Just in time for the school year, a journalist from the Doylestown, Pa, paper will be interviewing us this afternoon. When I left for vacation two weeks ago, the garden was weak and dry. Apparently it rained, and now the weeds are towering, flourishing. 

  Well, not anymore. But there went the morning.

The Outer Banks treated me well. I will begin posting for the new school year tomorrow.

 Finally some rain. It has, as local readers know, been unusually hot and dry. Oddly, the streams aren't all that low, perhaps a consequence of last year being so wet. The cornfields behind my neighborhood were flowing with two feet of water at one point. Walking through thigh deep running water amidst seven foot cornstalks was a little eerie. Felt a bit like 'Nam. Except for the corn being much taller than rice and no one hiding out trying to kill me and my home being 1500 yards away.

  Over the weekend I spent a bit more time reading news and trolling the internet than I often do. There can be so much to take in... at first it is enjoyable, then revs up into info-greed, and soon the swirl of emotions (provoked by politics, advertising, and general weirdness) mutates into compulsion. For me, it is a tense and de-centered feeling, which once I become aware of it, becomes a physical restlessness. It become more difficult for me to concentrate as a result.

   So I pull back. Of course, at this moment I am blogging, but it is number 7 on the list of things to get down this morning bracketed by photographing parts of the garden and a trip to the post office and guitar store (my favorite makers and repairers: those two angels at The Guitar Parlor). My internet misadventures did turn up a few items I would like to share: the truly awesome, but non-consequential fact that space indeed has a smell, and a sharp little taste of a new edition of William James' work on religious experience (e.g. James "constantly worried that we’re being encouraged by a certain type of scientific analysis to put our faith in abstracted explanations, often at the expense of our own experiences — the only things that we can truly know anyway. In the Varieties James is examining the emotional fundamentals not only of religious belief, but of all belief.")

   Per James, it isn't just scientific analysis that leads us to "put faith in abstracted explanations". This has always been a problem within religious practice. It is so easy, for people of particular temperaments, to simply enjoy and take comfort in the formal practices, the robes, the incense, the schedule, the liturgies, and so on. It is equally easy to completely reject these as superficial and distracting. And it is not a matter of simply splitting the difference. It is the essential task of living my own life and responding to what is around me genuinely and with deep engagement. Ritual and the rejection of ritual can be equally abstracted from direct experience.

   For some, ritual can be a dynamic mix of challenge (hearing what you don't want to hear, sitting zazen for an hour, etc) and comfort (co-religionists, inspiring words, sights, and sounds, escape from daily pressures). Taken together, it can be pretty strong stuff. If we pick and choose, however, we run the risk of merely creating a rather monochromatic expression of ourselves to gaze at, rather than the direct experience of the inner and outer life.

  Picking and choosing is what we do naturally, isn't it? For the most part we move away from discomfort and toward pleasure or relief. And as we deepen our sense of self, we radically broaden what we experience as pleasure, folding into this many experiences that our younger selves might have really run away from. In Zen practice, sitting might be one of these. Or training martial arts. But for some of us, being radically open and connected to others is the great challenge, the one most riven with doubt.

   The primary delusion is that we are fundamentally separate from others. I would like to discuss this further a little later...

  As a Buddhist practitioner and a therapist (for lack of a better term), the word "attachment" is packed with irony. Attachment, in the Buddhist sense, is clinging to thoughts, feelings, people, objects, anything that for the moment we invest with a sense of permanence. Suffering arises because nothing is permanent, so we experience loss when we come to depend on something always being a certain way. Non-attachment frees us from how we want the world to be, and allows us to be in the world that actually is.
  In psychology, or at least how I approach it, 'attachment' is the basis for emotional and relational health. The safety and reliability of our earliest caregivers become the foundation for later development. Our inner world of expectations and trust shape subsequent relations with the self, others, and the world.
   One could state that non-attachment in the Buddhist sense is not possible without attachment being achieved in the psychological sense. We need a profound and preverbal confidence in ourselves and the world (and our teacher, I might add) to make that vast leap of letting go.
    The really painful and disorienting miles on the spiritual path can also be seen as a letting go of the failed relationships that betrayed us, and turning our focus to whole of reality, including our experience, and allowing that to be the basis of our (psychological) attachment. From that newfound confidence, we can let go, knowing that letting go is not an abandonment but an acceptance. As Dogen put it, "to carry yourself forward and illuminate the myriad things... is delusion...that the myriad things come forth and illuminate themselves is awakening..." (see this for a helpful discussion of this aspect of Dogen's thought).
  
   The unexpected is the great teacher. When we seek to tighten control over much of our lives, the effort casts a shadow. That shadow is our inability to accept, or even see (!), what we don't expect. The pile of un-lived, unacknowledged life piles up in our darkness, and one day, topples over us.
   In this respect, we deny certain parts of reality because we can't deal with it, because we haven't the confidence (based on prior experience) that we can accept it without being overwhelmed. So it piles up and up, until it can't be denied any longer. But that can go on a long time.