Words and Bubbles

Mary Solas Glé McGrane, Sensei

He is eight months old and is sitting upright by himself on the floor. His attention is so caught up in what his mother is doing, he has forgotten himself, he is picking up on her excitement and paying attention to that.

She is blowing soap bubbles into the air and he is watching them as they start to float gently to the floor.

As they come near he reaches out, not to grasp them, but to touch them with his forefinger. He has learned to point. As soon as he touches them they dissolve. He does this three or four times until they have all disappeared. He looks up at his mother and then down at the floor, and lets out a big sigh.

There is something about seeing him supporting himself sitting. His body has developed naturally to the stage where he can do this. He can still lose his balance but tries again, and again.

But the wonder and surprise I see in him when the bubbles dissolve is what touches me, and the sigh.

We have this body that has been able to sit upright since we were very young. The first instruction we hear in Zen meditation is to sit upright. I find myself re-visiting the most basic instruction, beginning again.

During one sitting I saw that thoughts were arising and dissolving. Not me letting go of them. No, as soon as I turned my attention to them, they dissolved. And in that moment, seeing that all words and thoughts up to that point had all dissolved too.

There was wonder and then loss when I realized that the experience itself had dissolved also—like the infant, sighing when the bubbles disappeared.

There’s a koan I’ve been working on. The monk asks the teacher, “What is the meaning of the patriarch’s coming from the west?”

What is the meaning?

It’s the meaning we give to things that separates. I noticed as I moved through the days working with this question that I was dividing the day, giving meaning to everything, unconsciously putting words on different activities. Meditation—spiritual, shopping for groceries—mundane.

Paradoxically, it is the seeing of the meaning-making activity in the mind that reveals the seamless nature of reality itself.

The tradition recommends we work with a teacher when we take up koans. I noticed after some time working with my teacher how, after listening to my experience with the koan, her words were life affirming, pointing directly to life. So, words are important too.

And as we always say, what matters is not the words, but what touches us, what rings true, what speaks or doesn’t speak to our experience.

If words dissolve in awareness, why then do we have problems with them at times?

Suffering happens when I add words to what is said, create stories as my conditioning gives meaning to the words.

David Hinton, in his book, China Root, uses these words that I find most helpful when describing the separate self. He describes it as “that identity-centre defining us as fundamentally separate from the empirical Cosmos.”¹

“Instead,” he says, “we are an empty awareness that can watch identity rehearsing itself in thoughts and memories relentlessly coming and going.”²

I think it is important to say here that Zen says emptiness and activity are the same thing. Quite often we talk about stilling our thoughts or are concerned when our minds are full of activity, especially during zazen when they are most noticeable. This again is our putting meaning on words and thoughts, and judging them.

But, when we see that reality is seamless with no separation, then mental stillness cannot be superior to mental activity.

When we see the thoughts dissolve as we sit in that empty spaciousness, we see there is no need to react or respond in any of our old conditioned ways. We sit in the emptiness of thoughts and emotions.

In the chant Liberation from all Obstructions, there is a line, “Being with what is, I respond to what is.”³

We can have confidence and trust that being with everything just as it is, is a response. If action is needed it will flow from that.

David Hinton goes further and says, “thought is itself always already awakened: there is no need for a meditative struggle to quell it.”⁴

Further on he writes in the chapter on meditation:

If we search our actual moment to moment experience for that permanent self we assume directs our thoughts and actions, we find nothing. In the actual process of doing things, like washing dishes or planting a garden, we can find no self acting. It is only when we reflect on the action that we inject a self, and we do that only because of our cultural assumptions. The same is true of thinking or feeling … if we examine what is actually happening when we think, we can’t find any trace of a self. It is, again, those cultural assumptions that make us say thinking is the activity of a self.⁵

How comforting is that?

He describes the insight of Zen that “we are always already enlightened … that there is no awakening to be discovered in meditation, as a profound acceptance of oneself.”⁶

I’d like to finish with a poem from Seventy-Two Labors. That is the first three words from the Meal Gatha that is said before meals during every Zen sesshin. The poet is Susan Efird, a Zen teacher in this lineage who has sat with us in Dublin.

Dreaming I was breathing
in and breathing out
rouses me from sleep

upright in the dark
astonished
this breathing in
and breathing out
no one
is breathing⁷

1 Hinton, D. (2020). China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 30

2 Ibid.

3 Bays, H. “Liberation from All Obstructions,” Zen Community of Oregon Chant Book

4 Hinton, D., 106

5 Ibid., 110

6 Ibid., 107

7 Efird, S. (2022). “One Two Three Four”, Seventy-Two Labors, Bloomfield, CT: Antrim House Books

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This talk appears in the upcoming book, Digging in the Earth to Find the Blue Sky.