Saturday, May 15, 2010

Ino Anxiety Dream

This was a very full Saturday, and I might write about nenju or having lunch with the Saturday Sangha in due course (especially since I ended up telling them about the blog, as I was recycling some of the stories I have posted recently), but I had the most interesting dream just before waking up this morning: at the beginning I was down at Tassajara, talking with Mako on a nice sunny afternoon, but then there was a scene with two rooms full of people, whom Linda Ruth was organising as some kind of strategic group, and as I looked at what one table of people had been writing, someone said to me, 'oh yeah, we're going to do the Mountain Seat ceremony tonight'. My reaction was 'but nobody told me'...
We all have our own version of the anxiety dream - at the BBC, and for a while afterwards, I used to dream about being in charge of a transmission that was about to go live, and nobody else had showed up, or the tapes were missing. When I woke up and thought about this one, though, I noticed that I hadn't felt particularly anxious about the news, it was more feeling a little outraged that I hadn't been informed.
As it happened, I was scheduled to have dokusan with Paul this morning, so I kicked off with this little story before going over some of the other stuff that has been happening for me since we had last met. And of course, the dream did not come out of the blue; after the decision around restructuring the Abbacy, we have recently been discussing an installation ceremony for Steve here at City Center, as recently happened at Green Gulch, which is a ritual way to offer him a new seat in the zendo - and not a full-on Mountain Seat Ceremony which is when someone becomes Abbot, and as far as I can tell is the most complex and formal thing an ino could ever have to organise. A few people had been asking me about that yesterday, as that had been one of the original dates mentioned for the ceremony to take place, although it is currently planned for a couple of weeks from now. I certainly haven't felt out of the loop as far as that one goes, and Paul assured me he would keep me on board...

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