One-Legged Meditation

Though this seems at first glance avant-garde sculpture, in real life it's the famous one-legged torii of Nagasaki.

You can fill in its backstory yourself.

This Shinto devotional object was just another spirit gate, like thousands of others in Japan, until retrofitted for the Atomic Age by the US Air Force. The survivors took its still standing, despite the instant destruction of their entire city and the amputation of over half the monument, as an icon of hope. While rebuilding their home, they carefully preserved this gate, unmoved and unrestored, in front of the shrine that no longer existed behind it. (Though it soon would again.)

Today both are close-pressed by modern urban development, quite unlike the quiet neighbourhood in which they started, though neither has travelled so much as a yard since the day they were built.

And though all of this is as Shinto as it comes, I can't help but find commanding Zen significance in it, too.

To me, that war-veteran torii's silhouette – gates being a foundational metaphor for us, too – speaks to the nature of enlightenment practice. You practice where you are, how you are. If you lose a leg, you practice on the other.

And if an atomic bomb annihilates everything you know, you practice in the remains.

Nothing to do with machismo; it's just that you have no alternative.

I'm particularly touched by the Little Apocalypse – the tidal wave of concrete that drowned shrine and spirit gate in a matter of decades. Because while I struggle to imagine their Great Apocalypse – it's just more horror than my mind can honestly grasp – I've lived, and continue to live, the little one over and over.

Thus the sight of that silent, single-minded symbol of trust and true nature, standing up to its chin in a mindless race to oblivion, has special relevance for me. In that sense, notwithstanding religious distinctions or the brutality it's survived, we're comrade monks.

It's simply the most succinct expression of Things As They Are that I have found.

Today humanity is flirting with holocaust at least as hot as WWII. Given the geo-engineering challenges we choose to ignore; our growing embrace of political ideologies long proven suicidal; and the diplomatic tools we beta'd at Nagasaki, this could reasonably be the end.

It's difficult for me as a historian, a Zenner, and a decent guy, to remain in harness in the midst of our extinction.

So, what to do?

Well…

Sit down.

I'll also be keeping a photo of the one-legged torii of Nagasaki somewhere in the house, where I can see it.

(All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Contemporary view also courtesy of Frank Gualtieri. View of torii after blast from bottom of stairs also courtesy of U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1945; Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the Atomic Bombing; Nagasaki Foundation for Promotion of Peace; and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Torii's eye view of the devastated city also courtesy of 林重男 [Hayashi Shigeo].)

Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

The article linked in the next paragraph has saved countless lives.

In Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning, Mario Vittone makes some timely points about how people drown. And how many die each year because everyone thinks a drowning person says, "If you please, good sir, I believe I am drowning," like they do on Gilligan's Island.

I'm acutely aware of this quandary, because when I was in high school I saved a child's life. Several families had convened on the waterfront for a late-summer get-together, and the kids were all splashing around in the water. I – the oldest – went snorkeling some distance away.

I'd circled back to the swimming area and had just stood up in the shallows, when I saw a that three-year-old boy had edged himself out too deep. In the space of that glance, he tilted his head backward in an effort to breathe, and as he opened his mouth, it immediately filled with water. I'm not talking about a slosh; I mean a wave sucked him, open-mouthed, completely underwater.

I screamed and ripped off my mask and snorkel, stomping across the rocky bottom in my annoying big diving fins, throwing younger bathers right and left as I floundered toward him.

I made quite a scene.

I also reached the sinking child in seconds, whereupon I jerked him clean out by the armpits and hauled him, at the same thrashing, half-stumbling pace, back to land.

Afterward I sat down on the bank, trembling, my flippered feet still in the water. Everybody stared. The kid was crying. "He was drowning," I panted.

Awkward silence.

"Oh, uh... thanks," said his mother. She was about ten feet from where her son would likely have died, or at least required full-on resuscitation, if I hadn't happened by the dumbest of luck to see him go under. No-one had noticed him out there, or what was happening to him. As Vittone points out, the kid hadn't made so much as a peep at any point.

I wasn't perturbed by the lack of fanfare. Like most rescuers I was as traumatised by the event as the victim. I was exasperated by the attitude of the grups, and that some seemed irked that I'd upset the little guy, as they believed, by randomly snatching him out of the water.

Which is why I'm sharing Vittone's article. His precise description of what drowning looks like took me right back to that place, over 40 years ago, where a child nearly died just feet from half a dozen cavorting others, and a few feet more from another half-dozen adults drinking and kibitzing.

The victim didn't gesticulate or shout. He didn't splash or flog around.

He just… sank.

Water season is upon us up here in the Northern Hemisphere. Let us read up in readiness.

Oh, and a secondary point: if a bay boy says somebody's drowning, somebody's drowning.


(Photo courtesy of Amy Humphries and Unsplash.com.)