Values-aligned living

I ring the Bonshō to the temple residents and the woods just after 6 in the morning. I see the moon in different places in the sky through all its phases. I no longer need a headlamp this early, the purple and blue of the morning just enough to see what is necessary to see. My attention is fixed on the seconds which can’t move any faster or slower than they do, 50 seconds can only be 50 seconds between rings. I hear the crows, the ravens, the quail laughter, an owl, many other unrecognized birds that I hope to become more familiar with. I wake up and go back to sleep again many times through the night and day.

The farmers plant their seeds. A new group of work practice apprentices arrive to ramp up the season. I continue to chop vegetables, make dressings, make soups, make friends. The nerves in my hand have a hard time of it. Tips of the fingers keep going numb, keep me up at night.

We harvest seaweed for the year on “state” land, one of the only places it’s legal to. Kombu and sea lettuce and others I can’t name but can eat. We meet early in the morning and finish before 8, when the tide starts to come in again. I eat straight off the rock, legs in the water. My ancestors harvest with me, singing their island songs.

One of my main goals this year is to read as many books as possible. Not for any particular reason other than the love of reading, to do more than carry books around with me wherever I go without opening them very often. It’s funny — now that I’m not a bookseller as my primary vocation, I’m reading so much more. I don’t think there’s a correlation beyond not having a job that burns me out so much (managing two bookstores for two years for much less than a living wage knocked me out).

A few things are contributing to putting this fire for reading under me — one of which is realizing that the amount of TV I watched in the last 5 years could have added up to reading more than 100 books, which is way less than the number of unread books I have on my bookshelf that I don’t want to leave unread for the rest of my life. And reading and supporting books is a much higher personal value of mine than watching TV; something I’m not even really interested in in theory, but I’ve leaned to automatically when tired, exhausted, under-rested.

It’s now been about 80 days since I’ve watched TV alone. Not that it’s a hard boundary for me, but watching TV alone while living at a Zen Center feels so out of place at the moment, and I know myself enough to know that once I start watching a show, I will fill all of my downtime with that show until I’ve exhausted every episode through long hours of zombie binges. So replacing reading time with TV time has been huge for me. That, and being a bit over 5 months in to drastically limiting social media time (i.e. going back to my boundary of only going on social media when I have a creatively-aligned posting plan, and catching up on messages for about 5-10 minutes).

Also — being on a prescribed medication for the first time in my life for anxiety/depression/pain. I am amazed at my ability to concentrate and direct my full attention to reading when I am not constantly seeking ways to distract myself from my thoughts and pain. My work schedule is also pretty spacious, which I try to intentionally fill with reading and rest time. I work in a Zen kitchen about 5 hours a day 5 days a week, meditate and do ceremonies in community about 2-3 hours a day, and otherwise eat, talk to people, clean and organize, walk around, do recovery stuff, and read. That, for the most part, is what my life is looking like these days. I am very happy about it.

If Wandering Stars made me a Tommy Orange fan, There There made me want to be a cult follower. More Tommy Orange please. For everyone. Require it.

First poetry book read for National Poetry Month and 15th book read this year. Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poetry is brilliant, a mosaic of impressions, real. Definitely a poetry book I’ll need to revisit and keep chewing on.

Some favorite lines:

“everything we know of duty, we made up”

“a ten pound weight on your shoulders can kill you
if applied the american way”

“Waves do everything except rewind“

“The first white man invented the first flagpole

while inspired by the first hole he ever put in a human being“

“We are cheap people and therefore always gambling
World history has a proletariat when the lights come back on—“

“Warlords, run”

Since my 33rd birthday in September, my daily reflection routine has included prayer, a gratitude and powerlessness journaling exercise, and two daily readers. I have a firm boundary about not looking at anything on the internet, including email, before I complete this routine, even if I don’t get to it all until the afternoon. Connecting to God, to my body, to my in-person space before connecting to the online world.

Since New Year’s Day, I’ve been reading Ashley Hetherington’s The Joy of the In-Between: 100 Devotions for Trusting God In Your Waiting Season as one of my daily readers. Accessibly written and deeply hopeful, Hetherington uses modern, real life examples to apply God’s promises to our everyday day lives. Starting each day with this devotional, I felt inspired and reminded of my faith that I’m exactly where I need to be, even and especially when it doesn’t look like where I thought I would be or where everyone else seems to be. Or where others expect me to be! I can’t force things I thought would happen by now as a 33 year old wahine — marriage, kids, a thriving career, a home of my own with a family of my own — the things we’re taught to hope for growing up. I still want these things in my life, but less desperately than I used to — I hold the hopes more loosely and turn over the outcomes to God’s will and timeline. There are no guarantees, and that’s okay. I am on the path I’m meant to be on, and when I’m not, God redirects me.

This book is full of insight, bridging seemingly small daily matters to the wisdom and joy of God’s work in us. I very much recommend this warm, simple devotional.

Mystics and Zen Masters by Thomas Merton, Trappist (Catholic) monk who also wrote extensively about Zen, explores the mystical and monastic traditions of a variety of Christian and Eastern religions. I wouldn’t classify this as an introductory book — there were many references and terms without explanation that I did not understand at all — though I learned a lot about the histories of Zen and Christian monasticism across denominations and orders, and what each religion stands to learn from the other. There are also some viewpoints in several chapters I would definitely not endorse, but this book was worth chewing on, especially as a person of Christian faith who is currently a student and work apprentice of Soto Zen.