Beige Badlands

Badlands, you gotta live it every day.
Let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay.
We'll keep pushin 'til it's understood
And these Badlands start treating us good. - Bruce Springsteen in "Badlands"

Day 168. The immutable heat is stupefying. I'm living in my own personal Badlands. My brain says, "Move! Do! Act! Create!" My body lies supine, immobile with lassitude.

My preferred version of reality includes fluid, vivacious words bursting from my fingertips the second I sit down and summon the blog screen. I want to tell stories with sentences ending in exclamation points. Curiously, the only sentences flowing from my present stream of consciousness end with . . . .

. . . . Only nothing follows. My practice has gone beige. I sit as usual on my cushion after performing my ritual side stretches and bows. I approach zazen sincerely, and seem to have mastered no aspiration and no expectation. I'm still working on no thought no feeling no perception. Even the last five of my thirty-five minutes is less tortuous. I suppose these increasing signs of detachment are what the whole thing is about, but I feel vaguely troubled. I've never been much good at beige. Ask my family members (the ones who also have the attention spans of gnats) and they'll tell you: I run hot and cold. Magenta and vibrating turquoise. Beige is a welcome mat for anxiety. I tolerate it poorly.

I'm wallowing in the conundrum of Buddhism as a way of Waking Up! and feeling More Alive! while I simultaneously trip up the Middle Path, carefully stepping over the Leaves of Attachment. Perplexing, to say the least. I vacillate between revelations pristine as Swarovski crystal and the blunted, neutral affect of an English headmistress. It's hard to tell what is real anymore. I guess they both are. Traipsing about in Big Mind reminds me of those little balls tumbling around in the cage spun by an old school Bingo caller. You get real excited just before the number is called out, only to find that it's not listed on your card.

I miss my Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The novelty of early sitting was challenging and invigorating and stimulating and (novice that I was) full of promise. Blog material washed up on the shores of my consciousness like BP oil balls. Now zazen is comprised of arduous minutes passing like months while my feet go numb and my back aches. It's a lot of Practice and no Big Game. No wonder Americans are so lousy at this. You can put in a LOT of hours with not a payday in sight.

I'm not going to quit. I'm still terribly curious to see how this all turns out. I'll just keep pushing until it's understood, and these Badlands start treating me good.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc