In the middle of the night
the dog
is watching summer lightning

In this issue of Uncertainty Club we have fire, water, the goddess, and long reads for the end of summer. 

The connection between Chan and the feminine feel for the world is ancient. It begins with an appreciation for beauty. The world is beautiful beyond liking or disliking. We never tire of the winter snow, the spring sunlight, the look in the eyes of a deer, a stranger, someone we love. Every moment is complete and holds all moments that have ever been or ever will be. The presence of here spreads out through our lives.

The early meditators in China thought of here as a kind of feminine presence from which everything arises. Everyone looks to mountains but the world actually comes from the valley, apparently unobtrusive, not asserting or exerting herself, something indescribable. That power, the Valley Spirit, is inexhaustible. And we depend on it without even knowing that we do, although it’s easy to see: the way the trail reaches up to meet your feet when you take a walk, the way the trees embrace the air, the sense of aliveness and deep solace you feel when you breathe and look around and see, “Oh I have a place in this mystery, I am this mystery.” Beauty catches us off guard. We reach out for wholeness but we already have wholeness, even in the reaching.

The Daodejing was written right at the beginning of Chan, and helped make Chan and Zen so different from original Buddhism. It describes the origin like this:

The power of the valley never dies.
It’s called the Mother-Deep.
The gate of the Mother-Deep
is the root of earth and sky,
gossamer like silk, always here unseen,
use it; it will never leave you.

(Version by Rachel Boughton)

In these pages:

Rachel Boughton has a lovely investigation of the European lineage of the valley spirit. She looks at the role of The Lady, the mother deep, the goddess, in the neolithic European world, and the implications of Marija Gimbutas’s archeological work on the goddess.

Joan Sutherland, who not by coincidence, edited Marija Gimbutas’s monumental book Language of the Goddess, has two pieces on the myth we are currently in. Joan is trying to reimagine the meaning we give to current events.

Dogo Graham, who teaches Zen and writes novels in Glasgow, has given us a poem.

Chris Gaffney has a piece about the Paradise fire in California which burned his land but not his house. 

Mario Da Cunha has three marvelous art pieces.

I have a piece on the enigmatic koan of a sieve being filled with water and also a poem about the dreams of an apricot tree.

Happy end of summer to all.

John Tarrant

Sleeping Lady (Malta, 4000 BC)

The stone woman gives birth in the middle of the night. – Zen koan attributed to Dongshan, China, 9th Century

I have a story to tell you, but it’s a story for which the words have disappeared.

The language in which the story could have been written existed long ago, in a time we call “pre-history.” The language left its footprints in certain rare loanwords that have no roots in Indo-European languages, words like thorax and labyrinth and absinthe and zither. There is also a written language, which we call Linear A, that is thought to be related to this early language. It is drawn on clay tablets that were first discovered 150 years ago, but no one has yet been able to translate the words. Is that, I wonder, because the language speaks of things for which we have no reference?

There are also old songs made up of nonsense syllables that are still sung in places where some of ancient culture still persists. These are said to be pre-Christian songs, and their words may not be nonsense, but some of what remains of these earlier languages. There are are intense, wild songs like this sung in Eastern Europe. It may be that some of the sounds of the old language came from the very origins of language when humans learned to speak from animals and nature. Which sounds were they? Perhaps water running, owls and songbirds, foxes and trees, roots growing down into hard soil. What do oceans talk about, or trees? What do predators and prey shout to each other in the night? What name does the doe give the fawn as it lies in the grass catching its breath? The language almost certainly knew how to speak of a culture with rituals and understandings and an ecology we have forgotten, including the way death is not an ending, and beings are part of each other.

I say we don’t have the language, but that’s not entirely true. We were all there. That’s one of the things that connects us. A part of every one of us was there, we developed in those times. The language and the stories are encoded in our DNA, and when we hear it again, we might recognize it. We can remember it in our bodies. It doesn’t take much to hear it, it’s just at the edge of attention, sometimes it only takes a smell, new grass, a baby’s hair, morning mist, to tip us off, so much do we long for it. So how could we have ever forgotten?

That’s the mystery. What happened?

The story is long, and from so long ago that some parts can only be intuition or conjecture. But can you see how it’s shocking it is, and then exciting, to imagine that things haven’t always been as they are now?

Venus of Berekhat Ram (Golan Heights ca. 300,000 BC)

Around 300,000 years ago hominids carved figurines of round women using volcanic stones, stones the size that would fit in your hand. We have found a few. Would you carry one with you? As an amulet or a companion? Would you hold it for luck? Hominids at that time weren’t known for making decorative art. They fashioned tools with sharp edges, this we knew, and a tool makes sense to us now. What sense do we make of this figurine? There have been many other figurines of women, and only women, hundreds of thousands of them, found in every age and every place, of stone and clay, mammoth ivory, wood, and later, bronze. You can see them in every archaeological museum in the world. So many of them have been found that it’s easy to imagine that a little doll like this was carried by everyone. What would that signify? Like the doll in the fairy tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful, did they feed them and ask them for advice and counsel? And who was she? And what did she know?

Venus of Willendorf (25,000 BCE)

The story I want to tell is also to be discovered in the artifacts that have not been found. For a period that lasted tens of thousands of years there is an archaeological record full of conspicuous absences. Here are a few: While we have discovered much art depicting life, people, animals, hunting of the times, there are no depictions of war between humans, not anywhere, not on any pottery or stones or cave walls. There are no weapons for killing each other, nor bones or skulls of people killed with weapons, and no protective fortifications around cities. There are also no special tombs for the rich, or for queens or kings or chieftains, although some there are some special tombs and grave gear apparently for priestesses. There are remains of major cities with populations of thousands, which lasted millennia, with innovations like indoor plumbing and refined crafts and agriculture and technology, but war and class seem absent. Nearly all the figurative art found from this time is of women and of sacred animals. Male figures are rare and aren’t in the foreground, are never larger than the women, and are often seen as companions or lovers. For at least thirty thousand years, across a vast continent, in hundreds of ancient civilizations, from the Semitic cultures and North Africa in the south, to the Celts in the west, to the Balkans and nearly to Siberia, until these civilizations began to unravel perhaps 4–5 millennia ago, these are the things we see, and what we don’t see as well.

If this is the way the world was, I wonder, why no violence? In the world that’s familiar to us, humans seem to do anything they are capable of doing. Where was the cruelty? Where was the organized destruction? Where was the greed? Why, in these cultures, for tens of thousands of years, is there no evidence of a consuming desire to be better or richer or more powerful than one another? And where are all the men, displaying their aggression and dominance? Was birth itself such a powerful miracle and metaphor? Was nature and a relationship with the earth enough? I have no conclusions. I’m full of wonder. These questions never fail to take my breath away, and when I sit quietly, I feel both sadness and an inkling that there are implications to the understanding that things haven’t always been the way they are now.

Seated Figure Giving Birth (Catal Huyuk, Turkey 6000 BC)

Stories from these times are a key to begin to break the code of more recent myths, like bread crumb trails through the forest. Here’s a familiar Christian allegory: God punished Eve when she ate the apple of knowledge, by making her ashamed of her body and by making her give birth in pain. Ah, so there was a real garden. When did we leave it? Why did we leave? Before that time, did we give birth without pain? There are Neolithic sculptures of relaxed women seated as if on a throne, giving birth calmly. What if there were no shame in having a female body, and every birth was a celebration showing the generative and regenerative power of the earth-as-mother? Would the context be so different, even our physical bodies be so different, that birth would be easy?

What if “Golden Age” wasn’t just a manner of speaking?

Allegories are everywhere, and I find I’ve begun to read the old stories differently. Even the story of the Buddha, whose mother died giving birth to him. As an adult he left the women and his newborn baby at the palace and went out into a world of men and strife and renunciation. Does this story point to a much older story? Is it one of the many stories that tries to give us hints that something happened?

It is hard to imagine how this history could be washed away. It’s as if there must have been a powerful effort over a period of time to erase the narrative (although it is not difficult to imagine that the new civilization, with values so different, would have wanted to erase it). In later mythology, the complex and nuanced stories from earlier iterations are written to make everyone a cartoon, and the Goddess a monster, or a harpy or a young and innocent fool. The complexity rises up through the cracks anyway: old, discordant alternative versions of the tales, and the stories told by the grandmothers, passed by word of mouth.

The question comes, so pertinent in uneasy times like ours: What forces could make such a brutal change possible, could create an environment where such a pervasive and powerful, creative and fecund culture could become a diaspora, could almost entirely vanish, sometimes in the space of a just a few hundred years? The geological record shows a change in climate: ice, then a warming, ocean currents shifting, flooding, drought. It’s easy to imagine that these were part of it, conditions that brought with them famine and disease. There were volcanic eruptions, too. Thera, a vast volcanic island that became the much more diminutive Santorini, was adjacent to Crete and was almost entirely destroyed around 1600 BCE, and may have been the source of the myth of Atlantis. Maybe these kinds of events were combined with some apparently benign development, like the domestication of horses on which nomadic raiders could travel great distances. Whatever happened, over the course of a thousand years, populations migrated away from cities, and figurative art died for centuries, along with civilizations and technology. At this time a new language began to replace the old one, and what had been known about the nature of reality became unknown, and eventually became silent. After a while, language and forgetting and cognitive dissonance made this old way of being nearly unknowable.

Venus of Brassempouy (Mammoth Ivory, France 22,000 BC)

I’ve never liked the word Goddess. Perhaps it had some sentimentality attached to it that rubbed me the wrong way. Whatever the reason, I’ve been examining its etymology. I found out that the word Goddess first came into use recently, in the middle ages, around 1,350 CE, and is a combination of the Germanic-derived God and the Latin -ess which means small or female. But further back, much further, you can find the Greek word Potnia (πότνια) which means Lady, a poetic title of honor. For Goddess there was the word Despoina, perhaps from Domus Potnia — the lady of the house, or perhaps De or Deswas, a title of divinity. This word Despoina was used like the later Hebrew word Yahweh. It is a stand-in for her real name, the name of the Lady, which was secret, and only told to initiates in mysteries. I don’t know if anyone knows the name today.

I take the loss of this word very personally, and I would like it back.

We all have a story to tell, and, like a birth in the middle of the night, there are no words for it. I’ll use the language I was born into, knowing that it can’t be enough, that the words will hold inside them the violence and lies against the story I’m trying to tell. I’ll talk about the pictures, and the sculptures, and I’ll try to describe things that are written in my genes, and in yours. Maybe hearing this awkward telling will make you aware of something you’ve always known. Maybe you will feel like you are coming home from a long exile.

I had a dream where I was looking through a clay bowl I had made. There was no bottom and there was a hole in the table underneath it and in the floor below that and I could see through the bowl, as if through a lens, the people moving around underneath, going about their lives, making things. And I could also see hundreds of gray rats moving over the floor at their feet, as if invisible to everyone, as if out of time, moving in the space between the seconds. No one could see them but me. And once I could see them, I could see them everywhere. There was a different reality existing concurrently. Rats are an ancient species; outsiders and survivors, they have the ability to thrive while hiding. They recognize danger, they feel emotions, they are altruistic and social. They laugh. The dream showed me the way it’s possible to see through things, that sometimes I miss this, but if I really look, it’s there.

Later on I had a dream in which I had laryngitis, and also couldn’t hear. I could speak but the words came out so quietly that no one could understand, and no one would stop what they were doing to listen. I was there but somehow not synchronized, not in the same time. Things had gone on without me.

It seems important to speak, and to continue speaking. To make art and to continue making art, to create relics for people in the present day, to encourage us, and to be found in midden heaps in 10,000 years. It’s easy to forget things and we live in a time where falsehoods replace reality at the speed of light. But that’s nothing new, the way our past can disappear; we are encouraged to forget, and then the remembering itself is an art.

The other thing that seems important here is what happens to us when we start to see that the foundation on which our reality stood is made of nothing. While it’s disorienting, it’s also exhilarating to experience how we’re connected to everything and everyone, in an unbroken line, held by ancestors who have felt the world in a different way. In meditation, in practices of attention, a space appears that reveals how trivial our beliefs really are. And in that space, possibilities can arrive. When we consider the likelihood that things haven’t always been like this, we can begin to choose to make something that has never been before.

That sort of creative gesture is going to be necessary, if we are to survive.

Postscript:

I first came across studies of these early civilizations through the work of Marija Gimbutas in the late 1970s. Her research and analysis and conclusions changed the way I saw the world. A few years ago as part of the editorial team for this magazine I came across a piece that referred to the myth of the maze of the minotaur. I had visited the maze, in Knossos on the island of Crete, in 1992. I was aware from the work of Dr. Gimbutas that the story of the minotaur was probably a bastardization of story of the original matriarchal civilization there, later re-written by the conquerors to obliterate the story of the previous culture, as conquerors often will do.

Some of Gimbutas’ later work and conclusions have been controversial, but she is universally respected by other archaeologists and subsequent research has served to strengthen her case.

I’ve also been thinking about the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were an initiation based on the story of Demeter and Persephone, and took place yearly in and around Athens, Greece, starting around 500 BC and persisting for over 1,500 years. Thousands of people participated yearly: women and men, slaves and free, including every great writer, thinker, statesperson, and philosopher of those times. Anthropologists now believe that these rituals went back at least 3,000 years, but finding any definitive beginning to the mysteries would be impossible, so ancient were their roots.

If you start to trace the artifacts and recent work of archaeologists and anthropologists and linguists and musicologists and climate scholars and ethnologists, and if you reread the ancient mythology and folk tales, the story of these ancient cultures becomes clearer and the resonance becomes more powerful. While lack of evidence doesn’t constitute evidence to the contrary, as in the evidence of artifacts not found, the conclusion that this was another kind of civilization and world view is compelling.

These stories and artifacts can be found elsewhere, in Africa and Asia and the British Isles among others, but the majority of the research is about the area that’s sometimes called “Old Europe”. Anecdotally it seems like this sort of civilization and these kinds of artifacts are to be found everywhere and comprise the universal origin story. I’m curious to find out if that’s so.

If you care to read more, you could begin with Gimbutas’ The Language of the Goddess, and the posthumous The Living Goddess. Her books are full of detailed drawings of artifacts that illustrate her points. It’s also easy to find photographs of the same artifacts online as well as thousands of others. These pieces are also on view at archaeological museums all over the world. If you travel, Catal Huyuk in Turkey is an example of a city that has been excavated and reconstructed in parts. There are the remains of ancient civilizations on Malta and of some of the other Semitic civilizations in what is now the Golan Heights. There’s also Knossos on Crete, which was the last known civilization of this kind, persisting until 1100 BC.

For a well-considered point-by-point refutation of the Gimbutas deniers, I recommend an article written by the Swedish archaeologist Erik Rodenborg in 1991. It is available in the original Swedish, or in a condensed and translated version, courtesy of Maria Kvilhaug. 

For a beautiful book about our hominid musical heritage, with a chapter on the music of Old Europe, read Sounding the Depths: Tradition and the Voices of History, by Dr. Victor A. Grauer.

For recent scholarly work that supports these conclusions see Menotti & Korvin-Piotrovsky 2012; Anthony & Ringe 2015; Lazaridis 2014.

For a very complete exhaustive history of women, with an exciting bibliography, read Marilyn French’s From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume I: Origins: From Prehistory to the First Millennium (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2008) with a foreword by Margaret Atwood.

The Origins of Greek Religion by B.C. Dietrich ( (Liverpool UP, 2004), talks about the early roots of what we usually think of as Greek religion and mythology.

For an example of a modern Ukrainian vocal/instrumental group performing a pre-Christian song, probably derived from the old language, listen to Dakha Brakha.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

Update: The Potnia Project
Summer 2019

The idea of an undocumented history of cultures that are very different from those of the last 2,000 years has been lying fallow in me for over four decades, but in the face of the 2016 presidential campaign and election and a need to respond, I found myself heading back in that direction. For a while I had been responding to the political situation out of my outrage, gathering information about what may and may not have happened, trying, in my own small way, to help disseminate information, but eventually I lost the taste for it. I wanted to find a way to move forward with a vision that went beyond opposition, toward something powerful and transformative. Perhaps I was looking for the conspiracy beneath the conspiracy, which is just a way of saying I was trying to find out about something buried in the unconscious of the culture, and hidden in my own deep psyche.  What came out in this article was tremendously encouraging, to me and to a surprising number of people around me, both women and men.

Since writing this article I have been educating myself further about the things I touched on. Most of the burning questions in that piece — what happened? Why? — are still my burning questions, but I have gathered more of the considered opinions regarding them. There’s more evidence and information out there than I could have imagined and I’m just beginning to get below the surface. I have also been exploring cognitive biases that help to explain how we forget and misinform ourselves. Each time I read the word “discredited” I follow up and read carefully the writings of the “experts” who are being cited. They are mostly in the general category of what Gregory Bateson terms “Everybody knows what everybody knows,” with varying degrees of sophistication.

“What I tell you three times is true.”    – Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark”

I continue to follow the breadcrumb trail through the woods when I look at the old and recent work of archaeologists and ancient historians, people who hold bits of the history. The crumbs are getting closer together and I’ve started to gather them, and discover others who are as well. Among the surprising discoveries: a blog post about soldiers returning from the Middle East, talking about how the “goddesses” of ancient Egypt were actually real flesh and blood queens with the power to determine who the Pharaohs would be. Or a mainland Chinese website that told the story of a famous female general of the Shang Dynasty (2000 BCE) who was one of the most influential and powerful of her time, right at the edge of the time when women’s roles in China began to be circumscribed and diminished. There are lots of academic papers by modern archaeologists re-examining the meanings and cultural assumptions we’ve projected onto relics and grave goods, and finding ancient cultures with very different values and structures. I also found a translation of an old Norse verse from the Poetic Edda, the Völuspá (Prophecy of the Witch), that makes reference to the time when the Norse pantheon was faced with the first (ever) war:

“Then all the powers went to the high chairs of fate, the sacrosanct gods, to discuss this: Who had blended the air all with harm? Or to the devourers kind given the Poetry’s Maiden?”

Ah, that’s my question exactly. And was there a time before war? And what happened to end it? 

We humans are afraid to believe things that go against our previous understandings, no matter how well-supported. We like what we know even if we don’t like what we know. There is a lot of evidence that there existed in the history of humans a different kind of world, and that our ancestors understood human nature in a radically different way than most of us do now. And, as I said in the article, even lack of evidence isn’t evidence to the contrary. There’s so much that’s still a mystery, so much we need to learn again as a species. Evolution is not proof that the world is as it should be, nor that something very different never existed. Being adaptive in the past doesn’t mean something will always be adaptive, and large changes have occurred, and will occur again. I breathe better when I notice this is possible. 

In the last few years I have been making figurines and small animal vessels out of clay, letting my hands tell me what to do. I have been following my body, my intuition. I like this research in all its forms, it’s what inspires me: to find the ways in which we haven’t lost the legacy of this other world, the one that held us for hundreds of thousands of years. I am looking for the past that shows us there’s a way to have a future.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

A version of this post was originally published on Medium and on Zen Notes, Rachel Boughton’s blog.

“Warm Pink Sea, Two Dragons” – 2015-2016

Click on the artwork for a magnified view.

36”W X 21”H

Mixed media: miscellaneous old paper/tissue/toilet paper, miscellaneous plastic food packaging, electrical/painter’s tape, old acrylic paints.

“Song of the Seed” – 2015-2017

Click on the artwork for a magnified view.

36”W X 18”H

Mixed media: old file folders, newsprint, plastic food packaging, electrical/painter’s tape, old acrylic paints.

A letter from somewhere near Paradise, 2018.

‘I take what work is on offer’ – John Tarrant

Dear friends –

What a wonderful community you all are. I would not have thought that being held would come through so strongly over the electronic aether. A report this morning from a crazy, wonderful neighbor – Tommy Slattery, let his name be known –  who stayed the night through the burn-over said, ‘some places are gone, some places are standing’.

So I don’t know. The yearning to know – Is it gone? Is it standing? Is there anything in my life that I don’t yearn to put into this dualism? I just want to know – even if the news is bad. But I don’t know. What IF this were the true nature of things? All knowing riding on the great deeps.

 My house, like all my endeavors, has a story to it. A long, shaggy dog story – filled with drama, exuberance, depression, and beauty. I had already begun to tell the story forward – that my son would inherit the house and land, that my daughter and her husband would move to Chico and visit me on the ridge. Maybe that all might happen, but the fire is always on the ridge line. It was some sort of personal fire that caused me to be living on that ridge in the first place.

I just had extensive drainage work done around my house, since the crawl space turned into a lake for months due to the heavy rains we get up here. Yes, it will soon begin raining – we get 40-80 inches a year. But first things first – get the fire finished, then start on the flooding. I may well have a well-drained ash home. This would be the second time a home burned on the foundation.

Fire always reveals something. When I was evacuating I realized I had no idea what to take. Everything seemed to be of nearly equal value. I have hundreds of books, many of which I have hauled around for decades, but gave no thought to trying to save them from the fire. Standing in my closet, looking at the motley collection of clothes, picking and choosing which shirts and pants to take, I began laughing at how absurd it was. I ended up grabbing art from the wall – including the great Boogey Man print by Michael Hofmann. I thought I could begin a new home with art from friends. And art is easy to carry and fits into a Toyota Corolla.

Yesterday, driving around the back roads on the ridge, getting spectacular views of the fire. Because of the winds, the sky was completely clear, no trace of smoke smell, yet a mile away the fire raged, apocalyptic skies loomed above. A grand, beautiful day for sightseeing the end of the world. The great Earth can tip so slightly and easily into a state that appears as conflagration to mammals such as myself.

Bobcat – NPS – Keith Geluso

On that drive I passed both a large coyote and a bobcat right next to the road. In each case I slowed my car to a stop and we regarded each other. We were in the same situation. We are always in the same situation, though I often don’t recognize it. I continue to think there is a refuge from the fire, but the coyote and bobcat have not the slack for such fantasy. To be a witness to the beauty of the wild creatures, and the awful beauty of the fire – good work if you can get it.

Love, Chris

Cloudy but bright inside, like a moonstone.

Beethoven’s original score for Piano Sonata Op. 15

We are always trying to know, but it’s not knowing we depend on. We try to expand what we know, and to work with what we know, but everything that we love comes out of a place of not knowing.

Where do ideas come from? What about songs and art? And how do we know what we love? One way we discover what we love is that little bits of the universe speak to us. The bits don’t have to be beautiful—a corner of a building, a patch of sky, the rhythm of a child’s feet running—any piece of life will do, and what makes these little pieces appealing is entirely mysterious.

Serendipity is a helpful idea here, because it refers to finding, by accident and sagacity, things that you are not looking for. The need for sagacity indicates that you have to be paying attention to notice a good idea when it occurs. Serendipity indicates that life is larger and stranger than we imagine, and that there might be mysterious and invisible connections between things.  When we notice connections between the separate bits of life, they make us happy. In stumbling on connections, we learn to rely on what we don’t know.

The important thing is to make discoveries that you are not looking for. If you find what you are looking for, you are still a familiar person in a familiar world, doing routine things. The Chinese knew about this problem, and invented koans as one solution. In the Zen tradition koans are little stories and questions that lead into uncertainty and depend on not knowing. Silence and stillness are interesting because they allow the mind to settle until the right course of action appears. When I am quiet, life reveals itself to me, and who I am begins to change and open. When I find what I’m not looking for, I become unknown even to myself.

When we are not doing things to acquire something, we are not manipulating the world to get things or people to get love, then we are just living, and freedom appears.

People call sitting in silence ‘meditation’, but meditation is really just listening to your life. You ally with the forces of serendipity by getting out of the way. In the midst of doing, there is a way of non-doing. It has silence and waiting in it. The Chinese told the koan stories and said that even hearing such a story might change your approach to life. Everyone knows the way a chance remark or snatch of song can change your mood. The koan stories shift your feeling about who you are.

“Moonlit Road,” by Edward Steichen – 1910

I live in Sonoma County, among the vineyards North of San Francisco, and at night I hear great horned owls calling. When the sound enters me, and I really hear it, everything else disappears and there is a feeling of being at home in the world, of having my place in the larger story. The current of life carries me along. I can’t use this great current for any purpose, but at such a time there is no limit to the joy of being alive. Even reaching for peace is itself a kind of peace. Entering these moments is caring for life, not just my life but all life.

One time, I woke in the night as I often do and sat in meditation looking out at the garden. The dog sat beside me. It was a foggy night and the moonlight had penetrated the fog and was reflecting back from it with a diffuse glow—as in Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Magician’s Retreat.”

Cloudy but bright inside,
like a moonstone

The pale flagstones and vines were softly visible, along with the shoots of the lime tree. Everything was quietly alive. I was not clear about the edges of things or even my own edges and noticed a koan, which I had been dreaming about during sleep, was continuing to repeat itself now that I was partly awake.

The story was the koan of the sieve, here it is:

A small group of people met every week to talk about koans, they kept company with koans. This seemed to work well enough. Then they invited a teacher to instruct them. The teacher told them that they could have a regular practice, develop a feeling of tenderness and appreciation for everything alive, and not be so caught up in their reactions to things. The explanation of meditation was like this: “Realize the light that runs through all things. Realize this wherever you are and whatever you are doing, so that meditation becomes seamless and you can’t tell the difference between meditation and anything else that’s happening in your life. It’s not hard. Fill a sieve with water.” Then the teacher left.

They followed these instructions as best they could, different people being affected in different ways. Their lives changed and most of them were happier and less troubled by their thoughts, more open to what came to them. But there was one woman who was deeply touched by the image of the sieve and of the fairy tale task of filling it with water, and the story wouldn’t leave her.

So after about a year, she traveled the day’s journey to the coast to see the teacher. She arrived late in the afternoon and told her story. The teacher said, “Well, it’s late. Why don’t we let it rest here, you can stay the night, and in the morning, we’ll look into this.’” She spent the night in the guest house, hearing the seals barking, and the next morning, the teacher said, “Come with me,” and they went for a walk. On the way they made a detour through the kitchen where the teacher picked up a large sieve. They went down to the beach; it was a calm morning, small waves ran up on the grey rocks and fell back. Silently, the teacher handed her the sieve. She was excited and confused, as if something were trying to be born. Impulsively, she knelt down and her jeans got soaked and she scooped the cold water into the sieve with her hand. She was happy doing this and the bottom of the sieve glistened, but the water ran right through and back into the sea.

She stood up and passed the sieve back. The teacher took the sieve and threw it out as far as he could into the waves where it floated for just a few seconds and sank. At that moment her heart opened, tears came, and she understood that she was at home and could be happy.

So that’s it, we thought we were separated from the world and we are held in it, and saturated with it. We’ll get what we want whether we get it or not.

The koan of the sieve is a journey; it draws the heroine along to the shore of resolution. We accompany her and as the images transform, they take the material of our lives and bring about changes in us. A woman who heard about this koan told me that it brought recent grief to mind, all her watery losses—the marriage, her sister, her brother, her dog. And then something else happened, in her meditation, the sieve became a red colander which rose up in the sky and the bright sun shone red through it.

There are two fundamental conditions: In the first, I’m separated from myself, desolate, uncared for, far from home, trying to fill a sieve with my hands. In the other situation I’m immersed in the world; everything I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch, comes bearing its own meaning and beauty. When we experience this, it’s as if we were always inside the world and playing our true part in it, but we don’t necessarily notice this. Whether we strive for outcomes, or whether we are touched by sorrows, the external circumstances are not themselves the main thing. To be carried by life, to be saturated with it, is itself a kind of song.

Each life is complete but sometimes it’s hard to let it be so. It is the strangest, most difficult truth that life gives us what it gives us, without regard for our intentions, our kindness, or our devotion. We can accompany each other on our journeys, but there is no real protection, and there is nothing we can know or hold onto. We are always sinking into the ocean, and though our schemes are part of life, they don’t protect us from it. And in the midst of this nakedness we can be at home.

There is no life without holes; even if we try to fill the sieve with our hands, the starlight, the wind, and the sea pour through us. The little bits, the sights and sounds that appear, each one comes out of the not knowing and contains all of life. It is ours, it’s for us and if we say “No” to one part of life that “No” gradually seeps into everything.

As I sat with the Border Collie that night, the great horned owl called, and when she went hunting, I heard and felt her wings inside me. I had the feeling that something had already arrived or was here even before I’d finished wondering if it were here.

And I remembered some lines that had come into my dream shortly before:

The sieve is in the sky now,

and filled with the stars.

The dog and I continued to look out into the garden, the fog, and the moonlight.

“Red Thread” – 2017-2019

Click on image for a magnified view.

43.5”W X 27”H

Mixed media: miscellaneous old papers, tea bag envelopes, electrical/painter’s tape, miscellaneous plastic food packaging, watercolors.

The Dodo, from a painting by Avian paleontologist Julian Hume, The Museum of Natural History, London.

Memorial Day 2019

A day of remembrance. How do you memorialize something that hasn’t happened yet? The United Nations says that a million species could go extinct in the coming decades. What will that look like coming across our news feed? Imagine that the extinctions are announced one by one as they occur : How many alerts per day will that be?

My piece “Dreaming the Invisible” spoke to grieving these losses, including the possible end of human life on Earth. Grieving doesn’t keep us from acting, but it changes how we do so, in ways that make a great difference. Here’s what I’m wondering about : Whatever we’re doing now isn’t working, since we’re still headed for the cliff; and something is preventing most people from engaging with the emergency, despite all the warnings; and it’s possible that an important part of that something is a fear, conscious or unconscious, of the sorrow to come. Perhaps it is not grief that weakens us, but all we do to avoid it. Perhaps we need, instead, to include it.

Grief has strengths that are different from those of anger, as water is different from fire. Many contemporary cultures tend to valorize what some consider masculine traits over what some consider feminine ones, which means fiery virtues over watery : outrage over sorrow, assertiveness over receptivity. Is grief seen as feminine? Does it feminize us to feel it, and is that one of the reasons some are afraid of it? Anger tends to feel for (I don’t like what is happening to you and I want to change it), while sorrow tends to feel with (your pain is my pain, and I care about it). Feeling for and feeling with complement each other. If we valued both, we’d be able to employ fire or water according to need. They could temper each other, and combine in as-yet-unimagined and powerful ways. Each of us would be able to draw on more of ourselves in response to the crisis; each of us would have more with which to strengthen and console ourselves.

Canadian soldiers, Remembrance Day.

We see the results of fiery action all around us, for good and for ill. I’m wondering if at least some of the burning rage so characteristic of our time is actually a defense against grief. I’m wondering if free-floating, unacknowledged sorrow is a larger influence in our communal life than we give it credit for. If that’s true, perhaps we should spend some time with sorrow and grief and mourning, here at the end of the world.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

Grief is a buddha. Not something to learn lessons from but the way it is sometimes, the spirit and body of a season in the world, a season of the heart-mind. Grief is a buddha, joy is a buddha, anger is a buddha, peace is a buddha. In the koans we’re meant to become intimate with all the buddhas — to climb into them, let them climb into us, burn them for warmth, make love with them, kill them, find one sitting in the center of the house. You’re not meant to cure the grief buddha, nor it you. You’re meant to find out what it is to be part of a season of your heart-mind, a season in the world, that has been stained and dyed by grief, made holy by grief.

A long time ago, a young woman is lost in mourning after the death of her husband. She leaves everything behind and goes to a monastery to ask for help. “What is Zen?” A teacher replies that the heart of the one who asks is Zen : Her broken heart is the buddha of that time and place. She decides to stay and find out what that means. Sitting in the dark, the woman runs her fingers over the face of the buddha of grief, learning its contours. Over time, she discovers a kind of grace in that dark, with grief as her companion : a deep humility, a deep stillness, a deep listening. In its Latin roots, grieving is related to being pregnant.

One day the woman hears the cry of a deer from a nearby stream. “Where is the deer?” the teacher asks. She listens, concentrated, ripe with something. “Who is listening?” The ripe thing bursts in her; the deer’s cry echoes through the trees and rises simultaneously from her own scarred heart. She is there, cloven hooves wet, and she is here, wondering —and everything is listening to everything.

Later she is at the stream with a lacquer bucket meant for flowers, only she fills it with water. She sees the moon’s reflection in the water : her grief, radiant. Later still, she says, the bottom falls out of her bucket : water and light soaking into the earth. All that wet : the stream, the watery moon in a bucket, the deer’s moist eye, the woman weeping.

Her tears become a solvent for what is unyielding within, the defenses we erect to keep from feeling the pain of life all the way through — which also keep us from feeling its beauty all the way through. The tears soften, unstick, breach, topple, and fill. They run like water under the ice, and suddenly the frozen is flowing again.

Some people fear this kind of dissolving : Will I still be me? Will I disappear or go mad? Will I be able to fight climate change? If we begin this weeping, if we open ourselves to the pain and the poignancy and the terrible, wounded beauty of life on this Earth, perhaps we won’t be able to stop, and we will drown.

We do not disappear, nor do we drown. Neither do we cry forever. But if from time to time these tears are called from us, they’re no longer frightening; they are a small ceremony keeping us close to the world. They make us less brittle, more resilient. We weep because something is pouring in and we’re overflowing, because it is impossible to say anything in some moments and it is equally impossible not to offer something back. The salt tears are remnants of our oceanic beginnings, and they are also the residue of the difficult sea we cross in this life. We contain both, the timeless depths and the waves washing over the fragile raft that carries us from birth to death.

Photo – Max Ellis / Caters News

The woman in the story, whose name is Mujaku, went on to accomplish great things, helping other women meet their own hearts. Generations of nuns wrote poems about her; one said that the water from her bucket filled many puddles. She was able to do this not because she found a way around her grief, but because she went quiet inside and listened for what grief was asking of her. Her cry for help, the cry of the deer, moonlight pouring from a broken bucket : her grief spread further than the edges of her skin, belonged to more than her particular heart — and so did her awakening. As she was held, so could she hold.

That is what awakening is.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

Grief is a form of love, how we go on loving in the absence of the beloved. It is the transformation of love through loss, and how we are initiated into a new world. Like all initiations, it begins with a purification. In the case of grief this can be particularly intense, because the loss of what we love is so intense : sorrow, memory, rage, regret, tenderness, depression, gratitude, guilt, fear, paralysis, longing, disappointment, betrayal, relief. We are scoured by gales, the old life stripped away. The grief of our time is a strange one, because in some part we’re mourning what will disappear in the future. The loss won’t be sudden and unexpected, like a plane crash. We have predicted it, it will go on for a very long time, and, even as we mourn, we’ll try to salvage as much as we can.

Eventually we might find our way into the eye of the storm, as Mujaku did. There’s a difference, though. In Mujaku’s time it was possible to love the natural world innocently; her awakening is entwined, in an ancient and uncomplicated way, with deer, stream, and moon through the trees. She could take something for granted we can’t anymore, that the natural world will, eternally and self-sufficiently, be here to heal and open us. We can no longer love the Earth innocently like that, ignoring the effects of the way we treat it. How do we love now, past innocence? How do we stay with that love even when it near kills us with hurt? Perhaps letting loss stain our love will help, because it will keep us closer to what’s actually happening. Perhaps letting remorse stain our love will help us do what a genuine love must do now : acknowledge our debt.

Peter Hershock once said that remorse is the foundation of morality in the koan tradition. He didn’t elaborate, so I’ve carried his thought around with me since. As best I understand, remorse begins with listening without interrupting, and then feeling with, experiencing the pain I’ve caused as my own. The natural result is a desire not to do whatever it was again. And so remorse becomes inquiry : How did this happen? How can I keep from repeating it? How can I make amends?

This too is the activity of love. Grief is how we love in the face of loss, remorse is how we love when we’ve caused harm. How could they not be part of the work of this time? Right now it is difficult to imagine loving the future we believe is coming, but someday soon we will have to. How can we if we’re still drenched in unacknowledged grief, if instead of attending to remorse, we’re lost in guilt and denial?

We don’t cry forever. Grief changes, growing from its wild beginnings into a kind of dignity. Remorse becomes a noble companion. They fit the season — as unexamined innocence no longer does, as outrage only partially can. We can’t know from here what our love of what’s coming will look like, but we can decide how we’ll walk out to meet it.

Eye of a Salmon

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

Right now we are so pregnant with the future, pregnant without entirely knowing what’s about to be born. We’re entering a great mystery together. We bring to this invisible ceremony our warrior skills, our hungers and our strivings, the genius of our minds — all the things that got us here — hoping we’ll do something different with them this time. Perhaps we could also bring washed hearts humbled by what we have done, and a willingness to follow love wherever it takes us, as we step into the great ceremony of the rest of our lives.

It opens and it closes,

it opens and it closes

and it is always open

and it is always closed.

It opens and it closes

and it does not open

and it does not close.

It always is

and it is never

anything or anywhere.

It is.

The taste of an orange,

the smell of cooking soup,

a hand touching naked skin,

people waiting at a bus stop

on a morning of steaming rain.

At dawn, still awake

I ask the apricot tree,

“Did you dream, last night?”

“I did. I dreamed leaves and the moon.

I dreamed I flew.”