Everyday Zen - Norman's Blogs

August 24, 2005
By Norman Fischer \| 8/24/2005 @ 6:25 am
From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 49 Aug 3, 2005 Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach More on Berlin. The Communist memorials and monuments have quite a different, non-Disney, non-glitzy, feel. In the Municipal area, near Potsdammerplatz, there's a copper-fronted Bauhaus-style building that used to be the central headquarters of the city government of East Berlin- anyway some official Communist building. It's now abandoned and widely considered a blight on the cityscape, though from a distance (close up one can see it's full of graffiti and damage) it looks Ok to me. It was built on the site of an old palace the Communists had destroyed, out with the old in with the new. Now there's the reverse movement, to destroy the Communist building and rebuild- at tremendous expense- the palace. Someone's raising the money to do this. In the Tiergarten there's a war memorial built and maintained by the Russians to commemorate their war contribution. This thing is a marvel — quite over the top, heroic and romantic beyond belief. A long rolling vista in the middle of the park, tree lined, at the end of which is a huge bronze statue of a muscular great-coated Russian soldier holding a child in his arms as he tramples a swastika (or something like it) underfoot. At the opposite end of the vista — a very long distance away — is a statue of a pathetic and pleading mother. On left and right, about half way down the vista, are identical facing Russian soldiers, bearing arms and kneeling reverentially in front of massive triangular stone monoliths that stand sentinel over the space. The whole seemingly constructed to create a sense of awe at the power of the state to protect and ennoble. Elsewhere in the Eastern sector of town is Marx and Engels Square. I liked this place for its modesty. It seems to be infrequently visited and not to be well kept up. Some small hedges, some grass, a few flowers. Statue of Marx, again in the heavy, somber, Communist style, seated, with his hands resting on his knees, Engles standing to his left. Big open circular space, again with monoliths — polished steel this time rather than stone- and etched into the monoliths photos of various workers' revolts. Back to the Municiple area near Pottsdammerplatz: a more recent German war memorial. An old palace, like a temple. You enter one room, a simple space with a stone floor, stones arranged in concentric circles. In the middle of the room one simple life size statue, just there on the floor, not on a raised platform, in bronze, of a sort of realistic peita, a hooded and enduring grieving but very solid and sturdy peasant mother holding on her lap a crumpled lifeless grown son. Very eloquent simple and moving piece that a few people at a time enter to view and silently photograph, as we did. Towering over the city wherever you look is another noteworthy Communist icon, a huge radio tower (forget the name). Built by East Berlin in I think the 1970's as an assertion of its technical superiority over the West (a superiority it never had but constantly emphasized). Soaring up in a needle, a very dumb faux space-age shape insinuating itself high over the city. Just below the needle an indoor observation deck. Kathie really wanted to go there, kept photographing this tower from various places in the city, and this time we did wait an hour or so to get into the restaurant, where we had very bad coffee and cake, the service was also quite bad. As we sat there at sunset marveling at the view of the city we had a sense of vertigo, as if something were moving slowly around us. It turned out we were moving, the platform on which the tables stood slowly, very slowly, rotating, so that in about a half hour it made a 360 degree circuit enabling you to see the full panorama of the city in all directions, lights slowing coming on as darkness fell. Also quite near Pottsdammerplatz we encountered an odd public sculptural piece — it occupies a huge city block. Who would give a single artist this much expensive real estate and why? It's 1500 or 2000 monoliths (again this German affinity for the monolith) arranged in rows. But no two of the monoliths are alike, they vary in height from a few inches, as you enter from the main street, to eight feet or so; they also vary in the angle as which they are set into the ground, so that looking down a long row of them you see the shapes leaning subtly this way or that, all askew. And the aisles or avenues are not level — they dip and rise, so that walking among the monoliths you're sometimes enclosed deeply within them (they tower over your head, canyon-like) sometimes come up to a rise, and can easily look over the top. Every now and then you encounter another person appearing suddenly out of nowhere, coming across the aisle — appearing then swallowed up in the forest of monoliths and suddenly gone. Only on visiting the second time did we realize what this is — the controversial Holocaust memorial to the Jews. Only in a far corner, as we later found it, is there any indication of this — there's a small kiosk for buying tickets, and a staircase to an underground exhibition space that we never entered, content to experience the memorial as an odd wonderful lonely and disturbing unnamed enigmatic journey.

August 19, 2005
By Norman Fischer \| 8/19/2005 @ 10:24 am
From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 49 Aug 3, 2005 Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach To Berlin. Ottmar picked us up at the Bahnhof and took us to our hotel, located on the Spree (river that snakes through the city), a nice, new place, in a quiet — nearly a dead — section of town, but very spiffy. For several days we were tourists, walking here and there, seeing the sights, marveling at the cityscapes. We went at first through the Tiergarten to the Reichstag and to Pottsdammerplatz, the famous architectural wonder of the new, unified, Berlin. Reichstag's located in a large park, has been refurbished (and, in the late 80's or 90's, famous wrapped by Christo, to mark its reopening as Germany's new/old symbol of state) and fit with a space age glass dome on top, designed by the British architect Norman Foster. There's a perpetual queue into the building, for going up into the dome, which seems to be spectacular inside, a long spiral staircase going up and round and round, but we did not want to wait in line for this. Pottsdammerplatz is quite spectacular, especially in its vistas, seen from afar, heroic, not heroic, post-modern boxes and squares, conceived of by the world's finest architects, with some sort of indoor-outdoor mall that's got, I don't know what, some kind of cloth or metal fabric-like awning overhead held down by heavy cords, so that you see the sky but don't have to get rained on. I was wanting to see this place, but in the end it's just - like so much else that's built nowadays, as the cutting edge Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus tells us - all about shopping, a mall, and indeed we went inside to peruse the three full floors of exclusive shops, pretty much the same as you'd find in San Francisco or New York (though of course different, European, odd how differences between the various glitzy shopping areas in major cities all over the world end up amounting to something that feels very much the same, wherever you are, whatever language is spoken — all so exciting in its newness and at the same time comforting in its familiarity). Kathie was not impressed and we did not spend much time here. There was an odd graffiti-splotched ("Ich bin ein terroristir" scrawled under black stencil of Rosa Luxemburg's head) piece of sculpture on the street in front of the Platz — an eight or ten foot high piece of concrete wall, with a curved footing jutted out three or four feet at the bottom. This, as we figured, was a slab from the Berlin Wall. Many sculptures like it here and there around the city — one close to our hotel, without graffiti, looking swank and finished, with a polished metal tube across the top holding together two or three of the large slabs. When Ottmar took us several days later for a bike ride around the town, we went to a place where the Wall still stands, which is now made into an outdoor art gallery, full of interesting graffiti work I took several photos of. The Wall in this section follows along the Spree, where much sand has been dumped, to make a series of "theme" beaches. The one where we happened to be was a reggae beach, with people coming and going in reggae-appropriate outfits, looking quite blissfully stoned out. Everywhere in Berlin is constant living evidence of the War's bombing (the city's constantly being built, even now, cranes everywhere) and of the Wall's having come down, so people are constantly mindful of these events, and seem not yet to be tired of the tourist's questions, which always reference them. In general this seems true of Europe: how the past, as witness, bears down always on the present, in the shape of churches, monuments, ruins, etc. In America, especially in California, this isn't at all so. It's all about today, maybe tomorrow, but yesterday doesn't exist, except as Disneyland. In fact though the influence of Disneyland is pervasive, and even in Europe the past begins gradually to take on a fantasy quality, to be made profitable, and quaint. Still, the death and horror that has clearly been a feature of the past is still hard, at this stage, to ignore or cover up, though the attempt is certainly being made.

August 16, 2005
By Norman Fischer \| 8/16/2005 @ 4:24 am
From Abbot's Journal Vol 49 July 30, 2005 Muir Beach Mid-June did a workshop with Jack Himmelstein at Harvard. It was one of three workshops running Monday evening through Friday morning, on the general theme of working with conflict, combining conflict-resolution skills with contemplative disciplines that might help make the employment of those skills more effective. This event followed the first experiment in such a combination, done last summer, under the auspices of HNII, the Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative, Erica Fox's program, which is a subset of the Harvard Program on Negotiation. She'd invited Jack to teach this summer, and asked him to invite a spiritual teacher, and he invited me. We'd had several meetings about how we'd go about doing this event- which neither of us had ever done before - a full integration of meditation practice with Jack and Gary's (Gary Friedman, Jack's teaching partner) model for mediation training for lawyers. But it still wasn't clear in my mind as we began the workshop. We had 27 participants. More or less what we did was begin each session with meditation, including some guidance from me, then I'd say a few words about the relationship between meditation and the ability to make actual, sympathetic, contact with the parties in a negotiation, and to be flexible enough to let go of preconceptions, so that solutions and connections could emerge. Then we'd go on to Jack's explanation of the mediation process, and from there do some role plays to enact the techniques he'd described. The first day seemed a little mechanical to me, and the people in the workshop complained that we weren't sufficiently integrating the contemplative element into the process of the training — which was I think true and to a large extent my fault, because I'd been hanging back, giving the lead to Jack, not knowing exactly how to fit into what he was doing (and shy to take any authority in the mediation aspects of the work: so many experienced mediators in the group and what do I actually know about mediation?) To straighten this out Jack and I had to have meetings in all the breaks and during all the meals, but somehow we did straighten it out, and by the second day we seem to have corrected whatever imbalances there had been, and people were more or less satisfied. There was a later moment in the workshop that was decisive, one of those group-dynamics satoris that sometimes, if not always, happens during the course of a multiple-day training. A month later, I can't remember now exactly what it was, but someone stopped things dead in their tracks, suggesting that we were off, the workshop not going as it should, that we needed to change course with what we were doing, hard to tell whether some, many, or no one at all shared this view, hard to figure out how to find that out, so I responded by asking people to deal with this question right now in dyads (discussion in groups of two, for about five minutes) which then opened and changed the atmosphere so that it seemed as if the problem opened up and dissolved. Jack and I were able to show that we actually understood and appreciated the concern, were not resisting it, took several comments from people, and then went on. This was taken to be a real life demonstration of what we had been trying to teach all along: that when you actually listen to someone and understand their concerns, and are truly willing, reasonably, and with regard for all, and for the process, to take them into account fully, then people will trust the process, and will be willing to be flexible. We'd been saying this, and trying to show how to do it in the role plays, but here, in just a few moments, we were able to demonstrate it — and to show that the arising and expression of conflict can become an opportunity for a deeper understanding and connection if you don't freeze up and get defensive. The program ended with a concluding presentation, which all three groups attended, that featured Roger Fisher, the founder of the Negotiation Project. Roger'd come back from World War II, an optimistic can-do type of that generation of privileged American white Christian males (think FDR), genteel, hard-working, honest — he'd come back to find that his good friends from college, his gang, had all been killed in the War. "Surely there's a better way to deal with conflict than this," he thought, and, just like that, within a few years (after working as an administrator for the Marshall Plan, and then later arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, he had many amusing things to say about how he'd tailor his arguments, often contradictorily, for each Justice) had been invited to join the law faculty at Harvard, his alma mater, where he began to invite anyone he could find from anywhere in the world who knew about negotiation to come and share their knowledge. Out of this series of meetings and conferences the Harvard Program on Negotiation was born. Roger's book, "Getting to Yes," which I'd read years ago, continues to be a best seller, year after year. Eighty years old now, and, according to Erica, only intermittently mentally sharp, he was, on this day, charming, energetic, lucid, and full of yarns about famous and important negotiations he'd been involved with over the years. The burden of most of his stories was simple: that if you are honest and interested in others, make face to face contact, and have a spirit that problems can be solved, they will be. As they were, for instance, in the famous case, at the end of the 1970's, of the Iran hostage crisis, negotiated at the 11th hour, just before Reagan, who'd announced he would not negotiate, assumed office as President. At a crucial moment, with time running out, Roger calls Iran and is told that the person he needs to talk to is in a meeting and the secretary to whom Roger is speaking has been told she is not to interrupt the meeting under any circumstances. "Is there anyone else in the office with you? Roger asks. "Yes, a janitor." "Send him in," Roger says. "That way you will not be disobeying orders." Roger also told the story of how he urged the presidents of Peru and Uruguay to simply sit down and talk to one another in an effort to settle their long-standing border dispute. This was not an easy thing to do. Finally he managed to have them photographed, sitting side by side, not facing each other but looking together at a document, in a symbolic gesture of cooperation and mutually working out a solution. And how that photo, which appeared prominently in newspapers around the world, had led to a popular desire for and expectation of solutions, which in the end actually did produce solutions. Another tale had Roger somewhere in an Arab country to do some workshops and trainings toward solving some crisis or another. But on his arrival in the country the schedule of events was abruptly cancelled. Rather then getting upset and returning home, Roger somehow contrived (and some of his contrivances in this regard were truly astounding) to meet for an hour with the head of the country- simply a social meeting. Roger did not bring up the issue. He simply asked the man about his life, his family, his goals and desires for his country. As the conversation warmed Roger finally asked, "Why did you suddenly cancel our plans? After we'd agreed on them, come all this way?" The man answered, "because I did not know you." "How could you not know me?" Roger had asked, incredulous. "You've read my books, you know my track record, reputation, and methods, read the memo I wrote on your particular situation — all that I'd submitted before coming." "Yes, but I hadn't touched you, hadn't heard your voice," the man said. The workshops and meeting were then reinstated. All of us were moved by Roger's presence, tall and lanky, and with a beaming smile, and felt inspired to be involved with the work he'd so effectively begun and practiced for so long.

August 11, 2005
By Norman Fischer \| 8/11/2005 @ 10:13 am
From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 49 July 5, 2005 Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach This morning we arrived at Frankfort airport, which, it was suggested by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Liernhard Valentin, our German publisher, who picked us up there, is the largest airport in the world. Is this true? In any case, it is very large. The parking lot — this I have never seen before — is in the form of an endless corridor, one can't see the end of it in either direction. Along the corridor are doorways, numbered and lettered, that lead to parking areas. We drove through the countryside to Benedictushof, Willegas Jager's new retreat center, where our event was to be held, unpacked our gear in the small, neat, white room to which we were assigned, and rested for a while in advance of the beginning of the retreat that evening after supper (having had no sleep on the plane the night before, and having lost nine hours across the time zones. I always dread the jetlag, but on this trip, it wasn't so bad). Jon and I had done no planning whatsoever for the retreat, which had a vague generic title like "Spirituality and Everyday Life." There were 110 people, the maximum number Benedictushof will accommodate, many of them in the medical profession, students or otherwise fans of Jon's work. (I always joke that for some odd reason when I appear with Jon I am much more popular than usual. A similar phenomenon on the poetry side when I appear with Gary Snyder. It's hard to explain). We did the event entirely in English, but there was a clutch of people in a corner who were getting simultaneous translation. Mostly it seemed that we were well understood. That first night Jon showed his gorilla film, in which people dressed in white, other people dressed in black, pass a basketball around. Viewers are instructed to watch the basketball and to count the number of times the ball is passed between the players dressed in white. In fact while this is going on a man dressed in a gorilla suit (which is black) comes onto the set, beats his chest, and walks off. But no one watching the film sees this, so intent are they on watching the white players pass the ball, and on being successful in their counting, that they literally do not see something as odd and as obvious as the presence of a gorilla on the scene! This illustrates very convincingly how our desire and our usual focus on achieving our ends makes us literally unaware of what's going on, literally unable to see what's unfolding right before our eyes. After the initial run through of the film it's shown again, after the presence of the gorilla is revealed, and of course this time people see the gorilla, and are amazed and astonished. And so the point is made: can we cultivate awareness, and must'nt we, don't we absolutely need to, in order to live our lives as they actually are rather than as we wish they were? As Jon and I have often discussed, I have (and he sees my point) some small discomfort with this notion of awareness, in that it makes awareness sound more concrete and objective a function than it actually is, and that this objectifying of awareness, making it into a skill you can systematically develop, has the downside of bringing up performance and perfectionistic issues. In fact awareness is more subtle and mysterious than the literal ability to notice something. It's more open and panoramic a phenomenon than that. Still, for Jon's project, the promotion of awareness as a secular and scientific reality, independent of any religious matrix, the film is perfect. Our retreat consisted of long sessions of sitting for a while, then talking for a much longer while, usually in dialog with the participants. I was alert enough to be a full participant but not alert enough to much remember anything that was said. Jon did most of the talking. People were there to hear him, and he's a very good talker, inspiring and full of information. I find it most interesting when he gives scientific information (which however I always forget soon after I hear it) and least when he talks dharma. For me the challenge was to stay alert and awake (staving off the jetlag) as he spoke and to find unobtrusive and natural ways to enter the conversation that were supportive and consonant with what he was saying, yet at the same time added something new that was useful. This wasn't so easy to do, and I wondered how successful I was at it, but Kathie, who attended a few of the sessions, said they were OK, and Jon seemed to enjoy my input, and said several times that he enjoyed teaching with me. We harmonized well. It was a pleasure to meet Willegas again, after so many years (I'd met him briefly at Green Gulch in the late 1980's). He's a Benedictine monk who'd lived many years in Japan, where he studied with Yamada Koun, Bob Aitkin's teacher. Received transmission and came home to Europe twenty or more years ago to establish a large network of groups and centers that practice classical Japanese koan Zen and/or what he calls "Christian Contemplation," which is more or less what Alan (Rabbi Alan Lew) and I do with our Jewish Meditation, that is, apply zazen to the Jewish context. Willegas is over 80, a very upright, dignified, and severe person, somewhat withdrawn now, as one gets in old age when one develops a hearing problem. Staying more within one's self, within the sphere of one's life's-built-up set of ideas and attitudes, and only occasionally able to receive some input from the outside, and that always in the light of one's inner dialog. Still, he's quite kind and loving, a "national treasure" sort of person, worthy of great honor and love — which I certainly felt for him, one of our great elders, a person to be thankful for. He invited us one evening to have a glass of wine with him in his quarters, which we did, and got to enjoy further his charming smile that's quite bright and genuine. I hope to return to Benedictushof sometime and meet him again. His story's interesting. After operating for many years out of his Benedictine House in Wurtzburg (he had been given permission to use half the large establishment - now housing only a few monks — for his activities) he's recently been silenced by the Church. What happened was this: Wurtzburg is a very Catholic, a very conservative, town. Though Willegas had had no trouble with the authorities in Rome, the local people disapproved of him. They sent letters of protest to Rome full of partial or distorted quotations from Willegas's public talks, which they regularly attended. Finally the authorities felt they had no choice but to respond by silencing him (Ratzinger in charge of Church doctrinal purity). This meant the withdrawal of permission to use the House. Local authorities happily took it over, including with it all Willegas' various possessions and treasures accumulated over the years, hoping to continue to run it on their own as a retreat center, but, according to Willegas, this has not been successful. Now Willegas was left with the problem of how to continue. Ultimately he decided to leave the House and strike off on his own, where or how he did not know, setting forth like, he said, Abraham, entering an unknown land far from his father's house, with only his faith and courage to support him. Three days after announcing publicly that he was going to do this a woman came forward and offered to buy for him an abandoned 8th Century monastery located in a village a half hour away. She did purchase the place, a ruin, and added an additional 5 million Euros to renovate. This is Benedictushof, quite new and lovely, simple and unadorned, with plenty of space, elegantly put together, with, in places, behind glass, architectural elements of the original building showing through. I did not ask Willegas how, silenced, he is able to continue to teach, but he says he is still a Benedictine, still a member of the Church in good standing.