r/StormBornHollow

To anyone who has been banned from a community, I do not mean to say that I know the particulars of what happened, or that one person’s experience explains another’s. I have been banned too, in what felt to me like a similar kind of mismatch. I recognize something in the mixture of being excluded, smiling at the strangeness of it, and wondering whether what one meant ever had a chance to arrive.

Zen was not my first language. It became meaningful after a long apprenticeship to other books and other ways of listening. Before I came to it, there were texts that spoke more clearly to my ears and gave language to what I could then hear. I have come to think that people meet the same difficult human territory through many doors: Zen, Christianity, poetry, philosophy, psychology, recovery, song lyrics, science fiction, or no named path at all.

So perhaps a ban does not always settle the worth of what was said. Sometimes it says that the message, in the form it took, could not travel in that particular place. Tone, timing, vocabulary, history, and the available ear did not meet. That is not necessarily a verdict on the person who was banned, or on the people who moderated the space. It may simply be a mismatch that became visible.

Zen has its images of cutting through confusion. Still, I keep returning to the thought that the sword which cuts through all the BS must finally cut through the idea that sharpness by itself is wisdom. The question is not only whether something needs saying, but whether I have found a way to say it that another person can receive.

I do not say this as a correction to anyone. I am trying to learn it myself, through my own failures of measured expression. The work, as I see it, is to keep listening for the cues in the traffic, to keep tuning the instrument, and to remember that another place may have another ear.

Before the seven years,
old news already, antiquated too,
slang evolving without me,
I was lost in a different way.

I never cared for the signals
that said I had kept up.
I cried out for a commune to become,
for some answer outside
the immediate self.

Inactivity sat in a burning house.
The exit was clear.
Every solution was considered
except the door.

Until the last moment,
dead of night,
the body took it
with compulsion.

I know miracles.
I know not to settle for them.

For roughly seven years
I picked litter on a college campus,
minimum wage,
a five-gallon bucket in one hand,
an aluminum claw in the other.

The task was as simple
as a task could be:

find what had been left behind,
grasp it,
place it in the bucket,
walk toward the next piece.

At the beginning of the day,
a body coming from night’s rest,
the work was easy enough.

As afternoon gathered,
the bucket took on its own weight.
The claw made the hand close harder.
My legs had to be persuaded
to take another path,
another lawn,
another hedge,
another cigarette butt pressed
into the seam of the walk.

By afternoon, balance was no longer enough.
I entered the posture of piercing effort.

I did this for roughly seven years, at minimum wage. There was an extra day available for overtime, useful for household expenses, and the body paid for it afterward. Recuperation became the unpaid portion of the job, a private strategy of sleep, stretching, and becoming able to return. My wife admired the body the work made. I could smile at that, but not for long once the duration of the pressure returned.

Still, in the single-mindedness of the work
there was an ongoing scan
for the next step:

a wrapper beneath a hedge,
a cup caught in grass,
a crushed can at the curb.

I knew the students mostly
by what came down
or what was left behind.

Beer boxes in the parking lots.
Things tossed from dorm windows.
Piss bottles, so common
I learned to watch where I reached.

If someone made a habit
of throwing things down,
we reported it.

What playground was this,
where the game could end
at another person’s feet?

And in the intervals
the surrounding world entered:

a crow’s mocking caw,
squirrels darting to the nearby trunk,
the timing of my crossing
not mine alone,

a red-tailed hawk crying
as it circled,
its eye passing over the campus.

One day an office worker asked me
something about the job.

At the time I did not understand
that the question might have taken courage.

I told her how good it was
to see the whole campus working,
no corner unseen
in the course of the day.

Later, a tradesman, passing, asked
how I did it.

Didn’t I get bored?
Wasn’t I skilled enough
for something else?

I smiled.

No pressure, I said.
Just show up.

For a moment it made sense to us both,
neither of us changing occupations,
the campus continuing to shed its evidence
into grass, hedge, gutter, and walk.

I say this afterward. The self who inhabited that campus knew something, though the day was filled with its toil and the mind busy with fatigue and the next task. Contemplation was not a calling exactly. It had a shape that was not a shape, a way of allowing the meeting.

Some never visit it.
Some press the vein
with genuine discernment,
as if a wellspring were there,
not giving up,
not turning away.

The work was seen in my absence.

By evening
the landscape was impeccable.

The evidence of the labor
was its absence.

Authenticity was there
in each breath before thought.

By morning,
bucket in one hand,
claw in the other.

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author note: working draft