here we are.

it's an interesting place. and a longer-than-usual post.

It’s been an interesting and challenging few weeks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering and karma and the endless ways we’re deeply entangled with each other. How, whether we like it in any specific moment or not, we’re in it all, together. How do we live?

I’m recently back from Sesshin at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center.

Yokoji sits in the San Bernardino Mountains at the base of a high desert canyon at 5,600 feet in southern California-the weather can be mercurial, and occasionally, merciless.

The evening I arrived, three miles down the mountain from Yokoji, we hit a dense wall of fog that slowed the car down to a crawl. At Yokoji, the ground was covered with two inches of snow, and the next afternoon and night, it alternated between pelting snow, rain, freezing rain, and ice. The next morning we woke up to another few inches of hard, fresh snow, and that afternoon went into Sesshin-a silent, seven-day retreat of alternating zazen, work practice, meals and sleep.

The days were dazzling: it was still cold and dark when we started the day, mercury sunlight sliding into the canyon through the first block of zazen, the sky turning to a blue ringing like a struck gong.

As the week passed, the energy in the zendo gathered and deepened and finally broke open as we closed. Sesshin can be an intense and shattering experience, and a deep, peaceful one, and pretty much anything and everything in between. This one did not disappoint. Everything that can come up for me did come up-from euphoria to dread to laughter and tears. Both emotional and physical discomfort and pain. Confronting and embracing whatever comes up is precisely the point, and you’re stuck with it.

Coming out of Sesshin-thanks to some challenging and intense circumstances-I was catapulted into a world of suffering: tangled action and reaction, hurt, rage, regret. Waves of repercussion exploding from a single starting point. The wheel of karma-the real-world consequences of action-turns, and it’s a bitch. For everyone.

This was a very real, visceral and painful lesson in cause and effect, interconnectedness, trust, responsibility, reactivity and response.

It broke me unexpectedly open and catapulted me headlong into what’s really just the work of getting on with what’s right in front of me. In sesshin or not, pretty much the whole point of practice. Peaceful or not. What can’t I avoid? That’s where practice is.

Where do you find peace for someone whose trust has been shattered? Where do you find forgiveness for someone whose action shattered that trust? Where-and how-do you locate yourself in the midst of others’ suffering? What’s right action? Are there sides to pick? Are there sides at all? Where is equity, responsibility, awareness, and actualization in all this? What’s the way forward through it?

So here’s me, stepping forward into all of it.

One thing I know in my bones-one thing we all know-is that living is messy: bloody, confusing, full of shadings and shadows. By denying that basic ground, by covering up or avoiding or repressing any of that, I create all kinds of suffering-we create all kinds of suffering. For ourselves and for others.

So, okay. You can’t evade what’s right in front of you-we can’t evade our life. There’s a price to pay for ignoring it when it gets difficult. Difficulty-and complication, and confusion-is coming for us whether we like it or not.

Let’s simplify it all. We have no choice but to take in that whole mess, to swallow it without reservation. Without leaving anything out.

Anything at all.

It’s not really complicated unless I make it so. Just keep going forward, just stay with it.

We’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to make bigmistakes, we’re going to hurt the ones we love. We’re going to get hurt. Badly hurt. We’re going to have to swallow the consequences of our mistakes-and swallow the hurt and rage of having been wronged. We’re going to have to take full responsibility for all of it.

How do we hold each other, and ourselves, accountable? We’re going to suffer with all of it, no matter what.

I keep finding myself again and again shotgunned fully into living: into relationships, expectations, disappointments. Things don’t go the way we want them to. People will screw up, we’llscrew up, and there’s no avoiding it.

There’s no way around any of it, except through it.

Everywhere we look, we’re facing our life. I’m facing my suffering-that bottomless gap between my expectations and my lived reality. Sometimes it’s almost invisible, sometimes it’s almost unbearable. We’re the victims and perpetrators and beneficiaries of all kinds of harm and all kinds of healing and all kinds of love and all kinds of hate. It’s hard, it’s inevitable, it’s impossible. It’s what’s right in front of us.

I came to Zen Practice from a place of deep, existential, suffering. It’s the fundamental question at the heart of practice: recognizing and appreciating, down through my bones, that suffering itself is universal.

And then, what?

For me-although I do everything I can to make it complicated, and at a remove-the what is not really that complicated: practice. Settling into the deep quiet of zazen, entering into it wholeheartedly-surrendering to it-there’s a crack in my experience of suffering: the suffering caused by me, and the suffering caused by others, and the ways they’re knotted together, space and light and awareness pouring through that crack. The billion billion ways everything is deeply entangled. Cause and effect. Karma. Paying close attention to it all, accepting what’s right there, without judgement. I’m never off that hook. That mercury lit awareness is a gift: that experience of this moment, whatever this moment has to offer. There’s the whole endless universe right there. Right here, right now.

It’s all painful. Zen practice isn’t avoiding the responsibility of our actions or papering over our suffering at the hands of others or ourselves. It’s living fully and completely. Without reservation. Swallowing our lives knowing that we risk being deeply hurt and deeply hurting others. Knowing that we won’t see any of it coming.

Stepping forward into living knowing that, facing and embracing ourselves completely. The good and the not-so-good. Willing to risk it. Life is so much bigger, there’s so much to be gained by swallowing the whole thing.

The flip side of suffering is joy. The sun comes up and dawn fills the canyon with light. A boulder in liquid sunshine radiates warmth. Woodpeckers on both sides of the canyon strike tree trunks; jays screech. A cold wind brushes my freshly-shaved head. A stick of incense is lit. Someone brushes away our tears. Someone offers themselves fully. Our heart cracks open and light pours in.

The universe is full of wonder. Living here, right now, is a miracle of time, space, action and reaction. Karma. A billion billion circumstances resulting in the absolute, nearly mathematical impossibility of our lives. The very fact of existence. Miraculous. Mysterious.

Suddenly, slowly-in this endlessly deepening practice of living, there’s the place that’s always accessible, always here, always completely, fully us. Right now-so much more than simply us, a deep expansive quiet and infinite clarity. A crack in the sky. A crack in our hearts. We’re bigger than our mistakes, bigger than our hurts.

And yet, we hurt. We suffer and we cause suffering. How do we live in the face of that? How do we swallow our lives? We’re all responsible for all of it.

Our lives are mercurial. Merciless. There is no escape and we’re in it it together. What’s the way forward?