Zen?

 

As will be apparent to all who are actually Zen practitioners or students of Eastern (and Western-adopted) religion, I use “Zen” in a loosely metaphorical, lazy, even, way. 

While I have probably used it in this way at least since reading Pirsig, I best recall using it as I trod water awaiting the perfect wave with my handboard, or “pod,” out with the boardriders at NSW’s Diggers Camp. There I laconically taught myself to be still (paddling legs excepted). The wave would come in its own time, its kairos. Sometimes I would catch it. Sometimes I wouldn’t. Time was its own Lord and that was okay.

This crazy excursion I am currently engaging with is a far more harsh exploration of time. I think I grew to love the wide open spaces of Australia because even a narcissist like me (though I prefer the term “solipsist”, and use it with a sense of, I hope, self-deprecation), even a narcissist like me cannot help but feel infinitesimally small and vulnerable here in this vast and harsh land.

A different harshness to that other land I have adopted as home. But vastness speaks most loudly to me, or even most silently, to me, surrounded by those lone and level sands that Shelley knew so well (albeit from elsewhere). Out here on the great harsh Red Western Isle all self-importance disintegrates. I become dust that to dust shall return.

Stillness and vulnerability and silence ... these speak so clearly in the desert. But they can also be found in the city, and there is great paradox. 

Years ago in the Diocese of Melbourne I assisted wise and creative minds as they ran a programme called “Finding God in the City.” An action-reflection programme based around work amongst the urban poor, around a schedule not of Zen but of Christian monastic liturgy, a programme that set out to do what its title indicates.

Right here, right now, my challenge is not to be overcome by the awareness of the. Creator Redeemer, Holy-maker in the harsh inescapable vastness of the Outback, nor even in the in-ya-face flotsam and jetsam of the Inner-City, but in the ’burbs, where most of western society lays down its head to sleep.

There is little romantic about suburban streets, the helter-skelter of endless traffic, the same-same of house after house, lawns kempt or unkempt, and endless noise of tyres on tarmac. Eliot “had not realised death had undone so many” as he or his persona observed ceaseless pedestrian commuters crossing London Bridge. “Death” in that famous line was the living death of un-life. 

Here in the downtime of an obstreperous car fault, I see that same living death that is the potential of all living.

Swish. Swish. Swish. 

Honk-honk-roar-squeal. 

I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date. 

With what? Accountant? Window fixer, plastic bag supplier, blocked toilet? “I had not realised death had undone so many.” Yet it is who we are and what we are as we survive the dash (to borrow a paradoxically profound cliché) from womb to tomb (equally a paradoxically profound cliché).

So: finding God in suburbia, forced to be still not in the Outback where the pressure of divine presence is all but inescapable( if I so choose or am graced) to interpret the universe that way, but amidst the haste and turmoil where that same presence is all but undiscernible. Honk-honk-roar-squeal. 

I yearn for the road again. But for now I must await the right wave, la bonne vague, as the French may or may not say. It will come. Or will not come.

Spring is springing in the Adelaide ’burbs. Blossoms are blossoming. Hence the very un-Outback picture.

Today I venture out without thermals (too much information perhaps?) For the first time since March. Tomorrow the sun will come up either naked or behind clouds and it will be another day.

Tomorrow the car goes to the mechanic. Sometime soon I may or may not reach out and beyond Parachilna to the vastness once again.