JohnLines

Snow beginner.

Yesterday, as it snowed, life slowed.

Somewhere, in the minds of those who didn’t have to venture out, there may have been a sense of unimaginable joy.  Of unexpected freedom.  Of the chains of the everyday being broken.

Trust me, you don’t have to be in school to feel this.  It’s been a long time since I paid attention to the TV scrawl with closing announcements.  (I didn’t know there was a school named St. Cripsin’s of the Hollow Woods ...?)

Why is this?

Snow, deep snow, is a fresh start after a complete stop.  It is beginner’s mind.  Where else could this joy come from? 

It is a all-too-infrequent reminder that being takes precedence over doing.

Soon the snow in the picture above, from our backyard, will have squirrel tracks in it.  Then dog tracks.  The grooves of the familiar will wear it down.  Doing will once again replace being.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Because it won’t.

In the beginner's mind, there is no thought.

That's from Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi, Zen master and sometimes puppeteer.  (Not really.  He wasn't a Zen master.  Ha!  Now I am now talking like him.)

Well, this beginner's mind thing, at my age ... not so easy.  It's not that I know everything.  I still have a reasonable grasp of the state capitals, a smattering of Latin, and with a few days practice I could pull off a Bach Invention or two.

But it's all iffy and unfocused.  I have Jeopardy mind.  A vast collection of relatively useless information that became obsolete about five versions of Trivial Pursuit ago.  And if I made it to Jeopardy, there would be some smarty pants from the military beating my butt anyway.

And so, this year I am cultivating beginner's mind.  But even that's a Catch 22.  Because it cannot be a goal to have beginner's mind.  (Honestly, sometimes Zen is like bad technical support with some guy from India named "Skip."  By the time the conversation's over, nothing's fixed and you have a headache.)

In this "Beginner's Mind" quest, I will be testing out this proposition of no thought.

After a five-year hiatus, during which I forgot everything, I returned to studying shakuhachi with the master (yes, lineage, the whole bit) with whom a took a couple of workshops. 

Shakuhachi is a devilishly difficult instrument to play which -- even when it is played right -- sounds like it is wrong.

Stay tuned.  Other beginners projects will involve accordion (there is nothing sweeter than the sound of accordions ... burning), bodhran, and yoga.

I will also explain the box on the guy's head, too.

Best headline of the year. So far.

Yeah, I know.  It's only January 4th.  But this is one killer headline that reveberates in so many different directions.

To the unknown WSJ Editor:  Bravo.

On snow being general.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
~ James Joyce, “The Dead”

James Joyce is most remembered for his pyrotechnical technique — the word plays, the language creation, the ability to intricately plot the criss-crossing of three lives, Stephen, Molly, and Bloom, as they skip back and forth between myth and reality.

Long have I been an acolyte.  Many are the rites I have performed.  I climbed the Martello Tower at Sandymount, just outside Dublin, breathless not from the climb but from the view of the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea.  I found my way through a warren of streets to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, where Ulysses was first published.  I made the pilgrimage to Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.
 
And yet, in the end, it is this passage from “The Dead” — poetic and not pyrotechnic — that is my most powerful Joycean memory.

I read it first almost forty years ago — tender and callow, then — and it seeped into my subconscious.  Each year, with the first snowfall, it comes back to me in a mood of melancholy.  And each year the resonances, like arcing spirals in a Bach solo cello suite, keep building on each other.

I used to wonder how Joyce wrote such a work in his late 20s.  I’ve given up trying to figure that out, chalking it up to genius.

This year, I see its intersection with the Nativity story.  Actually, it is the flip side.  Quietly, somewhere in the night, upon all of us, hope is falling gently. 

Do you see what I see?

Sometimes grace arrives in your pocket.

I was in a meeting yesterday afternoon when my phone began to vibrate in my pocket.  (If you're laughing now, go to the back of the room.)  

I took my phone out to shut off the vibration.  And there, on the screen, was a text with just four short words:

"clean bill of health"

The message was from a good friend of mine who had cancer surgery last week.  All of a sudden, the day changed.  Life was good and sweet again, for the nonce.  (A word seldom overused.)  

We often ask why bad things hppen to good people.  Yesterday, I was left with wondering why good things happen to good people.