What's in a Name?

Who am I? Who is carrying this body? - Jack Kornfield in the Zen Calendar (November 14, 2006).

Day 148. I logged on to the dinosaur, got into my blog, and the screen looks entirely different. No reason I can detect. No solution I have discovered. Next to sitting in nothingness, cyberspace is the weirdest domain I know.

I just came inside after working in my yard for three hours. This yard and I go back 17 years. When I was 32 and became a first time home owner, caring for the yard was an adventure and a tremendous ego investment. I remember playing soccer, football, baseball, and countless plots of intricate pretending with my son in the yard over the years. For the first five, I would have to interrupt the games and pull a weed if I saw one. OCD is a demanding beast. I guess all that analysis kicked in at some point, because presently I am impervious to weeds. Now that I think about it, the timing of my weed tolerance happened to coincide with my broken back. Bummer. I was hoping all that time on the couch had some measurable outcome.

I am so physically fatigued that I must head to my cushion while I can still sit up. I chose the above quote because it so closely parallels a process through which I am finding myself in deep meditation over the past few nights. I repeatedly go back to the point about our given name made by the presenter at the yoga workshop . I can't say why, but when I think of myself as nameless - or of the randomness of my name and the fact that it could have been any other name of the thousands available to Western parents in 1961 - my ego falls away. I am amazed at how my name appears to be so strongly connected to my sense of self. Lose the name, and the self becomes lost, too. I become a breathing being sitting on a cushion. The Monkeys must be connected to my name, too, because when it falls away, they chatter much less.

So who is carrying this body? Who is minding the store - of my memories, my dreams, my goals, my future? I can't really say. All I know is that the former shopkeeper seems to have left town. Before she trained her replacement.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc