Green from the Real Green -- R. M. Rilke
Dear Friends,
For today's meditation, please have with you a small item of plant nature. This could be a thorn, a dried flower, a potted plant, or you might be located where it is easy to see a single plant in the ground close up. We are not looking for plants significantly transformed by human handiwork: no espalier trees, no wooden chairs, no guitars.
In recent practice with a stone, we have felt that mineral nature itself is alive and can be experienced compellingly as non-objective: that is, not something outside the self and its perception, but inside. This does not mean that either our normal or our enlivened perception of a stone is illusory. It means that, at whatever level we perceive it, we and the stone are part of a single event.
The same holds true of a plant, but we are no longer opening specifically to its mineral aspect, rather to the formative meaning, or felt sense, of the specifically plant nature of the plant. What gave it life -- whether it is alive now or not -- and gave form to its mineral aspect? We want again to sense this directly, rather than by thinking it up in words or borrowed concepts. To do so, we'll alternate several ways of looking at the plant item as well as at other items in our immediate environment.
And we'll return to our three-part meditation, where we bring to mind a problem of some kind at the start, allow ourselves to forget that problem in the central practice with the perception of the plant item, and then return to the problem very briefly at the end to see if our slightly altered consciousness can help us in some way.
And what is the problem to be focused on today? We have an overwhelmingly rich choice: Ukraine, climate change, women's rights, gun violence come most immediately to mind. I would like to focus instead on the problem of looming totalitarian or fascist government, which has to do with all of these issues.
Next week, July 12, we'll meet to talk about animals, both domesticated and wild, and the meaning or life they present to us. Then we'll take a two-week break, so NO GROUP JULY 19 AND NO GROUP JULY 26, and reconvene on Tuesday August 2. At that point, our focus will shift for a time to the nature-focused poetry of Zen master Dogen (13th century). I recommend The Zen Poetry of Dogen, edited by Steven Heine, but since this is out of print and very expensive as a used book, I'll be sharing relevant meditation themes from it in emails starting on August 2.
with love,
Michael
