Floating In The Swamp

Kicked Out Of the Airplane

I posted about mudlarking in our psyches a couple of months ago and since then have been wallowing in my personal “mud”. It is often up to my neck and soon to cover my head. I am still on shaky ground, tiptoeing and trying not to flail or grab at cattails to keep from being overcome. Perhaps the best thing to do is to relax, float on my back, and allow the mud to hold me up while waiting for lotus flowers to blossom. That is difficult for this over-responsible eldest daughter. My inclination is to sink down feet first, find the bottom, and slog my way out, screeching all the while. The problem is, there ain’t no bottom in this swamp and screeching disturbs the frogs.

Roshi and I were in dokusan when the metaphorical rug was yanked out from under me. There was a sudden shift in perspective that felt like a switch clicking in my brain. I am not sure what triggered it. I don’t remember Roshi saying anything apart from our usual conversations. This meeting was like all the others we have had through the years, yet all creation looks and feels different from what I am accustomed to. As I felt it happen, a stray thought flitted by. “Here we go,” said my internal chatterbox. “It’s going to be interesting to see how life changes now.”

There are various descriptions of such an event. I wondered about calling it a psychotic break, yet a friend reminded me it was more like a psychic unmooring. I have been flapping around, resisting change and uncertainty, grasping and struggling to stay in the familiar grooves my mind runs in. Everything has been thrown onto the burn pile, yet I still have to keep myself sheltered and fed. I have deep connections with others that I want to continue to honor. How I approach the circumstances of my everyday life is changing, although it may not look like it to someone who does not know me well.

Roshi says the flailing and struggling is because my ego is resisting the change in outlook. She often quotes Chogyam Trungpa’s description of enlightenment.

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”

I hesitate to use traditional Zen terms to describe the experience. It feels presumptuous to do so and I am not fluent in Japanese. Do you remember the old toy, Silly Putty? My psyche is like the sticky pink stuff and ingrained habits are like the dark streaks of ink in it when we transferred images from comic books.

Peace, calm, and equanimity come at a cost, that of understanding how much the need to control shapes our lives and how much we depend on fantasy and delusion. In Zen practice, we learn to recognize the stories we tell ourselves and how much we ruminate in order to escape reality. We learn to tell the difference between truth and fantasy and how subtle our egos can be in challenging new insights. We have to give up the habit of creating fantasies to self-soothe. We have to recognize that all we have is the present moment, which is subject to change, sometimes in unexpected and dramatic ways which overwhelm the natural, subtle, and daily changes we tend not to notice.

I don’t know if I can describe my experience as stepping out of an airplane. It felt more like I was pushed out of the cargo bay and landed in a swamp. Roshi describes the effect of meditation as allowing muddy water to settle so we can see clearly. I am surrounded by something ancient and primal, of being carried along as a small part of a larger thing regardless of whether I choose to be. I suppose my next task will be to sprout wings and learn to glide rather than splashing around in the mud. Maybe the mud is really the atmosphere and at heart we are all amphibians.

I wonder if this moment of insight is what I have aimed for after all these years on the cushion and I don’t recognize it. I thought it would be more blissful. Silly me. I just wanted to manage my suffering. When I told her about it, Roshi just shrugged and moved the conversation along, refusing to feed the drama or to encourage me to cling to the fast dissolving fantasy I was turning the episode into.

It’s an unfamiliar perception that will take some adaptations. I can’t quite remember it exactly or recreate it and it would be a waste of time and energy to try, yet my life is shifting. I am still the same old lady living alone in the country with her cats that I have been for the past few years. Now I am floating on top of a symbolic mud puddle, wondering what will happen next as I pop open cans of gushy food for the fur babies. Maybe the next thing will be as mundane as another mole carcass left on the doorstep.

I have tried to adopt such mental habits for a long time, as if I were reading a recipe and checking off steps, measuring ingredients, and inserting my heart into an oven. After a predetermined ding from the timer, there would be something good to eat. Some might call that process cognitive behavioral therapy.

Imagine my surprise to discover that I was not baking a cake. Methinks perhaps that meditation cooks up a variety of desserts and depending on intellect to understand it is like mixing sweet cake batter with the wire brush used to clean a barbeque grill.