When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I often dreamt of becoming a Zen monk. I pledged that I would work hard at my meditation, serve the abbot as best I could, study the writings of all the Zen masters and strive for enlightenment like my Zen master heroes Dogen, Bankei and homeless Kodo. I sat in my bedroom in the big granite house my parents had bought some years before. I began to sit in meditation following the instructions given by master Dogen in thethirteenth century: sit in a quiet place …eyes open …set aside all opinions and attachments …don’t be concerned with notions of good and bad … set aside your desire to become enlightened …just sit at peace and be at one with the universe …observe whatever arises in your mind with equanimity …sit up straight, alert yet relaxed …breath gently through the nose, watching each breath as if it is your last …
There is a radical simplicity to sitting in zazen – it is very simple yet extremely difficult. It involves nothing more, or less, than sitting in full attention to the here and now – being-here – observing the mind in tranquillity without commenting on, or clinging to, the experiences, thoughts, feelings and sensations that make up consciousness. When I look back to my childhood, I realise that my earliest experience of this kind of mindful, undivided attention was as a bird and animal watcher. In the years before I’d heard of zazen or meditation, I spent hours and hours out in the woods and heathland near my home, waiting for birds and animals to arrive at the place I’d chosen to sit – usually a rock, or a small clearing, or the foot of a tree. My friends and I knew the locations of countless bird’s nests. We knew where to look for the partridges and peewits on the common behind my home. We could go to the pond in the disused quarry where we could see great-crested newts and sometimes grass snakes gliding about in the water. Because we were observant and interested, we knew our little patch of earth very well – it was our territory, where we belonged and were at home.
As I wandered about this familiar territory, I noticed that if I was agitated, or distracted, or overly hopeful, the birds and animals would notice me and keep their distance. But if I gave up any intention of being a birdwatcher, if I let go of my excitement and anticipation, they would often wander right up to me – almost as if I wasn’t there. And in a sense, I wasn’t there. That is, the egocentric, acquisitive, ‘I’, wasn’t there. Instead, a different state of being was at work (or at play) – as if the edges of myself were dissolved into the surrounding space. It felt as if there was no separation between me and the world. As if the blackbirds, wrens, gorse linnets, and the occasional fox and badger that wandered by, were other essays in being, alternative manifestations of the life that flowed within me. It is this state of being and relationship that zazen engenders and when I first practiced sitting meditation it felt very familiar, a return to the state that I’d sometimes experienced as a youngster sitting on a rock watching a goldcrest only a few feet away making its carefully constructed nest.
I remember reading Samuel Johnson saying this: ‘Nothing is little to him who feels it with great sensibility.’
Here is part of a poem I wrote at that time:
who knows when the night ends
and the day begins?
who knows where I end
and you begin?
Mindful awareness involves letting-go of the acquisitive and divisive ego – enabling us to feel kinship and togetherness with the many beings who live alongside us. I am sure everyone occasionally has these feelings. Realising that we live in relationship with each other, in a world bursting with an incredible diversity of life-forms, we need to do all we can to maintain this diversity. There is a deep connection between being mindful of the natural world and wanting to care for it. It seems to me that mindful meditation, animal-watching, and taking action to care for nature, are deeply linked and can help to heal our divided and suffering world.
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These animal-watching experiences remind me of another episode in my early life. Although my mother grew up as a chapel-going, Welsh-speaking person in a mining valley in South Wales, I was sent to a Catholic primary school. By this time my mother had married her wartime sweetheart and moved to another mining and quarrying village in Leicestershire. We lived on the top of a hill at the edge of the village, a mile or so from the village schools. I wasn’t sent to the Catholic school for religious reasons, but because I couldn’t walk home and be back soon enough for afternoon lessons to start. The Church of England school didn’t provide school meals, but the Catholic school did – so that is where I went. I have only good feelings about this time, and I think my few years there were beneficial.
The school was closely affiliated to a convent just over the road from the school entrance. Nuns, and at least one priest, did some of the teaching. For a time, I had piano lessons in the convent with a rather severe but kindly, ruler-toting nun, whose name, sadly, I can’t bring to mind. As I tried to learn the fingering, she would stop me to say, ‘Are you listening?’ No doubt, I said, ‘yes.’. But it took me a while to realise she wasn’t just talking about the notes I was hesitantly playing. She would tell me to listen to the clock ticking, to the hum of the lukewarm radiators and the occasional birdsong that came in through the window in the summer months. She wanted me to listen to the music that is all around us – the everyday sounds that were the accompaniment to my life at that time, but to which I had probably been paying little attention. I have a feeling that this early encouragement to listen was one of the most important lessons I learnt at the school. I know I loved the morning assemblies and the regular church services – still sung in Latin. Though I had little idea as to what was being said or sung, I found the sounds, the melodies and the intonations of voice, to be very beautiful. I feel sure this sowed the seeds of my later interests in music and poetry, is connected to my animal-watching activities as a grew older and, eventually, to my practice of zazen.
It makes me chuckle to think that when I encountered the work of the radical American composer, John Cage, in the 1960s, I was already well-versed in his seemingly controversial idea that we should consider all sounds as music – not just those made by so-called musical instruments. My dear convent piano teacher, who was never far from prayer and gently moving her rosary beads, had much in common with the firebrand composer who became famous for his work titled, 4 minutes, 33 seconds – a piece in which nothing happened other than the pianist lifting the keyboard lid and closing it again. The reverend sister taught me early in life, what John Cage later affirmed – that is, that listening and sensing in this open non-judgmental way enriches life and endlessly reveals new worlds of creative awareness and appreciation. I am indebted to them both.
NB
The first part of this talk includes extracts from my book, Interwoven nature: relatedness & identity in a changeful world. Whitewick Press. 2016. (pp. 154-155) Available on Amazon for £8.99: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Interwoven-Nature-relatedness-identity-changeful/dp/0995678901