1 Thresholds, Edges, Doorways Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to share this afternoon with you. I woke this morning, as I m sure many of you did, to wind and fog and crows flying around and landing on the roof, and I thought of this long, extraordinary summer we ve had, day after day of sun and blue skies, and I thought, Summer is over, everything is changing. Yesterday I was driving out to Cape Flattery and the Makah reservation, and all along the coast the bigleaf maples were turning golden, seemingly more with every hour. I often feel, and I wonder if some of you do too, that this time of year is one both great beauty and great poignancy. This time in no longer summer, but not yet winter. On the one hand you could say that it is an in between time, but really, what does that mean? It is its own time, its own season. Today I want to explore the theme of thresholds, edges, doorways, and what it means to stand on the edge of something new, or let go of something you have known, and what the spaces in between feel like. Just as a doorway is not just a doorway between two rooms, or between inside and outside, it is its own thing. One of my very favorite words is liminal, which comes from the Latin limen, or threshold. Something that is liminal is in between, not clearly one thing or another.
2 When I hear the word liminal I think of a shadowy place, a place where things are blurred, like twilight, the place between day and night, or dawn. A liminal space is also an open space, a place where things are not so clearly defined, and where a kind of freedom is possible. Liminal is not about a past of future, but the ever-changing, every-fluid now. And really, this is always the place we are, the threshold between this moment and the next, life unfurling in front of us as we bravely step through the doorway, or get dragged through the doorway, or stumble through the doorway to we don t know. Sometimes the doorway is one of joy and new beginnings, sometimes the doorway is one of saying goodbye, letting go. Some thresholds are immediate, like the moment when a child is born,or the moment when a person dies. In Port Townsend we have a Threshold Choir, which sings at the bedside of those who are dying, recognizing and honoring the sacred threshold between life and death. Other thresholds are long and shadowy, like the thresholds of age. When are we no longer young? When have we become old? When do we cross over from one to the other? I remember years of desperately wanting to be grown up, to be seen as an adult, and then one day I was, and it was just ordinary, already ordinary, no going back. I have a friend, Zenju Earthlyn Manual, one of the only African American women Zen priests in America. She wrote about this threshold of age for The hidden lamp, the book I edited. A few days before her fifty-ninth birthday she asked herself, Am I old? What is old? For the next seven days she looked into a mirror for five minutes a day, as an intentional exploration of this question. These are some of her words about what happened over that week... (and I want to say that Zenju is one of the most beautiful and vibrant women I know), On the first day, I didn t see anything because I was afraid of seeing an old lady. My eyes constantly turned away. On the fourth day, as I looked in the mirror, I wondered what an old lady looked like. So I spent much of my day examining women as I walked in the world, deciding who looked old and who didn t. On the fifth day, I decided I must be old because my neck skin was beginning to sag like I had seen in the so-called old women the day before.
3 On the sixth day, I cried in front of the mirror. I felt I had no control of my stumbling into old age. I felt my death was closer than ever before. On the seventh day, I saw fear in the tightness of my lips, confusion in the brow. I thought what a tough journey life was. Then I looked deeper, without an idea in my head, just the question, What is old? and I saw a courageous woman willing to look at herself. I am not old, middle-aged, or young. I am fulfilled in my own spirit. And in this recognition I feel the connection to my ancestors, to those who came before me, and to a life larger than my own. The Japanese have a term for this poignant appreciation of things just as they are, knowing that they will fade and change, just as we fade and change, a fleeting, changing beauty that Zenju as she looked in the mirror on the seventh day.: mono no aware. Both sweet and sad, appreciative and mourning. I thought, in honor of the equinox, I would read a few haiku about autumn from my favorite haiku poet, Mitsu Suzuki, who is a hundred years old this year. Mitsu Suzuki is the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, one of the great pioneers who brought Zen to America. Some friends of mine translated a hundred of her poems for her hundredth birthday and they are collected in a book called A White Tea Bowl: A Hundred Haiku from a Hundred Years of Life. You may notice feel this quality of tender appreciation for this ephemeral world, mono no aware, as I read these very short poems. My grandmother s name On her kimono-hanging rack Autumn equinox. Clear autumn day- Airmail letter in my hand Walking stick feels light. Well again after illness A gift of red bean rice Clear autumn day. Early autumn evening rain Shoulders touching They walk down the hill
4 I was in Japan for the first time last year on a Zen pilgrimage with seventeen canadian Zen students and me, the token American. Japan is a country of gates, from exquisitely humble bamboo and brushwood gates in Zen gardens to towering thousand year old gates to Buddhist temples, flanked by thirty foot high snarling statues of guardian deities, one on each side. But the ones that touched me the most were the simple red tori gates of mountain Shinto shrines, two tall posts with a lintel laid across the top, all by itself, no wall on either side, marking an entrance to a sacred natural space, open to the sky and to the forest around. As part of our pilgrimage we went to a place in the mountains called Koyasan, one of the most sacred Buddhist sites in Japan, with hundreds of temples and monasteries. Japanese people have gone on pilgrimage there since it was founded in the year 819. But from its founding until 1870, for more than a thousand years, no woman was allowed to set foot through the gates of Koyasan. This is the other side of gates and doorways. Gates and doorways keep out as well as invite in. At Koyasan there is a women s pilgrimage route through the mountains around the perimeter, skirting each gate but never daring to enter past those fierce guardians. At many places on the women s path there are red torii gates, just out in the forest, spanning the path, like a blessing as you walk through them. These gates, that invite anyone into sacred space, are very different than those gates through which women were not allowed to enter. As a person who has been thinking for a long time, about the ways that women s voices and teachings have been hidden and forgotten, I am very aware of the gates that have kept women out, in every culture. And not just women so many people stand on the other side of closed gates, closed doors, even now those who are not white, those who are poor, those who are without houses, those who are mentally ill, those who are different from us. Can we recognize the doors and gates and guardian deities in our own hearts and communities, and find ways to make them more like the tori gates in the forest, recognizing difference but locking no one out? Sometimes a whole culture stands on a threshold, or now, maybe for the first time, a whole world, a whole planet. Last week there were four hundred thousand people gathered in New York, calling for action on climate change.
5 Even in our small town of Port Townsend we had 200 people gathered by the water, singing and inspiring each other to protect our Salish Sea. My heart soars when I thing of this. The Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls this time The Great Turning, and like all thresholds, we don t know what is on the other side, what kind of change is truly possible. Those in New York, and millions around the world, and we, are all part of that great turning, trying to help us all across this risky threshold safely and with grace. This is what the Irish poet and teacher John O Donaue wrote about thresholds, in his book, To Bless the Space Between: It remains the dream of every life to realize itself, to reach out and lift itself up to greater heights, though we often linger for years in spaces that are too small and shabby for the grandeur of our spirit. Looking back along a life s journey, you come to see how each of the central phases of your life began at a threshold where you left one way of being and entered another. But to acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust. At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time what am I leaving? What am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing? No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise. So I ask, can we let the thresholds, edges, doorways of our own life and our community be like those torii gates I walked through in Japan, open to the sky, allowing birds to fly through? Just as we willingly turn toward autumn every year, whatever it may evoke for us - gladness for turning inward again, sorrow for the ending summer --, perhaps we can meet the thresholds of our lives and our world, wanted or unwanted, with some of that same willingness, a sense of their invitation and promise.
6 In Zen we bow to one another as a gesture of honoring. Maybe there s a way to bow as we pass through the next gate in our lives, with gratitude and understanding and maybe even a willingness to weep for all that is changing, all that is arriving, all that we are given every moment. As the poet Ryokan wrote, At dawn I see the thousand gates and doors thrown open. I d like to close with my favorite of Mitsu Suzuki s haiku: Birth and death Not even holding on to one thing Autumn brightness Benediction Whatever thresholds we face today or in the coming times, may they be a blessing, a promise and an invitation. May we find the courage and willingness to turn towards the changes in our lives. And until we gather again, may we bring our gifts to the world, and accept with grace and gratitude all the gifts this world offers to us.