Chelsea, August 2007

Our sudden chilly weather produced a beautiful day yesterday, so I went on a photo expedition to a very productive area in Chelsea, where I found tons of great street art and took lots of photos. I augmented that with brunch at The Dish on Eighth Avenue, one of the gayest restaurants in the gayest neighborhoods in NYC. I chowed down on buckwheat pancakes and finished “Buddha or Bust,” and of course kept an eye on all the guys.

Last night I watched “High Noon,” with Gary Cooper. What a terrific movie! Very fast-paced and easy to watch. I love an old Western, and this one features Grace Kelly (a very unlikely casting choice for a Western) and an alluring actress named Katy Jurado, who brought a kind of haughty brilliance to her role as Cooper's Mexican ex. It was a bit sobering to realize that almost everyone in “High Noon,” made in 1952, is dead now.

W. 36th Street, August 2007

While the South swelters in unnaturally hot temperatures, we’re having a cold snap, if you can believe it. Yesterday it rained and rained, and when the storms finally passed it was in the high 50s! It’s very strange to have the temperature drop 40 degrees in a single day.

I went out with my friend Jan last night to the South Street Seaport and then to the Ritz Carlton at Battery Park, which we’d been told had a bar with a great view. The Seaport area is a little too much like a big mall for my taste -- Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, etc. -- but we did find a nice wine bar called Bin 220 and had some excellent cheese and red wine. Then we went to the Ritz and found the bar depressingly bland, like the food -- but the view was killer. We watched fireworks over the Statue of Liberty. Not sure whose fireworks or why, but they were a fun surprise.


I finally had my day in court yesterday. You may remember that as president of my co-op, I had to testify in a case related to my apartment building. I’d never testified in court before, but it went very smoothly. Examination, cross-examination, witness box, judge in black robe - just like the movies.

Madison Avenue, August 2007

Yesterday I got out my camera again, after not touching it for nearly two weeks. I took it to work and snapped this photo on the way. It was one of those serendipitous shots where I held the camera up and had a great photo almost immediately. LOVE it when that happens.

I'm reading an entertaining book called "Buddha or Bust," by Perry Garfinkel, in which he traces the spread of Buddhism around the world with visits to countries as diverse as India, Poland and Japan. It began as an assignment for National Geographic and Garfinkel expanded it into a book. I'm loving his easy writing style and the subject matter, more focused on cultures and people than a scholarly history of the Buddhist diaspora. A recommended fun read!

W. 40th Street, June 2007

I did try to go to the gym yesterday morning, but when I got there they said the weight room had been flooded by the heavy rains and was closed. That should have been my first indication that this was no ordinary storm.

As I walked to work a little later, I saw hordes of people waiting at bus stops. I overheard one man say into a cell phone that the buses weren't running - but I think he was asking a question, because it turns out that the subways were out, not the buses. Apparently all the rainwater flooded the subway lines. Mass chaos! Pedestrian overload!

My boss, who lives in Brooklyn, couldn't even get to work. And there was also a tornado, which caused some damage in another Brooklyn neighborhood. An eventful Wednesday!

I'm going to try to tackle the gym again this morning. Hope they got out the Wet-Vac.

East Village, July 2007

We’re having quite the rain-and-lightning display this morning. My cat keeps looking at the bright flashes in the window, followed by resonant booming thunder, with great concern. She’s lying on my chest, probably under the illusion that I could protect her from it all.

I was going to go to the gym this morning, but I woke up later than usual and now we’ve got this rain, so I may blow it off. I’ve had a little trouble getting back on schedule after my retreat. I got about four hours of sleep the night before last, and felt like a zombie all day yesterday. Fortunately, last night I made up for it by sleeping nine hours!

Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, July 2006

Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the beginning of practice.

When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and no-understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and no-understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time-being is all the time there is. Grass-being, form-being are both time.

Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.

-- from “Uji - The Time Being,” by Dogen Zenji, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi

Uji, a collection of writings on time and existence by the Zen master Dogen, was the study text for my recent Buddhist retreat. Each day we would take it out and read a few passages aloud while on the cushion, and consider its meaning. Roshi and the senior students gave one talk each day that touched on Uji.

It’s a complicated document, and I can’t begin to really understand it, but Dogen essentially contends that objects and beings are time. I take that to mean the physical manifestations of time, both past and future. One teacher, for example, talked about her genetics as the product of ancestors going back thousands of years - all that time leading up to the present moment and her own existence. I watched a rabbit on the lawn, and thought the same thing: All those thousands of years of rabbits that came before it, trickling down to the present and this one rabbit.

I’m not sure that’s how Dogen meant it, but that’s how it makes the most sense to me. Anyway, I especially liked the passage above.

Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, July 2006

Well, I’ve returned from my retreat, a few pounds lighter and somewhat light-headed. It was, in a word, interesting. Challenging. Definitely not fun.

People often think going on a Zen retreat is like going to a spa. They think you ought to come back all refreshed and glowing, having done lots of yoga and restful contemplation.

It’s nothing like that. A fellow retreat-goer described it yesterday as “controlled insanity,” and that’s about as apt a description as I could come up with. For me, it was about meeting my own mind in its darkest places, seeing my desires, my thought patterns, the ways I try to fake myself out. It was sometimes downright grueling.

We got up at 4:20 every morning and basically sat zazen all day, interspersed with services and ritual meals served traditional oriyoki style - “just enough” food in three small bowls. (Delicious food, by the way.) We were in bed by 9:30 every night. We also had an exercise period, a work period and time for a midday nap.

No reading. No TV, movies, telephones, computers. No escape, in other words. We had a couple of musicians in the group who played for us during a few rare periods of zazen. But mostly, it was just me and myself, facing off across a divide of silence broken only by birdsong and the white-noise sound of the blowing fans.


It was interesting to watch my own practice through the week. When the retreat started, I was all into it, enjoying the quiet, the order and the mindfulness. I could watch the sun on the grass and hear the wind in the trees and really delve into those experiences. My cushion was near an open window, and I often saw wildlife outside the meditation hall: deer, a family of turkeys, a hummingbird, rabbits, a lightning-fast chipmunk.

But extensive meditation is not all pretty. After about six days, I was struggling to retain focus and rebelling inwardly against the same order I’d loved just a few days earlier. My mind was screaming to be released, to pursue its little distractions and habits. It was sending me all sorts of alarm signals: “You’re not getting enough food! You’re going to die here! These people are all crazy! You have to get OUT!”

I also got increasingly irritable. Giving up control, or the illusion of control, was hard and I was grumbly from time to time. (Thankfully it was a silent retreat, so my grumbling was internal!)

And then, of course, the retreat ended and I learned that others were dealing with those same feelings -- the frustration, the annoyances, the challenges of meeting your darkest self. “Controlled insanity,” indeed.

This was the first full 10-day retreat I've done. Would I do it again? If you’d asked me on Friday, I would have said, “Heck no!” But now, from a position of safety in my normal daily routines, I see that all my mind’s empty threats and fears were for naught. I could imagine going again. I certainly learned from it.

Still, it’s good to be home!

I did not take my camera on retreat, so these photos are from the same retreat period last year. I’ve been so attached to the camera in recent months that I thought it was important to get away from it for a while!