Give and Take (Diaz)




 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84NSRd5vKo   

 (copy and paste to YouTube to watch a short video if it doesn't appear as a link)


The above link to a short 3 minute video about turning a clay pot on a potter's wheel is the perfect visual to go along with the final bit from Painted Rice Cake which states, "When you understand this teaching with your body and mind, you will thoroughly experience the ability to turn things and be turned by things. If this is not done, the power of the study of the way is not yet realized. To enact this ability is to actualize the painting of enlightenment." 

We've been discussing how much, if not most, of life is made of 2D images. I can sit in my recliner in front of my giant window and look out to a tree row with blue sky and a sunset behind it, but in my 3D world I still see a flat 2D image of what is real and has dimension several yards away from me. This class, we discussed the idea of a painter. It felt as though we kept coming back to there not being a painter. Or at least we focused on the fact that I am an observer and that's all I can know. This final word from Dogen has me more convinced that I can indeed experience the give and take of the creator and the created. In fact, it is only when I understand the teaching he is offering with my body and mind that I can "turn and be turned" as a pot on a wheel. I may not be able to grasp every experience held by various observers, but we will share some elements in common. We will share the fact that we've both had our own life experience that brings us to the pot. We are both experiencing the pot in a way that moves our own mind, perhaps our body. The pot might hydrate my thirst, even momentarily, for beauty. It seems that to hunger, or long, or yearn is a shared human experience. The object may perhaps deviate from one to another, but the elemental longing remains. 

I am also at times, or at least at some time have been, the pot. My experiences are shaped by those around me. My shape, my texture, my color...all are formed by the experiences of my life and my interactions with other pots, the tools others hold in their hands, and the environment surrounding my pot. At times, my pot has been in a frigid and icy surrounding where tiny ice crystals formed inside my pores and caused cracks in my surface. Or maybe I've been hanging out in a hot, humid environment too long and tiny mold spores have begun to multiply on my unglazed surface causing discoloration. 

Either way, at times in life, or it seems at all times in life, I'm simultaneously observing pots, as I myself am a pot and experiencing both worlds in unique ways. My body observes my pot-ness, and my mind observes other pots. To try to make the two "not different is a hindrance. When you allow reaching to be unhindered by reaching, one reaching is myriad reachings." Maybe my thoughts about being a pot is a 'reach' but, hey, my reaching will somehow get to the myriad things so it all gravy. Hey! Maybe I'm a gravy boat!

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