Street Level Zen: Home

"A man is never lost at sea."

Ernest Hemingway


(Photo courtesy of Paul Harrison and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Oyster boat

(Dredging on the high tide.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Thanksgiving Recipe

"Gratitude to squelch my anger, and tenacity to overcome the obstacles."

Henry Winkler's recipe for success. Note that the first one is bodhisattva awareness.



(Photo of Yorkshire coble "Gratitude" ["There's Gratitude for you!"] courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Schooner Zodiac under weigh

(Local charter and school ship, 127-foot Zodiac, built in 1924 for a wealthy industrialist, outbound from her homeport of Bellingham, Washington.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Swingin' on the hook

(I've never seen so many boats anchored off Fairhaven [Washington], where the marinas are all at capacity. Most of the newcomers appear to be transoceanic; a few look like homeless people. Both, I'm fairly certain, are down to COVID; the ocean-crossing crowd are beached by closed harbours overseas, and have nowhere else to go.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Schooner

WW: Navigation light

(This is a ship's larboard navigation light. When they change them the crews tend to drop the dead one overboard, so we often find them washed up. They're actually quite striking amidst all the grey. This one's about the size of an overripe summer squash.)

WW: September afternoon

WW: Home port

(Open in a new window to see it larger.)

WW: Freighter in the mist

WW: Marine railway

WW: North Coast homeport

WW: First Nations canoes

WW: Spring afternoon

WW: Seafaring lizard

(My nephew and I went fishing all day a few weekends ago. We loaded the boat in his truck, drove across the county, launched in a large lake, motored about two miles to an anchorage, and fished for several hours. Then we repeated the process in reverse. When my nephew pulled the boat out of his truck that evening, he found this stowaway – a Northern alligator lizard – that must have been there the whole time.

Note typical belligerent pout.)

WW: $5000 boat

(Had a long chat with the fellow who drew and built this motorsailer. Whole vessel cost him $5000, including a woodstove he also drew and built. Can't comment on the seakindly of his design, since I've never sailed it, but you can't argue with the price. Looks great belowdecks, too.)

WW: Running

Shipwrecked

I recently re-read a journal I kept in January 2003, during the period of my divorce. I was struck by the events and emotions it recorded, and particularly the role of meditation and Zen in helping me weather them. Although the period was one of the hardest I've traversed (and there are lots of candidates), in some ways I remember it as the best. The log, which I kept to gain insight into my mood swings (and, I confess, to have someone to talk to) ends up documenting a proven strategy for surviving adversity. So for the benefit of others in similar straits, I'd like to share a few reflections.

The first pages, written when my wife was still living with me but flaunting an affair – and getting in a lot of gratuitous cruelty on the side – are especially gruelling. I was living in the great Canadian G.A.N. ("God-Awful Nowhere"), 3000 miles from my family and friends, in a culture (Québec) that wasn't mine, with no car or income. In short, I was in an abusive relationship and there was no escape. No wonder those paragraphs are so full of angst and fear.

A litany of suffering is listed there: ghastly nightmares; medical issues; niggling terror; my wife's sneering, baiting jibes; and conversely, the odd oasis of peace and reflection. Most of the latter are associated with meditation; I had been sitting twice daily for nearly a year, and snowshoeing in the forest, during which I often meditated as well. Then, suddenly, after my wife announced the date of her departure, a marked drop in stress. Pointed insight, if only in retrospect.

The role of my growing monastic practice in enduring all of this is clear in entries such as:

Good AM meditation, followed by Zen study and tea. Sunny in my cell [a tiny room in which I barricaded myself, often for whole days]. Attitude rises. Productive day. Some sadness at night, before PM meditation. The sit was OK. Cut branches outside this afternoon. Felt very good during and after. Work helps.

Yet I took her actual leaving surprisingly hard. Surprising, I say, because I'd quite had enough of her by then; I was eager to live in a whole house, in peace, without a demon from some Buddhist parable whose personality had dwindled to just two channels: cold and screaming.

I've long since forgiven, in light of what I've learned, and no longer take the abuse personally. But I vividly recall what life was like with her. So it's interesting now to read the lines of grief and despair I wrote the day she left.

Still, the bedtime entry, last one in the log, sums it all up:

Things remained sad and shaky until I meditated at 10PM, for almost 50 minutes. Now I'm still sad, but less so.

Because the journal ends there, it doesn't detail the accruing strength and calm of the following months, due in part to the full-on monastic discipline I adopted. Nor does it record the inevitable relapses, when depression and desperation paralysed me for an hour, or a day – or in one instance, four straight days – before I took up the practice again and forged on to healing. But the seeds of that story germinate in the telegraphic chronicle of the last month of my marriage.

Things don't happen to me,

I wrote toward the end,

they just happen.

And then, in response to my wife's constant insistence that I was the source of all her unhappiness:

They don't happen to her, either.

Zen saved my butt, and not for the last time. I'm a monk today for the same reason my grandfather remained an FDR man till the day he died: not for theory or pretence or cachet, but from sheer fire-hardened memory. So if you're suffering, be assured that you're not alone. Others have been there – others still are – and there's an end to it.

In my case, the Four Noble Truths, and the practice they inspired – not just reading and reflecting, but the actual doing – were that solution. It may be for you as well. Any road, you might as well try; sitting is free.

The path is always there, regardless of trailhead. May we walk it with the Buddha's own diligence and humility.

• Readers interested zazen [Zen meditation] will find good instructions here.
• Zen students suffering through depression or despair will find support and companionship here.

(Detail from Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art [Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906] and Wikimedia Commons.)

Mente de Marinero

"El mundo era una estructura muy compleja que únicamente podía contemplarse desde el mar; y la tierra firme sólo adquiría proporciones tranquilizadoras de noche, durante el cuarto de guardia, cuando el timonel era una sombra muda, y de las entrañas del barco llegaba la suave trepidación de las máquinas. Cuando las ciudades quedaban reducidas a pequeñas líneas de luces en la distancia, y la tierra era el resplandor trémulo de un faro entrevisto en la marejada. Destellos que alertaban, que repetían una y otra vez: cuidado, atención, manténte lejos, peligro. Peligro."

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

English translation here.

(Foto por cortesía de Joaquim Alves Gaspar y Wikimedia Commons.)

Street Level Zen: Breaking the Trance

"Everybody grows up on their own reservation, and the quality of your life depends on how willing you are to get the hell away from it."

Sherman Alexie


(Photo of Chumash Tomol 'Elye'wun paddlers pulling hard for the Channel Islands courtesy of Robert Schwemmer, NOAA Photo Library, and Wikimedia Commons.)