Take This Potted Plant

This makes me giggle a whole lot. :)

I have done fuck-all nothing for the past few weeks, and it actually feels good. I don't really have any regrets about by and large wasting my time since coming back from Minnesota, but there's a rising feeling in the back of my head that says this "Get out of work free" card is coming to an end.

I *have* been doing stuff for Boomer Express, don't get me wrong, and I've been scribbling down lines and snippets of poetry, but I haven't been going anywhere with them. I'm also writing the next draft for a story I originally wrote for Mustsy (God rest its soul); I'm writing it largely because it's a good thing to kind of cut my teeth on. It's not this huge enormous story that I feel a tremendous amount of pressure to get right, but I do care enough about it to make the effort. I'm thinking it'll be a good 'in' for writing in general, kind of getting settled into the idea of writing short stories and taking off from there.

The main thing that's caught my attention right now...well, it's not any one thing. There's a bunch of different things that I want to write about, but my experiences with sex are best left for a locked/private post and my affinity for the end of the world is already the subject of an essay I've been noodling around with, so here goes on spirituality.

One of the biggest realizations I've made recently about my practice is that Zen isn't something...seperate from the rest of my day. With a lot of people, of all religious bent, there's always this sense of dichotomy. There are times, places, people that are sacred, and when you're out of that environment everything else around you is mundane. Even in Zen, there's this tendency; zazen time is sacred time, my time to be 'holy' and 'pure', and my Roshi is a sacred man, so I'd better not tell that off-color joke to him. What we forget is that our seiza bench is really just...wood, and no more sacred than the chair I'm sitting in at the computer (or maybe no *less* sacred). Roshis and teachers are just men who enjoy jokes about sex as much as the next guy. True spirituality doesn't just occur in a single time or place. Holiness isn't truly only stored in a Bible or a bench or a bottle of water blessed by a priest. It's *everywhere*.

The practice of being 'in the moment' (which is really just a different way of saying having mindfulness) isn't something that you limit to the 30 minutes a day you're on a bench. You can be mindful when you're working, or eating, or showering, or typing. The more you try to bring meditation with you through the rest of the day, the less of a barrier there seems to be between sacredness and mundanity; everything becomes permeated with spirituality. Eating can be an enormously ecstatic experience if you just pay attention. (Incidentally, I think this is what ultimately made me think of cooking as an art, as a form of communication; honestly, I had lost a sense of how purely joyous eating could be until I visited <lj user="joshuwain" over New Year's.) As a result, the feeling of ecstasy, of mystical experience, happens a lot more to me now. There are a lot of things that'll send me off; a touch from a coworker who cares less about propriety than a sense of connection, or how simple salt can actually make a TV dinner not taste so bad. Textures, and colors, and sensations, and sunlight, time, motion...when you stop to think about it, there's not a single thing that you could be doing at any given moment that's not cause for the highest sense of amazement you can muster. When you break it down, I'm putting up a bunch of varied symbols in a particular order into a machine that actually uses a complex pattern of completely *different* symbols (1s and 0s) to make itself function. Somehow, these symbols are going to be saved and transmitted to a boatload of different places at once for other people to see. And these symbols will be instantly understood, and cause a reaction (hey, even boredom or confusion is *something*). The fact that I'm writing this at all, and you're reading it, seems to me like a cause for celebration. It's a vulgar miracle. The closer I get to this perpetual state of wonder, the harder it is to take cynicism. There was a friend of mine in college, whom I'll name Jay, who was a lot like that. He was one of the most gentle, thoughtful people ever. One of his big things was watching people while they were alone...not in any kind of creepy stalkerish way, because he wasn't fixated on the person. He was fixated on what they did by themselves, when no one was watching. The need to impress or cover up was at an all-time low, and so...purity happened. That purity was what he was attracted to, what happens when people drop all the pretenses and bullshit and forget themselves to the moment they're in. Sarcasm and cynicism actually hurt him a lot more than most because, as he put it, "it's just people causing themselves pain for no reason." It didn't make sense to me at the time, but I'm beginning to come around to see what he means. This kind of worries me, because eventually he severed all ties with everyone and became pretty much fundamentalist. ;) What I *think* happened is he tried to get beyond the...diluted nature of 'ordinary' religion into a purer form. Or maybe the nature of people just drove him to that, because nothing's more cynical than a bunch of self-assured collegiate philosophy majors, smug bastards that they are. Anyway, cynicism and...overall assininity is way more of a buzzkill than I ever thought possible. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, especially since I know a *lot* of cynical and generally assinine people. ;) It's not too easy to look over at someone and go, "You know, skin is really fucking cool." and not have them go. "Ummmm...OK." I think the closer you get to pure joy, the more insane you seem to most other people. I'm down with that. :)