185 pages in

185 pages into a book about the scandal around the SFZC, and around the abbot's role, Phil Whalen ("I was at least 20 yrs older than almost everyone else in the building") shows up. Philip fled Bolinas ("too many parties") in 1972 to move into the Page Street Zendo. Here's the poet's perspective:

"I didn't ask why Richard was the head of the place. It was simple. It was his. The old man [Suzuki-roshi] had handed it to him. I didn't expect anything of him. Baker couldn't disappoint me. He had it [transmission] from Suzuki-roshi. Isn't that why he and I were both there?"

This is literally the first comment which isn't pulled or tugged by the zen purges, wars, brouhahas and co. that every other of the dozens of interviewees recollect. So I want to say, lets hear it for the sanity of poets, a practice than lets you keep your head even in the midst of bay-boer driven spiritual chaos.

Here's an interesting observation in the same vein: "Jane [Hirshfield] has a deep Buddhism and a deep talent. She was devoted, but she did not give herself over. She didn't have to; she knew how to give herself to her poems"

How much, then, of the scandal and drama (militaristic and otherwise) of our lives is because we are all leaning on each other so heavily with our beliefs and vested interests, that we end up clawing and critiquing - how you don't stand right, how you didn't pay me, how you are misruling your desk/house/businesspolice district/nation. The history of folks turning to spiritual practice is mixed (so is the arts, no?) - to some real extent, the emphasis on communal and community practice - in Buddhist terms, sangha - itself fosters a codependant relation, builds a nest which the instinct is then to augment and guard.

But, through practice of art, some of us manage to find a liberation almost beyond our material situation - couple that with an artless spiritual practice, and you have, well, perhaps an ability to pick your - of course smaller, starker, more discrete, rather than on a monstrous blur of inbred mistakes and sufferings building thickly and quickly one on the next.

Former: I am thinking of Phil Whalen, and also of Stacy Dacheux's responses to Pirooz Kalayeh's interview of her, available on his blog.
Latter: George Bush comes to mind for a start. Most corporations. Most radical activists I know too (that unmistakeable hardening).

So yay for poets, for poetry as a practice, and for those who don't care after money, glamour, power and fame. Now if my job would just give me a raise.