I am starting this blog to document my involvement in the 100 day Treeleaf Ango lasting from August 28, 2010, to December 5, 2010. The announcement page for the Ango is located here.
I join this Ango after a long period of lax practice, with the hope that the Treeleaf group spirit and making a public vow to intensify my practice will not only help me restart a daily zazen practice, but will also infuse a life that has become muddled, lazy, and wanly hedonistic with mindfulness, energy, and discipline.
This Ango falls auspiciously at a time of significant transition in my life. I left home in Fall 1999 at the age of 16 to go to school several states away. This was the beginning of a long search for home--a place where I could feel comfortable in my own skin. Originally from Virginia, in the last 11 years I have lived in Massachusetts, California, New York, and New Jersey. I have delighted and suffered in turn in each place and do not regret any of my experiences or moves.
However, having learned a lot about myself during a brutal period of spiritual opening in the New York metro area, which was marked by rapid disillusionment, loss, and isolation, I have come to a point where I want to find rootedness and nurturing soil. I have realized that proximity to family, a slower pace of life, and a more rural lifestyle are more important to me than the nonetheless appreciated intellectual, artistic, and cultural refinement of urban life. My life never quite took root in this rocky soil.
I will finally leave this long exile in October, almost exactly in the middle of this Ango, and return to Virginia. And I do not believe I could start this period of transition any more auspiciously than by committing to this practice period. It has been all too easy to let transition, disappointment, and shake-ups in my life throw off my discipline. And I have seen that without discipline, life drifts and gets stagnated in a morass of habit; all that is beautiful decays into the slime.
The theme of this Ango for me personally is "blooming." Treeleaf teacher Taigu shared in one of his talks a view of practice as blooming, opening to experience as it is in the moment, "letting reality touch us." Taigu talks about the obsession with finding answers, and the difference that can be experienced when we let questions bloom in us.
I have for too long cultivated ideas of what reality must be, too long fixated on finding an answer. I miss the 999,999 things it could be looking for the 1 instance that matches my expectations. This is dead soil in which nothing blooms. I have forgotten how to let questions take root, how living with a question can open the eyes and sensitize the nerve endings, let more light and life in. Finding an answer is like the bloom closing.
This Ango, I embrace the closing of one chapter of my life and the opening of a new one as a time to let myself bloom. To bloom is to let in all things that come, all of the sunlight, the hummingbirds and bees and bats, no longer closing myself to everything in order to wait for that one blue butterfly I have heard about in legend, as beautiful as it may be. That butterfly may come, but so will strange moths by moonlight, and all are lit by the same distant sun.
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