Zen in the art of staying home

March 27, 2003

Dear Patty,

South Lorimier Street is a yellow road of crocuses now. You wonder if dogs are deafened by the sound of buds bursting up and down the street.

We have grown accustomed to living on South Lorimier Street. For years, parents and friends wondered when we would move. We wondered too.

It's a neighborhood in transition, we assured them. The transition is taking awhile.

DC was walking the dogs a few nights ago when someone ran through our front yard and tried to jump our fence. He didn't make it but kept on going up Lorimier Street. By the time I heard the commotion the police were involved. On the police log later I found a report of marijuana and cocaine possession.

Wednesday morning was disturbed by the sound of steel excavation machines widening the street that runs beside the park next to our house. To make room for more cars, the city chopped down the trees that lined the street. Are we making progress?

To retreat from the noise I walked to Grace Cafe for coffee. Soothing guitar music played over the stereo system. I read from "Zen in the Art of Archery," a classic that has eluded me until now. I fantasize it will make me a better golfer. "If one really wishes to be a master of an art, technical knowledge of it is not enough," Eugen Herrigel wrote in 1953. "One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an 'artless art' growing out of the Unconscious."

I am convinced this is true. I could go to the driving range and play golf every day and improve moderately, but mastery of anything goes beyond knowing what body part to move where and when.

I hope to teach my Unconscious how to play golf. My Conscious is too unreliable.

There is an "artless art" to making a home too. As many Martha Stewart shows as you watch or decorating magazines you read, making a place that comforts you comes from the Unconscious too.

We may need therapy to put our house in order, though. There long has been nowhere to put any new acquisitions, but DC returned from the Salvation Army store a few days ago with a '50s-era ceramic plate and a glass coffee carafe.

She likes '50s designs and predicts that these items will be worth something someday. Actually, DC's Unconscious dilemma isn't acquisitiveness. It's the inability to throw anything away. Our basement, backyard and closets are full of things that will be worth something someday.

Also disturbing our collective Unconscious are the willingness to harbor three dogs who live to make messes and my own slovenliness, which is even easier to ascribe psychological motives to. Disorder in the brain does not result in feng shui in the home.

Obviously, we have lots of desires and habits to detach ourselves from to reach what Zen Buddhists call "right presence of mind." It is a mind that does not cling to an idea or thought but rather views it, like a passing cloud.

This is the end of our eighth year here in this house. I have discovered the joy of making mortgage payments. I hope to learn to think of commotions as clouds.

Detachment is the essence of Zen. Another way of saying detachment is unselfconsciousness. It is emptying yourself so that life occurs spontaneously, artlessly, like a crocus opening in spring.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.