Charlotte Joko Beck’s Nothing Special is a masterful book that takes the woo-woo out of Zen practice and anchors it securely in the here and now. Focusing on “everyday” Zen (the title of another of her books) she helps her readers to find the practice in daily life, all the million and one ways in which our activities, thoughts, and actions can be brought under the purview of an overarching perspective. It’s great stuff, especially for those of us who can’t go running off to retreats all the time or take a few years off to live in a monastery. There’s practice in a footstep, in a word, in a thought, in a humdrum action.
There is a larger point to not only Nothing Special but to the very idea of everyday practice, which is that enlightenment—far too often represented as some impossibly remote and unreachable absolute—is all around us, all the time, and in all places. It’s not as though our practice is aimed at finding and flicking a switch from OFF to ON. (Nirvana means “extinguishment” so maybe ON to OFF makes a better metaphor.) Perhaps the misconception of enlightenment as a massive, one-time-only paradigm shift is rooted in the massiveness of the word itself: enlightenment, a state of being filled with and surrounded by light, with all its ancient connotations: sun-worship, day versus night, the positive of light-heat versus the negative of dark-cold. The young couples of A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be reshaped and manipulated in the moonlight, but they emerge into the light of day transformed and healed; Merton’s unforgettable phrase the dark night of the soul fits right in there. Some Dhamma traditions model the process as a slow ascent by named, identifiable stages to the final big event. Nowadays that model strikes me simplistic and even a bit materialistic. I’m skeptical of enlightenment—a state of grace—as a big-event phenomenon. More and more I come to think of it as being a recurrent part of our constantly shifting experience, one that we can choose either to encourage or stifle. There’s a native American tale of the two wolves that live inside us—the good wolf that helps us to maintain a clear and steady path, and the bad wolf that turns us to evil. They’re both in there permanently, but only the one we feed flourishes.
Thus no enlightenment, but enlightenments. Little ones, big ones, memorable ones, forgettable ones. Nor are they necessarily solo events, nor are they exclusively mental/emotional. Consider Kent Haruf’s exquisite novel Plainsong, set in a fictional town on the eastern Colorado plains where down-to-earth and ordinary people go through their lives over the course of a year. There are no alien visitations, no gruesome murders, no rapes or beheadings or car chases or terrorist cells or psychics or inexplicable paranormal events. Just people living their lives as best they can, out on the great plains just eastwards enough so the Rockies remain hidden below the western horizon.
Plainsong’s central characters are compassionate each in their own way. Selfish, oafish, and greedy characters don’t get much space; they do whatever damage they’re going to do and fade from view. The focus is on the people who try to do what they see as the right thing, however awkwardly, however reluctantly, however imperfectly. The elderly bachelor brothers who take in a pregnant and forsaken teenage girl, the schoolteacher who instinctively seeks to heal wounds in the people around her, the father with a morbidly depressed wife and two joyously normal pre-teen sons, the principal trying to maintain his school’s integrity in the face of a family’s aggressive arrogance regarding their sociopathic son. Nothing is necessarily solved or wrapped up neatly; the teenage girl becomes a teenage mother, the father’s wife does not return, the issue with the sociopathic son ends in stalemate. As the novel draws to a close, the “good” folks are together at the warmhearted brothers’ farm for a Memorial Day picnic.
On the porch the women looked out into the yard where the two boys were seated in the swing with the baby and farther out toward the barn lot and the work corral where the three men stood at the fence, each with a booted foot crooked on the bottom rail, and elbow slung over the top rail, comfortable, talking.
The boys had the baby in a glider swing, rocking her a little in the evening, this little thatch-haired black-eyed girl. Guthrie had said an hour earlier, I don’t know about this. They might be careless with her, forget her for a moment. But the girl had said, No they won’t. I know they’ll take good care of her. And Maggie Jones had said, Yes. To which Guthrie had said, But you boys be careful with her.
So they had the little girl in the glider under one of the stunted elm trees inside the old hogfencing wire, rocking her by turns on their laps in the cool evening, while the blue farmlight played over her face.
That’s a state of grace. By their actions and thoughts these flawed, human, good people have created, for the moment, a heaven on earth, blue farmlight and all. Nothing special, but special anyway.