So then the tearful snotty kind (where you put about twenty tissues in your robe sleeve that morning because you know you’ll have used ‘em all by lunch) (or, in your case, no-lunch) just must be just what it is. Anzan saying to me gently, “You’ll do it until you’re done,” and me wanting to hit him, only not. Because he was being nice and offering me another tissue.

Like how Mandarin and I, instead of saying to each other, “Have a good sesshin!” would finally always just say, before one or the other of us went into that particular 5-9 day-long testing ground/knife room, “Have a sesshin.” Because really it has YOU. And when preferential mind gets yanked out from under you like the cozy rug it is (what, I can’t just go to the fridge any time I feel my blood sugar dropping?), the gaping truths arrive. They sit on the sofa staring at you and unable to make civil conversation, like weird next-door neighbors who dropped in and won’t go home.

Taking away preferential mind (the Zen phrase) is all about practicing the powerlessness. Herself telling us that it was practice for dying. And for living. Because the control strategy is illusory anyway, of course. Because as Winston says in 1984, “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

The Brujo sometimes scoffs when I tell him stories of deliberate privation/restriction/abstinence, because I think he hears in them only my self-punishing desire, which is true—which was true for me, in how I did it. That whole “I brought my Calvinism to Zen” thing. But I did also learn somehow gentleness in the matrix of restraint (though not from Zen qua Zen, but from other people—from sangha, I guess, the group of others who walks the path with you). I don’t know that he understands that—that anyone can, who hasn’t delicately but firmly taken away their espresso and bonbons and remote control, and their talking and their moving around, and said: Well, okay, let’s see, just experimentally, what happens to this whole carefully constructed Me-person now, without all the stuff I usually use to hold up the scaffolding.

With, of course, great inner gentleness and a powerful sense of the self-loving voice. Of the internalized good parent—of the Goddess, frankly.

En bref (!): You are doing the thing. I am moved by your doing it, and by your telling what it is like. I found it to be like that too. And I wish you joy in the frailty, relief in the letting-go, and beauty in the breakdown.

Brilliant, how you worked carapace in like that. Have you found any crenels in your merlons?