Tadaima!

(Japanese for “I’m home now!”)

Cynthia Eisho Morrow

September 2023

 

It’s April 24th, 2023, and I’m nervously sitting in a chair at a barber shop just south of Kyoto Station in Japan. An adorable, young Japanese woman takes the electric razor up against the side of my head… bzzzzz…. bzzzzz…. I watch as thick, long clumps of curly tresses fall to the floor. Gazing in the mirror, I start to dissociate. “Be here for this!!”, I tell myself, drawing my attention back to my midline. My breath deepens as I observe in the mirror this radical act. After about 10 minutes, she beams at my newly bald head and proclaims, “Kawaii!”, which means, “Cute!”. The next day, I arrive at the monastery gates high on a mountain for my 60-day initiation to become a Tendai priest.

 

A prerequisite for all who enter the Hieizan Gyoin for “shugyo” (spiritual training), the shaving of the hair is an act of relinquishing attachment to ego. It is said that our attachment to ego or self—clinging to fixed ideas of who we are based on our conditioned patterns of what we like and don’t like—keeps us from being able to see and understand things and beings as they really are.  Keeps us from being truly free and limits our capacity to help others.

 

In our earth-based rites of passage work, this act of shaving the hair is an example of Severence. Through the power of our intention, we cut the ties to the old life and to what no longer serves as preparation for ceremony. The Gyoin, in addition to being an extraordinary opportunity to learn about Tendai Buddhism, is training ground for seeing our own fixations and obscurations, and relinquishing them for the benefit of all beings.

 

During the ensuing 60-day road of trials, my Dharma siblings and I endured the total absence of free time, the intricate rules to follow, the physical pain and exhaustion from 3,000 prostrations in 3 days, the pressure wounds and constant numbness in our feet from sitting in seiza meditation posture so many hours every day, the mental fatigue from having to memorize so many things, the chronic sleep deprivation, the weight loss. Being stripped bare of all our worldly habits that maximize comfort and ease, we are challenged to meet ourselves more deeply than we would ever engineer if it were up to us. In the midst of all this, we are learning about the Dharma from accomplished teachers, meditating and chanting together, performing ancient ceremonies, all on a beautifully forested mountain top where priests have been initiated in this same way for over 1,200 years.

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In our modern-day rites of passage work, this is the Threshold – the liminal place of separating the wheat from the chaff. Through the pressure of forces beyond ourselves, we are cracked open to something beyond ego, beyond our own preferences and capacity to control our reality. It might be the ferocious wind storms, the searing heat, the frigid cold, the hunger from days of fasting, the meeting of ourselves deeply in solitary silence. Brought to our knees, we might remember our early pain and strategies for coping. Perhaps there can be healing when this is held with the intention of ceremony. We might find a humility that puts us on the same playing field as the essential nature of all other beings. Breath-after-breath, moment-by-moment is how we move along the path. If all goes well, we might find kindness and compassion, from others, for others, for ourselves. Perhaps we might touch a freedom within that cannot ever be taken away.

 

In the strictness of the monastery environment, the compassion and kindnesses shown will never leave me. The extra support around language difficulties, the warm clothes lent, the woman in the kitchen who always efforted to make my food gluten-free, the teachers who saw me trying and met me with tenderness and understanding, the assistants who snuck us treats, the sly smiles and secret laughter, the love letters from family and friends. When all is stripped away, it’s true what they say, love is everything.

 

Fast forward to this moment of writing in September so close to Equinox. It is now 2-1/2 months since returning from Japan, and time for my official return to EarthWays after a year’s sabbatical. In our rites of passage landscape, I find myself knee-deep in Incorporation—the most challenging phase of all—bringing the gifts home.  How does the ordeal of monastery training mirror the rites of passage work we do on the land, and how will my life and my work incorporate and transmit some of the wisdom gained through this experience?

 

Now only one season into the year-long incorporation road ahead, there’s not much I know yet. However, I return to a summer of extreme climate events like we have not before seen, resulting in a shocking number of lives lost. Maui. Morocco. Libya. I shudder as I consider the hand we have played in our warming earth. Being attached to comfort is understandable, but in our privileged first world, our unconscious entitlement to that comfort casts a very large shadow upon the earth community. Who pays the price? Ultimately, we all do. Our actions, no matter how conscious we are of them, affect all other beings in our world. What will it take for us to really get that? What will it take for us to meet suffering with an open heart rather than turn away? Will we continue to live out of our self-preservation strategies fueled by greed and aversion, or do what we can to invest in a way that is as sustaining as possible for all? In truth, we have more freedom, power, and love than we can possibly imagine. How might we choose to use it?