Retrospective: Part II

Family got covid in late January, which completely derailed my idea for writing more on this blog. But we are fine now. I think sometimes it's necessary in some way to maybe document for people how covid went , but I don't think that's necessary here. We got sick, and it was a sort of strange sickness (I felt very weird - Emily had buzzing or vibrations in her body after the initial fever and cough, etc), but beyond that we're okay now. 

So this is a return to what I wanted to write about before, which was a retrospective on my writing life so far. The first retrospective ended with the notion that I developed a writing style that arose from the practice of meditation (Zazen). I began to understand that I wasn't experiencing reality, but that I was constantly experiencing my thinking mind. Or my emotions. And while thought and emotion are "real," they're also just an aspect of consciousness. In any case, I wrote stories with long, winding sentences, meant to mimic the vast hallways of thought and emotion I encountered in my own mind, lost in that labyrinth of thinking. Then, over time, as my mind settled more and more, I began to see other ways to write. 

One of the things I noticed after practicing meditation for a long time (over ten years now) was that I was distanced from the physical world. Or, maybe better put: I chose moments to be in the physical world, and moments to be in my mind, and mostly, my life was lived inside my skull. Practicing zazen brought me back into my body (mind and body not two), back into the physical world, and back into a relationship with nature. Because of this, my thinking contained more "gaps," more empty spaces, and I began to sense how nature moved, which was different than how my thinking mind, so immersed in a certain form of culture and intellectual activity, moved. It was slower. So, I began to consciously write toward this slower place. My sentences became shorter. I began to write in sections. And finally, I began to write directly about zen practice rather than indirectly, which was what my previous books had done. The book that came out of this is The Oxherding Pictures, which is based on a famous Buddhist text of the same name, depicting the stages of practice that a practitioner moves through (though these stages aren't neatly linear). I began to understand that I didn't need to live in the wilderness (a fantasy I had engendered in myself for years) to encounter wildness - it was right there, to some degree. The rhythm of the natural world became more apparent - I began to garden, to pay attention to birds and learn their names and songs, to pay attention to trees, to see where they grew and why and learn who they were. They began to seem like people. Then I started to see people in a new way: they were personalities, like always, and biological entities, but they were all also me. In everyone I began to see myself, though not the "Alan" of myself. There was some other recognition there. And in talking to almost anyone, it began to seem as though I was speaking to a being deeper inside them and also right on the surface waiting to be spoken to. So I began to write from this place in which it was clear to me that I was only me because of the people and world I had encountered, and the same was true for everyone else, and thus everyone was both biologically, organically, connected, but also psychologically intertwined. There seemed to not be a bunch of individual minds, but one large mind to experience and live inside. This changed my writing style to one that was slower, more physical, and based in gaps and imagery, rather than a style based in tracking how an individual mind works - I don't view one style as better than the other, just different, and each valuable. 

Such is the place I am with writing currently, and I'm looking forward to whatever new evolution occurs next.