When All that Remains of Me is A Deep and Gentle Laugh

It was about 9:00 am. I opened my eyes and got lost in colors and sounds, some of those sounds soon becoming voices. The voices were possibly from outside the house or inside, outside my head or inside a dream. They were just sounds, with a hint of something familiar. And I was just there, listening; listening to everything, and not wanting to do anything but lie there in the easy tired warmth that can come at the end of night.

 

I remember one time sitting with one of my cats. She gets so happy she almost talks, her words a language of cries, snorts, and kneading of the blanket. It’s a language I of course didn’t totally understand, but I get the drift. She also loves to rub noses, which always evokes a deep smile in me. I feel so full in her presence that all that remains of me is a deep and gentle laugh.

 

In both instances, I’m right there. But let’s say I want to tell someone about it. I get an urge to write this blog, for example, to talk about my funny cat or my taking refuge in the deep comfort of a warm morning, and I lose it. To write about her, I need to step out of my deep loving laugh as a snorting cat and look at me thinking about, and distinct from, her. But I guess writing can be another way to feel full or immersed, another sort of magic.

 

I was reading Zen master teacher Dainin Katagiri’s book, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight. He talked about there being a subtle feeling that exists before we decorate, expand, separate from or bury it with words. Before we move to approach, avoid, or stay still; before like, dislike, or feeling neutral arises. There’s a subtle state, he says, that we usually zoom right past. In that state, there’s “a oneness of our feeling with the object of our feeling.” A oneness with no sense of someone looking at it, no impulse to speak about it. His words shook me up and felt so alive and fresh. But as soon as I wrote them down

that life of meaning disappeared.

 

Back in February, I wrote a blog about re-discovering a leonine version of a Teddy Bear that I was given back when I was 5 or 6 and now lives on the back of the couch in the den of our home. That lion has seen so much of my life.

 

I look out my window at an apple tree that has been living outside our front door since we first built that door in 1972. That tree is so old, and so many limbs have fallen off, that what remains is a shell of what it once was, hollow, seemingly held up only by history and memories. And that tree goes back to other trees, a maple that had once lived in front of my ancestral home in Queens, NYC, back to when I was gifted with the lion. It goes back to pre-school, to a drawing of a tree that was used to formally teach me the word. It goes back to when I first spoke any word, probably Mama— Mama maybe being the root of all words. It goes back to ancient Sumeria and the roots of written language. It goes back to prehistoric caves like Lascaux in southern France and maybe the first symbolization. It goes back to the first humans or first hominids or first creatures to draw a breath. Or back maybe to the wind.

 

The tree isn’t me. Yet, without me and my wife and cats, who would know it, enjoy it, tell stories about it?  When I see it, a universe of me can appear….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project:

If We Can’t Be Silent, How Then Can We Hear Deeply? Expecting God to Send a Text

How often do we look up to the sky, or sit at our desk or in our bed, and we ask a question, or want to, of a God or the universe?

 

We want the universe to be like AI, or social media. Or we want God to speak at the other end of a text but never get Her, Him, It, or Them. Or we want a voice in a cloud to speak to us, in English or whatever language we prefer. Or maybe we engage in one of those conversations with ourselves that so occupy our time, and we divide ourselves in two, into a questioner and a responder, but all we get in response is a repeat of something old and familiar. The universe then feels silent to us, even empty. Oh, or something happens to us, and we think the universe is sending us the event as a message.

 

As I was thinking about this, one of my cats, then another, went to the glass outer door in my den and intently stared out the window. One, our girl, looked slowly from side to side, as if following something, while the other stared straight ahead. I don’t know if it was her eyes that were tracking something, or her hearing, but whatever it was, it was invisible to me. They were both seeing with more than their eyes. There was no distraction for them from looking, just attention.

 

Maybe the problem is in where we look, or how we ask. In Exodus 3:1-6 God says to Moses, from a burning bush, “Moses, Moses! Here I am.” Or in the 1950s classic religious movie, The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston stands over the Red Sea, parts his arms, and speaks “Behold His mighty hands.” And God answers by parting the sea. Maybe we’d like such a clear and dramatic response, but it’s a bit much to ask. I’ve never personally seen seas parted by command or heard God’s voice in a bush.

 

Maybe we expect the answer to come in a certain way, and the expectation blinds us to the answer. We might look, for example, outside ourselves, or to some authority or a defined being not ourselves. Or to the thoughts and images in our minds, not the feelings and sensations in our bodies.

 

Maybe we’re hearing the speech of the Burning Bush wrong. Maybe, as some scholars say, we could hear God’s “Here I am,” as “Look Here;” see all this, see this right here.

 

Describing Buddhist practice in his book, You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight, Dainin Katagiri, a central figure in the early transmission of Buddhism to the US, says that to truly see a teacher, or see anybody, you cannot maintain an expectation of a certain response. If you have a preconceived idea of a meeting, there’s no meeting.

 

We often create such noise in ourselves. We know this. We know people who can’t stand silence and constantly play the tv or listen to their earbuds or search social media and suffer from FOMO. The world right now is bad enough, so terribly frightening. So, silence, if we can hear it, can be so healing. We need to give ourselves a break, a pause, a bit of kindness. If we can’t be silent, how can we listen deeply?

 

Maybe we’d hear more if we asked ourselves a question and then just listened, listened not just to words, but to the entirety of the moment when we heard the question in ourselves? We ask and then feel the asking. Maybe then we’d hear our own mind more clearly….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.