The “Zen Rock Garden” as it is affectionately known in the community

The author completed this raking pattern (the result of about 5-hours work with help from several curious meditators) in early October 2016, specifically as an offering to the practitioners sitting in the adjacent (behind the 6 red-framed windows) practice space known as the “Main Shrine Room.”

Of all the patterns produced thus far by this author/raker, this is the simplest and yet resonates the most energy from what has been called “The Buddha Rock” or the largest rock protruding from the earth closest to the Main Shrine Room. Encircling the large stone created a pattern of watery ripples that fills the entire garden space. Simpler, quieter, one-ring ripples encircle the 4 stones that represent islands (like the “Buddha Rock”) amidst the wave-action of the teaching Buddha (and all Buddhist teachers), to form the precious three jewels of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha–all represented here by way of a single focal stone, 4 other stones, and an ever-expanding range of concentric circles.

Before The Year of the Fire Monkey ends (January 27, 2017), and before the calendar year of 2016 ends (December 31st, 2016), the author (given 2-6 years to live by Western Medicine) plans to offer one more raking in the coming weeks prior to the first week of November. Because of recent events, because of changes ahead, because of the environmental energies we feel and honor, the next pattern will surely be very different.

The author’s dedication to karesansui here at what Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1970, named, “The Tail of the Tiger” has given him a beloved mind-body synchronization practice (along with the profound practice of Kyudo)–within a sacred space–that has resulted in a strong appreciation for an ancient and traditional Japanese, Zen-monastic practice. The author plans to remain involved in the upkeep, uplift, and future of this particular example of a small, temple-style dry landscape garden.

Postscript

Though it appears simple, the challenge of completing the final encirclings (four stones, one of which cannot be seen in this lovely photograph, with photo-credit thanks to Mr. G. Vu) was difficult….namely entering and exiting the two “disciple” stones, or Buddha’s children–the two stone/islands flanking the Buddha stone to the right and left–and finally, touching up and exiting at the Buddha stone. The final operation of raking the single “frame” line was straightforward, and–as the author has told others (and through consultation with our resident Feng Shui expert), improves the feng shui of the garden.

May this garden help others contemplate impermanence, joy, and the six perfections as they manifest in the phenomenal, psychological, and social worlds. Thanks to the Vidyadhara for creating this garden; thanks to everyone who has supported and acknowledged the author’s practice in this subtle space; and thanks to the stones and the dralas. May…..as the Natives say when sometimes referring to stones…..the ” wise ones” continue to offer a space of phenomenal quietude and yet, contemplative insight, and may the garden itself thrive and benefit all sentient beings, especially those who visit this space/place and feel the dralas that have been felt and carefully embraced by this dedicated karesansui raker. With hopes of continuing to practice the contemplative dry landscape art within this space in the coming years, thanks to Mr. A. deLong for giving me the first opportunity to explore what has become a most profound and energizing meditative and contemplative practice. Most gratefully, as my healing journey contnues…..Chi-me Chönying

Dear Reader

As the Axis of Character now approaches 100 posts, and with this author’s awareness that posts have been sometimes frequent, sometimes absent for extended periods, and, of course, sometimes non-literary in appearance….the author wishes to note that his health has become a paramount challenge. Secondly, photo-imagery is important, alternative blog content, along with captions and ancillary text as a part of this overall literary experiment. Captioning a photograph can take many turns, leading to a future post (as these dry landscape garden posts have been a kind of counterpoint to the fabulist [fable-like] pieces that have been regularly offered at the Axis), creating illustrative relief. As a visio-spatial and kinesthetic artist/writer, images and the 3d spaces they imply via 2 dimensions–posts containing photos of real-world imagery–help provide juxtapositions and inspiration for literary moves.

May you enjoy the experiment as it continues (while the author searches for better, more curative, healing therapies). Your comments are always welcome.

 

 

The nighttime overbite of Michael Brundlethwick, in his dreaming, yet ever-so-feckless body, could eviscerate the bowels of ten thousand Laudenveek Morper Druden. Only one other from the group of ancient warriors who were reanimated after a few lifetimes in cryogenic suspension, Caoimhin (pronounced Qwee-VEEN) MacQueen, could unleash such teeth of demon-terror.

This was possible because C. McQueen had opted another lifetime ago–after losing all of his natural dentition to cancer–to have the newest in experimental 22nd century bionic dental implants. These unique choppers gave McQueen a triple row of knife-like incisors, and ferocious, superior canine fangs.

Stopping hordes of Morper Druden was warrior’s work, but work set aside by the khan’s protectorate for a special forces team of enhanced and enormous warriors…..citizens three times the size of genetically unaltered citizens.

After undertaking a spate of tests upon reanimation, Brundlethwick and MacQueen were given key privileges as officers of the special forces team. Only two privileges were publicly known: each could read the others’ mind thanks to a new, experimental upgrade; and each could reconstruct a new face at will.

Telepathy came with many challenges, one of which was the simultaneous anticipation of a team-protecting decision, another of which was the possibility of mistaking another’s thought as one’s own. Unlimited faces was a way to maintain anonymity, but there was always the option to restore a past facial identity in order to be recognized by a friend or loved one.

Brundlethwick, oddly, after two decades of service, developed prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognize faces. MacQueen, the younger of the two, developed over the same time period a savant-like ability to remember seemingly endless streams of numbers, particularly, binary code. What he did with that ability is unclear; however, rumors have spread that he hacked a satellite feed from Voyager 1 (long ago the first human-made satellite to leave the “outer” solar system), using code from an alien transmission to reprogram his colleague’s (that is, Brundlethwick’s) newest brain-machine interface. Supposedly, with his MacQueen-reprogrammed BMI, Brundlethwick is now able to recognize faces as they correspond to MacQueen’s now-patented, astronomical catalogue of constellations. This, in turn, has helped the colleagues in their collaborative decryption of a host of alien transmissions, which originated as a kind of “video” of star-travels.

A side-effect of creating this particular pair of genetically-enhanced superhuman giants who speak to each other in compressed “videos of binary number-streams that come from a different time-continuum” has only recently been shared with the public, though it is perhaps, quite obvious: genetically-enhanced, giant, superhuman brains are capable of astonishingly unusual leaps of evolution. Brundlethwick and MacQueen, according to Cyborg Anthropologist, Professor AM7/2196, “merged into one hybrid-organic entity currently exploring other galaxies.” Surprisingly, they have “co-evolved with a species of super-prisms,” that, at last transmission, “generate light pulses to travel anywhere, anytime” for the explicit purpose of stimulating the once-named “third eye” of humanoids.

The effects have been dramatic: innocent, suffering beings in far-flung locations–such as a protectorate zone in the northeast quadrant of North Amerikesh, where for centuries humans have practiced something called “meditation”–have become suddenly enlightened. This, in turn, has caused such a reduction of humaniod suffering, and increase in fearlessness, that the dreamworld hordes of Laudenveek Morper Druden have been entirely eliminated.

The all-seeing khan is pleased, composing fresh verses to thank his warrior-explorer of protection, for bringing a more profound love to his wife and family, and for bringing his citizens–such as the family of Brundlethwick MacQueen–eternal joy, peace, and recognizable faces that glow from an everlasting, prismatic halo.

[First shared/read aloud on the evening of Wednesday, September 28th, to a receptive crowd of Buddhist/Zen coworkers at my farewell festive dinner. Now as an “alumni,” I am currently attending a meditation retreat: Our daily schedule typically involves 7.5-8.5 hours of meditation/day ].

 

The latest “Zen Rock Garden” (karesansui) raking by the author (…completed on 4 September 2016). This pattern, an abstraction of the 8-spoked wheel of dharma, is an offering to those who helped Chi-me attend a Shambhala meditation program called ESA.

For those who wonder about the process: The raking started with the center-circle. The pattern was carefully laid out one “spoke” at a time, constantly measuring and checking the radius of the rake-head.

The author, Chi-me, on the right, master fire builder, with eager helpers adding dry fuel, is seen here adding specially-prepared kindling at various levels of this celebratory bonfire burn pile. The bonfire was formally offered in writing as a gift to the author’s teachers and fellow participants.

Only hours later, the luminous evening bonfire with flames reaching around 15′ above the stone fire pit, and with its constantly dancing sparks reaching skyward over 20-25′, was spectacular and much appreciated by those who sang and danced and celebrated life and primordial goodness in the Northeastern Kingdom of Vermont.

As the fire settled and the tall verticals began to change shape, the teepee-like-top leaned over and bowed perfectly to the full moon (which was rising in the East). It was subtle and unexpected: the fire element seemed to be honoring the heavenly lunar spirits and the vast cosmos.

The author thanks those who helped, his teachers and new friends, and the dralas….for filling his birthday week with soulful wisdom, joy, and kindness. Thanks to the lovely Miss Ani for a most delicious, birthday blueberry pie.

 

This unfinished pattern (several arcs intersecting the four central circles were removed and the final five-interconnected-circles pattern was finished after this photo was taken) was raked by the author the first week of August, 2016. Inspired by a friend’s kind and uplifting visit, a four-leaf clover gift, and a magical, sacred Tibetan object called a double dorje. (The garden was too small for the full, original design). Thanks to G. Vu for the wonderful photo.

Page 97 contained a passage about light coming through a hole in the wall of a secret room that had been locked for a couple of hundred years. Page 98, the reverse side of page 97, contained a lot of italicized items, recorded in a language that the original author wasn’t able to translate.

When I had first discovered this page, torn and floating in the air in front of me, until it got stuck under my windshield wiper in a light rain, the print from one side and the print from the other side formed a wondrous superimposition of text. By the time I had pulled over to remove the page, blocking my view of the road as I was driving through a tiny village in search of a place to stay for the night, the sun had begun to set, and since I was heading due west, the single page of text reduced the blinding low solar rays, while simultaneously glowing, quite eerily, becoming a rectangular prism containing this clipped fragment of a story.

The prism cast a magical bit of two-layered text upon my upper right arm, just above my elbow, and just before I turned off the engine. That part of my arm, at the time, was covered in a rash. The chemo-Irinotecan-rash further altered the way one story-bit bled into the reversed other bit. It was like my arm received a tattoo in a flash, and what was two passages became one, creating a kind of coded, blessed message.

One reading was: “Furvel Thrang-sloopyour gloinking yot. Snikkel, ploover infaz dna droim.” Another reading was crystal clear, undistorted, and unscrambled…as the light had shifted, changed colors, and I happened to glance quickly into the rear-view mirror (which caught a different glimpse of the polarized, moiré-effect passages): “In twelve seconds your life will merge with a flock of birds passing the thirteen parallel…the burning hinterlands will uncover their wispy secrets in a liquifying crystal…and that pot of O’Malley’s gold you see glistening at the end of the rainbow is waiting for you and yours.”

I had written this cryptic passage on the horn button, in pencil. When I finished, I honked the horn. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Then I started the engine, drove into the twilight, and looked for a quaint, inviting Bed and Breakfast.

Sure enough, it was O’Malley’s B & B, and as I trudged up the stairs to my room, I wondered about this odd coincidence. As I opened the door to the small but cozy attic room, a moonish beam of light came through the wall. The hole from page 97. I looked through the hole and then felt someone nudge my left shoulder. I was surprised. Now I wasn’t in a room; I was in a forest, and behind me stood my older doppelgänger, and a stand of giant Sequoias. I tilted my head up to the treetops, realizing only then that I had forgotten who I was, my name, my origin.

My reality was this: I was the author of the original text, and I was breathing into the Buntawabe tube, again, living simultaneously in a foreign country and in my cancer-ravaged body, my marked flesh, my human husk awaiting the teeth of gnawing madness.

So I wrote this to you, my friends, to ward off the demons, to stay awake, to create a rising sun, to keep myself alive in a world that was not dual, but under the stress of death’s spectre, my soul flowed as a stream of wakefulness, in a language that seems to be English, but is something gloriously more–something that speaks to the treetops and pulsations of sacred light, and the heart of mortal beings who live victorious, but belly-buttoned, well beyond time.

The curling of the edges of a Pinochle deck perturbed Ervin Myrtlewood on an otherwise flatness-maddening Thursday of work. Flame-belching mules appeared suddenly, in the finely-tooled, rapidly-turned burls that became bowls for Bella Lima, the queen of his chemo-burned, emotionally-churned soul…over there…in the unfair squareness of a skin-singeing, mind-meltingly-hot mid-summer’s day, in the blurred light of perspiration vision, as the temples of the world were simultaneously freed of dead moth wings and red math things and lead bath rings and the querrolous funk of one monk’s deep, feverish, inner groove.

Here, miraculously, hear the cascading and gasless, fingerized prize, cascading bravely over the falls of humanness, the squalls of doom-storms that form in the corners of our hornless, memory-adorned bone-structure…an utterly perfect washing of offline moribundity…an under-the-sun superfun-ditty, for your more-or-less-and-less-is-more enjoyment.

We are all here in the temple-to-be-free-of-fear; so shall we bend now?…to be touching each other like this epistolary Thayer-jazz bumps against its existence and you, deathlessly, with the best wettened lips and question-less flips of the unzippered, mission-accomplished, mandala-of-bantawabe, lama-olé, shaman’s-drum-beating and sometimes still……

but oh-so-brilliantly still-beating hearts?

Do tell from your bio-cellular belvederes of wellness!

Written in the late evening, Wednesday, 8 June 2016:

Sometimes a day unfolds without event or mishap: it opens to spaces and opportunities left unhinged, unbent, unknown. Today was a day with many late-arriving surprises, and it has yet to end…as a life may, in fact, unfold eternally, albeit with hinges and warps of reality.

First, there was the meeting of two dharma friends in our dharma center home: He, Aaron, was kind enough well over a year ago, to show me a few of the basics in raking and tending a dry landscape garden. I, now Chi-me, garden-raker and -tender, was thankful to be alive to reconnect with a kindred, deep soul. Our hug lasted longer than a casual hug: it required an unfolding of brotherly, heart-bending feelings.

But earlier, at the turn from lunch back to work, I received a friendly gift: one red and silver cold can of Coke. I thanked my coworker with a seated, sideways hug. It was spontaneous, like the gift. Joy filled two hearts and smiles brightened the room.

Later, the long-awaited arrival of a friend…and our handshake and hug and talk and a period of reacquaintance. Later yet, the suggestion and instructions from more loving souls on receiving a healing blessing, in person, from our guru. What a beautiful unraveling of chat into prescribed magic.

A prescription for magic is called for each day. Only moments before starting to write this, I made an effort to change from my day clothes into my night clothes…from working clothes into sleeping clothes. To complicate my simple task: a thin tube running up my right side–attached at one end to a black satchel containing a battery-powered programmable pump modulating the flow of Fluorouracil (“Directions: infuse intravenously at 3ml/hour”), contained in a clear bag with a label emblazoned with a fluorescent orange warning field, marked by the emboldened black letters: “Chemotherapy, observe safety precautions for handling and administration,” and a biohazard symbol–and attached at the other end to a port implanted in my upper left chest area….which routes the chemo directly into my jugular vein.

Earlier, a conversation with my supervisor about humor and silliness and my “doing better” or some similar odd language pertaining to my ongoing, sometimes emotionally-wild cancer-tainted health, yet still-working-head-of-department status.

And back to how I finally made it here, to the edge of my bed again, where I will seek rest and healing while being pumped-full of this poison: I fumbled to get my left leg into my p.j. bottoms. It seems that through some mysterious folding…only possible at nighttime, and at near the end of an emotional day…the bottom of my left pant-leg had looped back into the top, making it–sort-of in a knot–impossible for me to get my left leg into the p.j.’s….until I saw what needed to happen, and before falling, caught the knee-bend area of the knotted pant-leg, jerked it out quickly, flopped back on the edge of the bed, and decided that this was an event worth sharing with the world. Pure silliness leading to an appreciation for all those ways our days unfold into the night…and the next day…and so on…

 

The author, Chi-me (aka harnessingtheunknown), raked this pattern on Sunday, 29 May 2016 at the dry landscape garden of a dharma center originally founded as “Tail of the Tiger.” (This high-quality image, thanks to JJ, reveals about one-third of the overall garden). This pattern was challenging–geometrically and physically. The author was eager to offer the community a carefully-prepared space and pattern for contemplation.

Three days before the completion of this raking, Chi-me received very good news about his healing journey: A cancer blood marker known as CEA, or Carcinoembryonic Antigen, measured 4 times over the past 6 months in blood samples taken from his mediport implant, dropped slightly from 25 in December, to 17 in February, and then to 15.8 in April (most of this time on the FOLFOX 6 chemotherapy protocol), to 2.3 on 24 May (shifting to the FOLFIRI chemotherapy protocol). According to respected sources, a healthy CEA level in a non-smoking adult is 2.5.

As the Axis turns, it is helpful to contemplate impermanence and rejoice at every opportunity. With this post, may you, dear reader, find healing in the world, and express in your character, or any character you invent, the joys of being alive. Chi-me offers this healing pattern, a symbolic yet impermanent inscription, as a salute to health and joy.

As the Axis turns, characters (through discourse) are discovered in the process of being. Here, a door lacks a visible hinge, yet–with an open mind-heart–it can move to create a character. The hinge moves by looking deeply within the so-called “self.” Yet this self is a construct made to achieve certain ego-driven ends. If we reach to each side of our being, and grab a handle softened and tarnished by time, can we fold our brightest consciousness into the hinge, beyond rational pivotings, to pass through a doorway that accesses/activates the unification of mind and heart? Can we become an illuminating doorway for others to find their mind-heart pivot? [Thank you to J.J. for this image]