The Man Who Licked the Banana & Zen Buddhism

I stood perplexed, watching the man sitting in his shiny black shoes and blue collared shirt as he held his banana (peel still sealed) in both hands, licking it on the stairs inside Grand Central Terminal.

I did my best not to judge.

“Look away,” I told myself. “To each their own…”

“Don’t judge,” I told myself. “Alan Watts is in your bag. What would he think of you?”

Of course, in thinking not to judge, in trying not to look, in thinking about what he was thinking- I had already dug myself into a deep hole.

In my attempts to try and understand the Buddhist nature, I have inherently failed at Zen... and I imagine Alan Watts looking down at me, head thrown back, laughing as he watches me highlight the pages of his book.

Simply put:

“In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.”

And I’m quite wobbly, I must admit.

If you don’t get it, try this:

           

            One does not criticize a pig for having a neck shorter than a giraffe.

Not an animal lover? Don’t worry, because:

           

            What is therefore to be gained from Zen is nothing special.

And

In studying or practicing Zen it is no help to think about Zen.

If a man seeks the Buddha, the man loses the Buddha.

Anyways, the Buddha is our natural state and everything is the Tao.

And while so simple, I’m wobbly. I have confessed.

For it is such a paradox for me to practice living free; for if you need to practice, you are, therefore not living free.

I try to understand and in trying, I do not understand. ---->

Last night I wrote about the empowerment of women. I spoke of the women who are abused in the Congo. My stomach hurts.

I find myself judging myself-

Reflecting on how empowered I feel during yoga and how I carry that with me after I walk out of the studio.

What about the women in the Congo, and other parts of the world, who don’t have that freedom?

I feel ashamed, for some time, of the pictures I have posted of myself- sharing my empowerment, encouraging others to find their space.

Who am I?

For others do not have that freedom.

But, “No” my mind turns on itself.

I won’t let “them” (society?) take me down (“try” to take me down?) too.

 I will walk for them.

For there will come a day when they, too, will be free.

They have not lost themselves. I hear their voices from the City of Joy when they say “move your feet.”

Eve Ensler said it last night. 

An African proverb says it too:

            When you pray, move your feet.

Chelsea knows.

Zen is the “liberation from the duality of thought and action.”

It is living spontaneously.

If you are having trouble understanding (we all are), this is what helps me:

Think about a time in your life when you just did something without thinking. For me it is jumping out of an airplane, singing in the shower, running down Bedford Road with music blasting in my ears,  or laughing with my Salvadoran children beneath the waterfalls. It is quite impossible for me to remember those moments without feeling the same sensation of pure bliss.

All of those situations required not an ounce of trying. The non-duality of thought and action; 

just being.

That is Zen.

It is also like this:

The pain I felt hearing the news last night about the Congo. The fear I felt when that poor man pulled the gun on me in Antigua. The sadness I felt at my grandmother’s diagnosis.

That, too, is Zen.

For me, to my understanding, Zen is the natural state. It is a state that exists when we do not try, when we do not think, when we just be.

It is not getting upset about the pain or being afraid to express the fear or questioning the sadness. If those things just happen, they just happen.

And so:

            When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.

I can’t say stop thinking, because in trying to think, again you have fallen into the paradox of Zen.

To the logician it will of course seem that the point at which we have arrived is pure nonsense- as, in a way, it is. –Alan Watts.

But is it not also a bit non-sensical that we let society determine our jobs, our social class, how we dress and who we select to be our friends on Facebook? Who controls this life we live?

Zen is, in a way, pure nonsense- but I wonder about those women in the Congo- how their lives are so much more determined by spontaneity, without choice. They know what is real, where reality does not exist.

They “don’t need our help” they just need to be able to move their feet again.

To them, how non-sensical it would be to read Alan Watts, The Way of Zen! Yet, I wonder, if they are already living it- so much more than we.

For, when hungry eat. And when tired, sleep.

…And, here in “our” world, conditioned by the group, we often skip meals and deprive ourselves of sleep.

Unfortunately, you cannot be intentionally unintentional or purposely spontaneous, and so, here I stand in the hole that I began to dig when I started this blog.

Perhaps, all that is left to do, is grab an unpeeled banana and lick it. 

A Curious Life

I woke up today with the tune from Eddie Vedder's song "Society" singing in my mind.

"...you're a crazy breed..."

I guess that was partly due to the fact that Amanda had so beautifully added that song into our yoga practice the night before (just one more reason to fall in love with her and all her Aussie-ness, if you hadn't done so already).

Coincidentally, I just came back from the Jacob Burns Film Center where I watched, dumbstruck, as Andrew Young brought us with him to Focus on Nature.

Naturally, that song began humming in my ears as I visited the bears in Alaska with one of the most captivating nature cinematographers in the world and I longed for the days when I had lived vicariously through Alexander Supertramp.

What a brilliant, brilliant man. Andrew Young had me leaned forward in my seat, smiling from ear to ear, wiping tears, and turning to my right to share expressions of "holy crap!" with my little sister.

Andrew in the Congo

You know when people ask you as a kid, "If you could be an animal, would you be: a monkey or a dolphin?"

Andrew made me want to be a Salmon.

I am so overwhelmed with emotion that my fingers keep reaching for letters but my thoughts are carrying faster than my hands can capture.

Phrases from Andrew's storytelling flash across the empty space in front of my eyes...

You have to inhabit their world.

When you get down to the level of the animals, you can become involved. You can involve the audience.

The elders are the experts.

Conservation.

Outsiders came in and captured this amazing footage and then it was brought back to their homes and shared in their lands. 

She allows herself to die.

What lives right around us, takes a little more effort to see.

We assume we already know.

Beautiful things happen often; perhaps when we are not looking, perhaps when we are asleep, or perhaps we don't look.

Any other Peace Corps volunteers out there saying, "Cabal!" along with me?

I have to smile when I think back to my conversations with my older sister about storytelling; about putting a face to things and the ability to create feeling. I have to smile when I think back to the storytelling session at a recent Think Lab I attended with Coburn Ventures. I have to smile when I think of tonight's closing remarks about the beauty of storytelling and how storytelling is "how we participate in life".

Andrew Young is brilliant in so many ways, but it is his honest nature, passionate perception of life and exquisite ability to make you a Salmon that makes him incredible.

I have spent some of my days in nature; I, too, have explored the bat caves- none with airborne rabies or 4 feet deep of feces, but I had my own adventure in it's own, (now very adventure-less-feeling),  way. I, too, have swum with sharks, but have no footage to prove it...and again, I'd now rather swim with the salmon.

But I have learned so much tonight through the eyes (and lens) and stories of Andrew. I am inspired to learn more.

The night ended before I got my chance, but I wanted to ask Andrew Young afterwards:

When and how did this become your life? 

Did you ever feel tempted to let go of your passion for a more practical life? 

How has nature and the animals changed you?

You said, "you realized you had to get down to the level of the animals"... (Integration)... 

His ability to story-tell was such that you were so living in his moment, there alongside the beaver and the wood ducks, the salmon and the bats, and you could also internalize. You could feel in such a way that you could relate.

I thought of when I last had that feeling. I still find it often, but not in the way that it stayed with me while I was in El Salvador.

It was there that it really hit me one day, no one will ever get it, neither they nor I, nor the rest of the world, if I don't become a Salvadoran. To know something, you have to get on it's level.

And so, as Andrew Young made me a salmon, El Salvador made me a pansita-bearing robust lady, a tortilla-maker, a "va-pues"-speaking local and a hardworking empowered woman.

And if it weren't for that, I would, in no way, today be able to share with you the life as it is below the border. I could not speak honestly about a day in the life of the thumb of Central America. I could not ask you to support me/us in the ways you have because I would not have known the way.

There is so much truth that we don't know about the world. And seeing a bit of it, only awakens us to how much we hardly know at all.

And so, you are humbled to the fact that the world, nature, the animals- have so much to teach us.

Do you have any idea how a Salvadoran woman can balance a basket full of vegetables upon her head as she walks barefoot down a pebbly-road, while keeping track of 6 wandering children?

Do you have any idea how a bat can recognize her one newborn child amongst millions of identical babies, trapped in a black cave? Do you know what it means to breathe the life force of a Salmon as it attempts to cross the treacherous bar of the stream? Do you feel the valor of a one-day-old wood duck, as it leaps fearlessly from a 70ft tall tree?

Watching that footage- how inspiring, how humbling, how truthful.

What beauty, understanding, inspiration and information the natural world has to offer.

Yet often, we're not looking.

Or, worse yet, we are killing the fern that feeds the flies, as we burn them with our cigarettes. We have wiped out the beaver in southern New York, as we skin them shamelessly for fur. We have given cancer to the salmon of Canada, as we poison the streams with our chemicals.

"Lead a more curious, observant life," he said.

And I namaste'd.

Maybe if you can see the treasure that is all around us, you will start to reap it's gold.

Eve Ensler

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of anyone else.”

–Charles Dickens.

http://www.vday.org/node/3001 

From 7-9pm last night, I sat mesmerized into the eyes of EveEnsler and her two companions from the Congo. Those were two of the most poignant hours of my week.

Her words vibrated in my ear drums.

The pitch of her voice made my stomach and heart coil together.

“If you destroy the woman, you destroy the community.”

I will never forget those words.

Eve Ensler read us the letters from the woman who watched their communities be torn apart before their eyes. She spoke the voices of the woman: the mothers, the grandmothers, the sisters, the daughters, who were mutilated.

Who are mutilated.

The women in the Congo who are, right now, being mutilated.

You listen to the stories, but you want to stick your fingers in your ears as you did as a child when your parents were telling you something you just couldn’t bare to listen to.

You feel the pain, so your organs pull in and away, coiling together to try to comfort themselves.

Well- feel it.

Feel the pain. Be informed.

This is our reality.

When you destroy the woman, you destroy the community.

And, so, here we stand blindly, and let the world self-destruct.

Eve Ensler spoke the voices of the women in the Congo, but I heard the voices of my friends in El Salvador.

They, too, turn their backs when their husbands cheated, beat, lied, or left.

They, too, teach their boys to be men and their girls to be women.

They, too, carry the weight of their community on their shoulders.

Eve Ensler read to us the responses from the women of the Congo when she asked them “What can we do for you? What can we give you? What do you need?”

Eve Ensler told us what they said:

            We don’t want your weapons. We don’t want your international aid.

            We are strong. We have what it takes to rebuild our community.

But outsiders have come in and put a gun to these defenseless souls and these passionate hearts.

It is what I saw for myself in El Salvador.

The best people to change a community are the people in the community.

Those same defenseless hearts have found resurrection in destruction.

They still see the beauty of their country where hell has crept over.

The people who have all the power are the women.

.......So empower them! Hear their voice!.....

...Yet, we let the world demean, and abuse and strip them of their intrinsic power… and strength… and beauty.

Hear their voices. Listen to their stories. Feel their pain.

Be informed.

When you destroy a woman, you destroy the community.

http://arianajcrane.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/current-conflict-women-in-the-congo/

Chills

I just got the chills.

The flights have been booked. 

Two round-trip tickets from Wisconsin to New York, the week before Christmas, for $924.52--Thanks to all of you who have donated. The other funds raised will be going towards transportation, food, activities and daily expenses. I want you all to know where your money is going and what you have become a part of.

I was going to continue writing, in my own words, more about Saul and Fidel. Instead, I am just going to copy and paste a bit from the email I received from Saul:

“I really like photography but right now it's just a hobby  that I really enjoy, I am wondering when I go back to El Salvador how is going to be. My plan is this. When I go back I will try to get a job about business, mostly the business in El Salvador the people work just during the weekdays. The weekend I can work for a newspaper taking pictures about sports. After that I would like to start my own business about photography, a studio or starting to print my work and sell it. I know that in El Salvador the people prefer to buy something more helpful for the house rather to buy a picture. But some people that visit our country will appreciated it. Another thing is that pictures business in El Salvador is not that big, for example I don't have any picture to remind my childhood and I hate that because I would like to know how I was when I was a child. The first picture that I have is when I was 16 what about the rest. 

What happen to me I will not like to happen to another people to my community. 

If I open a studio my prices and not going to be highers. Sometime the ideas are big but the resources are not enough”.

Saul is going to be a famous photographer one day. He is going to give his friends’ children photos of their childhood. He is going to create a name for La Montana, El Salvador- put them on the map. He is going to continue forming peaceful ties between the US and Central America.

Thank you for giving him the opportunity to photograph the Statue of Liberty.

Checkout these photos Saul took in Wisconsin. Do you think he's got an eye for capturing beauty or what? You do know that before he came here to study, the only time he ever used a camera was on his flip phone...

Did I mention that Saul pitched the idea of creating the first yearbook ever for his class and school? 

He is now leading that project...

I also received this email from Fidel:

"I want to say thanks to all these people that are making my dreams to visit NY reality. I am so excited to be there.

I want to share that here in the US, I am having an amazing experience, I feel lovely, since I have a host mother that love me, friends that became my family, since with them I have been having my best experiences here in Wisconsin, I have been building an excellent relationship with a couple of host families and they have been taking me to different beautiful places here in WI over the weekends. Thanks to God, Host families and Friends for make of my life happiness."

Fidel and his friend in Wisconsin

Saul and Fidel when selected to participate in the
scholarship Leadership Conference.

Kenny

I was just writing in my Gratitude Journal- I usually do this at the end of everyday, but I wasn’t quite at the capacity last night. I suppose I could have done it at 3am, but I imagine there would have been some incoherency.

I started my gratitude journal a few months ago. I write down 10 things that I am grateful for each day. 

As I was writing how grateful I was about last night’s fundraiser, so many memories were coming to mind. Mike Hutton’s excitement over winning the dartboard and jumping on the table yelling, obviously came first. That was great emotion to have in the night.

But also the conversations I had with people: Old friends encouraging me to keep up everything that I am doing. People I hadn’t seen in forever telling me that my story of Fidel & Saul gave them the chills. A stranger, named Kenny, who bought 2 raffle tickets, didn’t win, but came up to me afterwards and hugged me and said- “thank you for what you are doing, I know it is not easy.” Then he left the room.

I went to find him after we cleaned up the raffle, to give him a t-shirt for participating. He was standing alone by the wall observing the bar scene. I asked if he had any friends there who would like a t-shirt as well. It was then that his beautiful story unraveled and I found my night ending in a very unexpected way.

Kenny’s house was destroyed in the Sandy hurricane in Union City, New Jersey. When him and his wife heard about the storm, they packed up their belongings for 3 days and left with their son to head to a hotel.

He showed me the photos on his iPhone.

He said, “we lost everything. And when I say we lost everything, you don’t even know. All our photos…”

Sill-i-ly, I asked if he wanted more t-shirts…

He smiled at me.

“So many people offer us stuff, but we have no where to put it. We are living in a hotel room. And, you know, it doesn’t matter. Our house will be re-built.”

What he cares about are the memories, the community, the school his son went to with his friends…

But he smiles. He knows it will be okay, he tells me. He cares more for those who don’t have insurance to re-build their homes- For those with less hope.

His attitude was an inspiration to me.

He stood there watching the bar scene, because he does not get that opportunity to get out that much. He does not live in his hometown anymore where he can go to relax with the friends he used to in the local placed they used to go.

I guess if we never had the fundraiser, I never would have met Kenny. I love how following your heart puts you in situations where you can share great stories- great memories- great people- inspiration.

I took a cab home alone at the end of the night.

I was standing on the street corner at 3am and my feet were aching from my heels. So many people were waiting for a cab but I hailed one down and he flashed his lights at me in recognition (usually they just slam on the brakes along side you and splash you with dirty nyc water). None of the people fought me for the cab…

The driver asked how I was doing. I explained about the fundraiser… He listened… He asked questions…He was from India…

When he pulled up at my sister’s apartment he told me it was $12. I gave him a $20, got change, and then gave $2 tip.  He paused looking at the money for a minute, and I felt a little ashamed…maybe he deserved more…?

Then, he handed me back a $5 bill. He said, “this is my contribution to Fidel & Saul’s trip.”