sweat

It’s my birthday week. Now sixty-nine and officially old, I’ve graduated from a single birthday day. Celebrate loud. Fireworks. Candles, sparklers.

All day the weather people warned of extreme thunderstorms, summer torrents, winds, and possible hurricanes. No matter. I chose to participate in a sweat. My first. What better way to celebrate my birth? So, I googled, how to prepare for a sweat lodge?

The Internet said, hydrate in advance. No alcohol, drugs, or caffeine. Check, check, check. Well morning coffee should be okay.

The Internet said this isn’t a chance to prove my manhood or gain some kind of cultural points. This is to purify, heal, cleanse. Check, I can do that. I can be open, willing, and receptive. Not sure about the heat though.

So, at 6 pm we picked up my son-in-law from his work at a detox centre. He works with the streetiest of street people. For a couple of weeks, his clients trade in their shopping carts and tents for abstinence, medicine, meals. For a couple of weeks a few less purses are stolen, a few car windows aren’t broken. Then back out onto the street and using again they mostly go.

My son-in-law will be our guide. He isn’t the best at directions, but he has done this twice. I drive out of the city onto the Tsuutʼina Nation, past the casinos, past the tax-free gas, and the tax-free Costco.

The land opens to the foothills with the Rockies coming into proud view. Lodgepole pine and spruce open the ground while the summer prairie sky opens to rebut the weather forecast. The evening sky reveals itself endless with radical cloud formations of sea creatures and dragons for miles.

The highway signs are in Sarcee as we get further into the reserve, further from Canada. One large sign is in English, “Permit Required. You Will Be Arrested for Trespassing. Tsuut’ina Nation Police Service.”

After a couple of wrong turns and a couple of gravel roads we find the place. A man named Brad cheerily, if roughly, welcomes us. Dear reader, if ever I wanted a shaman, I’d want him to look like Brad: bald and naked to the waist, covered in tatts. No fat: all sinew and wire, supple branches, his eyes pools of regret and experience and life. Judge Holden, from Blood Meridian, thickly tanned, somehow transformed good, compassionate, soulful.

“My name’s Keith. I am excited to be here.”

“My brother’s name was Keith.” Hint of connection. Hint of sadness. Hint of connecting over sadness. And I wanted to ask him about his brother and I wanted to tell him about losing Steve, but other people arrived and hugged and were getting ready for the sweat.

My wife introduced herself, but they had trouble with Yoshiko. “Call me Mrs Robinson.” Everyone laughed and agreed, “Mrs Robinson” it will be.

“Take off your glasses, Keith. You won’t see a thing anyway.”

My son-in-law carried the granite and slate stones on a pitch fork in from the fire where they heated and Brad distributed them and a woman put herbs and a prayer on the first five.

“We’ll go easy, just twelve stones.”

But the twelve were more like fifty because the heat exploded the twelve, glowing red.

The others sang and prayed along with and echoed Brad’s lead, but Brad’s voice reached out of the sweat and into the prairie sky circling our sightless black lodge. It became hotter than anything I could imagine; my skin and body were inside fire.

The more and louder he sang, the more he laughed and called and cried. And as he sang he poured water on the rocks, vaporizing before hitting the rocks, steam poured inside me, hotter by far than the radiant heat of the stones in my inhale and the heat was in my lungs and out to alveoli and hot red blood and then I was fireworks inside and out.

Buddha hands

 

Photo  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

we can put our hands together in a position of prayer and invoke the wondrous dharma, hoping our wishes are fulfilled.

we can put our hands together in a position of prayer and invoke the wondrous dharma for ourselves and all beings to attain Buddhahood.

we can put our hands together in a position of prayer and invoke the wondrous dharma believing this is the action of Buddha.

we can put our hands together in a position of prayer and invoke the wondrous dharma knowing our hands and voice are Buddha.

Poplar Madonna

Four days ago, Monday morning, before breakfast. Yoshiko calls me. "Keith, we have a Black Madonna." I look out the dining room window, at the naked poplars and bare oaks we see every winter morning, from our breakfast chairs we sit at every morning. 

"Where?"

"Right there, on that poplar."

"She looks more brown than black. Why is she here? Should I be creeped out?" 

After breakfast I go outside. I say "hello, we are very sorry about you losing your son, nice Jewish boy. He was a good person. We understand, we lost a child." I am talking to a tree. I take her picture. Her features look vaguely Asian.

The next day she is still there. I go outside. The weather is mild, above zero. I tell her, You can stay here as long as you want. We aren't going to pray to you, or build a cult. So, if you need a place where you can just be yourself, chillax, as the kids say, you are welcome here. I guess you lost your son twice, first by the Romans, then two days later he disappears. Must be horrible for anyone, even you, Mary. We aren't going to pray to you, but we will chant for you, the Mystic Law.

Yesterday, she is still on the tree. Yoshiko asks me, "should we call someone? Send the picture to the newspaper?"

Absolutely not. Every wack-job will be here, claiming miracles and making this a pilgrimage route and building shrines. Leave her be. I almost say, if the mother of god wants something, she'll let us know. But, I catch myself before the words come out. That would be me, being creepy. 

Why is she here, at our place, the Poplar Madonna of the Skins?

Maybe no reason. Maybe she is just an odd mark on bark. Maybe as the seasons change she will disappear and we will forget she was ever here. 

A few thoughts on sex, gender, and identity

 

In all things, there is neither male nor female.

The Buddha, the Vimalakirti Sutra

On July 12, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope began sending extraordinary pictures of the oldest galaxies in our universe. One thing, to my untrained eye, is clear: Everything is dancing. From the Cartwheel Galaxy and its neighbours to gelatinous jellyfish in the sea, it is all in the dance. 

The universal dance began a little less than 14 billion years ago. Sex has been around about 2 of those 14 billion years. The first life appeared on our planet about 4 billion years ago. So, for about 2 billion years, life happily danced without sex.

Sex was invented by single-celled protists because the environment was changing and diversity is always the most efficient way to deal with change. Exchange of genes through sexual reproduction leads to genetic diversity. Single cells copying themselves do not.

Today, plenty of creatures dance on the earth, in the seas, and in our guts, who manage fine without sex. Sex is an invention, a fairly recent, very enjoyable invention. The fun, unfortunately for the protists, came later. It took another 1.3 billion years for neurons capable of detecting pleasure to develop. Imagine, 1.3 billion years of gittin’ it on without fun. Protists are still around, doing fine. Protists are in our guts, too, but research into their function, friend or foe, has barely begun.

Sex in humans is dependent on a number of factors including hormones, genetics, anatomy; usually male or female but with some variance. Roughly 2-3% of humans have characteristics of both sexes.  So, sex is a biological and evolutionary construct.

Gender is identity. How one sees oneself. Gender is a social construct.

The Buddhist dharma (sometimes referred to in these writings as the mystic, or wonderous law) is concerned with fundamental universal principles. These principles are co-existent with the universe and with life. Nobody created them and nobody can break them. Our dear Kisa Gotami said:

No village law is this, no city law,
No law for this clan, or for that alone;
For the whole world — ay, and the gods in heav'n —
This is the Law: All is impermanent.

One of these universal principles is non-duality. Non-duality means that two things that appear to be separate are actually part of the same system. Bees and flowers are examples. Subject and object are examples. Two sides of very thin sheets of paper. 

The mystic law predates sex, predates all constructs. The dharma does not care about sex or gender, just as Newton’s laws of gravity don’t care about your hat size. That is the conclusion: the mystic law doesn’t care how you identify or with whom you like to dance. 

Vimalakirti teaches non-duality

One important scripture, the Vimalakirti Sutra, tells of a great lay practitioner, Vimalakirti. The Vimalakirti Sutra is very interesting, provocative, and worth much more of an examination than I can provide here. But here I share my interpretation of an incident in the sutra.

Vimalakirti’s practice, devotion, and concern for others was unsurpassed, stronger it seemed than even the monks who directly followed the Buddha. His strong practice made his wisdom deep. He understood the profound principles of non-dualism. To demonstrate this principle to the Buddha’s clerical disciples, Vimalakirti invited the monks over for a chat. He was wealthy and a major contributor to the care of the Buddha and his disciples. He also used his wealth to support the poor and infirm. He lived in a simple house with a lovely garden filled with mango trees. 

The goddess

A large group of monks arrived at his house. They were surprised to find a single plain room with only one chair. In the chair sat the most beautiful woman any of them had seen, a goddess descended from heaven. One of the monks asked, “where do we sit? Where is Vimalakirti?”

The goddess spoke, “Do you seek liberation, or furniture? The holy liberation is the equality of all things.” 

The monks were, to put it mildly, confused. They could not understand how the dharma could be presented by one in a female form. 

Then the goddess changed herself into a male form. It was Vimalakirti, himself. He engaged in a dialogue with the monks, trying to teach them the profound principles of non-duality. He continued to change his form from male to female, and then, wait for it: The goddess changed into the form of the principle monk and changed that monk into the form of the goddess.

Vimalakirti changed the sex of the Buddha’s disciples. This was no parlour trick. He was physically demonstrating that a person’s inherent worth, their humanity, was not determined by anatomy, eyebrows, clothes or culture. 

The Buddha’s top disciples were uncomfortable and confused. They shouldn’t have been. They freaked. They wouldn’t have, had they grasped non-duality. Vimalakirti changed them back and they ran back to their ashram at Jeta’s Grove and their comfortable ways of thinking. 

Vimalakirti was a bit of a prankster. His intent was not to humiliate the disciples but to show how liberation exists in ordinary life and not to be tricked by our preconceptions of others and of ourselves. Demonstrating non-duality in gender was one example of non-duality in all things — desire and enlightenment, matter and spirit, mortality and nirvana. 

The monks didn’t learn the lesson. And they were the ones to codify and spread the dharma after the Buddha’s passing. So, for around 25 centuries Buddhist priests have talked about non-duality, while engaged in dualistic behaviours and enforcing dualistic structures. Funny that.

Buddhist principles, in other words, are not concerned with sex, gender, or any of the many issues humans create around sex and gender. Unfortunately, Buddhist communities, over the centuries, like other human communities, have made them into issues. In Buddhist countries throughout Asia and over the centuries, women and those with non conventional identities have not generally fared well. It is my hope that as Buddhism moves from West to East, that will change.

All of which is to say, these writings are not concerned with sexual or gender identity. I am, however, deeply concerned with human identity, specifically mine, and the issues I have had with my identity. What does Buddhism say about human identity? That we are each noble, incomparable beings whose highest identity is expressed as wisdom, compassion, and life-force. All of us are smart, kind, and strong. Including me. I’m gonna go with that.