Dear Friends,

A book group in our meditation sangha has been reading You Belong by Sebene Selassie. It’s an excellent book, and the second time I have read it.

Right now, my feeling of belonging is challenged as I move through a personal crisis harder than anything I have faced before. When we emerge from this crucible, nothing and no one involved will be the same. There is much uncertainty and sadness, and in the past this would have caused me to feel separate from others. I would have felt I didn’t belong because of it or that I won’t belong if and when my life changes. But I know deep down that I still belong no matter what happens, and here’s a little about how I came to this insight…

I hope you have been enjoying the summer days and have had some time for what Thich Nhat Hanh calls laziness. I made myself laugh pretty hard when, after writing this letter, I looked back at a blog I wrote one year ago and it was almost exactly the same message!

I’m going ahead with this newsletter anyway for three reasons: because I believe we can’t hear often enough the virtues of slowing down and taking time to rest, because I have a few new thoughts about laziness, and because I’m too lazy to write on a new topic.

Years ago, I learned a new way to think about laziness from the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Here’s how he describes what taking a Lazy Day means:

“You may have an idea about the lazy day: Lazy day is a day when I can do what I like to do, but that is not a lazy day. Lazy day is a day when you refrain from doing anything; you resist doing things, because you are used to doing things. It can be a bad habit: if you are not doing anything, you have to die. You cannot bear the thought of doing nothing. It has become a habit. That is why, when you do not do anything, you suffer.”

On June 10, I was honored to receive the dharma lamp transmission at a ceremony at Plum Village France. This ceremony is an encouragement from the community to share the teachings I have received since I first encountered Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1990's.

For the ceremony, I wrote the following "Insight Gatha":

Seeing the skull with teeth in these foggy rainy woods,

I know this wildly free, composting world is mine, is me.

All of us will arrive home together chanting Namo ‘Valo,

Leaving nothing but our love and a few muddy footprints behind.

I wrote this verse based on an experience I had walking in the woods in the Blue Ridge mountains in May. I walk regularly in these woods which are far from any other houses and trails and on which I have seen bear, turkey, deer, and coyote scat. On that particular day, it was pouring rain and quite dark. Roger and Woody, our 20-lb terriers, were running off leash as we passed the abandoned cabin that was once a girl scout camp.

Roger stopped running and became obsessed with sniffing something I couldn't see, so I walked over to investigate. It was the skull (of a deer I believe) with all its teeth still intact. It startled me at first and I called him away from it.

Dear friends,

The three marks of existence are the three concepts that are true for everything. In many Buddhist lineages, the three marks of existence are Impermanence, Non-self, and Dukkha (suffering). In fact, I used this model when writing about the three marks in my book, Things I did When I Was Hangry: every thing is impermanent, nothing has a separate self, and every thing is marked with suffering. (For the Three Marks/Seals of Existence, scroll to the end of the blog.)

Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) disagrees. He says that the three marks are impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (p 20), he says:

It is not difficult to see that a table is impermanent and does not have a self separate from all non-table elements, like wood, sun, furniture maker, and so on. But is it suffering? A table will only make us suffer if we attribute permanence or separateness to it. When we are attached to a certain table, it is not the table that causes us to suffer. It is our attachment…:In several sutras the Buddha taught that nirvana, the joy of completely extinguishing our ideas and concepts, rather than suffering, is one of the Three Dharma Seals.