Tommy James clarified the assumption that "draggin' the line" refers to drug use is incorrect; it refers to the life of daily doing the work one does - simple. The song presents a daily spirituality, the work of this day, termed "draggin' the line," nothing special, yet special for enjoying what it is.
My iron begging bowl, receiving falling leaves.
*Sumita Oyama. Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda: Japan's Beloved Modern Haiku Poet. Includes a Translation of Santoka's "Diary of the One-Grass Hut." Trans. with intro. William Scott Wilson.
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I was a United Methodist pastor in Gainesville, Florida. The district overseer of the clergy, called a District Superintendent or DS, and churches in the area set up a meeting between a pastor of the largest church in the region and me. As a clergyperson ordained from another sect, I served a small congregation of about fifty parishioners on a yearly contract. The DS hoped the big-time clergyperson might invite me to serve as a minister of spirituality in his congregation since she discerned contemplative care and teaching as my strengths.
I entered the pastor's office and never felt at peace there from the time I walked in. Possibly, this unease was partly due to my being somewhat progressive and he more conservative. Also, this may have been for the position was not to be. Looking back two-and-a-half decades, I am glad I was not offered the position, though then I had hopes. The role fit my sense of calling and would get me out of the pastorate, where I often felt like a triangle trying to fit inside a square. Anyhow, not sensing at peace was a red light. I never heard back from the pastor and remained in the pastorate about a decade more, until the United Methodist Church decided, after a decade of serving, that I did not fit with them. - I write that now laughing, certainly not sad about their decision.
What I most recall is this man picking up a mug and asking me something to the effect, "What has this got to do with a spiritual life?" I looked at and inside the mug. I had no answer arising to reply. I searched, but nothing that felt right came forth.
A cherished idea that had arisen in my life then, due to devotion to a Contemplative Christian path, in contrast to the institutional one, was what I write about often - openness, spaciousness, receptivity. Yet, that thought did not arise. Nothing would arise. My brain was blocked - again, thankfully.
Also, thankfully, for I had also sensed this highly-esteemed clergyperson never "came down" to meet me but remained elevated "over" me. My DS was for this position for me, but it was not meant to be. Well, good - I was about as fond of church institutionalism as I was of eating mud or having a tattoo tattooed onto my eyelid. Still, I left slightly sad, for I knew the DS was right about what I could best offer to a congregation or the larger church.
* * *
Okay, but what about that mug or Santoka's begging bowl? Openness allows something to become. Openness is welcome. A mug can hold many things, not only fluids, but if it is filled with something, the openness is not openness. The begging bowl welcomed falling leaves, this morning my mug welcomed hot tea. The form of Santoka's bowl and my mug are different, but the emptiness is the same, even separated by about a century. To say openness, is to say welcoming, receptivity, and intimacy. Tea and mug become intimate. That is the Way. Forms come and go, emptiness remains.
Leaves have found their way into Santoka's begging bowl. Who could have foreseen this, this day, as the begging priest walked along the road? Where, now, does bowl and leaves begin? One begin, the other, begin? Either end? And how about Santoka, the one holding the bowl, now holding the leaves in the bowl?
* * *
So, the emptiness within a mug is as essential as the mug itself. The mug is a mug for it enfolds the openness. Form enfolds the formless; they are intimate, so inseparable to be one. Yet, openness is openness, and mug is a mug. All this; otherwise, "mug" makes no sense.
Emptiness is intergral to mugness, fecund with potential. The structure of the mug-openness provides the potential for something to happen.
* * *
So, the mug-openness is one with the becoming, for the possibility is present now. There is continuity between the mug and its entire lifespan. Everything to fill the mug led to creating the mug in the first place. That fruition, unfolding, no one could know in advance.
Without that potential of becoming, who would fashion a mug? How could anyone know all the mug would become in union with all that comes to be with it? In fact, can we say the mug sometime in the past is the mug in the present?
You look in the mirror and think this was the you of the past. Without your consent, the brain says it, spinning out a narrative you have witnessed many times. True? So, are you the self you were? What is a self? What are you? Who, or what, is looking in the mirror? Are you the openness allowing all this to happen, while something stands before the mirror? Could any of this happen without you, somehow, being the spaciousness itself?
* * *
Of import here is I am not speaking of the personality, or person, being openness. Who we are is more subtle than person, a formation in time and with a personality of varied traits.
So, consider this. The non-person without a personality, as the body is not the clothes wrapped around it, is always, already welcoming, is spaciousness, is openness, is receptivity itself. The self - i.e., person, personality - can only be brought into the openness of the Self by the Self. The non-person is the prior, always welcoming emptiness, so spaciousness. You feel glad when you connect intimately with someone or something, for that is reflecting your - our - nature.
This Grace of the Self seeks to bring into surrender to Itself the appearance we call I, me, mine, myself. The person can only be welcoming, truly, when surrendered by the Self to the Self. Maybe I could be more accurate in saying the person only appears to be welcoming and open. This fits with my submission that the self is only an appearance in the first place. Recall Jesus saying in the Christian Gospels, "Of my own self, I can't do a thing." This does not mean "my own self" is unimportant, so I need just to throw it in the trash, like the attempt to get rid of the ego or terminate one's life. It does mean it is vastly limited in comparison to the Self. It does mean the self is the conduit of the Self, or spirit, or soul, or ... .
* * *
A mug can only receive what it receives at the moment - this moment. I drink varied teas. What my mug welcomes is what is given it in this now. One now could be a green tea, another now a black tea, another now another tea. Even among, say, black tea, it could be black tea with a rose taste, a whiskey flavor, a bourbon tint, or another genre. See, emptiness is the presence allowing diversity. Emptiness is not an inert nothingness.
* * *
Without this spacious, receptive, feminine-like emptiness, we over-rely on deciding based on past experience, curtailing present experience. Here, there is a masculine-like aggression to present experience. And without this natural welcome, we live as autonomous beings, oft lost and confused - possibly most when we think we know who we are and what and why we do this or that and believe this or that - rather than companioning Life and others in a welcoming moment-to-moment, now, intimately.
We can live optimistically with openness, aware of the potential of pleasant, unseen surprises, our mood not determined by that of those about us or of the larger society or world-scene. - Just look on the internet and observe how people are controlled by the emotions of others, reacting to others' reactions and spreading this negativity like a fouled contagion - Is this the natural way?
See, openness means bird poop could have fallen in Santoka's bowl. The practice of wisdom is an active posture toward welcoming leaves to drop into our bowl, not poop. So, herein is the teaching of wedding wisdom and emptiness.
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When a hospice chaplain, I repeatedly saw the turn to openness, with its welcome. I saw the grace and joy when persons entered openness to say goodbye to the body. I witnessed, amid the slow loss of bodily functioning, the bliss, love, and fearlessness.
I have seen many beings dying beautifully, including my birth mother, welcoming what many call death. As one of the patients I got close to in spirit... days from death, she told me, on my last visit, to rejoice in her passing and not to be sad. I affirmed I would rejoice. She had no fear or confusion as she neared the end. Her being now welcomed the ending that had welcomed the beginning. Yet, the ending, she knew, was a beginning. As Robert Thurman, in Liberation Upon Hearing in the Between, teachings on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, says, no one gets out of here dead. She had peace through a natural spaciousness to welcome what appeared next, beyond our habitual, socialized contrast between birth and death.
With my mother, she came to peace and forgiveness in the grace of the openness. The melanoma was misdiagnosed twice, and when finally correctly diagnosed, it had progressed too far. She was formerly a healthy woman, age 68; now, she was facing the end at age 69. She was initially angry about the misdiagnosis and wanted the family to sue the doctor after her demise. Yet, true to her gracefulness in life, so in death, she released the anger and moved from the coarse body free of the animosity. She showed us, her family, how to welcome death in peace and gracefully. Forgiveness and peace arose in the openness of her true nature. Such grace never emerges from the self, only imitations of it.
* * *
Opening only takes a moment, for openness is always openness. We are opening, then, to openness itself. We return to that moment as many times as we need to. Over time, we become more sensitive to when we need to return and when we are living with this spaciousness. See, in this openness, we are not, strictly speaking, open; we live in openness. The self is empty, so open. We are being that we are, rather than that we think we are. We grow to see naturalness feels much easier than living closed off, for our true nature is intimacy, welcome, and receptivity.
In welcome, we live in celebration, gratitude, and joy; we no longer live to survive. Survival becomes only one part of the celebration, the dance of Life. We live to live, for Life is the living. Life is living, living is Life. They are not two. As one translation of a Buddhist saying in the Heart Sutra, "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form." You cannot have one without having both. Yea!
