Street Level Zen: Refuge

"Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places."

Henry Beston

(Photo courtesy of Mario Dobelmann and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Walking stick

(I've posted about my monk stick before, but there's no denying it has a very "rural" vibe. Ideal for forest and field, but rather too "Lord of the Rings" for road and town. That needs something shorter, and probably without a berry hook.

Hence the above. It's about sternum-height and is made from a nice piece of evergreen huckleberry [Vaccinium ovatum]. Though somewhat heavy for a walking stick, it's a hard, fine-grained wood, resistant to abuse, and oiling to a satiny deep gold lustre. A brass pipe cap - invisible under the snow - serves as a ferrule.

I've gotten used to the heft of the thing, and received some nice comments.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Wandering

Not all who wander are lost. Some of us are looking for our keys.

Or our glasses.

Or our glasses so we can find our keys.


(Photo courtesy of Maxpixel.net and a generous photographer.)

WW: Coral mushroom scramble

(This delectable disc comprises scrambled eggs and coral mushrooms foraged in the forest last week. I didn't bother to ID the fungus, but believe it was Ramaria. Chopped celery leaves round off the feast. Or maybe off the round feast.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Ten Years And Counting

This month past brought Rusty Ring into its tenth year of publication, not counting the four-odd months that I sat ango. This blog has become so integral to my monastic practice that I didn't even notice that an anniversary had passed until this week.

There's an ancient Zen commandment that monks keep a journal of their lives and activities, and that such records should be accessible to all in order to support others' enlightenment practices, present and future. Rusty Ring, and the regular posting schedule that I imposed on myself from the beginning, with the resulting pressure for material, quickly filled that gap in my monastic programme.

And then it added something else as well: sangha. As I've mentioned before, the third is the hardest Treasure for hermits to acquire, and the lack most keenly felt. In the case of Rusty Ring, just the blog itself, absent of readers, is already sangha; somebody for me to talk to. That it's also attracted a modest but loyal cadre of regulars, with similarly serendipitous stop-ins from visitors all over the world, provides a cogent counterpoise to my monk game.

And so I feel like this is the moment to let a small but significant cat out of the bag: that this is in fact an actual primordial 'blog. That is, in the original intent of the medium – by its full name, a weblog – it's a personal thought journal, with the appended late-90s enhancement that others can read it too if they wish.

Thus, all of the posts here are messages to me. Reminders, for the most part, practical and philosophical.

To lift my spirits and strengthen my resolve.

To summon the kyôsaku when I start sloughing off.

The recipes posted, I refer to while cooking.

The sesshin and practice points I consult while organising my own.

And crucially, the moral and political exhortations that frequently appear here are all addressed to me.

Spoiler alert.

Not quite The Sixth Sense, but there may be a touch of O. Henry in that revelation for some, all the same.

Any road, I hope the reflections that I share here – or at least make available – or at least don't hide – are useful to those who must, with increasing difficulty, dig them out. (I have got to move to a better host!)

Your company and contributions have been invaluable, and I'm deeply grateful for your influence on my life and practice.

In pleasant anticipation of the years to come, I remain,

Your obedient servant.

WW: Mystery tree

(Found this all alone in the middle of the swamp that has figured in many recent posts. The white trunk that so gleams 'midst the dead winter foliage and sulking North Pacific sky is none other than Betula papyrifera, the famous paper birch from which Eastern First Nations build their canoes.

Emblematic of the Eastern Woodlands and not uncommon in the Prairies and Rocky Mountains, canoe birch is perishing rare on the Pacific Slope. Hence Whatcom County's Birch Bay, whose endemic birches were noteworthy to early settlers.

But south of the Fraser Valley, B. papyrifera drips and drabs into scarcity, before disappearing entirely around Everett.

Which is 100 miles from here.

Nor is this the site of any disappeared habitation, which lets out persistent landscaping. So I'm flummoxed. I don't believe there are any other paper birches within five miles in any direction; probably a great deal further.

But I'll tell you this: when I saw it there - after I recovered from my disbelief - I almost cried. B. papyrifera covers the Laurentian Shield, and was the dominant species in the Québec hills that I lived in and loved, and where my Zen practice began. There I got to know it intimately, hiking under and through it, burning it in my woodstove through the winter, and meditating on all of its phases and stages.

This one may stand awkward and alone in this alien forest, but happening on it brought a kind of joy that is hard to explain.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Galaxy Song

Here's another burst of insight from that cagey lot down at Monty Python.

This time they put humanity in context with a song drawn, fittingly enough, from The Meaning of Life. One fated from the outset to become a seminal text in my spiritual training, because I too have long asserted that this whole Great Mind thing is just a largish vaudeville show. And here Eric Idle (aka the Pythons' resident Zen master) confirms my suspicions.

For the rest, kindly note that the figures cited in the work are scientifically demonstrable. (Making this is a rare example of a novelty song that contains, like, verifiable data, and is therefore acceptable to Wikipedia, among others.)

And that Eric's knack for a penetrating conclusion is the most electric since Lennon and McCartney.

Follows the tablature:

GALAXY SONG
by Eric Idle

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth