Ruth Ozeki Interview

from: https://www.ruthozeki.com/about-ruth

5 Things I Learned from Ruth Ozeki's interview with Ezra Klein

1. Meditation. 2. Emptiness. 3. Beginner's Mind. 4. Marie Kondo. 5. Capitalism.

Meditation and Returning. [V]ery often meditation is something that we think of as being done with the mind. And I actually experience it somewhat differently. I experience it as something that starts in the body and is really rooted in the body....

When we sit to meditate, our minds are very distractible and they get caught on thoughts and they start to drift away. And so at that point, the instruction usually is to return to the body, return to the breath.

And so this practice of return is something, I think, that’s very useful for writers to cultivate, because that’s exactly what we do on the page. We’re writing something and very often a self-critical thought will come in and suddenly we’re distracted. And then the instruction there is to sort of relax, relax the body, relax the mind, and just return.

The more we can accept that indeed the practice is just simply returning, as long as you continue to return, you’re doing the work. It sort of takes some of the pressure off. And it also gives you the resilience to continue to practice. I wish that I had been taught some of this when I was college age because I think I would have started writing a lot sooner.

Emptiness.  Emptiness is one of those Buddhist terms that is so hard to define and translate into English. Emptiness really refers to reality as it is, that everything in the world is empty of a fixed, permanent, abiding self. In other words, everything is impermanent. Everything changes.

And at the same time, everything is also completely interconnected and coexist with everything else and cannot exist without everything else. And so it’s just simply describing the nature of things to materialize, to constellate, to come into being, to come into form, and then to fall apart again.

And one metaphor that I tend to like is the metaphor of a wave.

And so if you imagine the ocean as this vast expanse of emptiness, just this vast still ocean. And then the planets shift, and the tides pull, and the moon waxes and wanes. And suddenly from this emptiness, a wave starts to form. And it starts to poke its little head up from the ocean, and it looks around and it’s sort of like, wow, look at me. I’m a wave. I’m pretty great. I’m really something.

And then, of course, the planet continues to turn and the tides continue to pull. And then the wave starts to recede and it’s like, oh, no, help. And it disappears back into the ocean again.

And so this is kind of the relationship I see between form and emptiness. The wave is this temporary form that pops up and thinks it’s really something, just like us. And then time works on us, and the form that we’re in now starts to recede again. And the wave becomes part of the ocean, and we become part of the planet.

And it’s this constant flux, this ebb and flow, which is completely about impermanence. And it’s also completely about interbeing, or in Buddhism, we call it dependent co-arising. That we’re entirely dependent on our context, and within that context, we arise and then we fall. So it’s this notion of interbeing, I think, is really at the heart of the word emptiness.

Beginner's Mind. There’s a phrase in Zen Buddhism that comes from a koan, which is, not knowing is most intimate.

And that it’s when we don’t know something and when we can sit in that state of not knowing is when there’s a kind of an intimacy with the world around us. And this is something that Shunryu Suzuki, who is the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center — he talks about beginner’s mind. This is another iteration of beginner’s mind.

And what he says about beginner’s mind is that in the beginner’s mind, possibilities are endless, and in the expert’s mind, they’re few. And so this idea that in this state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world arises, for lack of a better word. And that engagement, that curiosity is intimate and very, very alive.

And this really pertains, I think, to the process of any kind of creation, music, art, certainly literature, is the ability to sit in that state of not knowing and somehow find some way to rest there, somehow find some way to be comfortable there. Because it’s a very uncomfortable feeling as a novelist. When I start writing a novel, I know nothing about it. And what I really want is to know something. I want to know everything about it, about this fictional world.

And so there’s a kind of tension between the state of not knowing and then the state of knowing. And so somehow through meditation, I’m trying to cultivate the ability to sit in a relaxed state in that generative tension between knowing and not knowing until some kind of answers start to arise.

Marie Kondo. so when Marie Kondo started her laudable campaign of world domination, she was telling us to care for our objects, to exercise some sort of recognition and care, and recognize that we have a relationship with our objects, right? That they’re not just things that come into our life and that we throw away. That there’s a real connection there, or that there should be.

And so when she talks about how, for example, you have a pair of socks that have worn themselves out taking care of your feet. They’ve worn themselves out to the point where they are threadbare and have holes in them. You don’t just throw them away.

You take a moment, and it can just be a brief moment, to hold them and look at them and appreciate them. And then you throw them away. That sounds fanciful, I understand. And she also talks about how socks don’t like to be rolled up and turned inside out into a ball because it stretches them, right? And it makes them uncomfortable. They like to be folded.

OK, so she has very prescriptive ideas about what objects prefer. And of course, you could look at that as being sort of extreme anthropomorphism or just simply craziness. But there’s a long tradition of this in other cultures, certainly in Japan.

And so when I read Marie Kondo’s book for the first time, I thought, oh, she’s introducing a very Japanese sensibility to a Western audience. And it’s a very traditional sensibility, and it comes from the Shinto religion, which is an animistic religion, where things do have agency. They have spirits.

Trees have spirits in them. Scissors have spirits. Umbrellas, shoes, prayer beads have spirits. And they are taken care of as though they are sentient, OK?

Capitalism. I mean, at its root, this is what capitalism does best, right? I mean, it first of all creates this enormous appetite for things, and then it tells us that whatever we have is not enough. So it’s no wonder — I mean, I think that is a form of madness. It seems to me there’s no question about that.

But how do we navigate that madness? I think the reason that there are so many clutter clearing shows and this whole genre of self-help has sprung up, because we have such a fraught relationship with objects, and we want objects because of some sense of insufficiency in ourselves. But then once the object becomes part of our self, in other words, once we own it, it’s no longer enough because that insufficiency is perpetual. So I think we are all mad in that sense.

Books: Norman Fisher’s book called “When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections From a Life in Zen.” the third book is actually Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.”  “The Aleph and Other Stories.” And that collection includes the eponymous story “The Aleph,” which figures really heavily in this last novel of mine. And there’s also an essay in it, which I love, called “Borges and I.”