Listening on Scribd to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig, the hardback on coffee table sent (gratefully) by Chris in Augusta of the Kennebec River Zen Center.
At Tuesday Evening Conversations Chris and (elder) Doris (who is in NYState) join in conversation in repeatedly inspiring colloquy about the practice, thought, and questions involved in Zen Buddhism and ordinary experience along the way.
The delight of shared peer dokusan wending way through aporia of zen and everyday life.
This is what we shared years ago together in prison conversations and continuing currently weekly at both maximum security prison up on the hill and minimum correction facility down to the farm -- inquiring and listening, laughing and pondering what appears before us, whether in body or mind or spirit, going forward.
One question that crops up regularly for those whose zen training was conducted in traditional settings with classical methodology is the question of what zen will look like in metamorphic transfiguration being sculpted by contemporary experience.
Coupled with the sorrow of disentangling from what has gone by and, as yet, not fully fused with what is coming to be, we practice with one another as "nowlings" (per Koenig, p.183):
nowlings
n. the total set of human beings alive at any given
time, a group that nudges slightly forward when-
ever a new baby is born or the world’s oldest per-
son dies, and turns over completely every hundred
years or so; a random assemblage of billions of
contemporaries who you feel an odd sense of con-
nection to, because whatever problems we might
face right now, we’re all facing them simulta-
neously.
From now, the present moment + -lings, inhab-
itants of.
- the community (however and wherever they show up)
- presence (in whatever form it is experienced), and
- whenever aporia (uncertainty) beckons