Buddha Sutra

The Buddha, in talking about our own true nature, gives a talk on the four kinds of horses: the excellent horse, the good horse, the poor horse, and the very bad horse. I’m reading Pema Chodron’s The Wisdon of No Excape and the Path of Loving Kindness (only she could group those two statements together and get away with it) and she talks about this teaching with regard to our approach to meditation. The moral of the story is it doesn’t matter whether you are the excellent horse or the very bad horse because in any case it simply is your nature and you will learn from and through it.

When it comes to meditation I konw I’m the very bad horse. My innate “badness” at the task is probably what makes me teach it well. I have to really work at meditation and I make lots of mistakes from which I learn what to do and what not to do next time. This insight would have been lost on me if I’d simply started meditating and found samadhi. I’d be telling everybody, gee all you have to do is sit down, stop the chattering of your mind and find the peace that resides within. No big deal, see? Watch and I’ll show you. You can cross your legs into lotus, can’t you?

I was wondering how this would translate into fatherhood. First, what kind of father am I and then how does that then relate to my own true father nature? But perhaps here I have to also add in, How does it effect my son and my family? Not as simple as in the meditative analogy - my mind is chattering away like a monkey (monkey mind supreme) but I’ll learn how to manage it in a year or two and then, oh boy, then I’ll have such insight on it. When it comes to being a Dad-dito, any mistakes I make, well… my son feels them in the here and now. I lose my temper over him taking too long to get out of the house on a school day and my son hears me yell. He cries. I cry. We both suffer. Him for getting scared at my yelling and me because of the my own terrible guilt over yelling at him and seeing him get upset. And the lesson? Don’t yell. Get up earlier. Simple really but the drive to get more sleep is deep and insistent. It’s an interesting paralell.

I hear my own father and many other parents of his generation say, “I hope I was a good father to you,” and looking back now I can say he was (and still is), though at different times I’ve gone up and down on the rating scale depending on how our relationship is going- none of which makes me love him any less. I don’t think any of us wants to think of ouselves as the very poor horse when it comes to being a father – even though I know there are times I clearly am – perhaps more than I care to admit. At those times, I take it to heart that though my son has suffered through my inability to get on track, if I at least learn something from the experience and do better next time, he may not have to suffer in quite the same way again. I may be a very bad horse out of the starting gate but I’m an excellent horse on the turns. It’s good to know there are turns up ahead. The straight-aways make me humble. The turns make me smile. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Taoist Theory

If I accept the concept of life then I have to accept the concept of death – they go hand in hand, one with the other, one after the other. I think of these things when I notice my son has grown. Change is the constant fluctuation of Yin and Yang, one into the other, back and forth, the balance between the two never static, but always moving.

M-ito said this moring, “I took a shower by myself last night!” He was lying on the bed, his clothes scattered around him, his PJs still on. I sat next to him trying to get him to hurry and get dressed.

“You did,” I replied.

“You didn’t have to take a double shower with me.” He smiled, proud of himself.

I smiled back, proud also. I’d talked him through the shower from outside the stall, reminding him to wash under his arms and behind his ears, laughing with him as he tickled himself.

“Some day,” he said, still smiling but looking a little past me as if he was seeing some future I wasn’t privy to, “I’ll take a double shower too.”

“With your own son or daughter?”

He nodded. “And when you’re a grandpa you can take a double shower again.”

“That’s the way it goes,” I said, “around and round,” Yin and Yang.

Lost and Found

We were at the Medieval Fair, Poppi in his archers outfit, having successfully assaulted the castle wall at Sands Point, was resting next to us, leaning on his bow, the back of his next sunburned from his day at the archery booth. A woman across the green started to scream. She ran ten yards or so then turned around and ran back. She screamed again and I realized what she was screaming – the name of her child. She ran back again two more times, screaming in a way that sent shivers through me and Mom-ita.

She lost her son, rippled through the crowd and we all started looking at knee level for a child who seemed not to fit – who seemed to be lost. I could feel her panic. I’ve been there a few times myself and I never get used to it. M-ito is right next to me and then, when I go to get my change from the cashier I look down and he’s gone. I can feel the panic in my gut. Where is he? Where did he go? Then I start shouting his name with that same gutteral sound that the woman was using again and again.

She brought her hands to her head and screamed. A knight in a golf cart came by to help her look and cover more ground. They rolled down to the castle wall and back up – her screams punctuating the air with panic and fear and terror, her hands pounding the dashboard when they weren’t at her head.

A few moments later they found her boy. I saw them hugging and crying together. I pulled M-ito a little closer to me, his presence reassuring – perhaps to us both.