Grab Some Joy. Keep Grabbing!

“When you can laugh at yourself, there is enlightenment” (Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So). Well, how about that! Here we are, on the fast track to enlightenment.

My students, ages 5 to 85, make fast friends with Zen Master Suzuki. His light touch, quick sense of humor, and ease discussing his terminal illness and impending death pull them into the audience at his California monastery. C’mon, he chuckles, we can share a plate—cancer isn’t contagious. Hey, he plays, be careful what you wish for, you may not like enlightenment one little bit. Asked what she should do with the twenty-dollars she found, Suzuki replies by sliding his questioner’s bill up his sleeve.

“Maybe we are crazy…. It’s okay” (Not Always So). Oh, what a relief! Suzuki repeatedly witnesses human expertise in complicating our lives, silly champs at being hard on ourselves. Don’t worry so much, your problems will last a lifetime. Well, good. Laugh at yourself, shake your head with a smile— self-love soon floats right in. Stay put in each moment. Open up. Relax muscles. Soften edges. Flow. Don’t miss the world’s magic. Ocean. Shell. Turtle. Ginger. Petal. Rock.

Everything is moving, changing, transforming. Stay in the moment. “Be like a boatman. Although he is carried by the boat, he is also handling the boat. This is how we live in this world” (Not Always So). Moment. Moment. Moment. Only now. Only now. Only now.

Let’s accept Suzuki’s invitation to Yosemite National Park and observe from a distance the 1,340-foot waterfall. We see one whole water curtain—no separate drops. As we hike closer, however, we notice tears and rips in the falling curtain when it hits rocks, shifts with the wind, splashes into crannies. Returning to our original vantage point and gazing from afar, once again we see one whole flowing sheet of water. Only one. One.

In death, Suzuki gentles us along, we rejoin the whole again, no longer a distinct drop alone. Death gives us the joy of belonging again. “How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die?” (Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind). Life and death dissolve into each other in the waterfall. Without this reunion, life would be a run-on sentence, dangling without meaning. Death shapes the contours of our being. Wraps us up snug. Now forever.

I bet the Master’s students sat as silently as mine. Of course, he gets the next and last laugh: “If you had a limitless life, it would be a real problem for you” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind).

Like a caged bird trilling the notes of a soaring ballad, we heighten our stature as we look death in the eye. How about scoffing with poet Marianne Moore “What Are Years?” We hug eternity with every frank nod to mortality. We know you’re out there, death. Yes, “satisfaction is a lowly / thing, how pure a thing is joy.”

More joy. Bob Marley hasn’t a care because “Three Little Birds” perch at his doorstep, “singin’ sweet songs / of melodies pure and true.” Sweet, pure, true—ancient bird melodies made ever new note by note. Now.

Gustavo Dudamel mandates joy with this bopping, whopping “Mambo” interpretation from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” Musicians, instruments, attendees—up and down, side to side, round and round, on and on. On and on. On.

Look at these beauties, the first red roses springing up from winter’s thaw. “I see them bloom / For me and you.” Jon Batiste’s voice and hands affirm “What a Wonderful World.”

Now.

A rose. “That is all, but it is splendid” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind).

Forever now. Splendid.

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