(What comes after an enlightenment experience?)
Ta Sui says, "As soon as you get some sense of contact, you want be teachers of others. This is a big mistake."
Shunryu Suzuki says, "When your practice is calm and ordinary, everyday life itself is enlightenment." Perhaps it is not so difficult after all to have some sort of experience, he says; the hard thing is living accordingly.
"The stink of enlightenment," says the wisdom of the Sangha: the spurious sense of specialness that clings to those who are still excited about something so obvious and evident seeming to take place, when it had been there all along.
The Quakers probably have the best term for it: "an opening." To what is beyond.
For you, in case you are reading this years from now, I will say only this: what happened during and after my time in the hospital was unquestionably worth all the miseries of living for at least 15 years with a female hormone counteracting a male hormone because of the prolactinoma, all the trials of eight-hour brain surgery, all the strains of two weeks waiting for a piece of transplanted fat to do the work of a missing piece of bone so that my cerebrospinal fluid would finally stop dripping down my throat, and whatever will eventuate from the loss of my pituitary and half a lifetime of taking inadequate artificial hormones.
So--what comes after enlightenment?
Sock-doinking.
As with everything else, our playing together is the same, yet not the same. The empty spaces between activities are no longer boring--they hum with meaning, as in music. Timing itself is the best game, and once that is accepted, new games arise.
Helping to judge the state debate tournament, I found a huge red rubber band, which I brought home for you. Are these things really accidents?
"On top of Old Smokey, all covered with sand,
I shot my old teacher with a red rubber band.
I shot her with glory, I shot her with pride.
How could I miss her? She's forty feet wide."
goes one of our many silly songs.
So you were playing your usual Oedipal game with your old Ed-i-pal, thumping him on the bum with the rubber band, when you could get me to stop and let you on purpose. Somehow my movements were continually evasive, without particularly trying to be.
Then, after a telephone call, sitting in the recliner chair, I asked if I could try shooting it across the room onto my red coat. After one shot to calibrate, I did. Then I tried for the dog's dish, shooting blind through the clothes-drying rack. Got close. Then the dog himself, who was given butter for being patient.
Then I realized that the rubber band was probably massive enough to shoot socks off the top rail of the drying rack. A new sport was born.
There was a time, back in New Hampshire on Robert Frost Farm (as the one and only poet in residence, back when Frost's daughter hoped this young Vermont writer would help make it a working farm again), when I tried hard to pitch horseshoes in the same spirit as Zen archers. No go--fluidity was interrupted by my long legs and big hips (the tumor at work), which kept my arm from swinging in a straight line. But pointing a finger, drawing back a rubber band in one movement, holding it steady while assuming a stance, and cleanly letting go--you were watching, and will perhaps remember how I shot one sock after another, each drop sillier than the last. You take such accuracy for granted--that is, after all, your natural speed of learning. I showed you how to do the same thing using a stick, holding it against your hara--"like a penis," you observed.
But the miss was best: bouncing off the rail, where it had hit between the two dangling ends of the smallest sock, the band rebounded and flipped the forward part of the sock back over the rail so it fell neatly in the middle under the rack.
The last sock went from the third rail to the second on the first shot, the second to the first on the second shot, and finally to the floor on the third, by which time the game had dissolved to laughter.
Some day you may read of Ryokan: "His love of children and flowers is proverbial among the Japanese. Often he spend the entire day playing with the children or picking flowers, completely forgetting his begging for that day."
Parents often speak of "enjoying" their children. The language is unfortunate, much worse than the reality, I suspect. The implications of owning children aside, I think that even among people who never think of themselves as creative, there are many practitioners of the art of play--perhaps more than of any other.
Play. Practice. More lame words: play is not preparation for life to come as much as it is a practicing of what life is at all time. More than anything else, playing with you makes me feel "my" practice is doing what it could or should to broaden, deepen and strengthen compassion and insight into Dharma.
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