Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
2 . Living Poetry - Brooke McNamara
239 Plays2 years ago
ZEN!
And Poetry!
Zen monk and Poet Brooke McNamara has a lovely chat with Robbie about many things, among them:
- Sacred ritual
- Oceans of Love
- The student teacher relationship
- Paths of Spirit and Soul
- Publishing a poem a day
- Unorthodox sentient beings
- ...and Zen
Brookes Website
Awakening to the Poetic, Brookes online poetry course
Recommendations
From Brooke
CULTIVATING THE EMPTY FIELD: The Silent Illumination of Zen Buddhist Master Hongzhi - Taigen Dan Leighton
The Creative Act: A Way of Being - Rick Rubin
From Robbie
Mother! - Darren Aronofsky, and “friends”.
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin
I just have to say, the cover art on the current edition of A Wizard of Earthsea is the blandest, saddest piece of weak soulless Harry Potter wannabe nonsense. Please don’t, as they say, reject this text based on its appearance,
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Zen and Poetry with Brooke McNamara
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome to the first interview in the Saina Miraculous podcast. My guest today is Brooke McNamara. Brooke is a Zen teacher. She's also a poet and has previously been a dancer. I don't know if she would still call herself a dancer. Well, I imagine she still dances. In this conversation, we talk about the Zen tradition, poetry, and the intersection between those two things.
00:00:28
Speaker
And all of those things are very close to my heart. So this was a really fun one. I hope you enjoy.
Challenges of Teaching Meditation
00:00:50
Speaker
I was thinking about teaching. I also taught I taught a little
00:00:56
Speaker
kind of meditation spiritual get together a few weeks ago and I had a very similar experience there of um oh it's really hard like I'm used to teaching like
00:01:14
Speaker
circling, right? Or T group or NLP or something where it's like, or integral, where it's a map or it's a process. Yeah. And those things, it's, they're very mental, right? But to just hold a space for the kind of the wide, the widest space or the richest space you can imagine. Mm-hmm.
00:01:38
Speaker
It's really hard. It's, it's, it's like way harder than just meditating. So maybe that's because I think you do that really beautifully. I think that that's, that that's something like I noticed, like I, the reason I taught my little classes, I was inspired coming to your Zen Sunday mornings. I would walk in the room and just be like, Oh, there's room for everything here.
00:02:07
Speaker
Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah, I actually want to start with that prompt of like, it's hard to teach and especially I think to create that space that
00:02:28
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, I've talked a lot already about that, so I'm going to stop talking. But yeah, I just want to, I'm curious if that sounds true to you or like how it is for you to be in the front of a room full of people teaching Zen.
From Performance to Zen Teaching
00:02:43
Speaker
I mean, when you were just talking about it, I couldn't help but laugh because I totally agree. And there's a way where
00:02:55
Speaker
I get, you know, I get nervous, I get like the butterflies that are, I get all the physical sensations that are telltale signs that I really care. I've been a, well, I don't identify as a performer anymore, but that was my career in my 20s and what I trained for.
00:03:19
Speaker
you know, through childhood teens and college years was to be a dance theater performer. And I never once didn't get nervous. I just learned better and more unique, specific to my being tools for working with all those sensations. And just to also frame it as like, I feel I feel these things because I care about the
00:03:48
Speaker
ritual space.
Managing Fear and Embracing True Nature
00:03:51
Speaker
Like I know I feel that way when I'm entering what's potentially a ritual space. I can feel that my ego is squirming and needs to ultimately relax and let something bigger take over, which when that happens, it's really easy. It's the easiest, most pleasurable, most delightful natural thing
00:04:20
Speaker
There is, but so even when you were just talking about teaching is hard, I could feel myself right away, just cueing myself, just relax.
00:04:32
Speaker
Like I can just feel like such a, such an embedded, um, little coach inside myself. Like, Oh yeah, I know what he's talking about. And there's an immediate loving, thank God. I don't know if I trained it to be loving or if it just is, but there's just this loving voice that's like, yeah, it's really hard. Relax. That's so great. I do. And you say you don't, do you remember?
00:05:00
Speaker
Learning to do that deliberately, was that something you kind of, or is that like some grace that's just showing up?
Hormones and Social Sensitivities
00:05:10
Speaker
Um, probably both. I just in December was on a retreat with my teacher in Zen community for a hot new session and my teacher got really sick. So a couple of us senior students, she asked us to give the Dharma talks and support the retreat because she was really sick.
00:05:29
Speaker
And I chose to give my talk at the title of it was smile at fear. And so I really went into like a pretty nuanced sharing about
00:05:43
Speaker
For me, I'm 41, but a lifetime of navigating fear and particularly in terms of preparing to perform or preparing to be in front of people, which I think evolutionarily is just set up for all the physiology of wanting to belong and not be kicked out.
00:06:12
Speaker
And, and just, you know, particularly in a female body, I've recently learned that my the way female hormones are what puts us more sensitively in touch with the social nervous system. So in general, beings in female bodies are picking up more cues of who's getting along and who's
00:06:36
Speaker
and all those things. And for me, it's generally true when I compare notes with my husband and friends in male bodies, male friends. And I'm just
Creating Ritual Space in Zen Gatherings
00:06:50
Speaker
sensitive in general. So there's a lot, I'm wired to pick up a lot. So I think I've trained over time to have a whole arsenal of ways to prepare to,
00:07:04
Speaker
Embrace those sensations and work with them. So probably somewhere along the line. I taught myself To purposefully relax But I don't remember the moment And and you know, it says like sometimes if sometimes to tell myself to relax has the opposite effect so Depends the tone of voice You fuck it up
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so much, I'm wondering about the difference between, cause you were a dancer or when you say you were a performer that was primarily dance. Yeah. I mean, eventually it was also like we called it dance theater. Cause there was a lot of speaking on stage and I was primarily trained as a dancer. Gotcha. Like I don't know if it's doing a disservice to dancing and performing, but it seems like.
00:08:00
Speaker
The role of, of teaching spirituality and especially of, yeah, I mean, I keep calling creating a space. Like my experiences as much as like, when you, when, when you think of teaching, you think of like somebody explaining something, somebody kind of like.
00:08:19
Speaker
taking their knowledge and putting it in somebody else's head. And that's not especially my experience of what goes on in the Sunday morning. I mean, what would you call those? Is there a name for those, like a formal name?
00:08:38
Speaker
So for the listeners, Brooke and Brooke and her teaching team do a monthly Sunday Zen gathering where we meditate and they hold space and teach Zen. And you know, there's some amount of knowledge transfer happening about this is what a koan is, this is how to sit, like, but it's,
00:09:03
Speaker
It feels to me like that is very secondary to what's really happening, which is, I mean, you talked about a ritual space here, but, and you know, I kind of already said this, but like, to me, what it feels like is happening is I'm walking into a space where my whole being is invited.
Entering the Vast Self in Zen Practice
00:09:27
Speaker
including, especially the, the very vast aspects of my being, which are completely, maybe it's, maybe it feels especially they're invited because there are so few places where those feel invited. And like most of you day to day interactions, those things are not even on the menu. And then you walk into that space and it's like,
00:09:52
Speaker
It literally feels like something that was tightly packed in my chest can suddenly expand out into, into the universe. Um, and, and so, you know, I'm just kind of, this is just me like waxing lyrical and saying, thank you. I think they thank you for doing that. Like it's really precious. It's really precious. And that feels.
00:10:18
Speaker
like maybe an even harder challenge than to do with nerves or to do with discomfort than to be uncomfortable and to dance or to be uncomfortable and to read or even to improv. Yeah. And I don't know if that's true. And like I say, maybe that's unfair to the dancers and the theater performers.
00:10:42
Speaker
but there's something I know which I would find easier, even though I've never danced in front of an audience in my life. But I still think, like I would find it much more uncomfortable to dance in front of an audience, but I think it seems harder to me to hold that transmission.
00:11:01
Speaker
Well, first of all, what's really vivid for me is just feeling very touched to hear your feedback about how you feel coming into that space because there's a lot of training and a lot of intentionality and a lot of intention. Yeah. And I just said intentionality, that that's what we're hoping for is what you just said. So I'm really touched. Um, and
00:11:33
Speaker
Yes. I have a very paradoxical response to you that yes, it's harder than performing artistically. And it's so much easier because all we have to do is be our true nature. And it's so innate. And it's also so recognizable in each other.
00:11:58
Speaker
just to sit and look around at everyone's eyes. It's so clear that we are that vastness.
Paradox of Teaching Zen
00:12:10
Speaker
And there's something about the role of holding space from that seat that my ordinary self is totally here and included. But there's also a way that
00:12:29
Speaker
just kind of got to get out of the way. And I've watched my teacher do it for 13 years and received so much really potent transmission from her, you know, that like you said, it includes knowledge, but it's really a full body recalibration to
00:12:59
Speaker
being in the presence of and being the unfolding of Buddha nature or just, you know, awakeness and that can feel really intense in some moments and then it can feel like just the most relieving natural thing in the world.
Zen and Creative Practices
00:13:21
Speaker
But with dance and with reading poems in front of people, there's a way where like the content, there's choreography or even if I'm improvising,
00:13:30
Speaker
doing something, or reading something, or talking about something. There's a performance artist named Marina Abramovich, who does really provocative work. And she had a retrospective piece at the MoMA a few years ago called The Artist is Present.
00:13:51
Speaker
And there's a documentary about it, where she just sat in a chair all day long and people could just come sit with her. And she has a quote from the documentary about how doing something which is close to nothing is the hardest thing of all. So I think that kind of circles back to your original point that it's difficult to be so naked. And it also feels so natural and good.
00:14:21
Speaker
hmm that
00:14:24
Speaker
It depends on which part of ourself we're talking about. Like part of myself, it's hard. And part of myself, it's easy. That line, to do something so close to nothing is the hardest thing to do. Yeah. It reminds me of, I was just listening to a podcast, these two guys that one is a Zen guy and one is not. And the Zen guy was quoting, I'm forgetting the name of the monk. It's like a 12th century monk. And he had all these aphorisms. And one of his aphorisms was meditation is good for nothing.
00:14:52
Speaker
And they were talking about it in a particular light and talking about like, why would he say this? And it's kind of deconstructing, you know, la, la. And I was hearing it. I'm like, well, yeah, but also like, like, it literally, it's good for nothing. Yeah. Like, like not just it is not good for something, but it's good for nothing. For nothing with a capital N. Yeah. Right, right, right, right. Like, that's, yeah. So anyway, it's kind of, I don't know if that pun
00:15:21
Speaker
works in Japanese, but... Well, I think it's all over the place in Zen, and it's also all over the place in creative practice. And I think that quote, now you've got my like Zen historian mind racing, I think that's Uchiyama Roshi, Zen is good for nothing. But there's, you know, if you think about it, read about creative practice to it, there's
00:15:51
Speaker
There's always the layer that comes up that's also just true for me in direct experience, which is that to create or to meditate, like we have to enter a sort of concentration or a mind state where from the outside, from our conventional mind and conventional society, there's no value on what we're doing.
Fulfillment in Meditation
00:16:21
Speaker
Yes. We're doing nothing. And there, but from a positive perspective, I love this word autotelic, which means like auto is like self and tell it this purpose. It's like the purpose is inside the doing like being creative or meditating are
00:16:44
Speaker
satisfying in and of themselves. So they're good for nothing. They're good for no end point, but they're the most fulfilling thing right now. Right. And then some kind of byproduct might come out of it, like we might come out with a poem or less stress or something. But also, there's a Zen term, jijuizanmai, which means self-fulfilling samadhi, which is like when, you know, I can just see on your face that you know, when you just take the posture
00:17:13
Speaker
of meditation, you don't have to get anything else. Like suddenly something bubbles up from within and it's saddest. There's like a, my teacher often says it scratched an itch for her that nothing else could. In her 20s when she had studied philosophy and literature and she had lost seven friends in one year to all these different accidents and she was like grappling with how to make sense of that, why
00:17:43
Speaker
you know, what is this life? And something about just sitting closed the gap and scratched the itch of that fulfilling, innately satisfying quality of being, of just being self.
00:18:01
Speaker
But from the outside, it's good for nothing. Not going to satisfy that thing in us that's wanting to show some kind of, I mean, there's ways of measuring if we're getting better.
00:18:13
Speaker
This goes into the theme of the podcast more broadly, but I always feel slightly skeptical about those things. The kind of, oh, meditation is good for the, your brain, your, your, you know, brainstem gets fatter or like, I know you, like there's something, yeah. I mean, there's so much I want to respond to in what you just said. It reminds me, I think you, I think I got this story from you, the Trungpa idea, which is, you know,
00:18:39
Speaker
It's complicated by the fact he was an alcoholic saying meditation should feel like sitting down and cracking open a beer, but like that idea that like it's not supposed to be a chore. It's not supposed to be like, okay, I'm sitting down and I'm gonna.
00:18:56
Speaker
do my discipline and I'm going to, you know, suffer through this discomfort of, you know, and sometimes it's like that, right? Yeah. But I love putting on the map the idea that like, there's some, uh, experience, which is, say, what's the translation of that Japanese phrase again? Self-fulfilling samadhi. It's great. It's like that there's, yeah, there's something just like innately satisfying that happens there. Yes.
00:19:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I don't want to misrepresent the whole thing because it can be very difficult to meditate. And some sits are very painful and it doesn't make them a bad sit at all. Like, and sometimes I don't taste the jujus on my eye or the autotelic nature, you know, and I wouldn't
00:19:47
Speaker
talk about it that way. There's some there's some sits where literally the only response and I have shared this on retreat where it hurts so badly physically or mentally that the only response is like an inward scream. That's rare and I don't want to be dramatic, but it is true at some point. Whether we're meditating or just living, we're all
00:20:16
Speaker
encountering pain. And at some point, the only genuine response is just, ow. And that's just true. And still, there is something that is cultivated in the practice of sitting where we're able to taste that as samadhi as well. Samadhi being a kind of concentration where
00:20:45
Speaker
there's an open presence and interior and exterior are one thing and this is it.
Pain and Presence in Meditation
00:20:55
Speaker
And yeah, sometimes it feels satisfying and sometimes it hurts, but the good thing, the thing that gets developed is just the more and more direct realization of a capacity to be right here with it.
00:21:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I, I've definitely had the experience, especially if I'm meditating regularly, whether it's in meditation or not, that there can be the painful moments of life. There's like this sense of just like, it's just like a very subtle softening and, and it becomes beautiful in its own right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:21:44
Speaker
And I have this fork path here because I want to talk about.
Brooke's Zen Path and Rituals
00:21:51
Speaker
a little more about Zen tradition and ritual. But then I was also like, oh man, that leads us so nicely into poetry. I'm like, oh man, I kind of want to just go into poetry now. But maybe just a little bit more about just kind of formal Zen, just to say, you know, talking about that space, one of the things that really struck me, you know, I mean, I've been sitting with you for on and off for years and years now, actually, for like maybe four or five years.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, thanks a little yoga studio. Yeah. Yeah. And the latest incarnation has been you guys have kind of like it's you've increased the the energy coming in. Right. And I think deliberately and there's a you're about to receive Dharma transmission this year. Right. Which is kind of which I definitely want to hear more about. And what I noticed is when when the the Dragon Lake
00:22:48
Speaker
meeting started, it was still kind of had this slightly more informal mode. And like the, the cushions were just kind of laid out in like, in like an auditorium style. And, you know, and we would just kind of walk in and be chatting and what have you. And then the last couple of meetings, maybe just the last one, the last couple, you all have.
00:23:08
Speaker
It feels like I've crossed a threshold into like, no, this is a Zendo. Coaches are lined up like a Zendo. We're going to teach people how to walk in the Zendo. We're going to teach people the rituals. And I was feeling the thing before that, but there is like a.
00:23:25
Speaker
a noticeable deepening of that space when that extra level of ritual comes in. And I'm delighted by it and I just think it's missing in our daily lives. Like we don't, we've dismantled those rituals that we would have natively in our culture and partly for good reason, right? Partly out of
00:23:52
Speaker
kind of a rejection of whatever, like the history of where we would get those rituals from the Christian Church and there are reasons that a lot of us got thrown out of that world.
00:24:05
Speaker
So it just feels like, again, like it, like a really, a vital nutrient to add back in, but I, yeah, but I, I want to hear about maybe like your, your relationship with those rituals from the beginning, like how, and, and maybe a little into like what.
00:24:24
Speaker
What was the moment I see completely different questions, but maybe they connect somehow. What was the moment that you said, Oh, I'm, I'm not just, you know, a meditator or a spiritual person, but I'm, I'm going to enter into this lineage.
Sacrifices in Zen Commitment
00:24:41
Speaker
Well, again, I'm, I just find myself kind of.
00:24:45
Speaker
I feel my heart tender hearing that feedback because it's a lineage. This lineage is over 2,500 years old, and there's so much power and beauty and magic and depth in it. And because I value all of that, everyone who's part of it has made sacrifices.
00:25:15
Speaker
we sacrifice not having as much space to explore the spiritual marketplace in order to go to retreat with this teacher and this community and this tradition and practice with these forms and learn from these ancient masters. Um, but that cultivates a debt that is so beautiful to me. And I, I think a lot about how the word sacrifice, like not choosing one thing,
00:25:46
Speaker
has the same route as sacred or the thing that you do choose. You give up certain things because of the limitations of being in human form, make sacrifices, but then like a marriage or a long friendship or a commitment to any craft over a long period, the depth that gets cultivated is, like you said, very nutritious.
00:26:14
Speaker
It's scary sometimes because I've given my life to this tradition and it's so such an honor and so beautiful. So it's really wonderful to hear your experience framed so positively of what it feels like to come into that space. In a certain way, I'm still surprised that I'm in this like Japanese medieval, like from the outside, like our robes are made for men. They don't fit my body.
00:26:44
Speaker
But when I wear them, I feel so held. I feel the lineage. I feel so at home. So there's a part of me that's continuously surprised by this path, and then a part of me that's just deeply like, this makes more sense than anything else.
00:27:07
Speaker
in my, I always was a kind of mystical creature, I guess, like, probably everyone as a child is, is a mystic, you know, like, sensing unseen, subtle realm, beings and forces and
00:27:24
Speaker
even just in the gross realm or in physical form, just noticing more detail, just noticing more subtle beauty. And then I was raised Catholic, and so I did experience a lot of religiosity and religious ritual, but I honestly liked it. I didn't have any of the baggage that I know can be so, so heavy and so toxic for some people.
00:27:52
Speaker
But I did kind of let that practice go in my teens and really dove into the arts. I was a dancer and a poet, and those were what took me beyond myself and into something.
00:28:07
Speaker
vast and exciting and adventurous and also soothing. And then in my 20s, when I was dancing professionally, I found my first teacher Dorothy Hunt, who's a teacher in the lineage of Adyashanti. So sort of direct awakening teachings that
00:28:25
Speaker
her background was she worked with Mother Teresa actually and also had an Indian guru and then Ramana Maharshi came to her in a dream when after he had died she had no idea who he was and then she looked him up the next day on online and anyway so she had a student-teacher relationship with him in a certain way and then she found Adya Shanti and so
00:28:51
Speaker
her teaching was powerful, really, really, really powerful. And I spent a lot of years one on one in her office with her just feeling like, just my friend who also was a student of hers called her the Grim Reaper because you go into her office and she was old enough to be my grandmother and she's a therapist. So she was very comforting in certain ways, but also her presence, I just would feel myself
00:29:21
Speaker
be dismantled and melted into this. I said to her once, I feel like I'm in an ocean of love.
00:29:31
Speaker
With you and she said, that's what you are. Well, let me pause there because I, I, there's something almost paradoxical about what you just said, right? Like the grim Reaper and you felt dismantled and melted in this way that, you know, you sound kind of apprehensive and like, ah, I don't know if.
00:29:51
Speaker
it's uncomfortable at the very least and then you described the experience as an ocean of love which right your mind goes well an ocean of love who wouldn't want that but i i just think there's something interesting about how do those two ideas coexist.
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, the actually really spooky and awesome thing about that is that her dream about Ramana Maharshi, who's an Indian guru who was really, he didn't speak actually after he had some big awakenings, he was just silent. And he would sit on Mount Arunachala in India and people would just flock to him
00:30:34
Speaker
because of his presence. And all you have to do is Google him and look at his eyes. And for me, I'm like undone by, he has the most beautiful eyes. She had a dream about him not knowing anything about him. She had a dream about an Indian man saying to her in her dream. And I didn't know this. I did not know this story when I told her I felt like an ocean of love in her office. He came to her dream and said,
00:31:01
Speaker
I'm going to dismember you and drown you in an ocean of love. So I did not know that story and she and I were having a meeting one time and we knew each other pretty well and we had always spent our meetings talking, but we knew each other well enough that we stopped talking and we were just sitting in silence looking at each other.
00:31:28
Speaker
After a while, she said, if you were going to say something from this experience, from this place, what would you say? And I had no idea what to say. My brain was really stopped. And I just opened my mouth and I said, I feel like an ocean of love. And she said, that's what you are.
00:31:50
Speaker
And then once we kind of got into more of a talking mode and reflecting on it, then she told me the story about how she had had that dream. So that gave me, you know, there's just a lot of resonance and unexplained connection and all of that. But I think what you're asking in terms of like, how does like,
00:32:13
Speaker
being with the grim reaper and then being an ocean of love, how does that fit together? And I think it just goes exactly back to how we started this whole conversation about teaching is hard. And also, if my ego can get out of the way or relax, it's also just utterly natural to just be together.
00:32:34
Speaker
Does that connection make sense? Yeah, no it absolutely I mean I you know I might be maybe I'm kind of somewhat leading the witness here because I I also have a sense of like I think the sense that I made of it as he was speaking was that the reality of that profound and experience of love is frankly
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Yes. And your mind can go a notion of love. That sounds great. And you make a picture of just like, whatever the most comfortable thing you can imagine is. But, but the reality is we, we have all kinds of fortifications and defenses and what have you against that. And
00:33:19
Speaker
In this moment, I'm like, I don't really know why like I have like a story about why from you know Reading a hundred spiritual books and but I'm like, I don't know why Why couldn't it why couldn't it work that once you recognize the ocean of love you just go? Oh great and you just dissolve into it and you're you're never separate again, right? Like for some reason That makes more sense. But there's something else going on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think for some people it's
00:33:49
Speaker
happens more that way and for others, this karmic residue or whatever we're born with or experience that builds up that, like you said, is protecting us. In my experience, it's just a lot of sensation. It's a fucking lot of sensation to feel
00:34:14
Speaker
not only loved like that, but that I am that love. I mean, it just, yeah, it dismantles a lot of protective layers. And it's been in a different way. That's also been my experience of the teacher-student relationship in Zen training. That's one of the four pieces of Zen training. And I've formerly been a student for 13 years now. And
00:34:41
Speaker
There's a saying, I'm pretty sure it's Bodhidharma, who was the first founder who came from India to China, that Zen is a special transmission outside of scriptures. And I'm not sure if he said this, but it's mind to mind, eyeball to eyeball. We have lineage charts that Rob and I have traced behind us that trace 82 generations from the historical Buddha to
00:35:08
Speaker
where we are today. And the thing that's really moving about that is that it's not like you said, there's knowledge transfer. Yes, but it's each one of those ancestors is an intimate mind to mind transmission, where whatever it is that the first disciple or the first successor of the Buddha held up a flower. The Buddha was giving a Dharma talk and he
00:35:38
Speaker
basically said, like, what is Buddha nature?
Mind-to-Mind Transmission in Zen
00:35:41
Speaker
And I think it was Ananda held up a flower. I know it was Mahakashapa. It just held up a flower. But you know, you can you could hold up a flower, like, whatever. But the way he did it, the Buddha recognized that he that they were not separate in that moment. So he some Mahakashapa became the first successor. And so that's what that really
00:36:08
Speaker
I think that's so beautiful that it's just mind to mind to mind to mind. You can read about Zen, you can even practice alone, and it's going to probably do something helpful if it's something that's meant for you, something that resonates for you. But really, for me, it's been the teacher-student relationship and the sangha where it's real time. And we often say that part of the
00:36:36
Speaker
part of the structure of the teacher-student relationship. And she takes it very seriously. Like she has lots of students, but then if you're a formal student, there's a ceremony for that. And she says that that's the point where we are hiring her, so to speak, giving her permission to cross our ego boundary. So, you know, and that could mean like,
00:37:03
Speaker
Hey honey, you know, like in the middle, Hey, can I give you feedback real quick on something I just saw happen or on the talk that I, that you gave or a conversation we had or ego crossing the ego boundary is also just like, sometimes when I'm sitting in the Zendo, I sit, my place is right across from her. And sometimes I will just open my eyes just to wake myself up.
00:37:29
Speaker
And I've had it happen where she and I open our eyes at the same time and all of a sudden we're making contact in the middle of the sit. And that's an, you know, there it is. And it's just like sitting in Dorothy's office in the ocean of love. It's like moving from being like a self, moving around the world to inseparable from all things.
00:37:57
Speaker
is part of being human, but it's also a funny, challenging thing. And so just to go back to your point, I think for some people, oh great, the ocean of love, yeah, I recognize it, I'll hang out there, I'm home. But for most people, the recognition takes a while, and then the taste of it takes a while, and then letting go into it,
00:38:28
Speaker
and letting go of the protective layers takes a while too. I've just so much I don't respond to there's no way. No, it's great. It's great. I'm just like, oh man, there's so many, so many kind of juicy, juicy muscles in there. I mean, I love one thing, like it's, it's striking to me, the story of the student lifting up the flower.
00:38:55
Speaker
Because it's such a Zen story, right? And it predates Zen by a thousand years or something. But that's so Zen to me of like, like the teacher asks a question and then the student does something other than answer the question using, you know, kind of linear logic, right? So that jumped out to me of like, oh, I didn't quite realize
00:39:19
Speaker
that aspect, I kind of thought of that aspect as being, you know, uniquely Chinese or uniquely Japanese or like coming in later. And then, you know, you, you told me about the, the lineage charts. Oh, I've seen the lineage chart and there's something about that. It's just so cool. It's just so cool to, to trace like.
00:39:41
Speaker
It's kind of like the, I love the, uh, um, five degrees of Kevin Bacon game, where you've got a link to actors in a movie by where they've co-starred and, you know, not to profane this beautiful lineage with that, but it has, there's something really, yeah, gratifying about like this human being sat with this human being. Then this one sat with this one and this one sat with this one. And you can trace real moments of connection.
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah. All the way back to the beginning of this, this, you know, this lineage, which has spread in a thousand directions and has kind of had as much impact as anything that any human beings have ever done. Yeah.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah. So I'm just, I'm, I'm delighted by the, by the manuscript. Well, the thing is that the ones that we already have, what the first, the first ceremony called receiving jukai, when you jukai is like the law or the presets, it's when you, um, make your first set of Buddhist vows and basically agree to certain ethical, um, parameters as a way of life. And, um, you receive a Dharma name.
00:40:50
Speaker
you make a lineage chart for that. So even, even though you're not ordained and you're not a Zen teacher, you write your new Dharma name at the end of this whole intricate, you make the chart and you write your name at the end. And the cool thing is the line is in red, it's considered a bloodline. And the title even says the bloodline of blah, blah, blah. And the bloodline goes from Shakyamuni Buddha all the way through all the
00:41:16
Speaker
Indian ancestors, Chinese, Japanese into the West ending with you. And then there's a line from your name that also continues and goes straight around. It diverts the whole time space story and goes straight back to the Buddha at the top. So there's this whole like, here's the story. And then that other line is like,
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah. And the point of the story always is we are the Buddha already, everyone without question. And we might not realize it, so we might want to sit. And, you know, just to not be too religious, I would just say that as like, we're all already free, all already
00:42:13
Speaker
widely awake right here expressing as all these various qualities. And we overlay them with lots of preferences and stories and categories. And it's all just fine. And we cause a lot of suffering doing that.
00:42:38
Speaker
So we had a beautiful transition a while ago. I don't, it's, it's gone. There is now is no transition, but we're going to transition anyway, slightly just to bring in poetry. And maybe I'm deciding how self-indulgence to be. I'm going to be somewhat self-indulgent if that's okay. So one thing I've been noticing on paying attention to with Zen,
00:43:07
Speaker
And I think one of the things I really appreciate about it is like, it's so reductive to say what I'm going to say now, but I'm going to say it, but like it's.
00:43:18
Speaker
It's just very reductive. So I want to say it's not really the whole picture, but it's something like you can kind of think about like, uh, there is a soul, a path of the soul and a path of the spirit. Like, like Ken would talk about like the transcendent and the imminent, right? And so, you know, the path of the spirit is kind of disassociating from any worldly thing or disidentifying is a better word from any worldly thing and, and recognizing the kind of.
00:43:48
Speaker
the kind of the ultimate generality of being like that everything is one, right? We're all you know, then there's this and it's and it kind of has this
00:43:59
Speaker
ascendant like upward motion, right? And this and and moving away from from the particulars and it's the it's the it's the in the intellectual instinct. It's the thing that says all of these traditions are really saying the same thing. I mean, you had a version of it where you're saying you were talking about the Buddha and then you're like, but really what I mean is awaken free and like, you know, that Ramana Maharshi is pointing to the same thing and you know, and which there's
00:44:25
Speaker
Total validity in that and all of that I would think of as like the movement the of the spirit or the path of the spirit And then there's the path of the soul Which is about the particular?
Zen's Transcendence and Particularity
00:44:37
Speaker
specific
00:44:39
Speaker
Yeah. Things like, and it matters that when you go sit in the zendo, every, you know, everybody's wearing these black robes and that the, the stick hits like, right. And like these, like the cultural details and the personality, right. And the Buddha is different from our Manamahashi. The transmission is different and the face is different and it, and the unique, right. And this is the realm of art, right? Like art is about that.
00:45:06
Speaker
being in love with the particularities of life, not only the transcendence. And I think, you know, I'm saying all this because what I love about Zen, I think Zen is the tradition that I've encountered which most
00:45:22
Speaker
embraces both of those that doesn't prioritize one over the other and actually holds both. And then there's this other layer that I want to bring in, which I think is more on the soul side. Like the spirit is totally happy with explanations.
00:45:40
Speaker
Actually, like, and I'm making this up. Who knows if this is true, but like, this is my sense. It's like the spirit, like you can have like, you know, Ken Wilber is, you know, I think is an influence for you. It's big influence for me. And Ken is like, he explains the crap out of everything. It's like, well, this goes to this and like, you know, and sometimes it's a little constrictive, but it's also, you know, beautiful and helpful.
00:46:00
Speaker
And the soul doesn't want anything to be explained. Like the soul is like, don't fucking spoil the joke. Like don't. If you try and explain the magic, it destroys the magic.
00:46:12
Speaker
And, and I feel that in Zen where they're kind of like, we're not, we're not going to tell you exactly what we're doing here because that would spoil it. Like, and that is like, there's something. So when you say there's magic in this lineage, like I feel that like literally in a way, that's a way that I feel specifically the magic of the lineage, not the spirit, not the heart, but the magic is in part in the like.
00:46:41
Speaker
in the love of the particulars and in the unwillingness to give you your mind some framework to explain things. And what I'm doing right now, I would say is kind of contradictory to that a little bit. Like the part of me that loves that wants to be like, don't even, even saying this is saying a little bit too much. But I say all of that because this is kind of my segue into your poetry.
00:47:05
Speaker
Because I feel like, you know, Zen has this long tradition of like, poetry, right? There's poetry on Zen. And, and it makes so much sense to me. And, you know, I just read your book, Bury the Seed. I didn't finish it, but I read most of it. And it definitely, I can feel the resonances with the Zen lineage of poetry, while also it's kind of, you know, modern and
00:47:27
Speaker
has these other aspects. But in general, I think there's this resonance between Zen and poetry, where poetry also is in love with the particulars. And poetry also doesn't want to explain. Poetry doesn't want to tell you what it's the joke. It wants you to get the joke yourself. And I'll just say one other thing, which is what struck me about your poems, not all of them, but many of them, is that they're not only
00:47:56
Speaker
an expression of like, if I read William Carlos Williams, right, it feels so zen to me talking about the Red Will Barrow and everything depends on the Red Will and like, you know, it's, he says it more beautifully than that. But like,
00:48:08
Speaker
He's the one who says no idea but in thanks. He's who I reference when I'm urging myself and poetry students to get more concrete. As you get concrete, you inherently also get more transcendent. They're not two different things.
00:48:27
Speaker
Yes, that's, yes, right. And that's the path, right? That's the imminent path, right? And, and I even like, this is such a volatile metaphor, but like, it, one way I think of that is like the feminine and the masculine, right? The feminine, like, loves the world so much she transcends, and the masculine transcends the world so fully he can love it, right? So that poetry is like this, is that
00:48:52
Speaker
Loving of the world so fully that if you really love it so fully you transcend although I would argue that sometimes when I'm writing a poem it's like I can there's poems I could show you that I could only write that poem because I'd just been meditating and Completely disentangled my attention. Well, I don't know completely I was able to unhook and unvelcro my attention from the objects of my ordinary life and
00:49:20
Speaker
that I felt free enough to write that poem. Yes. Well, I think it works both ways. Right. Well, I, you know, in my horribly volatile metaphor, that would be a masculine movement. Yeah. Right. Not that. Yeah. But anyway, maybe it's it's those ideas are tricky. But but it feels like those are two possibilities. And I'm going to stop giving you my essay in a minute and hear your response. But listen to.
00:49:47
Speaker
Oh, the last thing I observed specifically from some of your poems is it also feels not just an expression like William Carlos Williams, but also it's a direct teaching. Like the poems are also teachings. And, you know, and without being kind of like without being abstract, right, but with being these kind of very concrete
00:50:11
Speaker
specific things and and so there's something like it's it's like you're even loving the transcendent particularly or you're including the particularity of the transcendent or something I don't know this but anyway I so that's me kind of gushing about the poems I love that I absolutely love them and yeah I mean we could we could get into specifics of specific poems as well but
00:50:36
Speaker
That was kind of just like a whole smearing out of a bunch of ideas.
Intersection of Zen and Poetry
00:50:41
Speaker
How do you feel about all of that? Yeah, there's so much. It's so rich.
00:50:48
Speaker
Well, one thing that came up when you were talking about like, don't spoil the magic by explaining, I mean, I'm kind of giggling because yes, that's Zen training. It's like you don't get the there's orientations, but you don't get like an orienting manual to how it's going to go. And even if you do read some of the Zen books out there that that outline the training elements or what have you, it's going to unfold without, you know, it's like,
00:51:15
Speaker
you know, take a step and the path appears. Like, you know what the path is, but there's no preparation. And Zen, the instructions for zazen, this is gonna sound like technical language, but zazen, or sitting meditation, is a form of sitting meditation that is objectless and non-dual. Meaning, like, sometimes people call it meditation without handrails.
00:51:45
Speaker
There's such a valuable, valid place for meditation that has lots of instruction and things to do to gather concentration.
00:51:58
Speaker
Sometimes it's essential to just first learn how to concentrate in order to stabilize attention to then go, you know, relax beyond a personal sense of attention. But anyway, in Zazen, it's like, just sit.
00:52:16
Speaker
Take this posture, and when you do, you are none other than the Buddha himself itself. You are the mind of one. You are the mind of men. You are it. Take this posture. You are it. And there's such a faith that the practice itself will teach you what you need, that it will unfold in the way that it will. And I love that, but it takes a bit of an adventurous spirit to dive into that.
00:52:46
Speaker
But that's also my exact experience with writing poems. And as you were kind of talking about all of what you were just talking about, I kind of had this, like, replay of my life and training as a poet. I don't know, like, it's weird. I don't know why I don't like to identify as a poet.
00:53:07
Speaker
It doesn't feel like a thing, it is a way of being. And I honestly feel like the most in touch with what that means when I'm not learning about it. So I've had periods of really studying it, like I got my degree in it, and I think it's important to learn the craft. So sometimes I'll take classes with poets I really love, like Ellen Bass, Rosemary Watola-Tromer. I like to read a lot of poets, but
00:53:37
Speaker
It's just in the doing of it where I learn, and right now I'm in a practice of writing a poem a day, which I've never done before, and I'm loving it. It's hard, but I am loving it because I've never learned so much about writing poetry other than just doing it every day right now.
00:53:59
Speaker
And there's a way where I'm kind of nervous, I'm about to launch a new course about meditation and poetry, and there's a way where I'm a little nervous that I won't be able to write while I'm also teaching. I don't know if I can do both at the same time well. And so I was kind of making a little parallel about like, I mean, I think I can, I just have to not teach in a certain way. I have to invite people to discover their own way of,
00:54:26
Speaker
of writing poetry rather than tell them what to do. So I was going to connect the practice of zazen, where there's not, and zen training in general, where there, no one's going to tell you how it's going to go. You have to live it out for yourself. And I think what's most, the truest thing I can say about writing poetry is that it's the same way. No one can tell you how to write a poem.
00:54:58
Speaker
The way that I'm writing now, I didn't learn from anyone. I don't know, it just, I sit down and listen and voices tell me what to say. It's like, it takes so much faith and so much willingness to be present just right now. And that's the funny thing that I kind of don't know if I ever want to say to poetry students on the first day is that,
00:55:24
Speaker
There's no methodology that I can give you. All I can say is that you have to be willing to sit with yourself. There's this beautiful quote. Let me read it to you real quick. This Canadian poet named Don Dymanski, who died in 2020. And he has these lectures called Poetry and the Sacred. And just this brief quote from him, he says,
00:55:52
Speaker
It takes a great deal of effort to see what's in front of you, whether that's a stone, a mountain, or another person. After much watching, after much witnessing of the metamorphosis from object to presence, you find that everything is self-liminous. So in a way, that's what it is.
00:56:20
Speaker
I've never written two poems in the same way. I've never known what I'm doing. And if I have, it's only gotten in the way. And the only way I know how to do it is just be here and listen really hard and then play and revise and play and revise and feel what make what what do I really need to say?
00:56:48
Speaker
What do I really need to hear? If I am ever thinking about someone else, unless I'm writing them a gift or an ode, if I'm thinking about how I'm gonna come across to someone else, I am fucked. Those are the worst poems I've ever written. But if I, I guess, get a little bit, I don't think it's selfish. I think it's just honest. What do I really need to hear? And those are the poems, when I write those, then other people,
00:57:17
Speaker
usually respond or it's like, oh my God, I think that is so funny. And then could I possibly capture what was so funny about that and put that in a poem or heartbreak? It's just tracking aliveness in all of its many forms. It's not even putting it into language because you can't do that. But what's the language that when I read that, it recycles that experience for me?
00:57:47
Speaker
And so it's, you know, there are things to learn for sure, but the heart of the matter, like someone's actual liberation from their own suffering is their own, it's each of our own discovery to make, and so is creating poetry. And it's,
00:58:09
Speaker
I don't mean to sound dramatic or heavy about it because it's the most beautiful, fun, and heartbreaking process. I know. I'm making a lot of comparisons between Zen and poetry, and there's obviously a lot of differences too, but for me, they go together so well because Zen is about realization, which is a silent matter, and the other half of it is manifestation.
00:58:39
Speaker
expressing what, you know, can't be said in words, manifesting compassionate actions, skillful means in the world to relieve suffering. But it's both of those together. Like literally the kanji for Zen is like insight, manifestation, both. So for me, poetry is a piece of the manifestation. You said you're tracking for the aliveness
00:59:08
Speaker
Which I love and I think that that's, you know, I just like, that's deeply one of my values is that, which I think is, I think I'm just going to make a claim that that is the artistic value. Like that's the vow. That's what makes someone an artist in whatever form is, is caring about that, right? In the same way that, you know, somebody caring about
00:59:36
Speaker
like precision and clarity makes them an engineer or like there's all these different kind of things, criteria or values. And like, I feel like that cut to the juice, like give me the, give me the, the, the, the, the aliveness. Um, and then you, and then you said, you know, you can't transmit that in words or you can't write it down. I think I just want to kind of push back on that a little bit and say, but I think you can.
00:59:59
Speaker
And I think that that's, you know, you've done it in this book. That's poetry. You've done it in this book. You know, Basho does it, right? Like, like you, you know, William Carlos Williams, like you, you read these things, even that, you know, the quote you just read wasn't even the poetry, but like, it
01:00:15
Speaker
illuminated something in my mind that it might not be the exact thing that you were feeling when I read the poem but it's it's related it's not a completely unrelated thing it's my it's my version of that the same way if you have two pianos in a room you hit one key the other piano rings
01:00:36
Speaker
I just kind of want to delight in the magic of that, of like, how does that work? How does that work? That's so fucking cool. You can read something from a thousand years ago and it still works. Speaking of Basho, and I do agree with you, I've gotten into really nerdy arguments or fun nerdy discussions about can you exactly replicate an experience through a poem or not?
01:01:08
Speaker
too. I feel like there's a point where you can dig deeper and deeper into like, yes, no, yes, no, but I think you can get really close. And I think that the that's the art form. Yeah. And then the feedback tells you how close you got. So I have some Basho right here that I'd love to because I'm I love Basho as well. Well, I think I know them by heart. Actually, there's one I just love so much. So he's pretty much the father of haiku. Are they credited with establishing that form?
01:01:38
Speaker
And I think my favorite of his is the temple bell stops, but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.
Basho's Haiku and Zen
01:01:49
Speaker
That is also my favorite bachelor poem. I fucking love it. I love it. The temple bell stops, but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers. He has this other one. I guess he didn't write much about death, but this one.
01:02:10
Speaker
points to it. Nothing in the cry of the cicadas suggests they are about to die. Nothing in the cry of the cicadas suggests they are about to die. There is something that I just was feeling into as you were sharing when you were
01:02:38
Speaker
saying, you know, if I ring this note, the other piano note will go. How does that happen? And the thing that one of the things that just blows my mind about writing poetry, especially right now when I'm writing one a day, and
01:03:09
Speaker
What that's doing is forcing me to be really equanimous about the whole thing. Like, oh, I think I, you know, I'm also sharing them every day. Oh, yesterday everybody responded so well to my poem. How am I ever going to write another one? And then, you know, something completely surprising comes up when I think I won't be able to do it again.
01:03:31
Speaker
how can I let go of what felt like a totally stupid poem yesterday and just do it again? Because I said I would. I just got to jump in and say, to me, it seems like a radically different practice to write a poem every day than to publish a poem every day. And to publish a poem every day is like, I've spent like, you know, times that I've written a poem every day. To publish a poem every day sounds like a
01:03:57
Speaker
really clarifying or really like just like potent. It's really potent. And I have to give credit to my friend Rosemary Watula-Tromer, who's been doing this every day since I think 2016. And her four vows are, every day I will write. Number two, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be honest or true. Number three, I can't know the end when I start. And if I do, I'll write past that.
01:04:27
Speaker
And number four, I will share. So I just, I didn't plan to do this. That's the funny thing. I just started to do it right before the new year. And then I thought, God, I'm learning so much. I'm going to do this. And it's really potent and really clarifying. But the thing I was going to say is that sometimes the thing that, like the two piano keys ringing together, the thing that makes me cry when I'm writing,
01:04:58
Speaker
is the same thing that makes, that I hear the most about from other people and is not something I anticipated. So I have a poem that I would love to read if you're open to that.
Reading 'Mine': Parenthood and Connection
01:05:11
Speaker
And I'll just say, this is an example. I just wrote this last week and it was based on a feeling of a particular unique kind of aliveness that I wanted to see if I could write
01:05:28
Speaker
And then when the end came out, I don't know where it came from. Honestly, I did not plan it. I don't know where it came from. But lately I've been writing at the end of the day when my son is falling asleep, there's like a nice like descending quality as he's falling asleep and I just write in his room. And I wrote this poem and then I wrote the end and I just put my laptop down and just started crying.
01:05:59
Speaker
And then I walked into my bedroom and I said to Rob, I don't know where the end of this poem just came from, but it's so tender. And I kind of just kept, it just kept working me. And then of course I was a bit, felt a bit vulnerable sharing it, but then that's the thing that seemed to ring the most for people who read it. So that's enough. That's enough.
01:06:29
Speaker
prep for it. It's called mine. Mine. When Orion is waiting outside his kindergarten classroom, after school, next to his teacher and friends, and he doesn't see me as I approach, but instead stares into the field where the big kids play soccer in the wind.
01:06:54
Speaker
and his snow boots come almost up to his knees. And Pokémon Backpack, stuffed with so much stuff, sags behind him, hanging from his elbows. And he just stands there, being so perfectly himself, not seeing that he's being seen. I know I certainly don't own him at all.
01:07:19
Speaker
but feels such a sudden, crushing rush of visceral recognition that he somehow emerged from my millions of choices and utter choicelessness. My heart tips over and spills its honey all through every bit of me.
01:07:43
Speaker
I sense the necessity of his being claimed, now, after an ordinary Thursday school day, and for countless moments to come, and that this is mine to do, this specific claiming. Of all the actions anywhere I could perform, I am needed just right here, by just this boy, just like we are.
01:08:12
Speaker
And as I scoop him up and carry him away, nuzzling my nose into his sweet, chilly cheek, I think of all the ways I'm grateful to be claimed, by parents, husband, lineage, and friends, and how powerfully I long for the great earth herself, one day, at just the right moment,
01:08:37
Speaker
when I'm still and struck by something and looking the other way to gaze on me and cherish me and then claim me for her own. I've never read it out long before. Thank you. We have a world exclusive.
01:09:07
Speaker
Should I read it twice? I know sometimes twice is helpful. Mine. When Orion is waiting outside his kindergarten classroom after school, next to his teacher and friends, and he doesn't see me as I approach, but instead stares into the field where the big kids play soccer in the wind, and his snow boots come almost up to his knees
01:09:35
Speaker
and Pokemon backpack stuffed with so much stuff sags behind him, hanging from his elbows. And he just stands there being so perfectly himself, not seeing that he's being seen. I know I certainly don't own him at all, but feel such a sudden crushing rush of visceral recognition that he somehow emerged
01:10:04
Speaker
from my millions of choices and utter choicelessness. My heart tips over and spills its honey all over every bit of me. I sense the necessity of his being claimed now, after an ordinary Thursday school day, and for countless moments to come, and that this is mine to do, this specific claiming.
01:10:35
Speaker
Of all the actions anywhere I could perform, I am needed just right here, by just this boy, just like we are. And as I scoop him up and carry him away, nuzzling my nose into his sweet, chilly cheek, I think of all the ways I am grateful to be claimed.
01:10:58
Speaker
by parents, husband, lineage, and friends, and how powerfully I long for the great earth herself one day at just the right moment when I'm still and struck by something and looking the other way to gaze on me and cherish me and then claim me for her own.
01:11:32
Speaker
It's hard to know what to say. Okay. It's this explaining the joke thing, right? Like, like I, you know, but maybe I'll say just this, this image of like the necessity of him being claimed and this moment where you're, it's kind of that particularity, right? Like, you know, just this boy and like in the poem, like as I'm listening, I feel, I'm, I feel like him. I feel like the boy and
01:12:01
Speaker
How?
01:12:02
Speaker
Like the necessity is right. Like how absolutely important it is that you're there in that moment. And that if you weren't there, that it would break his heart. Like it would be absolutely crushing. And I think like, you know, I think back to being that age and, you know, how old is he? Five? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember being five and waiting at school. And if my mom was late or somebody else came, you know, like she'd send a friend or whoever to come pick me up, just being
01:12:32
Speaker
devastated. Yeah, like of yeah, so that anyway, that's the I think that's kind of that's where it where it grabbed me. And then I with that with the end, like I have my own sense of what you're talking about. But I there's also a sense of like, I don't like then I don't I don't want to necessarily
01:12:54
Speaker
go, well, are you talking about, is this what you mean? Right. Like, and, and like that kind of like, can we turn the lights on and, and take away the last veils and look at the, you know, the naked body would fall like, you know, led lights or whatever. And it's like, there's something that instinct is, is there about the end. But yeah, I don't know if there's anything else to be said, except thank you. I think the reason that I wanted to share that one is because there's this, um,
01:13:22
Speaker
surprise element that, again, like I said, I didn't know. Yeah, I was writing about my own death and I didn't know I would be and it felt like an ontological other voice coming through. And the feeling of that was humbling and tenderizing and
01:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, and also inspiring. And so there's a way where that's the, it's difficult, like Don Dymanski says, it's hard to see anything clearly. It can be difficult to meditate, it can be difficult to write poetry, it can be difficult to teach. But when we're willing to sit with the discomfort,
01:14:18
Speaker
there are surprises like that. And there are in my experience, there's embedded in our true nature is wisdom and compassion that just simply arises and gifts itself. It's like reality is embedded with wisdom and compassion. And if I can sit through the discomfort of whatever I feel confronted by,
01:14:45
Speaker
those surprises emerge that are, I don't want to make it seem like a goal-oriented thing, but it's just, it's, it is self-luminous, as Don Lomansky says. I
Poetry as Living Entities
01:14:58
Speaker
didn't create that ending. It happened. And one other thing I was going to say is there's this great book called The Dharma of Poetry by John Brehm.
01:15:09
Speaker
And one of the things he says about certain poetry is that certain poems can be spiritual friends and certain poems can be spiritual teachers because they embody and model a way of being. I can't remember which haiku poet he starts with talking about. I can't remember, but it's a Japanese haiku poet. And he basically says, move out of the way, cricket. I'm about to roll over is the whole haiku. And it's super simple, but it's like,
01:15:39
Speaker
a childlike and very compassionate being living in an animate world. And so he's talking about how poems can be friends and teachers. And I sort of heard you saying that before that I really experienced them as living entities that I'm midwifing or something. And it's deeply satisfying to be there for that.
01:16:03
Speaker
It totally makes sense to me that the living entities, it makes me, I have not thought of it like that. And it makes me think of in the Hindu tantric tradition, and maybe I don't know as much about the Tibetan tradition, but in the Hindu tradition, they talk about the mantras as being.
01:16:22
Speaker
consciousnesses, like that the mantras are living beings, like non-physical things. And that there's just like a, oh, and the mantras are these kind of very concentrated things, distilled, but then the poems of the world are
01:16:41
Speaker
also these living thing. Yeah. Well, in the traditional four vows in Zen that we chant at the end of the evening when we're on retreat, one of them is sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Sometimes people now translate it. I vow to serve them. And yeah, we could go into that and unpack the meaning in there forever. But that's not what I want to do. What I want to say is I had a
01:17:10
Speaker
a meditation period a long time ago where it suddenly dawned on me that I was working on my first book, Feed Your Vow, and I was like, oh, these poems are sentient beings. I am fulfilling my Buddhist vows by serving them to come into form.
01:17:29
Speaker
And then I remember kind of digging around in some of Ken's work and, and either I heard him say in some interview where I read, I can't remember if I read it or heard it, but he said ideas are sentient beings. It's so good. It's so good. I think that's a good spot. Now we have a little bit of business to do at the end. Okay, cool. Recommendations.
01:17:53
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I have two. I have two for you. All right, go ahead. Okay, maybe we'll swap maybe we'll alternate. Okay, this is one of my very favorite Zen books, Cultivating the Empty Field. Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhe. He's a Chinese Zen Master Chan master. And his writing is so poetic. It's incredibly
01:18:26
Speaker
Yeah, you just have to read it to see what the flavor is. And this is a relatively new, it's translated by Taigen Dan Leighton, who's a Zen teacher and scholar. And it just came out not too long ago, 2000, but it's like, I don't think Hang Zhe has been translated before this.
01:18:44
Speaker
And it's so beautiful. Thank you. So I will tell you, you have previously mentioned this book to me and I own it. No, no, no, it's it's good. This is this is part of what will happen. It's fine. And but I'll say that I read the whole introduction, which was really interesting and scholarly. But but then I haven't got past it to the to the actual actual work.
01:19:10
Speaker
Yeah, so that re inspires me to so I'm gonna finish that. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I love the title. I mean, I think you told me the title and I was like, Okay, yeah, cultivating the empty field. So it's kind of good because the first one I'm going to recommend to you is is also something I've recommended to you before. Um,
01:19:31
Speaker
And, uh, and it's just, this is, I'm just gonna, this is just me indulgently getting on my soapbox for a second to tell the world, including you to watch mother by Darren Aronofsky. It's appropriate to be scared to watch it. It is, it is a very challenging film. It's a man, essentially, you know, it's Aronofsky.
01:19:58
Speaker
screaming in rage on behalf of the abuses of the masculine toward the feminine at every level of subtlety. And it's interesting. And what I notice is it enrages women, not all women, but there's a common response that women will watch it and be enraged. That was Lindsay's response was to just be enraged.
01:20:28
Speaker
And anyway, I don't want to say more about it than that, but I think it's an absolute masterpiece. It was transformative for me and it was completely ignored at the Oscars, which was a crime and chewed me out of the Oscars for the rest of my life. I will never pay attention. So anyway, we've talked about this before and it's hard. I want to pick a good day, but it's marketed like a horror movie. It's not a horror movie.
01:20:57
Speaker
It's a very horrifying, horrifying. Yeah. Um, but, but I think it's somehow ultimately why I don't even want to say anything else. I just think it's definitely worth watching. So
01:21:13
Speaker
I remember you told me you and Lindsay told me a few years ago to watch it and you said give myself a day to recover. Yes, maybe. And I was like, I don't have a day. I've got kids. I read an article about Jennifer Lawrence who was married to him at the time and starred in it and that she had some
01:21:35
Speaker
like mental and emotional challenges after starring in it. So I've gotten a little spooked, but you keep recommending it. So I will watch it at some point.
01:21:47
Speaker
Great. Yeah. And yeah. I love some of the other films, The Fountain and Black Swan. I thought were genius. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. I mean, so you can do it. If you can do Black Swan. Good. Good. One day when the stars align. But yeah. Okay. So give me your second. Yeah.
01:22:06
Speaker
I think I told you about this second one and I caveat, I haven't finished it. But so far, this is called it's new. It came out like two weeks ago, the creative act, a way of being by Rick Rubin. Oh,
01:22:25
Speaker
the guy behind Def Jam Records. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. And he, yeah, the producer, he did, he produced the Johnny Cash, the late Johnny Cash albums and a bunch of them, yeah. And Seaboys and a bunch of hip hop, I can't remember exactly who, but he's, yeah, he's big name. And I think he also was really into integral for a while and Ken's work and I know Rob briefly crossed paths and worked with him.
01:22:52
Speaker
But this is his new book. It looks like a Zen text, you know, the way that it's designed. And it's really distilled, kind of almost like aphorisms of like creative practice. And I was telling my teacher, Diane, recently that I have this weird experience when I'm reading. I'm not trying to like put myself, elevate myself. I'm just, when I read it, I feel like
01:23:21
Speaker
I've said that. I thought I invented that. Based on my own direct experience of writing and creating, I realized that thing. I thought that I realized that or realized it with creative collaborators like my friend Lauren Beale. I thought we discovered that and taught our students, but it's almost like
01:23:44
Speaker
Like I used to teach a class called summoning the unseen and there's a whole chapter in here called the unseen. And what he says about creativity and the unseen world is like exactly what I used to say in that class. Um, so anyway, there's a, there's like a something, um, universal, but he's, he's writing in his own voice and it's really kind of distilled and beautiful. Awesome. Awesome. That's a very exciting recommendation. I'm definitely gonna check that out. Thank you.
01:24:14
Speaker
Yeah. All right. My second recommendation, different. It was fun because you, where do you quote?
01:24:23
Speaker
I think you quote Azula Le Guin in a poem in the, or somewhere in the book you quote Azula Le Guin. So this recommendation is, it's kind of for your kids, which is, I don't know if you know it, but Azula Le Guin wrote a series of books called the Earthsea trilogy, but you know about that. Yeah. Okay.
01:24:46
Speaker
Yes, I read those in middle school and they blew my mind. Great. So I have a chip on my, again, these are my chip on shoulder recommendations to that extent. I find the Harry Potter stuff to be pretty kind of obnoxious. I mean, whatever, it's fine. But it always upsets, like the Ursula Le Guin told the story of somebody going to wizard school.
01:25:12
Speaker
you know, 20 years before Harry Potter with so much more magic. Like there's real magic in those books. Like real, like the magic we're talking about today is in a, you know, Sue Le Guin is a, is super interesting writer and her dog and everything. But, but there's, I've just, I read them yet about in middle school age and I felt seen, when I felt seen
01:25:41
Speaker
And in a way that I don't think I had felt before. And so anyway, so, you know, your, your kids are getting to Harry Potter age. And so this is, it's my alternative pitch of like, instead of Harry Potter, what if, what if, you know, and obviously they're going to read whatever they want to read, but you're not interested in Harry Potter. I can't even get London's eight and a half. I can't get him interested in Harry Potter. It's funny. So maybe we'll just divert that and go straight to wizard of birthday. Yeah. Yeah.
01:26:09
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah. Well, it's, it's not surprising that you, that you read those books, but yeah. So good. So good. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Um, so the last thing is just, uh, how should people, is there anything you want to pitch or how should people find you if they want to know more about what you're up to? Yeah. My, my website is Brooke McNamara.com and I have a new, I don't know when this conversation will be published. Uh, we're going to shoot for the beginning of March.
01:26:39
Speaker
Okay, great. So Monday, March 6th, I'm starting a new course called Awakening to the Poetic. And the tagline is meditation and poetry for coming alive.
01:26:52
Speaker
And it's poetry, meditation, reading poetry. I'll read it a lot out loud. I'll be teaching about different themes. A lot of what we talked about today I'll be elaborating on. And then we'll write together with prompts and connect in small groups and in the big group based around our process and our poetry.
01:27:16
Speaker
This is the first time I'm offering awakening to the poetic. It's similar but different from summoning the unseen. That class had a similar structure and I just fell in love with how these practices together in community bring people so alive and so connected. So it's for anyone, beginners and advanced practitioners alike.
01:27:40
Speaker
And it'll be on my homepage. Hello, editing Robbie here. Just jumping in to say, you might've noticed that we just missed the March 6th start date of Brooke's class. She was just talking about a weakening to the poetic. I talked to Brooke about this and she said, if you still want to join, there is still time. You don't have to join exactly on March 6th. You do have to join soon. So if you're interested in taking that class, there is still time, but you have to go very soon.
01:28:09
Speaker
All right, back to Burke. And then I also have Art of Meditation is an ongoing meditation practice class. There's weekly classes and then there's seasonal half-day retreats. And you can find that on my website too.
01:28:25
Speaker
And all both of those are online. So people anyway can do them. Yeah, both of those are online. And then if you're local, like you mentioned, Robbie, we have monthly Dragon Lake Zen Sunday morning practice sessions. And that is available through my website, too. And that is local to Boulder, Colorado. Yeah. OK. Well, thank you so much. It's it's been an absolute pleasure. And I'm very, very happy to have got this chance to talk with you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
01:29:06
Speaker
you