We Are With Them

Here is the conclusion of this week's series on a master teacher in Japan, Mr. Kanomori.

Empathy

When tragedy strikes a member of Mr. Kanamori's class he asks his students to help. Difficulties can connect us.

Do you have 7 minutes? Kleenex handy?

Then you're ready:

Wrong!

Since teachers are humans we make mistakes. Sometimes we get it wrong.

In this clip you'll see Mr. Kanamori make a bad call.

And here's the thing: he's big enough to see it.

Like him, I've make the wrong call. Like him, I've had to find the courage to admit it.

For me, at least, this makes some pretty riveting viewing.

A Bully's Remorse

Bullying is one of the hot issues in education these days. A master teacher will deal with meanness by going all the way to its source—the very root of the problem: the perpetrator's unresolved hurt.

Watch this video clip as Mr. Toshiro Kanamori takes his class from denial through to acknowledgment of bullying, then on to investigate the roots of the bullying in his class.

So often we find what Mr. Kanamori finds: we've been hurt and we have not grieved. We have not allowed the hurt to wash through us. We haven't received compassion from others for the injuries we've endured. So our injuries fester. And then they flare up to hurt others.

Here, in the eight minutes it takes for this video to unfold, watch as Mr. Kanamori extinguishes the flames of bullying in his class. He creates the conditions for psychological and emotional healing to take place. He's tough, but tender.

First, may I suggest that you go find some more kleenex.

Transforming Suffering into Happiness

My life's work, whether as a kindergarten teacher or a spiritual practitioner, can be understood metaphorically as growing flowers and veggies from fertile compost. What I do—as well as I possibly can—is to transform suffering into peace, joy, and happiness.

If a videographer were to visit my classroom for a year, the result would be similar to this. The video I offer to you today (part one of of five parts) is a look at a teacher in Japan whose work is exactly parallel to my own work. His focus is mine: Be Happy!

This video documents fourth grade teacher Toshiro Kanamori engaged in deep teaching practice. In this part, he helps his students touch their suffering and transform it into happiness. His students discover they are not alone: they share much. He builds community. He builds happiness.

Enjoy!



Two notes:

1. Find 10 minutes to see it. It gets better and better as you go along; you won't want to be interrupted.

2. Have a box of kleenex handy. Your cheeks will get wet.

Well-Being

I’m amazed that I ever got interested in Buddhism in high school and college.  

I was scarred by a difficult childhood. Although I tried to appear confident, intelligent, and happy, a cursory glance would see right through my façade. Just below the surface and almost to the core, I was anxious, insecure, and depressed.

Luckily, I had the good fortune to grow up in Palo Alto where I would occasionally see statues of The Laughing Buddha (a Chinese folkloric figure, Budai, Hotei in Japanese). 

I had read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse in high school English class. Hesse’s Buddha didn’t hold much interest for me. I thought perhaps that Hesse’s novel was somehow tangential to actual Buddhism. I had heard names like Gautama and Shakyamuni, too. Were these all the same guy? Were they all different?

I wasn’t sure. Concentration wasn’t my strong suit.

I confused Hotei for Gautama Buddha. That is akin to confusing Santa for Jesus, but I was desperate to find a way out of my depression. 

What gifts did this subtropical Santa, this Laughing Buddha offer me?

Opening the encyclopedia I saw that Buddhism’s basic teaching is the Four Noble Truths. The first two are: 

The Truth of Suffering

The Truth of the Causes of Suffering

Seeing suffering mentioned twice so early on had the effect on me of seeing images of the Crucifixion. Get me out of here! I’m suffering enough already.

My interest in Buddhism almost died right there. My reaction was probably not unusual. I know people who see Buddhism as a religion for dark and depressed people. 

A few years later, going beyond the encyclopedia, I read a pamphlet published in 1975 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation called the Miracle of Being Awake by a Vietnamese Zen monk named Thich Nhat Hahn who seemed able to enjoy life in ways that escaped me. He seemed to have some of the Laughing Buddha's wisdom in him. I began studying Buddhism in earnest there.

Thirty six years later, I’m reading another book by Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings. In Chapter Eight he suggests a reformulation of the Four Noble Truths, reworded here by yours truly. 

Begin with the benefit of Buddhist practice: Well-Being

First Noble Truth: 

Well-Being

Second Noble Truth: 

The Eightfold Path to Well Being

Wise View

Wise Intention

Wise Speech

Wise Action

Wise Livelihood

Wise Effort

Wise Mindfulness

Wise Concentration

Third Noble Truth: Ill-Being

Fourth Noble Truth: The Eightfold Path to Ill-Being

Wrong View

Wrong Intention

Wrong Speech

Wrong Action

Wrong Livelihood

Wrong Effort

Wrong Mindfulness

Wrong Concentration

Set forth like this, we'd see that Buddhist practices are aimed at creating happiness and well-being for us and for everyone we know. Having walked this path as well as I can, I know these teachings to be efficacious.

Perhaps if the Shakyamuni were alive today he’d see that for many of us our suffering is so intense that we are not willing to look—even briefly—at our suffering. Perhaps he’d change the order of his Four Noble Truths along the lines Thay suggests.


Hotei, Budai


Gautama Buddha


Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

Power of Words

We all want to see beauty....

Nuclear-Powered Clothes Dryer, An Etheree

If Madison Avenue advertising agencies wrote Etherees* they might come up with something like this Etheree to promote a green alternative to automatic clothes dryers.

free

on-line

clothes drying

method with no

hidden fees or costs

your clothes will dance dry in

gentle breezes—fresh and pure

you use the same safe, clean power

that grandma used way back in her day

our space-based fusion reactor: The Sun.

With the nuclear power plant emergency in Japan, I feel increasing urgency to trim my energy use. Simultaneously, I feel increasing pleasure when I do my small part to shrink my carbon footprint.

Today I am taking particular pleasure in the spring breezes blowing through Sebastopol because they made it possible to give my automatic clothes dryer another day off. I used my clothesline instead. 

Leaving the car parked for one more day, we walked downtown to do our shopping. We stopped at the Sebastopol Farm Market in the Town Plaza. Our neighbor Laura Shafer set up a spot to promote her business, Linedry.com. She promotes drying clothes in the sun.

Laura and me

As I talked with Laura, I realized that I can insinuate using clotheslines into my kindergarten curriculum. I plan to do that tomorrow. What reason is there for me or my assistant to hang up the cloth towels the kids use when they could hang them up and feel good about taking responsibility for the task? Duh! (Sometimes I wish I could teach 30 more years.)

I’d like to leave you with these facts. If you use a clothesline to dry your clothes:

You’ll save as much as $300 on your energy bills.

Your automatic dryer will last longer.

Your clothes will last longer, too. (Turn them inside out to reduce fading in the sun.)

You will enjoy the meditation of using a clothesline. (I promise you will!)

Your contribution to green house CO2 emissions will drop by as much as 700 pounds annually.

Please visit Laura’s website, Linedry.com

Inside-out your jeans

*********************************
*Consisting of ten lines, the Etheree starts with a one syllable line, then adds one syllable per line, ending with a final line of ten syllables yielding an overall syllable count of 55. In other words the syllabic structure is as follows: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. It’s an uncomplicated, unpretentious form of writing that has the quality of slowly opening, like a flower.  Try composing one—you may like it!

Walter, My Friend

My good friend, Walter, flew away a year ago. I miss him, his laugh, his warm hugs, his great heart. This evening a group of about a dozen of his closest friends gathered at his house to recite some prayers in Hebrew (Walter was raised in the Jewish tradition), tell each other our often hilarious stories about Walter, and, of course, to feast on some of his favorite foods. A happy-sad celebration of a man who had a wide open heart.

One of the things we shared was this poem that Walter himself wrote some time ago.

Here it is:

Nature’s Way

Where are you going?

The beauty and ecstasy you are seeking

I am here

Take refuge in the warm nurturing sun

The cool fragrance of the morning dew

The soft raindrops alighting gently on my face

Hills, like huge waves covered with superb shades of green

And colors so sublime

There are no replicas

Bold blotches of deep purple

Dispersed with frosty violet heather

Adorn the mountainside

Like a mammoth patched afghan

Looming in the distance

Thin misty clouds engulf the mountain tops

Conjure up images of a dreamlike fantasy

Beckoning

Come. come see what mystery I have in store.

Stop!  Be still. Listen!

Listen to the whispering wind;

I am yours

All the beauty that abounds

See it, touch it, feel it within

The depths of your soul

We are one.

All the resplendence that you behold

Abides within you.

Where are you racing?

Search no more I beseech you

I am here

Surrender. Or would you blindly speed towards

Your destination without savoring

The power of my sheltering arms?

Perhaps you are not yet ready

Another time then!

When the great subterfuge of pomp and pageant

Fame and fortune spurn your fantasies

I will await you homecoming you prodigal son

And embrace your weary soul

And turn your hardened heart

Back to love.

by Walter Blum






I wrote about Walter on April 5, 2010, the day after he died. You can navigate there the old fashioned way, or just follow this link  HERE.

Laryngitis

“Don’t speak unless your words will improve the silence.”

For the past three days laryngitis has made it nearly impossible for me to speak. The few words that I do manage to croak out loud hurt my throat.

Despite my tender vocal chords, Sarah and I were faithful to our planned social engagements: yesterday’s group kayak outing on the Laguna de Sebastopol followed by a picnic at the Balletto winery, and today’s opening of the Sebastopol Farm Market at the town plaza. We agreed that Sarah would talk for me. She told my stories about the stress at work that spawned this malady. As she told them, I noticed how she tinted my stories just slightly, but enough so that they became her stories, not mine.

My laryngitis has reminded me of two things:

• The great spiritual teachers are too dead to talk. Their greatness derives in no small part because they are not here to correct us when we inject into their teachings our own (mis)interpretations. Isn’t it like us to find our own retellings particularly satisfying, agreeable, and meaningful?
• The first independent steps on my spiritual journey took me into a Quaker Meeting Hall where people worship together in silence. I have since gone on many silent spiritual retreats, mostly Buddhist, where I have come to appreciate, keenly, that the third step along the Noble Eightfold Path is Wise Speech. Wise Speech is mostly about refraining from speech.

The wordless flower sermon was one of the Buddha’s most memorable Dharma talks. Perhaps the Enlightened One simply had laryngitis that day.

The Laguna

G mail Motion

After the hijacking of my computer, I switched to gmail, the same folks that bring us Blogger.

Check out this new innovation in email:

A Cosmic Ecology

“Insects and plants can look alike.  Science calls this ‘camouflage’ and ‘mimicry,’ constructing a paranoid fantasy of bug behavior.  The camouflage theory says moths, beetles, mantises, and so on are so steadily menaced and so wily that they must disguise themselves as twigs, sticks, leaves, buds, pods, blossoms.

Perhaps they did learn or selectively breed to adapt; perhaps, however, they like to dress this way, or perhaps the plants have put on the insects’ clothing; or perhaps the bug and the plant share a common habitat and climate, and so both present themselves in a manner fitting to it.  Suppose the bug doesn’t know that it’s not a plant, doesn’t follow our classifications into ‘animal’ and ‘vegetable,’ never read Linnaeus or took Biology 101.  Suppose its dress, its mask, its body habits were so vegetative that mimicry is not only of the one kingdom by the other, or of each other, but of a third factor that requires them to accommodate with one another in a sympathy with all things, a cosmic ecology.  Perhaps it is love that attracts these life forms to each other and inclines them to look alike.”

—James Hillman, Dream Animals, 1997;  Chronicle Books, San Francisco

A More Mindful World

My father was a rocket scientist who, quite literally, worked on—among other things—the earliest missions to the moon. My boyhood was richly steeped in a culture of astronomy and cosmology. Even today I find the cosmos fascinating.

I have just started reading a recently published book about cosmology, The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene who is one of today’s leading interpreters of this branch of science. It’s an exhilarating and mind-expanding ride.

Let me share with you a tiny morsel of this exciting adventure. Greene opens the second chapter of this book with these two paragraphs:


“If you were to head out into the cosmos, traveling ever farther, would you find that space goes on indefinitely, or that it abruptly ends? Or, perhaps, would you ultimately circle back to your starting point, like Sir Francis Drake when he circumnavigated the earth? Both possibilities—a cosmos that stretches infinitely far, and one that is huge but finite—are compatible with all our observations, and over the past few decades leading researches have vigorously studied each. But for all that detailed scrutiny, if the universe is infinite there’s a breathtaking conclusion that has received relatively scant attention.


In the far reaches of an infinite cosmos, there’s a galaxy that looks just like the Milky Way, with a solar system that’s the spitting image of ours, with a planet that’s a dead ringer for earth, with a house that’s indistinguishable from yours, inhabited by someone who looks just like you, who is right now reading this very book and imagining you, in a distant galaxy, just reaching the end of this sentence. And there’s not just one such copy. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many. In some, you doppelgänger is now reading this sentence, along with you. In others, he or she has skipped ahead, or feels in need of a snack and has put to book down. In others still he or she has, well, a less than felicitous disposition and is someone you’d rather not meet in a dark alley.

—Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality


Think about implications of this: there are an infinite number of copies of you out there. Each copy veers off to into a different reality whenever he or she makes a choice that differs from your choices.

In a very real sense, every single decision you make aligns you to a new universe of possibilities. You will have the company of the other infinite other versions of “you” who choose as you do. (But you’ll never get to meet them. That’s okay. You already know what they’d be like. They’d be just like you.)

Assuming the universe is infinite, this conclusion is inescapable. Knowing that awakens in me a new desire to align my choices more carefully with my values.

I want to live in one of the more mindful worlds, one that is kinder and more lovely for the attention it receives from the likes of me.

Hijacking Happiness

I know I’m not the only one to notice that when unhappy things come along, they arrive with unexpected joy.

The other day someone hijacked my email and tried to get my friends to wire away money. This fraud has resulted in some hassle for me. I had to open a new email account. I changed all my passwords. I spent many minutes on the phone, waiting to talk to a person employed by Yahoo! I’m sure you know—or can imagine—the drill.

Ultimately, what happened to me was only inconvenience. Still, I had to remind myself to stay calm and NOT believe my stories about the perpetrators.

The results of this fraud were not all bad. I ended up talking to friends who were genuinely concerned about my welfare. I hadn’t talked with some of them for months.  


I was free, wait, let me say that again, with emphasis, FREE!!!! of email for about 36 hours. I had forgotten how nice life without email is.

My inconvenience was nothing compared to the Japanese who are dealing with earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear radiation. Nothing. 

Not all the news from Japan is depressing. Read this post by Anne Thomas who is living in Japan where the earth shook. It may lift your spirits. It lifted mine.  A Letter from Sendai.

And thanks to my friend and neighbor at Temporary Reality where I learned of Ms. Thomas.

Times Are Gettin' Hard

Not long ago, I posted a video of Taimane Gardner  showing an exotic and mysterious side of the ukulele.

Here is another side of the ukulele showing a more subdued mood. It features my pal, Todd,  who posted this on YouTube a month or so ago. He sings an old folk song called "Times Are Gettin' Hard." Its mood and message fit these times we find ourselves in right now....

I'm Okay!

I'm okay!

If you get an email from my account describing some overseas distress, please ignore it.

 Someone hacked into my email account and is posting false information about me.

In reality, I'm fine and at work.

Take care,

Dan

Nouvelle 55: Downsized

 With a tip of the hat to Ruth at Synch-ro-ni-zing, here's a Nouvelle 55.

The painting is a very recent one by my brother, artist James Gurney.

Mike lost his firefighting job when his department downsized.

The bank foreclosed two years later. He loaded his TV and his tools into his pickup and covered the load with a black tarp.

He muttered to Jane, “At least the truck’s paid off—sure wish the tank was full,” and they drove south to Tennessee.

Link to my brother's blog, Gurney Journey is in the column to the right under "Blogs I Read."

I'll Bet You Like This

Readers of Mindful Heart are well aware of my increasing fondness for the ukulele. I know the ukulele to be a simple and humble instrument perfect to put into the hands of young children who want to make their first music. That's what I'm doing every day at work.

It's also a great instrument for groups of amateurs to play together. I spend most Thursday evenings playing with friends. That's what I did last night. We get high just singing.

But the ukulele can be even more than that.

She has a wild, exotic side as well.

Grab a pair of headphones. Set aside six minutes.

You won't want to be interrupted:

Saturn Fly By

I find this VIDEO made from actual photos of the Cassini spacecraft comforting and uplifting.

The universe is big and beautiful. Our human problems, (even nuclear power plant meltdowns, however complicated) can be seen from a larger perspective.

Link:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110315.html

Love is Something

Here's the reading taken from A Year With Rumi by Coleman Barks for March 15.

Before death takes away what you are given, give away what there is to give.

No dead person grieves for his death. He mourns only what he didn’t do. Why did I wait? Why did I not...? Why did I neglect to?

I cannot think of better advice to send. I hope you like it. May you stay in your infinity.

Peace.

—Rumi

Rumi’s message is one I try to remember and pass along.

I am grateful to teach kindergarten where I am expected to promote generosity and sharing. I teach these by my example and in many other ways including singing songs, none better than this little gem by Malvina Reynolds, “Love is Something.”

She sings her song with the panache of someone who knows homespun music beats manufactured music every time:






I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing and singing along with Malvina Reynolds when I was a student at UC Berkeley many years ago. The song has worn well.