Wind Mind

Many years ago, I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh – either in one of his books or a recorded teisho – a useful meditation technique. When, he said, your mind is roiling and you're having a hard time settling into a sit, repeat this couplet silently to yourself on the in and out breath:

"Lake. Still"

Picture a mirror surface, a body of water poured like glass, unmoved and unmoving. Become that lake.

Other times, when you're piqued by anxiety or undisciplined drive, try this:

"Mountain. Solid"

Feel the mountain. Its weight, its composure, its permanence. Sit like that mountain.

I've used both to great effect. In fact, they recently became a mainstay of my practice in a particularly challenging time. So I'm sharing them forward.

In respectful sanghaship I'd also like to contribute a third and similar focusing technique from my own practice. It's a little less placid, a bit harder to assimilate, but in my experience, just as valuable when called for:

"Wind. Wander."

I picture nothing when using this mantra; I just feel the wind inside me. But if a visual is helpful, you might try a leaf or dandelion fluff or even dust.

This came to me while reciting a favourite chant:

In cola ego sum apud te in terra, et peregrinus, sicut omnes patres mei.

("I am a sojourner before You on this Earth, and I will wander, like all my fathers before me.")

Unlike the TNH images, mine doesn't bring an immediate sense of calm abiding. But it does contribute crucial perspective, positioning me more accurately in the universe. And in some moments, it's just what I require.

Call it active abiding.


In brotherhood with the nation of seekers.



(Sailplane photo courtesy of Mike Peel and Wikimedia Commons.)

Good Video: Waterwalker

Here's a fabulous old NFB film from 1984 that has nothing immediately to say about Zen – though it does evoke eremitical monasticism. And if you don't care about that (which is likely), it's just incredibly engaging documentation of a long walkabout – paddle-about, really – through a howling Canadian wilderness that hasn't changed much since.

How many places can say that?

Though none of his projects were commercial, filmmaker Bill Mason remains a Canadian icon. Most outside the country will know him for Paddle to the Sea (aka Vogue à la mer), played and replayed to past generations in primary schools the world over.

I also strongly recommend Mason's 1969 short subject Blake, which is best left to your discovery rather than any failed attempt to describe it here. But know this: it's a documentary. Blake really existed, was a close friend of Mason's, and that's actually him in the movie. All depicted events are historically accurate, though some had to be re-enacted for the camera, as will be understandable on viewing.

But Waterwalker is widely regarded as Mason's chef d'œuvre. And with good reason; not only does it bottle the quintessential Canadian epic – a canoe trek across the Laurentian Shield – the movie itself represents a Herculean pre-selfie stick semi-solo travelogue.

Figure this: both Mason and his (invisible) cameraman had to ferry – and portage! – a hundred pounds a-piece of equipment and film through this entire odyssey. They had to set it all up and take it all down for each shot, and keep everything safe from light and elements clear to the end of the expedition.

Trekking's hard enough all by itself. Just keeping yourself alive and healthy and moving forward is more than enough pressure for me. The notion of spending the time and energy to document it all on analog technology is breathtaking.

So give Waterwalker a watch and see if you don't agree. "When you travel alone," says Mason, "you spend a lot of time thinking, and you see things you would never notice when you're with other people." Any hermit can vouch for that.

And here, for an hour and a half, anybody can experience it.

The Origin of Happiness

I'm suddenly reminded of the endless dithering in the model kit section at Sears, before choosing the next addition to the epic WWII dogfight hanging from my bedroom ceiling.

The dithering was exquisite.


(Photo of Avro Lancaster model [had it!] courtesy of Matias Luge and Pixabay.com.)

WW: Airship

WW: Contrail doodle

(Yet another military mystery: what is this plane doing? It continued scribing large stacked squares in front of the naval listening post for some time.)

WW: UH-60x Black Hawk

(I see a lot of these here at the beach. I've no idea why, since this is a US Army Black Hawk, rather than the expected Navy SH-60x Sea Hawk. [Aside from colour, the aft wheel -- shifted 13 feet forward in the naval series, to accommodate shipboard landings -- is a dead giveaway].)

Parted Stays

By the time I reached Alan's apartment -- six hours of rainy interstate blockaded by accidents -- I was exhausted, disgusted, and keen to leave freeways behind for a very long time. My glasses were embedded in the bridge of my nose, the bows biting into my ears.

But how good to find Al at the end! He smiled broadly as he opened the door, and I was heartened to see that the break-up hadn't taken the glint from his porcelain-blue eyes. He laughed his "H-e-e-ey, man!", clamped my hand, and suddenly we were college kids again, as if Al could make it so simply by combing his thick blond hair the same way.

There was nothing for it but to return to the scene of the crime, and so we drove across town to Fairhaven and our favourite restaurant. As I savoured a mushroom burger and frosty porter, Al regaled me with tales of his tour in the Air Force, his current job fixing helicopters, and a bar fight he'd recently witnessed, his large hands evoking the knife-whirling Canadians as he mugged and gesticulated, eyes wide with an enthusiasm that fell away from the rest of us with our hair.

We picked up frozen yogurt on the way home and spooned it out across Al's breakfast counter -- I in the living room, he in the kitchen. Missing furniture and blank spaces on the wall told a story that lost none of its poignancy for remaining unspoken. When at last Lake Whatcom blacked out of the sliding glass door, he said that Michelle had been with abusive men before they met, that she treated him like a child, and at last came to consider him the enemy. I understood, and said nothing. That Al's relationship had failed at the same time as mine only deepened the anguish: another stay parted on a sea grown surly. But there was exhilaration in facing the storm together, damming it up in silence, and so defeating it.

I slept fitfully on the sofa that night, and woke to muffled morning-jock banter from Al's clock radio. We gulped tea as he readied for work, the anticipated stress of our respective days twanging between us in monosyllables. At the door we hesitated, I in the hall, he on the mat, reluctant to desert the other in the presence of danger. But there were aircraft to repair, roads to run. We clasped hands again, muttered "See ya, man," and the door swung shut.

I showered and dressed, but the sadness didn't break till the Ram's engine roared to life.


(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Autumn Haiku

the troops of autumn
touch down in a blitzkrieg of
small helicopters

(No maple seeds where you live? Make your own.)

Good Book: At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace

I'm not sure he'd appreciate the label, but Claude AnShin Thomas is the most prominent hermit of our generation. Though an ordained priest in Bernie Glassman's Zen Peacemaker lineage, his practice is in the tradition of Bashō. In his own words:

"I made the decision to take the vows of a mendicant monk primarily because I wanted to live more directly as the Buddha had. […] Also, in witnessing the evolution of Zen Buddhist orders in the United States, I wanted to evoke the more ancient traditions of those who embarked on this spiritual path and to live my commitment more visibly."

AnShin specialises in walking ango – long voyages on foot, without money, living off the Dharma and the compassion of others. He calls them peace pilgrimages, and to date he's walked from Auschwitz to Vietnam; across the US and Europe; in Latin America; and even the Middle East. He also leads street retreats, a unique Peacemaker practice wherein Zen students take the Buddha at his word and become Homeless Brothers in the urban core of a large city for a specified period of time.

Where, you wonder, does a guy get gravel like that? Well…

In At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, AnShin describes his military service in Vietnam, where he clocked 625 combat hours in US Army helicopters, many behind an M60 machine gun. By his own recollection, he was in combat virtually every day from September 1966 to November 1967. He was, in short, the classic "badass American fighting man" so beloved of Hollywood.

Except it wasn't as fun.

He came home, like all war veterans, to a society desperate never to hear about those not-fun parts, or to pay for the care he now required for life. The tale that ensues has been told a hundred times, and each time is the first.

Re-reading At Hell's Gate (one of my all-time favourite Zen books) I was struck again by the sense that the author would rather not be writing it at all. There's a reticence in AnShin's prose, a tone of compelled confession, that suggests modesty, circumspection, and discomfort with the writer's art, at which he clearly doesn't feel proficient. Which is exactly why he is. You're not reading a writer; you're reading a veteran, in much more than just the military sense.

Interspersed among terse, almost telegraphic accounts of his past is some of the best how-to on practical meditation I've found. His themes are universally relevant: depression and despair; atonement and redemption; suffering and transcendence. All from a guy who speaks with thunderous authority.

His eremitical bona fides are equally evident. He writes:

"Anyone can come with me on a pilgrimage. It's not necessary for a person to become a student of mine or to spend time with me to learn this practice. It is open."

In these angos – which he defines as "just walking" – he's revived a practice largely abandoned in the era of institutional Zen:

"There is no escape from the nature of your suffering in this practice. When you walk, you are constantly confronted with your self, your attachments, your resistance. You are confronted with what you cling to for the illusion of security."

Should anyone require more evidence of AnShin's hermitude, his Further Reading section includes Zen at War, The Cloud of Unknowing (a classic of Christian contemplation), and the Gnostic Gospels, though none of them are cited in the text.

My lone criticism of At Hell's Gate is its light treatment of those incredible pilgrimages. In fact, I wish AnShin would write a whole 'nother book just about them. I appreciate his desire to avoid the odour of self-glorification; first-person journalism is a hard beat for a non-narcissist. And as a mendicant, he likely doesn't have time or space to sit down and write. But it's badly needed. I hope AnShin's sangha convince him someday to transmit and preserve these vital experiences, for the benefit of future generations. After all, where would we be if Bashō had remained silent?

Nevertheless, the book we already have is all by itself a repository of rare and hard-earned wisdom, a chronicle of unusual violence and damage, leading to unusual insight. The man himself puts it best:

"Everyone has their Vietnam. Everyone has their war. May we embark together on a pilgrimage of ending these wars and truly live in peace."

If you're suffering – whether firearms were involved or just plain-old heartbreak – read this book.

Straight From the Tahre Pits

Weird US Navy CH54 flew low up the beach this afternoon, exactly window-height at my house on the bluff. Reminds me of some giant prehistoric crane fly. Maybe that's why they call it a Sky Crane.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia and the US government. It's an Army helo, but you can't have everything; where would you put it?)