One head!

I've brought a head of red cabbage into the tiny hut kitchen to blanch, pickle and water bath can, using the few narrowmouth lids I have on hand (small jars). About half of this will go in the freezer. All will be small batches, to have with rice, spuds or noodles.

Red cabbage being cut up for steaming in the little old Aroma rice cooker
with onion greens, carrots, sweet peppers, water, vinegar, sea salt, maple
syrup, spices to taste.

[later] All done; it made about six pints of canned "imitation kimchi" in jars and five pints in bags in the hut freezer. That's enough for about thirty-three meals for me, in combination with other ingredients.

Two heads, they say, are better than one, but thirty-three meals' worth of cabbage is a lot for me in one year. So it's as well that only one of my cabbages made a head! I'm fine with that; the collards did much better and will likely be the main winter veg this year.

We are a two-headed species. One head witnesses a singing bird. The other talks to itself: "Oh, there's a singing bird." This monologue appears to be a step away from the world, or what could be called nature, even though of course the monologue occurs within nature -- it can't be anywhere else! But we fool ourselves.

The epitome of such fooling is when we try, sometimes with horrible success, to fool one another. As a civilization we're approaching fully automated 24/7 fooling, with a corresponding massive leap in gratuitous suffering.

Zen folks have a project to let go of that second head, for as much of the time as is practicable. Releasing the past as regret, releasing the future as expectation, hear the bird, see the garden, inhale, exhale, cut the cabbage.

The Woman Lets It Be

Hidden Lamp, p.62

 

Master Langye Huijue had a woman disciple who came to him for instruction.  The master told her to examine the saying “Let it be.”  He said that if she faithfully used this sentence as a scythe, she would cut down illusions and reap enlightenment.

 

The woman followed his instructions faithfully.  One day her house burned down and she said, “Let it be.”  ....

One day she started to make fried cakes for dinner as her husband lit the fire.  She prepared the batter and heated the oil, then poured a spoonful of batter into the hot oil.

 

When she heard the sizzling sound, she was immediately enlightened.  She threw the pan to the ground and jumped up and down, clapping her hands and laughing.

 

Her husband shouted at her, “What are you doing?  Have you gone mad?”  She answered, “Let it be.”

 

Then she went to Huijue and he confirmed that she had indeed harvested the holy fruit.

 

 

Question:

If we ignore the details of daily life, things fall apart.  But if we don’t ignore them, we may lose ourselves in those very details.  What is the middle way?