Zen Leadership

On my kitchen windowsill is one of my grandmother’s orchids. I brought it home after she passed away earlier this year as it wasn’t faring so well without her particular care and attention – I understood how it felt. Although I’m still a newbie gardener and have zero experience with orchids, it started to revive and I felt the joy of her presence again.

But in some ways, it can still be beautiful. Just like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where we put broken pieces of pottery together with gold, there is simple beauty beyond perfection in embracing our imperfections and flaws as artfully raw and human.

I am learning about belonging. The teachings of belongingness have come to me slowly from many wise people, communities, and nature. These teachings over the years are like walking a labyrinth, leading me towards the center and away, and towards the center and away from it again and again.  A journey.

This delightful shift in Zazen shows up off the cushion in the remaining 23 hours and 40 minutes of the day as trust in myself. I approach my work feeling solid in what I have to contribute, not leaking energy with fear of judgments.

Let that sink in for a few breaths. This is not just a phenomenon of the exceedingly small, but the nature of reality in which we lead, create families and communities, and make our difference. What it shows us is that process of observing is not passive, but a process of resonance or co-vibration that particularizes something by how it registers with us. In physics this is called “collapsing a wave function” where a range of possibilities condenses into a thing upon our pinpointed observation.

By flipping around our usual way of sensing, including our sense of self, we confound our filters, invert our thinking and let the new emerge. Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am” flips around into the spacious truth that when we don’t have to reify a self, we don’t have to habitually think the same thoughts. We can put up different antenna and new music becomes possible.

There is something slightly magical about mid-winter in the higher reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, the short days and long hours of darkness, with the sun rising around 8.00 am and setting soon after 3.30 pm. Stonehenge lies not far from my mother’s house, where our prehistoric ancestors laid out a ring of stones to celebrate these circadian rhythms.

In Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he appealed to the nation’s “better angels,” meaning the better aspects of our character, such as good sense and virtue. Seven score and sixteen years later, in the thick of the Trump presidency, historian Jon Meacham spoke to the battle for our better angels in The Soul of America. He recounts the disparities and triumphs of a nation founded on the declaration that all people are created equal and its unequal efforts to live up to that mighty truth.

On my kitchen windowsill is one of my grandmother’s orchids. I brought it home after she passed away earlier this year as it wasn’t faring so well without her particular care and attention – I understood how it felt. Although I’m still a newbie gardener and have zero experience with orchids, it started to revive and I felt the joy of her presence again.