Poets Teaching Zazen
It is hard to teach zazen.
What makes it difficult is not the articulation of the complex neuromuscular work that goes on during zazen. What makes it difficult is the use of too many words. A cat walks into a room and sits down. How could she possibly tell another cat how to do that? She wouldn’t, so why do we humans find it necessary?
At the moment, I don’t know an answer. But I do know we use too many words when we try. I’ve been thinking about a poem that Kristi Crymes sent a week or two ago, proposing it as something for the resource page for health care workers that our Institute has set up. It struck us both that it is a poem telling us how to sit zazen. And, it struck me further that poets actually could be excellent teachers of zazen.
They are masters of an economy of words
If their words are going to move someone, the words need weight. And the only way that happens is if a poet puts their own body into the writing
Where to break a line of poetry and begin the next one comes from sensitivity to the feel of words in the mouth and the ear and from breath
A poem often is reporting news from the senses
There you have the tools for zazen: breath, a sense of gravity, use of the senses. Nothing more needed. Here’s the poem Kristi sent:
