Holy Moly
I made my way back to Mid City Zen for meditation for the first time since coming back home. About time, but oh how my body ached just trying to sit still and think of absolutely nothing for one hour. Daunting. Though it’s the meditation that guides me there, it’s the talk afterwards I enjoy equally. We are still reading and discussing Genjo Koan, which I had left off of when I left for the summer. The sentence that stopped me this time was:
Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be apparent.
I thought that this sentence stood out for me for the first time this rainy morning, only to have realized it stood out for me back in the heat of June as well. I place it right in line with the forceable removal of my belief in orchestrating my life in lieu of just dancing to the jam session whenever it erupts.
Control is over rated. Just Friday night when we had friends over for dinner, I was sporting one of the bindis that my friend had given me as we embarked for Spain. My friend said she had recently heard that the bigger the bindi in India the more emancipated the woman. So I was digging my bright red tilak and happy with my doctor/friend who greeted me with, “Oh, how exotic you look.”
So if you start with the bindi, or the dot, then maybe you can leap over to this morning’s talk about Genjo Koan and all of us on our knees drawing and visualizing what Dogen meant in his treatise. My orange marker was running out of ink, and I drew dots, lots of them, because my hope was to connect them and show how stories evolve, but instead I ran out of ink before I could draw any straight lines. Now tell me if that isn’t zen in and of itself.
My thought for the day, the next time I wear a bindi, it will be a punctuation, because that time will be different, received differently, and on a different person as I will not, cannot, could not, would not be the same person each time I wore a bindi.