Fervent for My Foyer

The world is a passage back to God, that is the only reason it is here. - Golf in the Kingdom in the Zen Calendar (October 10, 2006).

Day 116. Peak experience! After a 60-mile training ride I was making grits for brunch (what can I say? I live with a Southern man). Five tablespoons of grits to one and a half cups of water. The water was boiling. I measured out the grits. Five perfect tablespoons measured into the water, and the grit carton was perfectly emptied. Symmetry kind of does it for me. This was the peakest of peak experiences because it reminded me so closely of the origins of this phrase in my life - the time the copy machine ran out of paper exactly when the copy job was done. Yes, God is in the details.

The front door of our house in Oklahoma City opens into an enormous foyer. It is about seven feet wide by 25 feet long. My partner thinks it is useless space. I think it is brilliant. I fell in love with the house the moment I stepped into the foyer. It is my favorite space in the whole house. Facing east, the foyer gets lovely morning sunshine, making it exquisite for growing plants. I have nine in there at the moment, lush and green and thriving. It took a while to get the right combination, but presently everyone gets along and is growing like crazy. The view from the foyer looks out on the front lawn, which comprises most of our acre. In the spring and summer, it is deeply green and spattered with several blackjack oaks. The foyer furnishings include my two favorite antiques: an oak secretary displaying beloved African art given by an Algerian friend over the years, and a slender art deco cabinet holding a few sentimental pieces including a carved wooden Buddha from New Orleans. We textured the walls and painted them a one-of-a-kind color resulting from earlier botched attempts to compliment the tile. It matches the hue of the peach color closest to the horizon during exceptional sunsets. Like the rest of the house, all of the hanging pictures feature a bicycle.

During the first couple of years after we bought the house, the foyer was the first thing I looked at in the morning and the last thing I saw before I went to bed. Sometimes, I still make several foyer forays within the same day. I like it there. It calms me and fills me with a peculiar sense of most un-Buddha-like pride. My partner says it serves no purpose whatsoever. I disagree. I think it provides an extremely vital function in the form of transitional space that must be traversed when you enter and exit our home. From the day I first walked across it, I concluded in my bones that all homes should be built with foyers. I think it would solve most, if not all, of what ails us.

The foyer metaphor is this: We don't allow for transitions in our daily living any more. We leap from activity to frenetic activity like stones skipping across a pond surface, barely leaving ripples. The world comes at us too fast to contemplate. We don't sink deep enough into anything to require processing time before we abandon it and vault to the next thing. My foyer provides literal and metaphorical space that must be crossed when I go out into the world and when I return to the safety of home. It represents a buffer zone - transitional space that eases the otherwise abrupt shifts from home to outside back to home again. The foyer buys a little time. When I depart, it says, "Easy does it; take care; prepare a bit before you step out." When I return, the foyer greets me: "Welcome home; you made it back; well done."

My zazen practice has a foyer. It consists of varying levels of consciousness spanning the space between my first mudra breath and deep meditation. The foyer connects the noisy Monkey chattering of my waking brain with the tinges of nothingness and serenity I enter when I sit. Zazen is not a black-and-white experience. For me, the Monkeys don't abruptly stop chattering, nor do I completely emerge from meditation the moment the timer sounds. The concept of easing gently into and out of experience feels right and good to me. I notice things more. In a gradual process, blurriness sharpens to greater clarity. I feel more alert and aware. I can be present and mindful rather than dwelling in the jarring, fuzzy-headed place that accompanies doing too much too quickly.

You don't need an architectural foyer to construct one in your mind. Build transitional space inward. Take some time between vaults. You'll have a greater appreciation of where you land.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc