Love Before the Blossoms Fall (Herreid)
"Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread" (29).
When encountering texts that warn against attachment, I find myself ambivalent. On the one hand, I understand how attachment causes suffering, especially when we cling onto something (or someone) that is no longer serving us, or something (or someone) that is no longer here. On the other hand, a life without attachment sounds incredibly lonely, and not worthwhile. I try to imagine giving up my attachment to friends and family, and the emptiness that would remain. I think about Ringo, my family's dog, how much we all loved her before and throughout her terminal illness, and how much we love her still. I do a cost-benefit analysis of love and inevitable loss, and love wins every time.
The dialogue between attachment and aversion reminds me of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
"It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death—emotions that appear to have devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."
How do we live with our emotions? Despite the pain they bring, why don't we simply want to shut them off?
Maybe I am making a mistake in how I think about all of this, in my linkage of love with attachment and hate with aversion. Perhaps there can be love without attachment; in the fleeting moment when the flowers are blooming, before they fall to the ground. Is the attachment what causes the blossoms to fall? Maybe sometimes, when our love becomes suffocating. But no matter how we love, the thing we love will change and eventually disappear. If we learn to accept that things are temporary, that despite attachment, blossoms inevitably fall, how would it change the way we love?
Ms. Herreid, I love this! And I'm right there with you in wondering how to live a life of detachment yet full of joy, happiness, love, sadness, despair; all of it. I want all of it. Without desperation and despair, I don't know the fullness of release and love. They partner together in their work in the world; love and hatred, joy and sorrow, exhilaration and boredom. I am writing a paper on the early buddhist discourses and he says at one point that he teaches the "dhamma for abandoning the material acquired self" and when we can learn to abandon the material then our defiled mental states will fall away and pure ones will replace them. That's when joy and happiness enter the human life. I'm wondering if it's a practice in releasing myself from clinging so tightly to my own desires. Feeling emotions of love and hatred might be perfectly acceptable and I should not avoid them like Dogen says, aversion brings an abundance of weeds. But desiring particulars is maybe where I need to set my mind toward abandoning and let whatever emotions come and go as they please, let relationships come and go as they please, let jobs, houses, etc all come and go as they please. Enjoy them while they are a part of my life but hold them with open palms to the sky. Thank you for this lovely post! And your dog is adorbs!
ReplyDeleteI have the same reaction. First I think I can’t possibly let go of certain things. Then I try to justify them by looking for ways in which they might possibly be not inconsistent with non-attachment. But immediately the reconciliation becomes suspect: Am I simply making excuses? What if the things I’m making an allowance for are the very ones to which I’m most attached? What if they are the most harmful? How can I heed the warning without perfect earnestness? Finally I end up in a place of anxiety and suspense.
ReplyDeleteA proponent of severing attachments would say: This is precisely the result of your attachment - If you agree that attachments cause suffering, why do you hesitate? Why do you desire consistency in the first place? And why then second-guess it? Why do you even desire perfect earnestness? I know I fail often, but I learn from each failure, eliminating an attachment once I spot it, and am content with my progress. So why must you be assured of perfect success even to resolve to make the attempt?
With all this I heartily agree. But how do I begin? How do I release myself when I am already stretched thin, when I am as it were constitutionally on tenderhooks? Sometimes a bit of humor and levity work. Often I struggle - not to struggle.
Great post and discussion. I guess the question is, Is love necessarily attachment? In the part of the chain that goes feeling-craving-attachment, none of these necessarily or intrinsically lead to the next one. Attachment is the attempt to secure something forever, and we know how too often love is confused with possession and control -- a confusion that actually can strangle love. If we put this together with the "Two Darts" parable, there is a natural grief that comes from loss of a loved one, but then on top of this we layer a willed grief that comes from an idea of what we should be feeling based on an idea of what should have happened. Having said this, I'm not sure Dogen is opposed to attachment -- might he be proposing a different orientation to attachment? that is, feel deeply, but know what it is.
ReplyDeleteYes! I wrote in my post about a particular line I'd written and took a long time to find a "home" for: "Strange, isn't it? How anything will turn dangerous if you cling to it long enough?" and I think you're getting right and the crux of my thoughts about attachment. Of course, invariably, I attach myself to things, people, practices, art, habits in this life. Some are surely dangerous from the start and not worth clinging to. But then there are those salvific ones... the writer who buoyed me through a dark time, the practice of rising early to start the day, hiking in nature to slow my mind and appreciate my surroundings. I think the "danger" sets in when one clings too desperately, when the attachment can become a desperate one, one that justifies the self, one that crowds out the exploration and adaption of new attachments. So it makes for a tricky middle ground, doesn't it? In a comment on Ms. Diaz's post, I talked about a yoga retreat I found in India among practitioners considerably more advanced than I was. In the end, it made me feel a little empty, because I saw these happy, fulfilled people for whom Iyengar had been a sufficient focus, their life's calling, their main priority. But for me, it couldn't save me from my recursive existential thinking... at times, I "escaped" myself, but... not consistently enough. It saddened me because it seemed at the time that the attachment that seemed ideal for these intelligent, kind people couldn't "save" me. I think I had too singular a need for some sole thing to lift me from myself... I wanted to find an obsession, perhaps. But I was too myopic. I think we need to find ways to embrace the attachments that serve us, while still remaining open to change--new attachments, changing relationships to current attachments, "retiring" attachments as we change and grow.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe we can draw inspiration from the natural cyclicality inherent in the opening quote you chose. Though the blossoms fall in autumn, the tree will bloom again in spring. When we embrace release, we do so with a trust that new blossoms will emerge, that we may exhibit seasons of shedding *and* seasons of abundance.
This is such an interesting topic you raise about our orientation to the falling flowers and how that might change the way we love. It seems on some level everyone, at least intellectually, acknowledges the flowers in their life will fall, but just not today, and so we indefinitely extend today. If we knew our loved one's flowers could fall anytime, would that change how we speak and listen? That is if we knew it with our bodies and hearts as well as our mind.
ReplyDeleteI sincerely enjoyed reading about Ringo, and it reminds me of my dog. Although I would say I love my dog beyond measure, I am embarrassed to say, but sometimes I don't want to play with her from me being flat out lazy. Indeed my dog is fully alive and inviting me to live fully simply by playing. I guess some dogs don't wait for flowers to fall.
After having seminar on Gita Govinda I have been thinking lately about vulnerability and consequently just why it can be so hard to practice. There's a sort of experience paradox that comes from loving so that after having experiences of being hurt, we can learn to cover those vulnerable spaces, which then makes it more difficult for us to be moved deeply by love. Perhaps we cannot separate ourselves from the pains of loving any more than we can separate ourselves from hunger if we don't eat. This made me wonder if maybe the best thing we can do is to dive towards the pain. But that's not right. We are not diving into our emotions. It is our emotions that are coming diving into us. Thinking about it this way helped me see that perhaps vulnerability and sitting may be one way to respond to the falling flowers.
Thanks again for the wonderful post
How difficult (and beautiful) it is to love without attachment!
ReplyDeleteHere is a poem called to mind:
To the Oak Tree
By Shu Ting (Trans:Johanna Yueh)
If I love you --
I will never be a clinging trumpet creeper
Using your high boughs to show off my height
If I love you --
I will never be a spoony bird
Repeating a monotonous song for green shade
Or be a spring
Bringing cool solace all year long
Or be a steep peak
Increasing your stature, reflecting your eminence
Even the sunlight
Even the spring rain
No, all these are not enough
I must be a ceiba tree beside you
Be the image of a tree standing together with you
Our roots, entwined underground
Our leaves, touching in the clouds
With each gust of wind
We greet each other
But nobody
Can understand our words
You'll have your copper branches and iron trunk
Like knives, like swords, like halberds, too
I'll have my crimson flowers
Like heavy sighs
And valiant torches
We'll share cold spells, storms and thunder
We'll share mists, hazes and rainbows
Seemingly always apart
But also forever interdependent
Only this can be great love
The loyalty is here
Love --
I love not only your strapping stature
But also your firm stand, the earth beneath you
As I was reading what you wrote I thought of two sets of people I know. The first were two friends of mine - one went to university in Australia and the other went to a university in their home state. When she came back home after four years they met again, but they found that they no longer had much in common. She told him that she had changed, and that he hadn't. He told me about this like someone who has sat with a thought for a long time. They're no longer friends.
ReplyDeleteThe other two are the parents of one of my childhood friends. His mother a bunch of years ago decided to cut her hair short and completely change up her style - everything from the clothes to even her attitude and way of talking to people. His dad also changed quite a bit - he got his ears pierced and started riding motorcycles and all that. I used to think: "wow - they've changed so much that they're like different people in the 14 or so years that I've known them. Don't they like, not like each other anymore?" But the strength of their relationship seems to be that they always gave each other the room to grow and become different people over time, and they were committed to meeting each other again as if for the first time - over and over again. This seems to me to be something like living together with love but not an attachment to a specific self of the other person. It seems like a very difficult but impressive and tender accomplishment to me. This is not exactly what you were talking about, but related I think.
These comments are so valuable, thank you all!
ReplyDeleteI am re-reading the Tenzo Kyokun, and regarding the handling of ingredients, Dogen advises the tenzo to treat them without any usual sort of judgement, no matter if your materials will allow you to make a creamy soup or only a watery broth. "Where there is no attachment, there can be no aversion." I believe this is a relevant addition to the above conversation because the passage demonstrates the relationship between attachment and aversion. They are two sides of the same coin, and there cannot be one without the other. The way to escape the irrationality and misery-making of attachment and aversion might be found in the following quote: "Do not be careless with poor ingredients and do not depend on fine ingredients to do your work for you but work with everything with the same sincerity." Maybe it seems too easy an answer, but might sincerity transform our relationships with things and people into something that is free of aversion and attachment?