Zen

is a great, big, magnificent, all-embracing seduction of a word

Photo: © David Whyte

ZEN

is a great, big, magnificent, all-embracing seduction of a word. Zen is a beguiling and charming philanderer of the first order, that good looking stranger who lets us fall in love, and then runs off with someone else, so that we can fall out of love with the word and be let alone in our grief, to fall in love with reality.

Zen is a centuries old, glamorous, disguised, cover-up: inviting us in, in each succeeding generation, so exquisitely, so quietly, so subtly, so seductively into its grip, that we do not, to begin with, have any understanding of what we have become, so innocently, ensnared by; we do not have a clue as to the way we are being taken in so swiftly and so unerringly into the currents that lead to the edge of our own necessary, physical and emotional breakdown. Amidst our hopes for polished wood, serene surroundings, the sound of bells and the whispered shuffle of bare feet, we always find, to our consternation, that Zen always begins and ends in tears.

The first tears in Zen practice are for our bodies and our restless minds: for our backs, our knees and for our legs, trying to sit upright on those strangely necessary black cushions. The next tears are for our hearts, our emotions and our previously imprisoned minds. The last tears are for a joy and laughter that still, to our amazement, keeps a friendship and an understanding with our previous griefs. Zen is the journey we take through heartbreak. At the last heartbreak, Zen retires from the field, Zen generously disappears and lets us alone, refusing to let us use the word so freely again, refusing to let us be fooled by what we originally needed to be so enticed by.

Drawn toward Zen practice, we almost always fall in love with the word itself. Zen beguiles us with that barely breathing vowel sound that lives so eternally and so glamorously at its centre, between the dashing capital Z and that oh-so subtle brushstroke of an ‘n’. The word itself seems to be clean and rested, insightful and eternally hip, something inspiring: something that conjures light and space, and a welcome order amidst a difficult world of besiegement, chaos and successive, never-ending experiences of grief.

We fall for the word as we fall for the deep silences that swim dreamily through the first pains of our practice, Zen welcomes us through its invitation to a sense of spacious ease, to freedom from worry and thankfully in our mind’s eye, to a deeper form of rested presence - a presence we first saw in the clean, perfectly proportioned spaces inherited so seductively from Japan - but then, as Zen breaks down the divisions in our mind and body, we find our sense of self breaks down too, firstly from the inside out and then, at the end, from the outside in. We learn to bow in the Zendo, not knowing what we are rehearsing: unconsciously preparing as we are, to duck through the achingly low doors of abasement our heartbreak will provide.

We pass through those low doors as we pass into the difficulties of marriage or intimate relationship. Like the raw vulnerabilities we find in the commitments of marriage or in a long, intimate partnership, Zen begins with the honeymoon of getting to know, graduates through difficult and unwanted surprises and then culminates in a slow breakdown, day by day, through the trials and invitations of intimacy and heartache itself.

-excerpt from the essay ‘Zen’ available in the new collection of essays, Consolations II.