WW: Warm autumn day

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Tandem

Let us walk alone together, comrade sojourner.
We will be like pebbles in a bag, polishing each other bright.


(Ship's dogs, ca. 1920, courtesy of the US Navy and Rawpixel.com.)

WW: Sun shower

(Not real interested in coming back inside today.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Christmas card sitting

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hermits and Hotdogs

In the fifty-odd years I've worked with pets and farm animals, I've learned that anxious and abused ones often fear men – but women, not so much.

Some of this gender-specific apprehension may be down to the fact that we're bigger, louder, and maybe don't smell as nice. But a lot of men also appear to believe the world is an action movie, of which they're the beefcake.

They hurt everything that doesn't meet their approval, usually while shouting. And those guys create dread and disconsolation in many creatures.

Catch enough of that, and any sentient being learns mistrust.

You can accomplish a great deal with their victims by just sitting nearby, not reaching out, speaking quietly or not at all. It takes steady patience, but often eventually works. Perhaps the target simply concludes, based on available data, that we're not really "men". (Or maybe that we're just not failed men, which would be accurate. Brothers barging around hotdogging for the camera snatch the lion's share of attention, which is why we non-gnawers of scenery tend to fade into it.)

I was put in mind of this recently during a night sit in the back yard. First, a coyote stepped into view 30 feet away. He seemed unconcerned, not just with the intense human habitation all around him, but even the intense human right in front of him. I hissed, and he ducked away.

Then not one, but two squirrels almost climbed into my lap, in the course of whatever before-bed routines they were pursuing.

As a Zenner who sits outdoors whenever possible – it's a form in my hermit practice – I've had countless similar experiences with wildlife. I've also used this technique intentionally, with lost or traumatised cats and dogs; nervous horses; and at least one refractory laughing dove.

The grace of these encounters never ceases to thrill. For a brief instant I'm freakin' St. Francis.

Very brief, to be sure. But a flash of kensho all the same.

And a reminder that true warriors are silent and watchful.


(Photo of a true warrior courtesy of Wikipedian Petr Novák and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Farm dogs

(Semper vigilans.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Labrador yoga

(This position: "After the Tornado". Vacuum cleaner cord optional.)

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The Gift of Ingratitude

I talk a lot about gratitude on this channel. It's a habit that has two not-very-subtle origins:

1. Gratitude is the wheel of morality, and

2. I'm not grateful by nature.

Prior to becoming a hermit monk, I was routinely guilty of chronic ingratitude. Which is why I'm always urging everybody else to be more grateful.

The problem with such haranguing is that it presupposes others need to be so harangued. Few things are as infuriating as being lectured by some freelance supervisor not to do a thing you were in no wise going to do in the first place. Prejudice that lacks the patience even to wait for you to fall into its trap is the worst of a filthy tribe.

But there's an even better reason not to invade this angel-forsaken terrain on a gratitude warrant: like so many other platitudes, it just wounds the wounded again. Now you're not only in pain, you're selfish and stupid besides.

Which is why I found this counsel particularly powerful:

"Please take this as permission to treat certain periods of your life as an unholy free-for-all during which you are not obligated to feel grateful."

The writer is American advice columnist Carolyn Hax, whose feature I encountered in a random newspaper.

Her correspondent was hoeing a particularly difficult row, and feeling guilty for undervaluing aspects of her existence that weren't damnably awful at that moment.

And Ms. Hax nailed it: you don't lose the right to resent intrusion on your peace just because other aspects of your life haven't.

I'm reminded of a period when I was badly injured by a calculating individual who left me crippled and broken. Even in distress I was aware that the damage had come largely with my own consent. (Pro tip: sociopaths usually lead their marks down an entangling trail of agreements, resulting in at least partial condemnation of their victims by the public when they at last drop the hammer. That's what they get off on.)

In his awareness that I could have avoided this, the abbot in my head kept disallowing my feelings of anger and offence. But at last I realised that this is what anger and offence are for. Misplaced they're a failing, but when justified, a critical source of truth and self-preservation.

I still remember the moment we talked this over, the abbot and I, and agreed that the time had come to let the dogs off the leash. What happened next is a tale for another time, but the spoiler is that I got the needed results. Taking umbrage under the watchful eye of my mindfulness practice was tremendously empowering, at a time when I felt wholly disabled, and ultimately made me a better person.

Memories that Ms. Hax's advice triggered. Because gratitude, acceptance, atonement, and other moral imperatives aren't absolutes. Like everything else, they exist within the great matrix of circumstance that comprehends everything in existence.

So there are in fact times when gratitude, like forgiveness and generosity, is not only optional, but pathological. The confines of this phenomenon are limited; no ground to stop being grateful as a whole. But for a year or two, in a specific context, till you regain a measure of largesse?

No more Goody Two-Shoes.


(Guard dog sculpture courtesy of Jason Lane; photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photgrapher.)

The Lincoln Koan

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?

Four.

Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.


Abraham Lincoln


(Detail from the Lincoln Memorial courtesy of Steve Evans and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Ancient bench

(The city developed a small but interesting walking park here a few years ago, on utilities land it's owned for many decades. Part of it includes a long stretch of lakefront, all of it densely forested. One could believe this shore had never been developed.

Until one stumbles on this ancient park bench in the jungle, now reduced to just the two concrete end supports, its wooden seat long since melted away.

So this is not the first park to be located here, though this property has been wild and overgrown for most of the half-century I've known it.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Compassion in the pit of Hell

(The world is still talking about the 40+ degree weather we on the North Coast experienced this week. I've lived places where that kind of heat wasn't unheard of, but to see it fry my green and temperate homeland was terrifying. [And uncomfortable; few homes here have air conditioners.]

The above photo was snapped beside a local bike path. It's a basin of water for the dogs that are often walked on this trail, presumably placed by the neighbour who lives behind the gate that's out of frame on the right.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Father's Day Meditation

"About the worst kind of person I can imagine is a man who's mean to his dog."

My dad.


(Photo courtesy of Fred Marriage and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Truth About Wolves and Dogs

"When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten."

This line, written by Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is incisive; equal to an revolutionary treatise, all by itself.

Reading it again, I'm reminded of several points of insight I've encountered in my past. For example, when I was a history undergrad, one of my professors described how America's white master class had forcibly converted captive Africans to Christianity in an attempt to render them docile and compliant. When, he said, the preacher fetched up against the many accounts of enslavement in Jewish scripture – accounts which rarely or never present it in a Godly light – he assured his enslaved congregation that those passages didn't mean what they seemed to mean; that they couldn't possibly understand such esoteric teachings.

"Of course, " said Dr. Francis, "this was complete nonsense. Those people knew full well what those Old Testament writers were talking about."

Later I encountered bitter capitalist denunciation of syndicalism. "Unions don't belong in The System!" they pouted. "They want to overthrow the free market!" Communism / socialism / atheism / totalitarianism / repression-depression-recession, fa-la-la-la-la.

But we lumpen learned unionism from capitalists. We implicitly understand such notions as monopoly, cornered markets, object value, possession, and the ethical justifications for acting in one's own interest, other considerations be damned. That the boss wants to kill this wolf is understandable. That he believes we've forgotten who the wolf is, is demeaning at best.

And then, of course, there's Bodhidharma. He said, "Just sit."

Literally.

That's his whole teaching.

All of it.

But in the fifteen-odd centuries since he said it, all manner of fa-la-la-la-la (or bup-po-so-en-jo-raku-ga-jo) has accrued on that small, inornate pedestal. Which was predictable; as I've quoted elsewhere, "Meditation is simple. That is why it so easily becomes complicated." You have to expect that, and accept it, and I do.

So now Zen has become a large corporate entity, complete with the usual demand for compliance, deference, and obedience, which has at length led to full-circle condemnation of Bodhidharma in some quarters. Or at least of others of his nation.

"You can't," we're assured, "possibly understand such complex, esoteric teachings."

And yet I meet more and more sheepdogs who smile and bow when we pass.

Brothers and sisters who know full well what the Old Man was talking about.


(Photo courtesy of Elxan Ehsan oğlu Qəniyev and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Predator competence test

Note to readers: I'm in the process of moving this blog to a new host. Please be alert for a URL change in the next weeks.

(Can you spot the two sheep that, if you were a cougar, coyote, or bear, you would really not want to mess with?)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Freshly-made bed

WW: Everybody loves the zafu

(First the cat, now the dog.)

WW: The Incredible Journey

("You guys get out of my hair! Go outside!"
And our story begins.)

WW: We have spring. Repeat...

WW: Sea dog

WW: August moment