nothing has changed...everything is changed

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It must have been over 30 years ago that I bought the Kuan Yin statue I had fallen in love with in a store window. It was then, as it is today, black and many-armed and cost more than I really could afford in disposable income -- eighty bucks.

When I first got the statue home, I was a bit afraid of it. I was new to Zen Buddhist practice -- new and enthusiastic and a bit star-struck by the mysterious wonder I had sucked up like some vacuum cleaner gone mad. I put the statue on the mantle piece above what had been but was no longer a fire place in my New York City apartment and I took to touching it from time to time as a way of making friends ... making friends as I might with some uncertain dog that I imagined to have sharp teeth. Each of those many arms held an implement and no doubt those implements had some constructive or destructive meaning ... who was to say or know? I never did bother to find out. I just tried to make friends and be as easy as I might with a friend.

Time passed and the statue never changed much. Some of the black patina wore off and revealed what might or might not be brass or bronze below. And with the paint, some of my gee-whiz-Mr.-Wizard uncertainties wore off too. I went to the Zen center and sat, and got the drift of things a little and the awe tinged with fear (what if somehow, something stripped me truly naked?!) wore down as well.

I noticed all this when I went out to the zendo to sit this morning. I had built the place and in the building there was no awe, no fear, no doubts. Instead, there were banged fingers from pounding nails, splinters from the rough-cut lumber, angles and other difficulties to be unraveled. But once it was built, I felt some of the same uncertainty I had with the statue. What sort of presumptuous son-of-a-bitch builds a church in his backyard? Even knowing its myriad flaws, I was pleased with the outcome, but not yet friends with the result. It was an 'important' place, a 'special' place, a place that filched from a tradition I admired and still wasn't quite sure I belonged to, despite the 20-plus years of practice at the time.

But today, I was pleased to see my old friend in much the same way I would be pleased to run into an old friend on the street. It was warm and mostly clean. The statues were on the altar together with an incense burner and candle and water bowl. Just as when I had first finished it only now ... well nothing had changed and everything had changed. Changed softly and somehow naturally, like a maple leaf that tiptoes into spring, gathers its forces, turns a ruddy, solid green and greets the rain drops with a plop, plop, plop. The incense rose from the bowl as it always had, the candle flickered, and everything was snug as a bug in a rug. Like old friends, sitting on a park bench, silent, but with shoulders touching easily ... nothing had changed and yet everything was changed.

How nice to have old friends, to breathe the same air, smile at the same jokes, and wonder why it was that what once had been wondrous was now just wonderful.
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