Episode Details

Our attention is a precious resource. We use it all the time, and so, might forget what a resource it is. Contemplative traditions throughout the ages recognized the preciousness of attention. And also recognized that if we don’t put in the effort to train our attention, our attention may get hijacked, scattered, frittered away by the thieves of time or thoughts of worry, disappointment, greed and hatred.

With the election news blaring right now. It might feel easier then ever for attention to get hijacked in doom-scrolling, anxieties about the future, worries and fear.

It is an on-going practice to notice where our attention is being pulled, and to remember that we have choice about what we are attending to. To remember that attending to joy, compassion, equanimity and loving kindness awaken these qualities in our own hearts and in the world.

The intellect can only get us so far, as individuals and as a species. We have other resources and capacities that are under-valued in our capitalist society, but are life-affirming and necessary for our wellbeing. Qualities like spaciousness, presence, clear-seeing, compassion for others, curiosity and play allow us to connect beyond our differences in views and even across species-lines. These qualities potentiate other ways of showing up for ourselves, others and the world—ways of being that empower us to companion uncertainty and awaken to our inter-connectedness.

About a thousand years ago, a Zen teacher named Yunmen said to their community:

Within heaven and earth, through space and time, there is a jewel, hidden inside the mountain of form. Pick up a lamp and go into the Buddha Hall, take the triple gate and bring it on the lamp.

In Zen, we call statements like this koans. Words or phrases that can’t be understood with our intellects alone but require a different kind of attention and inquiry. Koans like this, invite us in to ways of seeing that are as multifaceted as this jewel. They invite us into their world, a world of possibility—a world that is right here, inside this one that we are already living. So if you can for a moment, slip below the apparent linearity of time—into the present—and conjure for a moment—MOUNTAIN.

Maybe you live by a mountain. Maybe you have only seen pictures of them. Maybe at some point in your life you backpacked or camped or hiked on a mountain. Mountains have presence. To view a mountain, even an image of one can often invoke a sense of inner stillness, a sense of awe or even majesty.

In the summer at great vow we would often study the Mountains and Rivers Sutra by Dogen Zenji. In it Dogen says:

Mountains possess complete virtue with nothing lacking. They are always safely rooted yet constantly moving. You should study the meaning of always moving. You should study the green mountains. Just because the movement of mountains is not like the movement of human beings, do not doubt that it exists.

We would practice sitting like a mountain. My teacher Chozen Roshi said, “If you sit like a mountain everyday for a month, it will change you.” What is it like to sit as a mountain. To sit in your completeness, to sit as though nothing were lacking. To be both safely rooted, connected to the earth, woven into the landscape, deeply connected to yourself as ecotone, as ecology, as a network of being—in constant movement, yet so Here.

Mountain practice reminds us that we too are emplaced. Whether you live by mountains, or in the valley, or on the prairie, plains, forest, desert, coast—we are always emplaced. In a network of relations. In this city of sirens and heavy exhaust—a cardinal sings, a bright yellow finch bathes in the neighbors gutter, edible mushrooms grow in the metro park, walnut trees dine with paw-paws creating a ceaseless canopy near the rushing river, where a doe cleans her new born babe, whose fur is covered in white spots, legs still wobbly.