Empty Hand Zen Center

 By Catherine Seigen Spaeth

Asphalt bubbles up from the earth.  We use it to bind disparate things into a hard aggregate - it skinned our knees at recess and now it gets us where it wants us to go.  Black and smooth at first, it grays, pits and buckles with age.  Our garden has found its way into the cracks of the asphalt, settling into its curves and hollows, earth silting up and washing away on its crusty surface.  There is strong patience in taking root here.

A humble material, asphalt provides the infrastructure for our dependence on oil, the very thing it arose from.  There is pleasure in meeting this hard surface with the softness of the earth.  Our dirt comes from many places – a few buckets here and there of thick grey clay, of forest black soil and acorn husks.  There is  Frank's earth from China, a blend of pilgrimage sites including Tiananmen Square; and Rafe and Rose Martin's earth from Joshu's temple - a cypress tree grows here. 

A giant stump marked where to begin, and the Buddha sits there surrounded in vinca – an invasive plant that worries the foresters but pleases us urban gardeners with its vigor.  As the earth has begun to hold we protect its fragile borders with river stones and thyme, and a Lady’s Mantle has settled in.

Cut flowers from the altar and rose petal offerings end up quickly in the compost heap. As the seasons change so do these flowers – the very first layer of our own cuttings has appeared over store-bought irises and yellow tulips, curling and browning into dank rot softness.  Our pierced garbage can is an enso of what arises and falls.  Stanley Kunitz writes, "We are all containers for composting.  So we cannot approach the compost heap without a feeling of connection."*

Once on a scrap of paper in the dokusan room I left a note for Susan Ji-on.  “Did you see the Buddha head in the Wisteria pot?”  It was the final hour of long zazen, and I couldn’t wait until the silence had ended to verify my sanity, for after days of  silently observing the garden a head appeared from nowhere.  The surprise of this gift had teacher and student both in shivers, and in the next day we learned that it had been snuck into the garden by our neighbor, Ivar, who once lived in the building that is now home to Empty Hand.

Other such gifts have arrived, turtles in a row, and a Hotei too large to be discreet.   In Ed Roberson's beautiful poem, “Hotei:  The Fullness,” is conveyed our delusion to seek transcendence in Enlightenment’s fullness, the mistaken satisfaction “that fullness is assumed upon the full.” Hotei’s belly is for Roberson as much the swollen belly of no possessions, the swollen belly of the poor, distended to the very last minutes of life.   It is as though Roberson urges us to rub this belly not for good luck, but in acknowledgement of the path beyond abundance and lack.  In our urban garden, Buddha’s stillness is in the very left corner, and wandering Hotei is bursting from the right.

 Our feeders are frequented by sparrows and finches mostly.  They perch on springy willows in a gang. But as ground feeders it feels as though it is the pigeons who have really made our garden their home, strutting among the potted plants or resting on Buddha's head.  Transmission bows were interrupted by the cardinal that appeared out the window, but a cardinal has appeared only a few times since then.  There are other creatures who come to the garden to feed, raccoons have cleaned their fish in the birdbath, leaving  unfinished carcasses behind.  And a Red-tailed or Cooper's Hawk occasionally catches a squirrel or a pigeon - here, a Cooper's Hawk is wary as it feeds.

Asphalt belongs to a slower time where the beating of the sun, the pouring of the rain and winter cold barely effect it’s stillness, while thriving upon the asphalt life is as fleeting as a gnat. Our garden has no plan or purpose but to flourish -  when an iris blooms, the garden is the garden of the blooming iris.  We watch for the cardinal as much as we watch for the hawk. When the garden is for the birds we tiptoe up to the window, and when it is for us we do our best not to disturb the neighbors.   

Stanley Kunitz writes:

The garden isn't, at its best, designed for admiration or praise; it leads to an appreciation of the natural universe, and to a meditation on the connection between the self and the rest of the natural universe. And this can come not only from the single flower in its extravagant beauty, but in the consideration of the harmony established among all aspects of the garden's form.*

*Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, NY: W.W. Norton, c. 2005, pp. 65 and 13 in order of appearance.