Talk by Kenzen “To Be in a Time of War”

The following podcast is brought to you by the Village Zendo. For more information, visit villagezendo.org. It is our new age. Thank you and me. And thank you Bookshoo for all of your care this morning. It's a lot to make happen. We have a big full house and a bunch of new people and yet we somehow all come together. New and experienced and my good friends online. It's great to see you. So my name is Kenzen. I'm a senior student at the Village Zendo. What I wanted to do today is share a poem with you that has moved me recently. It's by a poet named Adele Adnan who was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, spent some of her growing up there, eventually found her way to California where she lived for a long time and then died in France where she lived with her partner, Simone Fatal. She died in 2021. She was a poet and also a painter, amazing person. And I've been reading and studying her work quite a lot recently and I came across this poem and I'm just going to jump into it. It's a very long poem. If I read you the whole thing, it would take 45 minutes. And I would love to do that. I read it to myself out loud because it's a poem of repetitions and sort of a litany of things that it's easy to skim over on the page. So it's one of those poems that's really helped by hearing it in the voice. So I'm going to skip some sections. I'm just going to read a little bit and then I'll talk a bit about it. But just let yourself flow into it. It's called to be in a time of war, which indeed we are. To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one's mind in the process, to return to one's chair, to stand again, to go to the bathroom, to close the door, to then open the door, to go to the kitchen, to not eat nor drink, to return to the table, to be bored, to take a few steps on the rug, to come close to the chimney, to look back at it, to find it dull, to turn left until the main door, to come back to the room, to hesitate, to go on, just a bit, a frightful, to stop, to pull the right side of the curtain, then the other side, to stare at the wall. To wake up, to stretch, to get out of bed, to dress, to stagger towards the window, to be ecstatic about the garden's beauty, to observe the quality of the light, to distinguish the roses from the highest sense, to wonder if it rained in the night, to establish contact with the mountain, to notice its color, to see if the clouds are moving, to stop, to go to the kitchen, to grind some coffee, to light the gas, to heat water, hear it boiling, to make the coffee, to put off the gas, to pour the coffee, to decide to have some milk with it, to bring out the bottle, to pour the milk in the aluminum pan, to heat it, to be careful, to pour, to mix the coffee with the milk, to feel the heat, to bring the cup to one's mouth, to drink, to drink again, to face the day's chores, to stand and go to the kitchen, to come back and put the radio on, to bring the volume up, to hear that the war against Iraq has started, to rise early, to hurry down the driveway, to look for the paper, to take it out from its yellow bag, to read on the front page, war, to notice that war takes half a page, to feel a shiver down the spine, to tell that that's it, to know that they dared, that they jumped to the line, to read that Baghdad is being bombed, to envision a rain of fire, to hear the noise, to be heartbroken, to stare at the trees, to go up slowly while reading, to come back to the front page, read war again, to look at the word as if it were a spider, to feel paralyzed, to look for help within one's self, to know helplessness, to pick up the phone, to give up, to get dressed, to look through the windows, to suffer from the day's beauty, to hate to death the authors of such crimes, to realize that it's useless to think, to pick up the purse, to go down the stairs, to see people smashed to a pulp, to say yes indeed the day is beautiful, not to know anything, to go on walking, to take notice of people's indifference towards each other, to have lunch, to ask for some beer, to give one's order, to drink, eat and pay, to leave, to reach home, to find the key, to enter, to wait, to think about the war. So it keeps going, and we'll come back to it a little bit, but she's writing in 2003 about the Iraq War, but it feels so much to me like this moment also. And the thing that I, that maybe want to share this poem is that she expresses something that I've found especially confounding over the past few years, which is that there are horrible things happening. And at the same time, ordinary life is continuing to happen. So a school is bombed, I drank my coffee, I go out with my friends, I hear that new anti-trans laws are being passed, and people are afraid for their lives. So all of this is constantly going on, and at the same time my own ordinary life is happening with its beautiful days and its spring, and then also its difficulties and its frustrations. And I think a shift happened in me a few years ago, where what used to seem like it was happening out there and far away. I mean this has been happening my whole life, like I grew up in the Vietnam War. So this has been happening my whole life. We've been assassinating this leader and bombing that country and joining in this military action and depressing people in our country and in other places. This has all been going on the whole time. But for some reason I feel it differently now. It doesn't feel like it's happening to somebody else out there and that there's some kind of weird haven around me. It actually feels like it's happening right in here, all of it, right in me, all the time. And so I'm needing to find new ways of being with this. And I found this poem consoling in the way that Atel Agnan is just right there with everything that's happening inside her and outside her. And you might be asking yourself what does this have to do with his end. One of the other things that I've been reading recently is an ancient Zen poem, teaching poem called the Shinshin Ming. And the Shinshin Ming was written in approximately the year 600. So it's one of the oldest of the Chinese teaching poems that we have. And it means basically faith in heart-mind. And it's attributed to the person that we call our third Chinese ancestor. So when this form of Buddhism was brought to China, there were six, they're often called patriarchs. I prefer ancestors, teachers who taught each other in succession who are important to our lineage. And the third one is Sengshan. Very little is known about him. Almost nothing. So what we can know comes a little bit from this poem. And it begins with this very famous and I think kind of charismatic line. The great way is not difficult. Just don't pick and choose. So you might also know this from a famous column where Joe Shou says this as he's teaching. He says, in that translation, the ultimate path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing. And I've always found this line just full of life and vibrating for me with its questions and its answers at the same time. So the poem begins this way. Cut off all likes or dislikes. And it is clear like space. The slightest distinction splits heaven from earth to see the truth don't before or against. Likes and dislikes are the mind's disease. If you miss the deep meaning, it is useless to steal your thoughts. It is clear as vast space. Nothing missing, nothing extra. If you choose or reject, you cannot see things as they are. And I think for me that line is one of the pivots to how I'm seeing this poem now. So the kind of choosing that's being talked about isn't so much. Should I have a burrito? Should I have Chinese food? Should I take this job or that job? Should I make this or that decision at work today? It's not that kind of choosing. We do have to make those choices all the time to go through our ordinary lives. I mean, it's good not to be completely controlled by our likes and dislikes and preferences in that manner. But we do have to act on them in some way. So I think what the kind of choosing-- the way it feels to me right now is that the kind of choosing that's being talked about is the choosing of what we allow to enter into our own consciousness. So for instance, it's New York. It's a spring day. You're walking down the street. Maybe you're feeling good. You see a flower at the base of a tree. You lean down. Oh, yes, yes. And then right next to the flower, there's a pile of dog shit. It's very tempting to try to hold on to that story of the beautiful day and the beautiful flower and edit out from your own mind your equally immediate experience of the dog shit. Or if you're having a bad day, maybe it goes the other way around. The whole city's full of shit and trash. And yes, here again, you can't even have a flower without some dog shit next to it. So we're constantly telling stories inside ourselves to modulate our own experience, usually to push away what is bad and to try to create little worlds for ourselves throughout the day, many times throughout the day, that are good. So what I appreciate in this poem is it expresses a kind of consciousness which, to the best of the poet's ability, lets each thing come when it comes, one after another, feeling about the war and the feeling about the cheese she's eating. She often speaks in the palm about food and speaks about feeling-- like one time she goes to sushi, have sushi one time. She's at somebody's event and they go out to dinner afterwards. And then at the same time she's taking the people who in Iran, in Iraq, in this case, are going without food, or having difficult, defining food, and feeling embarrassed by her own pleasure in her own life, and feeling maybe some shame there, which is also part of it. And I've had very similar feelings during the bombardment of Gaza, or by what's happening now in Iran, or their bombs in Tel Aviv, too. This is happening. And this is happening in many parts of the world that we don't know really anything about, because we can't pay attention to absolutely everything all it wants. But we can let what's happening that's within our sphere, both the sphere of what we read and see, and the sphere of what's happening in our mind. We can let it all live there, I think. Or we can experiment with that, in any case. So I'm going to read a little bit more of this poem, where we can feel some of this happening. To move forward into parading indifference, to bury one's feelings, to feel relief at the hairdresser, to stroll, to clean out some memories and allow death to manifest itself, to project the movie of things that just happened, to let bitterness invade the soul, to fight regrets, and lose the battle, to know that when it's nighttime here, it's early morning in Baghdad, to think of butter, shakir, al-Sayab, to descend into his tomb, to inform him that Basora is being destroyed, to wash blood off its people's faces, to leave butter to his sleep, to fly back to New York, the indifferent, the wounded, to remember inana's palms, to call Babylon's gods, to wish they joined the fight, and know that that won't happen, to foresee vengeance in death, to face the iridescent inner chaos, to start a gray day, to lose the limit between the self and its environment, buy two newspapers in order to double the horror, to reach the bottom of horror, turn distances into a tunnel, receive a package, read Bobby's letter predicting worldwide cataclysm, believe him, to enter time's movement, to walk around the block, to remove wet shoes, to watch one's heartbeat, to give up writing the letter, give up everything, to need some sleep, to swallow the pill, to wait for Ruth and Ania to let the body do the thinking about the war. Debuzz with fatigue, to dream almost of canals and planted fields, to climb mountains, but it's not true to be glued to the ground, to hurt because they are hurting, to bury the living dead, to lower one's mask, to clean the bathtub with disgust, to feel guilty and blame it on the war, to be puzzled by the enormity of what is happening, to live in a kind of luxury, avoid the idea that it could be different, to wait for the end of that, which will not end. And that's not the end of the poem. It does keep going, but we'll stop there. That line to wait to the end of that which will not end, also reminded me of when we say the gata of atonement in the mornings on retreat or during the satsu, we speak of the beginninglessness of greed, anger, and ignorance of our own, greed, anger, and ignorance. And so in that beginninglessness of all of these really horrible things that are happening, there's also kind of endlessness, which is difficult to face. It's difficult to face. She uses the words to face the iridescent inner chaos. And so that's kind of what I'd like for us to take from this poem today. From our own experiences in sitting in Zazen today, what happened to you today? What's going to happen when you leave here? Can you face your own iridescent inner chaos? An inner chaos, which is also beautiful. So we'll end with a few more lines, just a few more lines from the Shinshin Ming. Later in the poem, it says, to abide in this world, just say not to, not to includes everything excludes nothing. So not to, not good and bad, not me and you, not the world and out there and the world in here. The world in here is the world out there. Not to. To abide in this world, just say not to. Not to includes everything. Excludes nothing.