Gone and not gone...

Gone and not gone:
Like a wave that reached the shore.

Where did the wave go?
Did it go anywhere at all?

The ocean moves and waves are born
Life dances and we are danced into being.

You are dancing still.




February 28, 2012
(In memory of the bodhisattvas known as Mom and Dad)

The ocean is in every drop...

The ocean is in every drop - the moon as well

Bowing, I find my father
Chanting, I hold my mother
Sitting, the world is my chair

Then the bell rings:

TON!

TON!

TON!

Hands palm to palm,
Universe bows to universe
Buddha gets up and walks.


February 28, 2012

A Day In The Life*

*Originally posted on Treeleaf as part of the "A day in the life" discussion thread.

Online Zen practice: sitting with the virtual timer

Yesterday was only the fourth time I ever participated in a zazenkai - and only the second time with Treeleaf. I got up at 5:30 to prepare for joining the zazenkai. Clicked PLAY several times to no avail. So I decided to do the whole thing without the video. The prostrations forced me to be mindful (than I usually am) of timing my breaths while chanting the Heart Sutra - those prostrations are a potential workout! Great for the legs. Anyway, I fumbled my way through the dedication of merit. Then I sat seiza on my wife's Minnie Mouse footstool. I figured I'd be sitting for longer than usual so I opted for seiza on the footstool instead of my usual burmese on the throw pillow. Really maddening zazen  . Couldn't resist sneaking  a few glances at the clock.  Thoughts like "when is the g##dd@mn bell gonna ring?!"  kept popping up as I felt my legs go to sleep. I swear if they were people they'd be snoring loudly and drooling.  

My personal virtual altar: a series of pictures played in a slideshow, constantly transforming: Buddha, Manjushri, Kannon, a lotus flower.

The bell sounded for the last time and I put my hands together with a sigh of relief. Part of me wanted to throw my hands up and say "YES!" But I managed to maintain my composure as befits a student of the Enlightened Way  and settled instead for a bow. Very slowly got up with a lot of groaning as my legs started to wake up and complain. Turned around, recited the Verse of Atonement and Bodhisattva Vows just as my son made his way downstairs and stared curiously at his "Dada".  So much for the zazenkai. 


As for the rest of the day:


Made breakfast. Went through the usual chores. My wife and I decided to bring our son to the mall, which had an indoor playground. We got there and he dashed straight to the bookstore hoping he could convince us to buy him a new Thomas the Tank Engine book. Spent some time there but finally brought him out despite his protests. He soon forgot it as he realized we were bringing him to the playground. Less than a minute later, I was telling him to apologize for pushing a smaller kid out of the way and he was refusing. Finally I said, "You say 'sorry' or we're going home right now!" We went home of course.

Later in the house I scolded him again - this time using my patented REALLY SCARY DEMON-DEFEATING DADA VOICE™  - for hitting us repeatedly with a hard wooden building block. Shifted to gentle Kannon mode after a few minutes.

I come from a somewhat well-to-do and prominent family, and grew up in a huge compound that consisted of 3 houses (my brother's, sister's, and my parents') and a large multi-purpose open-air pavilion for common use. My wife and I stay in a house outside the compound, but ever since my parents died, we've been regularly eating meals together with my siblings, nephews and nieces in the pavilion. It's our common area. I often joke that we ought to name the place Switzerland. Anyway, that's where we had our lunch.
I play in a band led by my brother's life partner. We were booked to perform in a music festival back to back with another band in a nearby city. The city of Tagum was kind enough to lend us a bus, which arrived at 1 pm. We said our goodbyes to the family, got our stuff and boarded the bus with the rest of the band. We picked up the second band and traveled to Tagum. Got there around 3, set up our instruments and waited. 

Soundcheck

The set-up

We couldn't do the soundcheck immediately because there was an ongoing program in the performance area so we had to wait until that was done. I walked around taking pictures. 

Tagum City Hall

Me backstage about to go out and perform

The new and still unfinished city hall (which was the performance venue) is HUUUUUGE! Apparently the local government decided they wanted all the government offices in one place, unlike in Davao City where City Hall, Bureau of Immigration, Hall of Justice, etc. are all over the city. 


Finally it was showtime. 


We played for about an hour, dismantled and packed up our equipment, and waited for the second band to finish. There was a tent city outside with booths selling food and drinks so I headed there and treated myself to beer (just two!).

The second band finished and packed up, then we all went home to Davao City. I arrived in my house past two in the morning. It was raining. I tiptoed silently upstairs, took a shower, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. I woke up this morning past seven (usually I wake up around 5:30), got up, went downstairs. A few minutes later and I was bowing to my altar.


I chanted the Heart Sutra: "Kan ji zai bo satsu jin ma ka han nya ha ra mi ta ji..."


Hands together.  I bowed.  Sat down.


The bell rang. Once. Twice. A third time: 

Hands together.  Bowed.

I sat.  Legs in Burmese position, hands in Cosmic Mudra.  I sat.


Thoughts coming and going, eyelids drooping.  I sat.  


Mind wandering, coming back.  Wandering again. Coming back again.  I sat.  


Discomfort in the hips.  I sat.


Impatience ripping through me.  I sat. 


I sat zazen.  Zazen sat me.  Who was this "I"?  Just the sitting.  Just Zazen.

Sound of the bell. Once. A second time:

Hands together, I bowed.  I stood up and bowed to my cushion.  I turned around.  Then:

"Kanzeon namu butsu..."


I bowed to the altar just as my wife came down the stairs.  We greeted each other with a kiss and embrace, chatted briefly.  She headed to the kitchen.  I returned my focus to my altar and finish with the Four Vows of the Bodhisattva:

"To save all sentient beings though beings numberless

To transform all delusions though delusions inexhaustible

To perceive reality though reality is boundless

To attain the enlightened way, a way non-attainable."

Life is our temple!

Being Okay With Not Being Okay

Taigu over at Treeleaf wrote a moving post recently (click here for the full text):

"Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes life is a real bitch...

In this situation, no need to dress it up and make it cheerful. No need to flee and avoid the problem. We are all invited to participate with joy to this, because it is the very nature of life, fleeting, changing, fragile, the very nature of what is given to us, sooner or later taken back. In front of this, we invite the unknown, throwing body and mind into it, trusting a process beyond thoughts, feelings and fears...

What a remarkable way to live! Leaping into the unknown, life and death merged and both totally transcended. Every single moment is an opportunity for all of us to exactly do that, that this body of thirty, fourty, fifty years and a few days and throw it into the amazing unknown reality...

Nothing left, no traces, no shadow. Just the taste of what is as it is. That's our way to live, far from the hopes and consolations found in so many religions and belief systems.

Life sucks and it is OK!"

Life sucks, and it's okay.  No really, it is okay.  My parents died last year.  That sucked - and it's okay.  I cried so hard and so often last year.  And that's okay.  

It's not that I'm numb, or that I don't care - I'm not numb and I do care.  What Taigu so eloquently pointed out, and what I'm trying to get across here is that it's okay to not be okay.  If life sucks, that's life!  If I'm not okay and I just feel like screaming that's okay too!  It's not that I'm denying the "suckiness" (apparently there's no such word according to my Mac, but you know what I mean) of life - I'm just embracing it.  

It's so easy to talk about being present and "in the moment", so easy to talk about the "beauty of life" when everything's going well.  So easy to be at peace and talk about having inner peace when everything is peaceful.  But what happens when everything is not going well, when all around is so not peaceful, when all hell seems to be breaking loose?  It's easy to meditate when everything's quiet and no one is there to disturb you - but can you "meditate on the battlefield" so to speak?

But in Zen, we embrace all of life: its beauty and ugliness, its wonderfulness and "suckiness".   We bring the Zen practice from the cushion to the whole of life, and we embrace life just as it is - even as we're trying to make it better, and even when it sucks.  We learn to be okay with both being okay and being not okay.

Osashiburi desu!

Hey guys, what's up?  Haven't blogged in ages.  That's because a lot of stuff went on in the past few months: Mom's death, finals, deadlines, writing part one of my thesis, revising part one of my thesis, and so on and so forth.  So anyway, it's been two months now and I thought I'd post some updates here:

We're now in our final module of the Masters in Development Management program.  Part one of the thesis is over and done with, now we have to come up with part two by Monday, then there will be revisions, plus two more advisory defense sessions, then final revisions and printing.  But that's not all.  We also have our electives to deal with - and the challenge facing me now is how to manage the conflicting schedules.  I actually have all my absences planned - as in, "On Monday I'll be absent in this class so I can attend this class".  Man why couldn't they have given us the schedules ahead of time so we could better choose what electives to take up?

Anyway, that's not the most interesting thing about school.  The most interesting thing was that last September 9, the entire class flew to Indonesia for the Center for Development Management's first ever International Field Trip.  We spent a week there visiting various project sites with our learning teams, taking lots of pictures and videos, interviewing the locals (with the help of our Indonesian classmates of course), and writing our reports.  Then we flew back to Manila and spent the next week going to classes and finalizing both the written reports and the Powerpoint presentations.  Then we presented to the whole class and our professors.  I stitched together some of the best pictures and clips of our team and made a movie, which you'll see below.

Anyway, I have to clean my apartment and write part two of my thesis so I'll end it here.  More updates to follow soon.  Bye for now! :)

Eulogy Part Two

Note: This is the second time this year that I've written a eulogy.  The first was for my father.  This one's for my mother.

Let me start by sharing with you a MaFe moment.

By now you’ve already heard and exchanged countless MaFe moments: true stories with our beloved MaFe as the protagonist, stories so funny and so many that they have become the stuff of legend, meant to be orally passed on from generation to generation.  And earlier tonight we all heard there’s gonna be a book coming out.  So: from oral tradition to written tradition.  It’s gonna be our sacred scripture.  I can just imagine our descendants many years from now going, “A reading from the Book of MaFe, Chapter One, Verse 29.”  Okay I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I know we’ve all had our share of funny and embarrassing moments, but for some reason nothing beats a MaFe moment.

Of course not all MaFe moments were hilarious.  A few of them were quite profound.  The story I’m about to share is one such MaFe moment:

I was twelve years old at that time, and Dad had just scolded me.  Mom came to me and talked to me.  She asked me how I felt and I answered that I felt bad.  She responded by gently asking: “Then why don’t you cry?”

You see I grew up with the notion that boys didn’t cry.  Very young boys were excused from this rule, but after a certain point a boy did not cry - ever.  Crying was a sign of weakness, and weakness was not allowed in men.  Men were strong, not weak.  Boys aspired to be men; ergo, boys aspired to be strong, not weak.  Ergo boys didn’t cry.  At the very least if they did, they tried their best not to.  I got this message from just about everyone around me at that time: classmates, other kids, even grownups. 

“Don’t cry!  You’re a boy.”

“Bakla ka ba?  Huwag kang umiyak.  Babae at bakla lang ang umiiyak.”

So before she asked me that question I didn’t cry.  I didn’t even struggle to keep myself from crying.  I was a boy determined to be a man.  I wanted to take Dad’s scolding like a man.  And when she asked me that question that was the only time that the tears formed in my eyes and began to fall.

With that simple question Mom challenged a dysfunctional idea and showed me a new one: it’s okay to cry.  It’s okay even for men and boys to shed tears.  Tears signify weakness, but they also signify humility and honesty – because nobody is strong all the time, and it takes humility and honesty to acknowledge that.  Ironically, this becomes real strength.

Looking back now I realize that there is more to that lesson, a deeper lesson: the lesson of having an open heart.  When you are willing to shed tears, to be vulnerable and weak, then your heart opens up.  And what are the benefits of having an open heart?  Well, an open heart is the biggest container.  It can contain as much love and as much life as we are willing to welcome. 

The open heart is so big it’s not even right to say, “I have an open heart.”  Rather, it is more appropriate to say, “I dwell in the open heart.”  Just look at Mom’s life.  Look at how she lived.  She lived in the open heart and let everyone inside.  Look at everyone here.  We were all let inside MaFe’s open heart.  In my case, it took me a few years before I could call her my mother, but she called me her son almost immediately – that was the open heart in action.  The late Corazon Aquino called Mom “Santa Fe.”  She certainly earned that title.

At this point allow me to digress for a little bit to talk about karma.  There are two popular definitions of karma: one is fate or predetermined destiny; the other is that it is a form of divine reward or punishment (gaba in our dialect).  But the original meaning is neither of these definitions.  The original definition is action.  Karma is the Sanskrit word for action.  When we refer to a person’s karma, we are not talking about that person’s fate or divine reward or punishment – we are talking about her actions.  Now actions cannot really be separated from consequences.  Drop a pebble into a pond and it creates ripples – it is impossible to drop a pebble into a pond without creating even one ripple.  That’s how inseparable actions are from consequences.  And that is what karma really is: it is the pebble dropping and creating – and it is the ripples being created and radiating outwards.

Mom’s karma, her pebbles and ripples, are still with us.  In a sense, she is alive in them.  She is alive in the gardens she cared for, alive in the songs she wrote, alive in Quile, her masterpiece.  And look around you now: she is alive in us.  Alive in the children she helped Dad to raise.  Alive in our laughter and smiles.  Alive in our tears.  Alive in our kisses and embraces.  Alive in our memories.  Alive in every MaFe moment that we never tire of telling and remembering.  Look around you: do you see her pebbles?  Do you see her ripples?  That’s MaFe right there.

Let us now go back to MaFe’s lesson of the open heart: when we live in the open heart, we are never alone.  MaFe is there, along with everybody we love. 

May we all live in the open heart.

Mom's Death

Originally posted in Treeleaf.


Just as an update:

As I posted here about two months ago my mother was sick of cancer. We converted one room in my parents' house into a hospital room, complete with the necessary medical equipment and a team of doctors and nurses. One of the doctors happened to be married to an older cousin of mine so there was a mix of professionalism and personal care.

Last week my wife called me to say that Mom was in a coma. I asked her if I should go back home (I'd been flying back and forth between Manila and Davao every weekend for the past several weeks, and I'd just got back in Manila the night before). She said she didn't know but that she would call me later that night then we'd decide. After a couple of hours she called back and said that Mom had woken up. So we figured I'd stick to the original plan, which was to fly in on Thursday evening and stay there until Sunday. But then later my sister called and told me I'd better come home immediately. According to the doctor, Mom was going to slip in and out of the comatose state, and each time it was going to be deeper and deeper until she wouldn't wake up anymore. So I took the afternoon flight to Davao on Tuesday. I spent the next few days spending time with my Mom, holding her hand, talking to her. 

The doctor said she could hear us even in the coma state so we would whisper in her ear. Sometimes we'd sing to her. One time I recited the Metta prayer in her ear. Several times I chanted - once in her ear and other times while holding her hand. Many times I just sat there holding her hand, stroking her hair, looking into her barely-open eyes (when she was awake). Mostly I told her I loved her and thanked her for being my mother, and that I didn't want her to suffer anymore so while nobody wanted her to die, we all didn't want her to hold on for our sake. 

On Saturday night the doctors told us she would likely die in the early morning. So we spent the night there waiting. In the early morning we gathered around her. I was already chanting with my juzu, when my aunt told everyone in the room that this was a sacred moment and got everyone to pray. Picture this: you have a room full of Catholics praying the prayers for the dying, many of them clutching rosaries and prayer books, and there's my wife and I holding our juzu and I'm chanting the Nembutsu. And somehow it all fit. There was no division in my mind between Catholic and Buddhist, between the rosaries with crosses on them and the rosary in my hand, between what they were praying and what I was chanting. On one level, there was me, wife, my family, and there was my mom on her deathbed. At the same time, there was only chanting, only praying, only watching, only dying. All-at-once. It was like listening to an orchestra - different instruments making different sounds yet all in harmony. There was the sound of my mother's struggle to breathe, the whirr of the machines, the beeps of the monitor, our voices. There was her heart rate on the monitor dropping gradually from fifty beats per minute. Finally, she stopped breathing. The monitor still registered her heart rate as 22 beats per minute - but that was just her pacemaker. Her heart had finally stopped.

_/|\_

Rafael