next month. I have both craving and aversion - a desire for greater relief and a wish for an easier way. As humbled as I feel going in, I also notice trepidation. I can count on completing any training period with more humility and less drivenness than when I began, and that there will be a price to pay. The practice is hard, but although I have always found it well worth the trouble, I go simply because it doesn’t feel optional to me. I’m compelled to continue, and consider myself fortunate that I’m willing and able to do so. No matter what ideas I may have on the front end, there is always something different I experience that I couldn’t have imagined, and I always benefit in ways I can’t understand.

 “This point needs to be made very clear, but as it is not helpful to make things too clear, I will tell you a story to lead you astray!”

- Soko Morinaga Roshi

I got the cutest cat collar in the world for Izzy a few years ago - it had a peacock design and a bell, and I thought the teals and blues and greens of that collar would look amazing against her orange fur. I was also enamored with the idea of the bell. 

Izzy not only did not share my sentiments, she instinctively and with full force began to fight for her life the moment I snapped on the collar. She raced away from me, as cats are wont to do when they are upset - panicking and clawing at the collar around her neck. By the time I was able to corner her, she had the collar wedged into her mouth and was trying to remove it over her head with her back feet. I could no longer get a finger in between her neck and the collar to unfasten it because she had worked it into her mouth like a gag.

I had my older son help hold her tightly while I cut the collar off with scissors. By the time I freed her - less than a minute - she had drawn her own blood in the struggle.

I never tried to put a collar on Izzy again, but her response to it feels familiar when I consider my own struggles against conditions that chafe. I’m just as powerless to see what I haven’t yet understood as Izzy is to understand that the collar itself isn’t harmful. I fight, thinking I’m working through something. I resist, but at least while I resist, I’m also walking toward the people and the practice that can help me see my mistakes. 

"Follow your desire to its end as you'd follow a stream to the ocean or an echo to its origin. The beginning and end of desire is one and the same."

– Jean Klein