Fishing for Butterflies

I’m not sure why exactly I meditate. I’ve been doing so regularly for the last three years, in grad school (probably on account of the need for stability), and semi-regularly for years before that, since college (for reasons more to do with seeking, I suppose), but on the whole I have absolutely no idea why this practice is so central to my life. Like brushing my teeth, every morning I get up, lay out my mat and cushion, and take a seat atop, where I remain silent for about twenty-five minutes. Indeed like brushing my teeth, with my new electric toothbrush, I simply set the timer and do the thing until it goes off, trying to resist the temptation to cheat and cut out early. And I suppose my teeth could be cleaner, as could my head.

The meditation style I sit with currently is called koan work, and basically it entails allowing your mind to settle into a little Zen story that makes no sense. For instance, there’s one about a guy fishing with a straight hook three inches above the water, and no bait. “Here, fishy-fishies!” he basically calls out to them. What does that mean? I couldn’t tell you, never being much of a fisherman myself (perhaps it’s a legitimate, if esoteric, technique). And in fact “telling you” would defeat the purpose, which is to allow you to try and find out for yourself, and whatever happens along the way is the point—until you arrive at the canonical answer, or don’t, which may take you, oh, ten years. Part of the reason I love this meditation style is it gives intellectuals like me, by which I mean people who live in their heads (and need meditation the most), something to do. The alternative being that I sit there and fixate on what I’m going to do today, what I didn’t do yesterday, and basically try to change my life by thinking about it.

Not to say thinking your thoughts isn’t in its own way useful. It’s just that, “I should call Tony to book that haircut today, he’s busy and fills up quick, I really should’ve called yesterday, I’m so lazy and disorganized, why do I procrastinate so much, etc.” isn’t going to actually get my hair coiffed all nice-like. What this stream of perseverating does reveal, however, is the tendency of the mind to do so, which is good to know, useful in the sense of being able to see I’m doing it again. So that’s one merit of the koan practice, I suppose: allowing you to see your habits of mind in the bigger context of the world of Zen, where they might teach you something about yourself rather than, or in addition to, making you miserable. As my dad used to say, quoting—unknowingly—many of the writers I admire, “Write to get to know your own mind.” I guess I meditate for that reason.

But after a while, your mind becomes a pretty boring place, and it’s a miracle I still stick with the practice (supplementing, I suppose, with writing). I know what my mind does, only now I also know I can’t do anything about it. Sometimes I’ll get lost in fantasies of my girlfriend having sex with other men, a favorite of mine, knowing full well this is my brain’s attempt to entertain itself—like being at the movies, suspending disbelief to identify with the character, only the character happens to be me—and there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s what brains do! And so, I have no choice but to sit there, as my beautiful red-headed lover becomes, in the words of Willie Nelson, a red-headed stranger, and does what she does with me, only with some other guy. Then the reel ends with a click, “Oh, jealous fantasies again,” and I return to the koan, still waiting for that fish. So I guess meditation is not for the faint of heart, in the sense of being easily scared of what goes on inside your own heart.

The truth is, that the heart and mind are really one in this practice, and the carnival of thought comes from a deep place of wishing and fearing. These most basic human impulses well up with my thoughts, and not to really examine my head contents but merely notice their depths is the invitation here. What am I afraid of, or really desirous for, that perhaps I have trouble admitting? We don’t have to do a whole trauma inventory to realize that my fantasies are expressions of basic human needs, like maybe to catch a fish without dropping a hook in the water, to feed ourselves—physically, emotionally, spiritually—without risk.

I remember once I was on retreat, my first in fact, and it seemed like my fragile little ego was going to see itself for what it actually is: a fragile little ego. I was nervous going in to see my teacher, and told him as much, which of course he reassured me by simply accepting that. “Isn’t that the way it is,” he’s fond of saying, quoting his teacher, a lineage of people fearless before all things that are. I told him of how, earlier that day, I was sitting out on the porch overlooking the desert, and a butterfly came to visit me, bright yellow, and we remarked at how funny it was that butterflies could flutter by from both sides, nerves in the belly and drifters in the desert. This whole inside/outside thing started to get a little fuzzy, and I thought of my dad.

My dad had just died, a couple months before, making me a little nervous (again, seeing a pattern here) to go off into the silent woods of myself for a week. But my therapist had approved, and here I was, in the heart of my grief, wondering what was inside me, what out, and thus what of the old man—who did actually like to fish, so happens—lived on somewhere in the midst of me.

But this feels a somewhat unsatisfying place to end, because so seemingly unresolved. There’s a koan about a Zen guy who wakes up from a dream in which he’s a butterfly, and he can’t tell any longer whether he’s a man dreaming he’s a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he’s a man, and perhaps it doesn’t matter one way or another, just so long as both are possible and, in a way, true. My girlfriend and I got in a bit of a dispute the other day over this idea that people “live on inside us” after they die, and I felt like that was mere consolation, not an accurate description of how the world is—which, by the way, I now realize is my meditation practice’s chief aim, to see clearly. When I lost my father, it’s true that that part of him in me, that part I cherished (and resented, fought, loved, pondered) while he was alive, didn’t go anywhere. I can still do all those things with him now, and often do, though I can’t call him up after to confirm. But there’s also a part of me, or him, where a hole’s been left, and doesn’t so much “live on” as “empty out.” Perhaps it was there all along.

When I think of my dad fishing, I picture the dog in his little skiff, paws over the side, waiting, waiting. I never actually knew this man, only the fondness he had for telling this story, as he had for all stories involving dogs. I don’t know if he caught anything either.

Boy, this stuff is hard to talk about: meditation, which for me means sitting with whatever arises. Obviously writing is a violation of that (I'm not just sitting, but sitting at my desk and typing), and yet I'm tempted to say it's at the heart of my practice where these two intersect. I sit in the koan tradition, which involves little Zen stories of teacher-student encounters dropped into your meditation, and often we expand this to include poems as well. I like this because it gives my mind something to do, but also, more fundamentally, because it occupies the in-between space of the imagination. With koans, I'm somehow not just in my head, nor in my body, but back-and-forth, something like the revolving door of self. A great Zen teacher said something like that once.

Dorian Rolston is a writer and teacher in Tucson, Arizona. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona, where he currently teaches a Poetry Center workshop called, “Writing Well: Essay as Self-Help.” He's currently at work on a collection of essays around manhood and spirituality. His dogs know how to sit.