Pausing and Leaping II

Now, let’s reflect on a stanza from a poem by Garcia Lorca and one by Allen Ginsberg. As I said in my last piece, all we have to do is follow the ballet dancer, Nijinsky’s advice, “It’s really quite simple. I merely leap and pause. Leap and pause.”
The best poetry shows us how to leap from the known to the unknown. It ties things together which don’t at first seem to relate to each other and that is genuine intimacy.  
The poet Garcia Lorca lived in a very difficult time in Spain when civil war was raging. He was assassinated by fascists for the boldness of both his plays and his poetry. In spite of all this, he was a master at pausing and leaping.
Here are the first few stanzas of one of his poems, “Little Infinite Poem:”
To take the wrong road                                 
is to come to the snow
To come to the snow
is to get down on all fours for 20 generations
And eat the grass of the cemeteries
 
Often in our spiritual practice we think we are on the wrong road. But if we continually ground ourselves in our meditative practice, staying with our commitment regardless of how dissatisfying or even “wrong” it feels, at some point we are able to leap completely beyond good and bad or right and wrong and come to the snow.
 
I am writing this during a light December snowfall. Snowplows have not been out yet, nor sidewalks shoveled. How still and at peace everything seems, with no cars on the street, no people outside. The neighbor’s black dog is lying just outside their back door and he too is covered with a thin coating of snow.
 
Can we “get down on all fours for twenty generations” and deeply appreciate this pristine coating new fallen snow gives to all beings surrounding us? Can we give ourselves to the life force moving from the distant past to the endless future and “eat the grass of the cemeteries?”
 
Suzuki Roshi said that his teacher had a permanent callous on his forehead from doing prostration after prostration in the meditation hall day after day, decade after decade. Can we humble ourselves in this or some other manner? If we do, we will enjoy the nutrients of the grass of the cemeteries, the nutrients that come from the rich humus underneath. Real humility emanates from our immersion in the humus, giving ourselves completely away to something unimaginably both grounding and spacious which is not a thing at all. When my second teacher lived at Eiheiji monastery in Japan, the monks had almost no food. Three times a day, they had soup made from the weeds that grew outside.  My teacher said once, “Grass soup, best thing I ever taste!”  But we have to do a lot of pausing to discover the power of this kind of nutrition.   
 
Instead of getting down on all fours and eating the grass, we continually aggress against those we identify as "other.” As Franz Kafka said, "What do I have in common with others? I hardly have anything in common with myself! My thoughts run around like a wild horse, and feelings jump about like a monkey in the forest."    
           
Kafka was a great writer, but he had not learned to pause.  He was caught, as so many are, in the neuromuscular lock of fear which gives us no room to experience intimacy... with the grass, with the rich humus underneath it, and with generations and generations of life all around us. 
 
Allen Ginsberg’s "Song" is another good example of leap poetry.  Here is the first stanza:
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
 
Can you see the leap from the twin burdens of solitude and dissatisfaction to love?  
Here is the final stanza:
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
 
Can you leap with him, beyond the weight of your worries and concerns to your original body, the body of the universe, love embracing love?            
And the final lines with their repetition of a single affirmative word, followed rhythmic phrasing like the beating of a heart:
yes, yes, that’s what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted to return to the body where I was born
 
Dogen called this “the body beyond the body,” the body Ginsberg longed for. Ginsberg wrote that poem in 1954, well before the time he began his Buddhist meditation practice, but even then, he had an inkling of the power of the simple act of pausing and leaping.
 
When Yaoshan was sitting in meditation, a monk asked, “What do you think about, sitting in steadfast composure?” Yaoshan said, “I think not thinking.”  The monk said, “How do you think not thinking?” Yaoshan said, “Non-thinking.”
 
When we think non-thinking, we naturally embrace the anxiety of being human rather than indulging it or repressing it, as Basho, Lorca, Ginsberg, and Dogen were able to do.               
Dogen lived in 13th century Japan, a time dominated by strife much worse than we have been experiencing.  Here are two of his key instructions for pausing:
 
Sit zazen wholeheartedly and let go of all things; gathering together all distracted thought and scattered mind within this posture keeps your heart and mind from being stirred.  

When we do this over and over, we discover that, as Dogen says, “We can wander at ease... beyond the boundary of delusion and enlightenment, free from the paths of ordinary and sacred, not caught by ordinary thinking.”
                       
The pause and the leap are both separate and not separate. We start with an aspiration to meditate and we practice pausing over and over... until we realize that as Dogen suggests, “between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap.”
 
We discover that all moments are whole, lacking nothing, regardless of what we think or how we feel about them. 
                       
Huineng asked a monk, "Do you depend upon practice and enlightenment?"  The monk replied, "It’s not that there is no practice and no enlightenment. It’s just that it’s not possible to divide them."
 
In the sixth grade my parents sent me to ballroom dancing lessons, which I endured for some time. The highlight of my couple of years there was watching the married instructors, who were experienced stage dancers, do the tango. The seamlessness of their pauses and leaps entranced my friends and me, in spite of our hatred for this antiquated practice our parents forced on us.
 
Of course, I had no understanding then the wholeness is always seeking wholeness, (little) self is always seeking (big) self, even though so called “little” is continually cradled by so-called “big.” If only I had known that in the sixth grade.
 
In moments of confusion, can we remember to pause completely so we can leap completely?   Dogen suggests, “when you are fully present, you are free of how broad or narrow it is where you are. 
This is what he calls “actional understanding,” or in my paraphrase “life giving life to life.”    Breathing in, we pause, breathing out we leap, breathing out we pause, breathing in we leap:                                                                                                          
In plum blossom scent   
Pop!   
Sun appears   
Mountain Path
-Basho