Shrimp Season

Blackies parking lot on a Saturday morning is hopping from 5 am onward into the night. When I arrive in the summertime for dawn patrol at 5:30 am, it is difficult to find a parking spot. The fish market is open and there is already a line halfway down the lot. People leave with bags of fish, sea urchin, octopus, and shrimp freshly caught by the latest people in a long line of fisherfolk who have been working near this pier since at least 1888. The Dory Fish Market is notable as the last beachside fishing cooperative in the United States. You can't get fresher fish anywhere else in the country unless it comes off your own hook.

By 6 am, the surfers arrive. We are a motley crew: waxing boards, chatting, securing fins, and squeezing into wetsuits. The parking lot is the new night club as we all get out of the water when the lifeguards put up the blackball flag around 9 or 10 am, clearing the ocean of surfers in favor of the tourists. Blackies is a beginner-friendly break and it's not great for the local economy when a kook surfer can't control their board and takes out a tourist trying to swim in the same waves surfers are surfing. So Blackies is blackballed by 10 in the summer.

By 9 or 10, the tourists are arriving in droves, trolling for our parking spaces, seeing a great deal of exposed flesh as we all awkwardly peel the wetsuits from our bodies and dry our nether regions in full view of cars full of inlanders coming to the beach for the day. We often don't give up our spaces; many of us actually have signs made to hang on our uplifted trunk lids that say "Not leaving" to let the passers by know that this space is unavailable. We have more socializing to do. Sometimes we stay for breakfast at Charlie's Chili or grab a donut from the best donut shop ever, get a Super Panga taco or burrito, or stop by the bakery for an almond croissant or bear claw. On Sundays, there is a glorious farmer's market.

Summer tourists colonize the beach from around 10 am to sunset, bringing carts full of beach equipment to set up elaborate camps, often disappointed by the blanket of fog we call the marine layer, then those people who come for the night life appear. I have been caught in as much traffic in that parking lot at 10 pm as I have been at 10 am. Once, I went back late to see the bioluminescence that sometimes appears in the water. Never again. The bars are heaving with locals and college students home for the summer, blaring music so loud the fish can hear it in the deep underwater canyon off shore. Perhaps that's why the fish are so easy to catch: they've been stunned into submission by a bass line and a kick drum. This is the rhythm of a summer day at Blackies.

There are also annual rhythms. Summer is super busy and fall, called Local Summer, is peaceful, but often still crowded with locals. Winter is mostly empty, and so is spring, really. Waves are often big in the winter and water is really cold in the spring. The best time of year to surf is in the fall; October is my favorite month. The marine layer, so common in summer time, clears out and I am reminded that Catalina Island exists, protecting our little break from the giant 20-30 foot waves that might crash against our beach if it wasn't there. Shrimp season goes from February to October; lobster season from October to March. We see dolphins all the time, but the whales come through at different times depending on the species: Gray Whales in winter and spring, and Blues and Humpbacks in summer and fall. These are the natural rhythms of the world here in SoCal and we work with them.

On the way to the loo the other day, I heard the weather report on someone's car radio, and the movie Groundhog Day came to mind. For decades, this same changing of the guard has happened in this parking lot. These same cycles have played out over and over again. Circles endlessly spinning, endless and beginningless. It struck me that I have lived my life in a line. Most of my life has been spent achieving things in linear time, largely prompted by school and the way we socialize ourselves. The years proceed in linear fashion: K-12 school, then college, then grad school, then job, then married, then children...goals get made and achieved and it feels linear. One straight line from birth to death. We're on a journey and it has a beginning at birth and an end at death, and there are signposts to mark the passage of time in between: graduations, weddings, baby showers, and funerals. When really, life is lived in cycles.

When I was in San Simeon this summer, I stopped to see the Elephant Seals. I wondered for how many hundreds of years these elephant seals had been coming to San Simeon. Different individual seals, obviously, but the cycle endures. In a very practical way, this means I can let go of goals. If we are all really living in circles, then there is no real end goal, only another round of the wheel of life. It might be easy for me to say this, here at 57. I've already achieved everything I need to achieve, so this goal orientation might be easier for me let go. There is a much different use of my agency now that I am not using it to ACHIEVE.

I can see this in meditation. At first, I was very goal oriented; there was a checklist and an expected outcome. Focus on the breath. Relax the body. Notice thoughts. Let them pass. Return to the breath. The expected outcome was stillness or emptying the mind. The ultimate outcome was enlightenment, whatever that is. Now I just sit and see what happens. Bare witness. Epstein writes detailed directions for meditation in the Zen of the Therapy, and settling into your body, finding your anchor, noticing the breath, noticing sensations, and noticing when your mind wanders is part one. He then says, "In part two, you let in the rest of your experience. Rather than focusing on the breath as the central object, pay attention in the same way to whatever is most obvious, most dominant, in your field of awareness. It might be outer sensations like the sounds of the water, the wind, or the birds, or it might be inner sensations in the body or thoughts or feelings. But let them stream through you, noticing when you attach or hold on or start to get caught up and then releasing yourself from whatever it is that has held you. You can toggle back and forth, foreground and background, between the breath and the rest of your experience. When it gets too complex or difficult to follow, come back to the breath. Let yourself play around. But first and foremost, notice how things are always shifting, always changing. Allow yourself to feel the flow of your own experience.”

In the Anukampa course, Gil Fronsdal wrote, "Initially the practitioner provides the momentum for the practice through deliberate effort. This may require strong dedication to overcoming attachments that derail the practice. As the practice matures, however, the practitioner no longer generates the momentum through personal effort; instead, the momentum shifts to a different source. This is similar to a bicyclist who stops pedaling and coasts downhill, with gravity providing the momentum. When the momentum of practice becomes strong enough, the practitioner's role shifts from creating the momentum to skillfully flowing in it." So at first, I was putting in a great deal effort, and now perhaps I am more often settling into the flow of practice. My agency is used for relaxing and allowing, not forcing anything, not working to achieve something.

Fronsdal likened it to surfing a wave, "A surfer does not 'catch' a wave by sitting on the board and watching it approach; in that case, the surfer would remain 'waterbound.' When a good wave appears, the surfer turns the board toward the shore and paddles hard enough to match the speed of the wave, so that they are picked up by the approaching wave. Once they are on the wave, the paddling stops. A different kind of effort is needed now: the surfer must stand balanced on the board, guiding it by responding to the momentum of the wave. While the surfer no longer paddles, staying balanced requires a different kind of focus. If the surfer becomes self-conscious, it becomes difficult to stay balanced, as their attention is divided between surfing and self-concern." I can vouch -- staring self-consciously at my feet guarantees a fall. I need to look ahead and feel the wave, feel my body on the wave, and allow my body to make its natural adjustments. I am much more successful when I can let go of my cognitive management of this activity and let my body take over. It knows what to do.

As my autonomy and equanimity grow, I become aware of this flow, these natural rhythms, on a very deep, embodied level. In surfing, we have no choice but to align with the natural conditions -- surfing is a partnership between me and the wave. Alignment is the point. In life, I have felt separate from this flow, didn't know it existed. Now, a greater sense of equanimity reveals that I am part of these natural rhythms, too, and that realization allows a greater relaxing into it. Pink sings with her daughter in Cover Me in Sunshine, "Tell me that the world's been spinning since the beginning and everything will be alright." The world exists and endures without my intervention or input. What a relief. I use my agency to clear out my selfing to allow the natural conditions to flow through me.

Things often resolve themselves; I don't need to fix anything, really. I have struggled a lot with autonomy and agency, not knowing what is mine to do and not to do. I have pushed hard to achieve and perfect for ego's sake. There has been a lot of forward-leaning progress, pushing, grasping, clinging. When I sit to meditate, I actually lean forward until at some point my body leans itself back, as if to say, "You can relax here, honey. We're here to relax." Nothing starts until I relax. I can sit more comfortably when I am centered on my spine, shoulders back to let the air into my lungs, and my hands rest easily in my lap: physically, my bones are aligned. I am learning a new way to be: letting things go, aligning with the flow of experience, not doing so much but allowing. There is no end goal, no achievement to be made, just experiencing each moment of this existence as it is, both darkness and light. I am able to be in the moment more often now. That trip north really changed something internally that is allowing this equanimity to hang around. Within this equanimity, I am seeing in new ways.

The movie Groundhog Day really sums up well the machinations and circuitous routes the mind takes to acceptance, enjoyment, and meaning in the every day. In the film, this evolution to acceptance goes through many phases: fear, anarchy, manipulation, boredom, fantasy, feigned interest, despair, then finally real interest in an object worthy of attention: true love and authenticity. Self-realization and acknowledgment of flaws. Showing real vulnerability, and admiring values and virtues -- the subjectivity of the loved one, no longer objectifying her. Finally arriving at genuine delight and joy in everything around him, and suffering with the inevitability of death.

Another transcendent rhythm: the cycle of the spiritual path. The boon at the end of this journey is that every experience, every life is valuable, and we only have the warmth of each other to hold us when it gets cold. As Roshi Joan wrote, "...not attached, yet intimate." Jack Kornfield wrote, "In these challenging times we’re being asked to see the world in a more timeless way, to live from a wisdom and reality of love that is vast. As we open the space of seeing anew, with willingness and courage, we find what Zorba the Greek called 'the whole catastrophe.' We see the magnificence of life, and we feel the ocean of tears. We hold the immense beauty, and we are touched by the great tragedy of it. We realize that this is the reality of human incarnation."

Jack quotes James Baldwin, "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." Then Jack writes, "This is an entirely different meaning of love than one based in personal gratification. It’s a willingness to show up for this life fully with awareness, attention, courage, and love. You can learn to trust. In spiritual opening periodically you will die. Remember, at some unknown point in the future, you’re physical body is going to die anyway. We know that, we’ve all seen the statistics, and the mortuary’s waiting for you, I promise you. But as you progress down the spiritual path, you will welcome obstacles and learn to surrender and meet it all with love. Each of the 'little deaths' will open you further. Until all is witnessed by timeless consciousness, the reality that you are."

The reality that you are. Buddhism has quite a different reality of ourselves than what I previously was led to believe. Impermanent. Interconnected. Empty. No self. The teaching of "causes and conditions" and dependent arising shows us the truth of interconnection: nothing exists alone. Everything leans on something else. The tourists can't park until the surfers leave. The fisherfolk depend on the fish, but also on the tourists to buy their fish. The gray whales eat the shrimp. Interdependence is alive and well at Blackies. A beautiful article in Tricycle said, "So I started to think, we can’t say we’re so all important because we’re part of this bigger system. So we can’t really get bloated about our accomplishments. At the same time, we can’t say we’re insignificant either because we are part of the nature of infinite contingencies, and everything we do has reverberating effects. This is a very sensitive system, and we are citizens of this system of contingencies. So we’re not really big—we can’t be. We’re not so important. And yet we’re not insignificant. Can you really say who you are, because things are multidimensional and it all depends? We are part of this bigger system. This gives us a lot of information about how to move about the world—and we’re not separate from it."

I am part of the world, an integral piece of the whole. Centered within it. Alan Watts said, "You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here." I am here now. I am here. I am fully in my body experiencing the world as a fully ordained citizen of it. Feeling substantial, worthy, willing to be seen for the first time. No longer dissociating myself out of existence, my body is a partner in my being. I have weight and heft. Yet, there is an insubstantiality to this existence as well. I don't have to hold it tightly, cling to hardened notions of my permanent being or sense of self. I am continually changing with experience, so any notions of a Self can be tempered with the knowledge that what I think today might change dramatically tomorrow.

I am a process not a thing, as BTG said once. Leigh Brasington said in a course on dependent origination that everything on earth is phenomena, but "...phenomena sounds too much like a noun. So I changed it to processes to get the verb nature of it, because everything is changing all the time. And Joseph Goldstein said, 'You should think of yourself as a verb, not a noun because you're a bunch of processes, you're a circulatory process, an endocrine process, digestive process, breathing process.' So I'm actually a collection of processes rather than a thing. And then I started looking around and realized everything was a process, there really aren't any nouns. It's just that some verbs move kind of slow, and we think they're nouns. But everything is changing, and so it's so many processes impacting us, the processes are changing, and the intersection which I call me, is changing all the time as well." If everything is changing all of the time, then who am I? I don't need to cling so much to crusty ideas about myself. I can loosen up and allow these processes to... well, process.

I'm learning that there just isn't that much to do, per se, on any given day. Shrimp Season comes every year. The whales come and go, as do the tourists. There are natural rhythms to the world. We can align with them peacefully and then notice that most things just take care of themselves. Kornfield reminds me, "...there are bigger forces than we can imagine—bigger than politics, bigger than climate change, and bigger than AI. Despite the enormity of those issues, they’re trivial in comparison to the forces of the turning of the seasons, and the renewal of life. As Pablo Neruda says, 'You can pick all the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.' This is a mysterious, great force. It’s something we’re asked to remember—to quiet ourselves, to align ourselves, and then, of course, to act."

Connecting deeply to these forces is strange. They have a life of their own. After a lifetime of working to achieve, relaxing is just weird. Just like surfing, I sit on my board in the water and wait for a wave to come. There is lots of waiting. My action is minimal. Lots of things float by in the interim, and I decide how to engage with them. Cool little fish, pelicans, dolphins further out to sea, the currents bring all kinds of stuff into the water. I know this is an obvious metaphor for how life works, but it's news to me. That I do not have to work so much or so hard to MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. That things just happen, that the world just turns, and I can align with these forces and see what happens, acting only when I love something or feel compelled out of love, is revolutionary. Fronsdal shows me the way, "The transition to flow can happen with almost any activity that we become absorbed in, not only in practicing the Dharma. However, in Dharma practice there is a notable shift when non-clinging is no longer something we must do, but something that naturally happens without our interference. While learning to let go is invaluable, there comes a time when actively letting go is no longer necessary. Instead, we simply "let things be," and the current of release flows without obstruction. We then live with a momentum that moves us toward greater inner freedom, one that is not dependent on things we cannot change."

James Hollis wrote, "“The Self is the embodiment of the totality of the life of the organism. It is the architect of wholeness. What is monitoring your biological equilibrium as you read these lines? What moves your emotional and mental responses? What provides constancy when consciousness is distracted or asleep? A larger presence, which we all intuited when we were children and then lost contact with, moves and directs the total organism toward survival, growth, development, and meaning. Who we think we are is only a limited function of the ego, that thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul. Given the ego’s tendency to try to solidify what is in flux, it is better to think of the Self as a verb than as a noun. The Self selves; it is always selving, even when, to the ego’s consternation, it moves us toward our own mortal ends.”

In Opening the Hand of Thought, Uchiyama Roshi wrote, “Whether we realize it or not we are always living out life that is connected to everything in the universe. But when I say that, I’m not talking about someone else’s life, or life in general separate from myself. The life that runs through everything in the universe is me. I don’t mean me as an ego, I mean my self in the true sense, the universal self. It is the foundation of all life experiences. Eihei Dōgen Zenji referred to the reality of life in this sense as jinissai jiko, or 'the self that extends through everything in the universe.' This self is not some fixed body, it’s constantly changing. Every time we take a breath we’re changing. Our consciousness is always changing, too. All the chemical and physical processes in our body are also constantly changing. And yet, everything temporarily takes a form. This is our true self, jiko. This is the real or universal self, or the reality of life, as I prefer to call it.... I can’t stress enough how essential it is to look very, very carefully at this universal self that runs through everything in the universe. You live together with your world. Only when you thoroughly understand this will everything in the world settle as the self pervading all things. As Buddhists, this is our vow or life direction. We vow to save all sentient beings so that this self may become even more itself. This is the direction we continuously face. Shakyamuni Buddha said it this way: 'All worlds are my world and all sentient beings—people, things, and situations—are my children.' Dōgen Zenji’s expression rōshin, nurturing mind or attitude, came out of this. My way of expressing this is 'everything I encounter is my life'—deau tokoro waga seimei.”

There is something bigger at play here in this world. I am only beginning to touch it, but it has to do with flow, with allowing, with embracing everything I encounter as my life: fish and seaweed, whales and people, and thoughts and emotions. Francis Weller wrote, "I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow."

Mark Epstein wrote something similar quoting John Cage, "I think that life is marvelously complex and that no matter what we do there’s room to be irritated. I don’t think we ever arrive at the stillness that we imagine. I love the story of the Zen monk who said, ‘Now that I’m enlightened, I’m just as miserable as ever.’ And, in a beautiful description of his version of inner peace, he said, 'I began to understand that a sober and quiet mind is one in which the ego does not obstruct the fluency of the things that come in through our senses and up through our dreams. Our business in life is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.'" Epstein continued, "When I met Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Ram Dass and learned about mindfulness, they completely rearranged my orientation. Be open to everything, they counseled. Learn how to give loving attention to your whole experience. Open yourself, even to those aspects you would rather do away with. Cultivate equanimity rather than searching for the next peak experience.” Fluency, flow, agency means aligning with it.

I'm riding the waves these days. Different waves than before. A deep undercurrent of energy flows through me. I can sense it only when I'm cleared out of delusions for the moment and can deeply relax. Lama Rod writes, "Often, I can feel the world pulsating with love, radiating this warm sensual energy that I register as an invitation for me to consent to being accepted and cared for. I want to fall into this experience of trusting the care, but this is challenging because it always reminds me that I am self-identified with the constriction of pain rather than the space that love is. Because we survive so much violence, pain is more familiar, and it feels much more like home than the freedom of connecting to love." So this energy of love is new. I can instantly trust it, feel its inherent trustworthiness, but I cannot always hang in there with it. I'm constantly returning to delusion and pain, so need to keep moving through the pain to get free. Welcome everything, even the pain. It's how you get free.

Reflecting on the hero’s journey and its relationship to life, Campbell writes in Pathways to Bliss, "What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss." The Cloud of Unknowing says, "God...he's not asking for your help. He's asking for you. Lock your eyes on him and leave him alone to work in you."

Epstein tells me to follow my desire: it is the yearning for transcendence and, if "harnessed correctly can awaken and liberate the mind." When I follow what I love, I find flow states quite easily. As I have quoted before, Gil Fronsdal said, "The deeper we go into body-mind states, flow states appear and they take over. We don't have to do it. Who is doing the spiritual path? Our self and then, at some point, surrender, grace, something else is there that we tap into.... Over time, we become an instrument. The dharma is practicing us. We are trusting some deeper process of healing, opening, liberating. You can't really say it's me. We show up and something else takes over."

In the Anukampa program, Gil Fronsdal spoke about the "field of generosity." Generosity exists as a field, it is not a linear give and take, but a three- or four-dimensional space we step into. I feel like this is another important realization. When I was younger, I saw generosity, or any of the other wholesome qualities like love, as ego-driven -- everything was all about me, what I got and didn't get. It was a one-way street driving into me or not, but one way. All children are little narcissists, so this is normal. Development then leads us to a place of recognizing the other, and things like love and generosity go both ways. But with me, I learned they were transactional. Love was conditional, and generosity was give and take: I do this for you and you do this for me. A two-way street, but still somehow limited to this trading of resources. Now, I'm walking in this field of abundance, that generosity, love, compassion, joy are unlimited and swirling all around us at all times. A vast field -- like a magnetic field or aura -- in which we are simultaneously, endlessly, givers and receivers -- we are conduits, points of light, in this vast network of love and generosity. Like a radio station transmitting waves, these signals are running through us all the time. Timeless and abundant. I am less me and more a container and transmitter of all of this light. My agency is used to clear out this container so I can conduct this energy more effectively.

There is no time and no self. There are only these timeless processes, and I am one of those timeless processes. I am constantly opening and unfolding in the present moment. The world is also unfolding in a flow, in constant motion. And me and the world, we connect as we are falling through the air, traveling together. Epstein wrote, "...a continual unfolding, a succession of meeting places at the contact boundaries of experience." Ego has no intrinsic, permanent identity. I can be more open when I embrace the unfolding nature of everything. He writes, "A healthy ego initiates, approaches, makes contact, and dissolves, only to begin the cycle again. A disturbed ego gets in its own way and interferes with healthy contact, perpetuating its own reality at the expense of the interaction."

Tapping into this loving energy is quite something. Like the fisherfolk at the Dory Market, I can only seem to snag this flowy existence one small moment at a time on a little hook. Instead of thinking of myself as the fisherman snagging something on a hook, I am better off thinking of myself as the Blackies' parking lot -- an endless flow of life passing through me. A hook is too small and grasping. My ability to be a channel for this mysterious flowy energy is growing -- my ability to relax into the feeling is growing. I am a more substantial container now and I can fill it with whatever I choose. There is an ease about this feeling, an openness. Like driving in a car through a dark tunnel, the experience of coming out in to the light: open, spacious, luminous. Aligned on this road, this path, with a feeling of freedom. It's amazing.