A Complaint About the State of Things

My Zen practice is another thing that has suffered from my transition from student to ordinary office worker. I try to hang on to my morning meditation, rising half an hour early for it, but I more or less never go to my meditation group anymore. I've never really got along with the teacher, but I used to be able not to care. It's about personal chemistry; we're not on the same wavelength, communication is kind of halting and he's not a person I feel like opening up to (which doesn't say anything about him, actually. There are very, very few people I do feel like opening up to).

At retreats, there are mandatory face-to-face talks with the teacher about how things are going, and I actually gave up going to retreats because those talks were so uncomfortable. Still, being enormously stressed out and overworked last winter, I started to think about my relationship to my father (a classic, reruns about once a year) and decided to try talking to my Zen teacher about it. The conversation was, as per usual, uncomfortable and afterwards I haven't been feeling in the mood for going back to the group at all. It's like any other ill-advised show of privacy, the reluctance to look somebody in the eyes on Monday morning after drunken revelations on Saturday night.

There are other things about my Zen group that have started to irk me too. A community depends entirely on its members, and small changes can alter the whole feel of it considerably. There's a slow but constant flow of people in and out, and I really don't know if the fact that I feel alien in the group now is because of it or me. I'm also not sure whether the teacher has become less accepting, or if it's me who have become less patient with his factoids and assumptions, and opinions voiced as fact.

One thing I do know is this: when I first ventured to go to an introduction to Zen held by this teacher, one of the things that definitely won me over was the story of his own primary teacher, Ming Qi. The fact that the Chinese monastery where he was presented to Ming Qi apparently didn't think that her being American, female and gay made her a worse monk, and the note of pride in my teacher's voice as he told us aspiring practitioners about her made me feel that I'd found a place where sex genuinelly was not an issue. I've heard from other sources that Zen monasteries generally don't take nuns, but they don't care about the gender of the monks, and I love that.

The more disturbing it was when the discussion over tea after a meditation session about a year ago turned to gender differences and the teacher agreed with the other men present in that women were like this and that and so very nurturing and compassionate, etc. The women present made objections, but were completely run over by well-intended sexism and fell silent. Awfully enough, it didn't stop there: after a journey to China last summer, where the only female group member present was treated like a badly behaved child by one head monk in one monastery, the teacher keeps including women's mysterious superiority in his talks after meditation. And, you know, I can't get behind that.
(NB: Shatner Reference: http://www.uulyrics.com/music/william-shatner/song-i-cant-get-behind-that-featuring-henry-rollins/)

There's also the question of science vs. beliefs. I've never felt that Zen practice and science tread on each other's toes, but people in the meditation group tend to come from the humanities/arts direction and have less clear-cut notions about the the physical world. I feel that my occasional corrections to false assumptions might come across as unimaginative and pig-headed, my scepticism as petulance. Let me add that I've never made any objections based in science to any statements that were part of a teaching about Zen, or something that the Buddha allegedly said; I do realize that would be disrespectful. What I might do is comment on blatantly false statements like "you know, the lungs are the biggest organs in the body, they fill your whole ribcage"or "light is the purest form of energy". I also consider myself non-Aspergers enough to realize when something is meant symbolically or as a parable (the "purest form of energy" comment was not, in that particular case; the teacher actually turned to me, as a phycisist, for support of this statement). I'm probably seen as having trouble reconciling a Zen outlook with a scientific one, but what I'm annoyed about is the tendency to jump to conclusions about science and technology based on own expectations and opinions rather than fact. It used to be fine, but lately the teacher has seemed more disturbed by my pointing things out, simply turning on his heel before I get past the "No, there's...".

Wanting a different Zen teacher because the one I have doesn't agree with me doesn't come across as productive. Still, holding on to the fiction of belonging to a meditation group that I never actually go to because I dislike it so much won't get me anywhere, either.

Getting over the blank page

The fact that I'm up late on a weekday makes me feel more like my old, creative, introspective self, the twenty-year-old who could spend a whole afternoon sipping tea and writing colossal diary entries. Egocentric and lazy, but with some sort of inner life. The transition from studying to full-time working has taken that inner life away. Traces of it remain, though; I haven't stopped spending time composing snippets of text, putting everyday impressions into words, even though they never get written down any more.

For example, on the long train ride back home tonight, I felt inspired to write about my evening. I'm just home from dinner at a colleague's, which is no frequent occurrence, and the colleague in question is a person I'm strangely in awe of. Getting to see her home was a thrill, and I wanted to tell the story, but now I can't muster the energy to construct something coherent. Something about how we made our way to the front door past a heap of bicycles of different colours and sizes, the remains of a molten igloo, and a couple of empty rabbit-cages covered with a mangy bedspread; how the interior of the house was minimalist and yet haphazard, with a few lopsided Christmas ornaments (some clearly made my family members, others not) still up; how the one ordered section of the bookshelf paraded the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jean M. Auel's books, while the rest was peopled with crime, non-fiction, ugly objects probably intended as ornaments, and a toolbox.
Two of the children of the house were teenagers, the third quite a bit younger (powder boy, I thought, and reflected that perhaps I should try and read something else than naval fiction for a while). They were completely undisturbed by the presence of a bunch of strangers in the combined sitting and dining room and talked freely to us, so different from my siblings and me when we were young.
I sidled up to the stereo to look at the CD that lay on top of it; it was software, not music.
The food was an oven-baked mash of pumpkin with crispy little pieces of bell peppers in it and sprinkled with sesame seeds, accompanied by an unrelated dish consisting of meat wrapped in bacon and a random, very robust wine. It was served on a tablecloth of purple, crushed velour and the napkins had Disney figures on them.

Lately I've realized that my life is too ordered for my own good nowadays. Especially since I started working, I've grown used to eating professionally prepared food and ask the waiter for drink recommendations, of listening to in-laws discussing very fine points of interior decoration and praising the perfection of a holiday in Dubai, of spending nights in newly furnished hotel rooms. It turns out that I desperately need a bit of disorder and imperfection now and then, that it makes me feel revived and happy.