I got off the streets of Detroit last Sunday afternoon, flew back to Phoenix Monday morning, and have been spending the last few days trying to wrap my brain around what I did.  In a word, the Detroit Street Retreat was “intense,” in a good way. 

I started writing about the experience last Tuesday morning.  Originally, I was going to wait until I had a piece of writing completely together before I posted, but after working on it for five hours Saturday morning I realized that my piece about this experience is going to take time to unfold and I waned to post something shorter than seven pages on my blog.

The place last weekend’s Detroit Street Retreat holds in my soul is immense. The stories I could tell feel like fragments, lots of little pieces that could never really convey an understanding of the whole.  In my head is a cardboard box of snapshots, which represent stories from the streets.  These snapshots have become symbols of the depth of my experience.

I want to take out my shoebox and show you my pictures even though I feel like my stories are a bit like trying to capture the splendor of the Grand Canyon with a disposable camera.  Rather than give a linear timeline of what happened, I will pull pictures out of the box as they come to me.

Admittedly, when my father dropped me off Thursday afternoon in front of the Still Point Zen Center, a red brick duplex on Trumbull Street, I was a little freaked out, like when you are in the front car of a really high, fast roller coaster at the top of the first hill looking down and there is that split second pause before the car drops you.  I was the first to show up.  So I sat on the front steps looking out at the city.  There I was by myself in Detroit full of apprehension knowing damn well the car was about to drop. 

I walked on to those streets open, not knowing what I would find.  With a small army of thirteen other souls, together we lived on the streets of Detroit for four days bearing witness to the lives of people who generally are invisible in everyday life. 

In coming back I have been asked several times why I think people are homeless.  I don’t know.  The notion of simply getting a job just doesn’t begin to touch the needs for those that I met.  One of the things I can say about the homeless in Detroit is this.  Most were men and most of the older men are Vietnam vets whose wounds from that war still bleed.  I had no idea.  Many of the younger street soldiers I met were vets from a very different war, the war on drugs.  I always thought of that phrase as a metaphor.  Not in Detroit. 

But my stories are not war stories.  It was quite evident all around me that Detroit is a hard, harsh city filled with much suffering.  But the people of Detroit, both those on the streets and those who served us, are filled with love and compassion.

Some Street Life Snapshots: 

• Getting fed fried chicken and french-fries for dinner on Woodward Avenue by Muslims outside their Mosque.
• Being constantly asked by all sorts of people, “What are you doing?”
• Being given the opportunity to tell people what we were doing.
• Sitting and talking with folks in the soup kitchens over meals. 
• A salad at lunch made from vegetables from the church’s garden behind the parking lot. 
• A big pot of various Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pastas mixed together and a side of beans for dinner. 
• Flowers in bloom in empty lots.
• Sitting zazen outside in the long wet grass after dark. 
• Checking out graffiti art with Mike and Shawn. 
• Paco, standing over us as we sat in Cass Park, asking for us to pray for him. 
• Listening to Don and other people from the streets tell their stories.
• Bumming cigarettes for Don from White women at the Eastside Market.
• Collecting cans for change. 
• Being fed and taken in by the Pilgrim Church for the night. 
• Being given a second blanket in order to keep warm at night. 
• Cheap 24 hour Coney Island Restaurant coffee. 
• Receiving a bag lunch from a hesitant young volunteer at a soup kitchen and remembering when I did the same thing “helping the homeless” as a teen. 
• The tone of the bell that Sensei Grover Genro Gauntt used to start the sitting periods. 
• Sitting in Heart Plaza by the Detroit River. 
• A man handing us a sketch he had done of us as we sat. 
• Rudie, (My man from Amsterdam) and the hole he walked in to the bottom of his shoe. 
• Being pushed out of the way by a stranger on the street just before a pigeon would have shat on my head. 
• Eating and sharing a fresh Mango that I had begged for and received from a vender.
• A homeless man named Eddie offering to share his mouthwash with me when I joked that after four days of not brushing my teeth I felt like a monkey lived in my mouth.  (I did accept.) 
• Carrying around the city pink, white and burgundy gladiolus that I had been given. 
• Offering the flowers to a homeless woman after breakfast in a soup kitchen on Sunday morning. She took one stalk of burgundy and told me she was going to put them on her father’s grave that afternoon.  When I offered her the rest she said,  “No baby, I want you to keep the rest and give them out and make other people happy today.”  
• Hugging my mom when I got home, giving her what was left of the flowers, and seeing that for lunch she had made me all my favorite foods.

This experience has left me open to the fact that the world may be a place of great suffering, but in the face of that suffering there are many who respond with love and compassion.  In a snapshot, this is how I would describe myself after this whole experience, “a heart full of love and compassion.”

For more info on Street Retreats click here
Zaadz info on Zen Peacemakers is here

Free Burma!

I know that people endure much hardship every day on this planet.  I know that I live relative life of privilege.  I know that the problems in Burma (Myanmar) are nothing new.

(For a more in-depth understanding check out Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin and From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe.  I got them from http://www.abebooks.com/) 

Still, this week has been a very emotional one for me.  I feel a strong connection to this place and the suffering of my Dharma Brothers and Sisters there.  My first Buddhist teacher was Burmese.

I am happy that the world is outraged about the junta’s reactions but deeply saddened by the death and suffering of everyone involved.  Normally, I can watch with a more detached compassion as the horrors of the world unfold before me through the pictures, video clips and words on my computer. This time, however, it feels personal.  “Like [my] mother or [my] dog just died” – L. Cohen

I know that Zaadz is full of people who are much more apt at social action than I, and I would like to thank you for all your daily work to make this world a better place.  I am generally not a marcher.  I sit. 

There are some great information and action links have been posted around Zaadz about this situation such as ~C4Caos’s.

This week I have appreciated your voices as we came together electronically to bear witness to these events, thank you.   

Peace,

Hoen the Zen Cowboy


By the way, most of the images and news coverage we are getting out of Burma comes from this source, The Democratic Voice of Burma.  They are worth checking out.

Here is a BBC In Depth Report.

Here is a link to current BBC reports.   Double click the image and it will take you to the BBC videos.




Other links:

http://www.uscampaignforburma.org/ American Campaign for Bruma
Info on Aung San Suu Kyi  & Her website
Good updates and info

This is my favorite YouTube video right now by Sakyong Mipham Rinposhe

Please excuse my absence. I have been depressed for the past few months. This has been new to me, as I have never really been a depressed person before. Yes, like everyone, I got sad or felt low, but this has been a completely new sensation. It came soon after my ordination as a monk. It’s funny, depression. I always thought it lived in the mind from negative self-talk but for me that is not really the case. The negative self-talk is here, but the depression itself is this physical low that has me in a vice grip. I feel tired all the time no matter what I do or how I sleep and everything seems hard. Getting up in the morning is anguish, moving through my day is always painful. I cannot make decisions easily; my head just never feels fully clear. Every cell in my body hurts. Writing can be a nightmare. Sitting is almost impossible. I manage only by moving one slow step at a time one long day at a time. Last June I was hit with the realization that everything I do in my life is driven by anger and arrogance. Everything. Anger and arrogance are my fuel, my motivation for every act in my life. My life commitment to H. My life commitment to Buddhism. My life commitment to my students, my family, my friends, my reason for getting up, my reason for walking on this earth, my reason for being. Everything. All fueled by anger and arrogance. I saw the world through this lens of arrogance that I mistook for equanimity. I thought my calm detachment to the world came from my sitting practice and that it indicated my spiritual superiority over those poor suffering souls around me. But underneath this arrogance was a ball of anger that sat in judgment of the world. If asked at the time why I was critical of something or someone, I would frame my understanding as a righteous anger. Then, last June, I saw this anger for what it was, a ball of personal hurt and resentment. Pure and simple, I hate and used my arrogance to judge the objects of my hate. I couldn’t breathe for the first few seconds when this understanding hit me. I was stunned. I had no idea what I was. In an instant the arrogance became deep self-doubt. It was as if I was on my bike angrily peddling along at a swift pace and then suddenly, SNAP, the chain broke. Now I’m headed downhill but out of control with no idea how to fix it. Everything I do suddenly feels fake because I can see the fire of rage behind all my actions and I question my motivation for living. I get scared. The bike is still moving without a driving force, but in time I will need something with which to move forward and I have no idea what that force could be. The only things I generally feel besides anger are self-doubt, depression and fear. Now that I see what actually motivates me to sit so still and so long in the zendo, I no longer feel quite so bad-ass. In fact, I feel like shit, like I have been committing a really bad joke on myself. Without the shield of arrogance, the anger that I felt for the world has turned its gaze back at me. The world is fine. I am the fuck up and I’m pissed at myself for it. How could I have been so stupid? What was I thinking? This new fire of self-loathing consumes me. My brain has short-circuited. I can’t think my way out of this one. These feelings penetrate my being too deeply. I am paralyzed. When the flames die down, I’m always left in the smoldering ruins of a deep ache. When depression came, it was like the foundation of my being collapsed and a hole opened up just below my stomach and dropped down into forever. I almost heard the sucking sound as it pulled me into it. I can still go on stage and be “me” for short periods of time if I have too, for teaching a writing class or eating dinner with friends, but most of the day it is all I can do to resist falling into the hole. This has gone on for a few months until I just collapsed inside (and outside.) I got sick and couldn’t do much at all. I had to let go of I what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I felt cracked open. I would awaken in the night drenched with sweat and the sheets would have to be changed before I when back to bed. H has helped me through all of this. I’m not sure how I would be surviving without her. After about a week of this sickness, I got up one day and passed a full-length mirror. I looked at myself and thought, “I don’t really like you and never really have.” I just stared at my eyes, my face, my body. Then a wave of compassion came up from the pit in my gut. “I forgive you.” I said to the image in the mirror. In hindsight this seems to me like psychology 101 stuff. My anger is my own self-hatred turned onto others’ limitations as a means of shielding me from my own. I use logic and spirituality to create arrogance in order to justify my anger at the world. Classic projection. The problem is this projection has been a big part of who I think I am. My self is in doubt because I can no long justify the motivation to act from such a place. By hating the world, I don’t shield myself from anything; I just end up hurting more than me. If I am going to heal myself, I must begin by forgiving my self, my own limitations. If I can feel compassion for the man in the mirror, I can bring that compassion to anything or anyone in the world that the mirror reflects back and be the person (and the monk) I have only lied to myself about being. I thought “they” were the ones who were hurtful and unkind, not me. In truth, I have always been my own worst enemy and what, ultimately, is there to fear when the enemy is me? There is nothing to fear outside the man in the mirror, outside myself. If I can forgive my own limitations and stop killing my self, I can be open and vulnerable with the world. I’m beginning to feel that true equanimity comes from this place of vulnerability and on good days I have begun to try and move through the world from this place. I was working with a student on a piece of her writing last week. It was called, “Daddy Wasn’t There” and was about remembering how a four-year-old felt the first time her father didn’t show up at Christmas. I listened to her read this record of pain and looked at the strong young seventeen-year-old woman in front of me. I saw the vulnerability and honestly flow from her and I began to tear up. She stopped reading, looked at me and asked if I was okay. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. You’re a beautiful writer.” Honestly, what I meant was that in her open vulnerability I saw a powerful human being. I saw the beauty of truth. Up to that moment, I hadn’t cried for truth since I was five years old. In fact, I haven’t cried much for anything at all. For years I felt a detachment from the world. I cared, but from a far. For the past couple of months, I’ve felt like an open wound. Everything is up close and in my face. The suffering of the world is mine. Now, there are moments when I’m beginning to just feel open. I have always made the joke that I am the Tin Man from the Wizard of OZ and that H. is the Good Witch who gave me a heart and it bleeds as it beats in my chest, and I feel every pulse. This is a humbling experience for me. But what did I expect, taking a vow to “save all sentient beings”? Now, everything is personal. In this moment, I feel like I am coming out of the lethargy. My energy levels have moved up some and I no long feel completely overwhelmed by every little thing. Still, it’s like I’m looking at life as I sit on the edge of a cliff high in the Himalayas and if I don’t stay vigilant and awake to who I am, I could fall right off, back into the plummet of the last few months. I still have no solid answer on how to fix the broken, angry chain of my life. I am aware that writing this is part of the process. I feel that in putting this down on “paper” I am healing myself. But I know in some of my actions and responses today that I have not arrived. I forgive me. Earlier I wrote in my journal, “My heart beats strong and full of blood, filling the veins under my skin with a desire I’ve never felt. A desire to live, to love, and to be a human being in the world around me. This desire seems to give me inspiration, a new energy to move forward. Perhaps passion and compassion can drive me into action and I can let anger and arrogance take the back seat.” Perhaps. We shall see. Chain or no chain I must keep pedaling along nice and slow.

Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma and endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn how to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon. Master Ikkyū (1394-1481) Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you. Master Sheng-yen (1931) In my daily practice I sit, chant and bow alone in the mornings five days a week. On Sundays, I sit with a group at a Zen center in Tempe. Saturdays, I lay in bed with my love. We talk the morning away together. Then, I go out and get her coffee. When I get home she makes us breakfast, usually omelets. This is my practice. Hoen the Zen Cowboy (1968)

poems should come from bare ground night falling on night falling on black landscape sometimes all I am is a dark emptiness that I can’t hide in the sleeves of my own robes a woman is enlightenment when you’re with her and the red thread of both your passions flares inside you and you see I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you her mouth played with my cock the way a cloud plays with the sky and the night inside you rocking smelling the odor of your thighs is everything for us no difference between reading eating singing making love not one thing or the other only one koan matters you you stand inside me naked infinite love the dawn bell rips my dreaming heart I think of your death I think of our touching my head quiet in your lap this hungry monk chanting by lamplight is Buddha and he still thinks of you from Crow With No Mouth: Ikkyū 15th Century Zen Master Versions by Stephen Berg http://www.amazon.com/Crow-No-Mouth-Fifteenth-Century/dp/1556591527

So far, my favorite new disk to come out in 2007 is The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse by Bernard Lakes. Mash the sounds of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine and a sprinkling of the guy who played the guitar solos on the first two Boston albums (It’s not that I forgot his name, I don’t think I ever knew it) and all I want to do is close my eyes and slip away, away, away. Yah , it’s more than a feeling ☺ Yet another great disk to come out the Montréal music scene. Both Bernard Lakes and Midlake are touring. Midlakes’s disk The Trials Of Van Occupanther was one of my favorites of 2006. Other bands on tour with good new disks are Lucinda Williams, Sondre Lerche and Air. I hated the last disks of these artists (That may be a personal problem on my part, not theirs.) The new disks are good. They’re growing on me. Lucinda’s, West, and Sondre Lerche’s Phantom Punch (which is very very different from his last disk) came out a couple of weeks a ago. Air’s, Pocket Symphony, will be out on Tuesday, March 6 Here are links to their myspace pages for sounds and tour info: http://www.myspace.com/thebesnardlakes http://www.myspace.com/midlake http://www.myspace.com/lucindawilliams http://www.myspace.com/sondrelerche http://www.myspace.com/intairnet Oh, and Peter Bjorn & John’s disk Writer’s Block finally has an American release and they are touring the States http://www.myspace.com/peterbjornandjohn. I will be in sesshin the night that they will be in Phoenix, ouch.

Simple, Sincere Joyfulness Praise Allah! This little Buddha boy has found the light, Yusuf Islam style. I loved Cat Stevens as a kid back in the seventies, but by the eighties he represented to me all the naïve hippy bullshit that hit the fan when the boomers stopped tripping, smoking pot, hit their thirties, got “real” jobs and started doing lines of coke. “War is over if you want it.” Yeah, right. John Lennon is dead, long live John Lennon. In high school I started using the line, “I’m being followed by a moon shadow, moon shadow moon shadow. Leaping and hopping on a moon shadow, moon shadow moon shadow,” in a deeply cynically sarcastic way similar to how Kurt Cuban used, “ Come on everybody get together now got to love one another right now,” to open the song Territorial Pissings on Nevermind. Then, when that whole incident hit the papers about Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly know as Cat Stevens, saying he felt the fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses was valid, whatever remaining glimmers of childhood nostalgia I had for Teaser and the Firecat went up in the flames of anger and outrage. So, when I heard that Yusuf had released his first new album in 28 years last November I thought, “Who gives a shit?” Then, last week I listened to a broadcast of Nic Harcourt’s Morning Becomes Eclectic where Yusuf was interviewed and performs. It started simply as background noise as I was working, but it soon became the foreground. I had no idea how profoundly touched I would be. I listened to the show twice and was filled with a sincere joy that I haven’t felt since oh, 1976. I can’t really put into worlds how this simple act of hearing Cat Stevens sing is songs again and hearing about his life’s journey opened me. This experience is allowing me to reclaim music that was very important to me in my past. (http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/mb/mb061221yusuf) I now see Yusuf as a man who has lived his life moving through profound transformations and, like all of us, has his more extreme moments. This man, however, has a gift for writing uplifting songs and his new songs have once again uplifted me. Honestly, I find writing this an act of humility. I adore music, but rarely does a collection of songs crack me open emotionally like this one does. By my normal standers, I should not like An Other Cup. I think this album is over produced, lyrically naïve, overtly religious if not preach at times. . . And ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL for its simple, sincere joyfulness. Yusuf, thank you for your music. (http://www.yusufislam.com/) The video for his new single Heaven-Where True Love If you liked that song, here is my track by track download break down: If you want more Cat Stevens sounding songs go to iTunes and download the first three tracks: Midday (Avoid City After Dark) Heaven-Where True Love Goes Maybe There’s A World. If you don’t mind peppering a few Yusuf songs in there, this is the preachy stuff at times, add: One Day At A Time In The End I Think I See The Light The Beloved. Then there is his strings version of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. I like the live version I have heard of this better, but it’s an interesting cover choice considering his media history. There are a couple of odd spoken word bits, When Butterflies Leave and Whispers From A Spiritual Garden. Once a hippy always a hippy, I guess. The only track that I think is too much is the last track, Greenfields, Golden Sands. To me, it sounds like something Dorothy would sing to Toto in the Wizard of Oz, but if you're going to buy the first 10 tracks might as well just get the whole thing, right? Maybe not?