Zenola

I brought rather austere food when I sat 100 Days on the Mountain. Lunch and dinner were an identical bowl of rice and beans, spiced up with hot sauce, and curried after about the midway point. I brought very little in the way of snacks or sweets.

(I don't recommend this approach, by the way. An important practice point I learned out there is that discipline can be as egocentric and obstructive as indulgence. It's wise to keep your diet simple, wholesome, and habitual. It's unwise to eat like a zek.)

But breakfast came from a large trash bag, and it's these morning meals I remember with the most affection. Because from those unpromising origins rose each morning a braw bowl of zenola.

Zenola is a marriage of trail mix and cereal developed in the months before I left, for the express purpose of launching each day of practice. The ingredients supply essential nutrients deficient or absent in my other staples. And the rainbow of bright colours and flavours is a proper party when you're living on rice and beans.

The recipe is as follows:

30 lbs rolled oats (I like thick-cut the best)
1 1/4 lb powdered milk
3 3/4 lbs salted mixed nuts
1 3/4 lb each:
  cranberry raisins
  dried apples
  dried apricots, bananas, or other fruit
1 1/4 lb crystalized ginger

(If you don't require a metric tonne of zenola all at once, reduce these quantities proportionally to get the amount you want.)

At a cup a-piece, this comes out to about a third again more than 100 breakfasts, but when you're living alone it's a good idea to bring more food than you think you'll need. (And also to store it in several secure places.)

I almost always ate this in cold water, but you can use boiling water for a soft and steamy bowl. I find rolled oats most satisfying uncooked, but once or twice, on biting cold nights when I needed encouragement, I rustled up hot zenola and tea by the light of my candle.

Under the strict daily regimen, this stuff became such a treat that I used it as incentive, denying myself the pleasure if I rose too late. Other times it was a reward, to celebrate milestone days or cheer me up in bleak moments.

In all of these occasions, zenola was hearty and sustaining, and excellent support for practice.

WW: Sky on the Hanford Reach

(Here's a photo from my outbacking excursion to Spokane last summer, taken on the northwest limit of the Pasco Basin, just a few hundred yards short of the Priest Rapids of the Columbia River. This view is west to Umtanum Ridge. [Open the link in a new tab to see it bigger.]

I never get used to those electric Gold Side skies. People who live there walk around under them like nothing's going on, oblivious to the Greensider ratcheting off shots of nothing in particular above them.

But I recommend you avoid driving these backroads – lowest elevation in the state – in July if you have the shadow of a choice. Especially if your truck has no air conditioning. A thermos of heavily-iced tea was all that stood between me and posterity.)

Sobriety Kyôsaku

An intoxicant is any external source that draws you deeper into yourself, your beliefs, your egocentrism, and away from direct experience of the real, present moment.

Samsaric life is floating down a river of intoxicants; it’s difficult to go against the flow but it’s the only hope.

– insight from a fellow Zen hermit in my Twitter sangha.


(Photo of Oregon's Rogue River courtesy of Hamad Darwish and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: King boletes

(Boletus edulis. Part of a generous outbreak that burst up not far from my house during the record rains of last month. Some of them were the size of dinner plates. Unfortunately I neglected to get a photo of one of those, but had quite a feast on the lot notwithstanding.)

Buddha and Budai

(A point I made in greater detail here.)

WW: Neighbourhood pond

Passing Through

incola ego sum
apud te
in terra
et peregrinus
sicut omnes patres mei.

Psalterium Sancti Hieronymi, 38:13

(English translation here.)


(Photo courtesy of Atlas Green and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Ancient testimony

(Another electrical artefact from an old shed that's figured in these pages before. This time it's a full grown tree used as a power pole at some time in the shed's early life. Note that the wire now erupts directly from the centre of the tree's rather large trunk.)

A Prayer for the New Year

I first encountered the oft-cited invocation below in a newspaper column by United Congregational minister Dale Turner. At the time I assumed he was the author, but when the Internet happened years later, I found that its provenance is indeterminate. (No shade on the Rev. Turner, who frequently shared gems from his own tireless study, and undoubtedly flagged this as another in the column I read.)

In fact, no-one seems to know where these memorable lines come from. One source claims it's a traditional Kenyan prayer, but I was unable to verify that, either.

As for me, its very anonymity is value-added. Those many pithy, compelling observations that knock around the world, repeated for generations, unattributed or misattributed, are often the most profound; the mere fact they've travelled so far demonstrates how powerful they are.

Any road, this one became a form in my Christian practice. Now twenty years further, having taken the Zen path, I see no reason to change that.

So may this teaching from the great Zen master Anon be a guide and a buttress to fellow seekers in the coming year.

The Truth Testimony

From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth
From the laziness that is content with half truths
O God of Truth
Deliver us.


(Photo courtesy of Seiya Maeda and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Rain owl

(Stryx varia.)

Merry Christmas 2025

My very best wishes to all Rusty Ring readers, regular and irregular, on this Christmas Day.

May it be filled with warmth and light.

Both that you find, and that you make.

The first is luck.

The second, skill.


(Photo of Kinkaku at Kinkaku-ji [Rokuon-ji] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Christmas On The North Coast

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas
Just like the kind I used to know
With raincoats dripping
And blue tarps whipping
As thirty-knot gusts blast and blow

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas
With every Christmas card I get
May your home be warm and well-met
And may all your Christmases be wet

(Photo courtesy of Andras Vas and Unsplash.com.)

How To Be Sad At Christmas

Like a lot of old people, I've come to find myself adrift at Christmas.

Family mostly gone. Friends busy with their own.

I never found a home in humanity. So here I sit.

There's a certain irony. I was always the Yuletide warrior: the guy who spent the year sourcing gifts, and immediately on first December, sent cards, decked halls, logged kitchen hours, all while listening to holiday music, alternating between seasonal radio and my ever-expanding battery of Christmas albums.

Who knew the holidays were yet another thing you eventually don't qualify for if you're not married?

I'm told there's an entire nation of us, we solitaries. Though we mostly don't know each other. Isolation is best performed alone.

But fear not. This isn't another treatise on the maudlin holiday of the outlier.

Because I've come to spread the good news of Zen.

I've said it before: Zen practice doesn't end suffering. It just helps you suffer better.

A fact of which I'm well-reminded in December.

Sure, I'd love to have a warm home full of love and children. Somebody to give to. Somebody to share with.

But I can always cherish the desire itself. In spite of our Western thoughtways – our conviction that life has a scoreboard, marking each passing second "earned" or "unearned" – just the belief in Christmas is joy enough.

There's also something to be said for standing outside of a thing to fully see into it. Clear-seeing is harder to pull off from too close.

As my world has shrunk to a room, I've gained a great deal of pleasure in this season. All that's going on around me. The responses that weather and light and sights and smells elicit. The memories, and yes, even the unrealised dreams.

They were good dreams. And I'm grateful that my society maintains this calendar month of sesshin to remind us of such things.

It's important to affirm that our insistence on separating people into winners and losers is delusion.

So this Christmas, as in the past, I'm once again listening to my Christmas radio playlist – over thirty holiday stations worldwide. And if it's hard to get too excited about baking for just myself, I've still got chai and sourdough coffee cake, and pumpkin soup for Christmas Eve, and hoppin' john on New Year's.

And I'll get to have Christmas dinner with my sister and her family. If my circle has dwindled to little more at this stage, it's also true that I look forward to that all year.

And the knowledge that even that isn't guaranteed, in this world of dew, keeps me treasuring it.

So once again I'll sit through midnight on New Year's Eve, holding mudra, minding my posture, and smiling inwardly as the fireworks drive this year out, never to be seen again.

And into that vacuum will immediately tumble… something else.

Creation is infinite. And I am small.

A heartfelt Merry Christmas to all my brothers and sisters. And if that's foreign to your practice, then at minimum, a deep December full of cheer and contemplation.


PS: If you've yet to discover Internet radio, and would like a taste, Christmas Radio Malta is one of my favourites. Their website player is dead, but you can click here on their stream URL to open it in your browser, or paste it into your media player.

I'm listening to it now.


(Photo of the Jellyfish Galaxy [ESO 137-001] and surrounding space courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia Commons.)

WW: Power outage season

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Rain

"I am a continuation, like the rain is a continuation of the cloud."

Thich Nhat Hanh


(Photo courtesy of Anderson Mancini and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Autumn leaves

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Good "Song": Alice's Restaurant Massacree

This unlikely 1967 Arlo Guthrie classic has become a Thanksgiving ritual for American radio stations, many of which spin it on that day. Some play it over and over for several hours, if not all day – though seldom or never on any other.

Yet everything about this track is anomalous. For starters, in a market that then insisted that all songs come in under three minutes – and remains uncomfortable with four to this day – this one tops 18. The whole A-side of its album!

It's also harshly critical of a particular American war, and conservatism in general, and despite what some would have you believe, that sort of thing has always been embargoed by American media. (Yes, even in the 60s.)

And finally, of course, it's not a song at all; more like a long monologue with a chorus at both ends. (This art form is called "talking blues": a sort of redneck rap that gained mainstream appreciation in the 30s when Arlo's dad, of whom some have heard, scored a hit of his own with one.)

In sum, it's a bit of a mystery how the Massacree met such wide success, or came to be so deeply associated with a quasi-religious holiday. Or that such a scathing assault on Cold War conventions still calls so many of the nation's angrily divided citizens to enjoy a good-natured laugh.

(And it's had that magic from the beginning. I played this recording in my high school history classes, to Reagan-era students who seized it with delight. There's just something about it. Discuss.)

One thing is clear: this gem of American pop culture is a true Thanksgiving blessing, given the genius of the writing and performance and the welcome relief of whimsy on such a solemn day. Guthrie's text and tone evoke the spirit of the era – and the rollicking ideals of its young. Realism and optimism; hope and resolve; humour and candour, all in equal measure.

I miss that. And them.

For the rest, this story Arlo tells in first person is fundamentally true, with allowance made for good storytelling. Alice really existed, she really had a restaurant, and it really wasn't called Alice's Restaurant. Arlo and a friend really were arrested for an environmental offence on Thanksgiving Day. They really did go to court. He really was later called up for the draught.

As for me, I don't know when I first heard it – early 70's, I'd guess; radio, no doubt – but it's been a favourite ever since. I loved Arlo's rural delivery, his youthful smartassery, his opposition to militarism and the Vietnam War, and his parody of military posturing. Above all I loved his trenchant wit.

All of which reinforced my own burgeoning career as a wiseacre. Now friends, there's only one or two things that the adults in my life might've done in response to this and the first was that they could have risen to their feet cheering, which wasn't very likely and I didn't expect it.

Anyway, here a half-century on, we're suddenly back in a place where singing a couple bars of Alice's Restaurant and walking out may be a duty we must all again perform. And two decades of Zen practice, with its tales of eccentric japes before the coercive glare of authority, have done little to spoil my taste for it.

So Happy Thanksgiving to my American brothers and sisters; peace and insight to all.

All Religious Morality

One lonely commandment:

If you don't like it, don't be it.


(Photo courtesy of Danh Đãnh and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Comrade spirit

(A point I've made before.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Brief Visual Meditation

Courtesy of a Zen droogie on social media.