A student once asked a great master, "How do you practice Zen?
"One thing at a time," the master responded.
How can we possibly live like this? The world screams at us to do so many things at once.
One day years ago I spent a shift with Nancy, an intensive care nurse at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Her task work was overwhelming.
She was constantly adjusting a maze of lines that hung like vines amid a forest of I.V. poles. She checked the oxygen levels of her intubated patient, adjusted his pillow, checked his back for bed sores, monitored his blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen level, sometimes speaking to her unconscious patient about what she was doing.
She performed her tasks with such rapidity that she seemed to be doing some of them simultaneously.
Then she did something I didn't expect. She withdrew a comb from the drawer beside her patient's bed and combed his hair. Her frenetic activity turned calm. She became a study in Zen beauty.
Later, it occured to me that perhaps this caregiver had been practicing Zen all along. It was I who felt frenetic. She, on the other hand, seemed as smooth and skilled as a ballet dancer. Her hands graced the landscape of her critically ill patient like a mother attending the unspoken needs of her newborn.
What did the Zen master mean? He was speaking, perhaps, about graceful living.
When Liz Wessel creates her mandalas she is perhaps letting other energy move her hands. Every fine artist like Liz knows that trying to force creativity blocks it.
But, don't we have to do something? After all, the nurse manager lurks just down the hall. Malpractice lawyers never forgive. Patients and their families expect magic. Mistakes are not allowed.
What Zen teaches us is that we need only do one thing in each moment - train ourselves so that when Love's energy comes through us we will have the skill to practice it in healing ways.
Zen is powerful because it enables us to focus all our energy in the way that a laser, by concentrating light, increases its power. It reminds us to slow down and find our inner quiet. Only then can Love find its most precious pathways through our hearts.
-Erie Chapman
