WW: Scottish thistle

(Emblem and patron of my father's people, as any who know us will understand, this well-armed weed flowers in surpassing beauty on the North Coast this time of year. Hated invader notwithstanding, compromising pastureland, and misguidedly considered coarse and unseemly.

As are we.

Cirsium vulgare; though this being the avatar of Scotland, disputes abide over which exact species is truly the authentic Scottish thistle, amongst the many, well... er...

pretenders.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Bodhisattva Day 2025

So here we are on another Bodhisattva Day. The statement has subtly become more emphatic in the current environment; even a touch confrontational, in a world where any call for steady hands is suddenly fighting words.

Perhaps that's why I chose my father's cardigan this year, though the thought only just now occurred to me.

My best to all who agree that discretion and mindfulness are the essence of morality.

Gasshō.

Reflections On The 23rd of February

Today is День защитника Отечества (Defender of the Fatherland Day) in Russia. The date always leads me to a bit of a "on the one hand" contemplation, because over time it's gained more significance than simply Veterans' Day. To wit, it's come to honour all men, whether veterans or not. For example, on this day women in the workplace perform small gestures of appreciation for their male colleagues – gifts, compliments, cursory favours – regardless of civil status.

This is a good idea. The denial of universal human value implied by identity warring is, as Dr. King taught, backward and ultimately suicidal, and in my era at least, gender warriors have been most vocal and least corrected in this delusion.

(I should pause to point out that the Russians have observed International Women's Day since the Bolsheviks, which is why at some point they felt compelled to balance the equation in this fashion.)

So fair play to them. But I'm unsatisfied with glossing armed service with manhood. To begin with, Russia has famously employed large numbers of women in military combat roles for at least a hundred years. But the deeper issue is the unchallenged custom of pegging a man's intrinsic human worth to the presumed privilege of killing him at discretion. In wars, certainly, but also on the job, or in emergencies, or when non-men require defending, or to assuage collective rage, or basically any time we need more grist for Hollywood movies. Loudon Wainright III nailed this many years ago, and I haven't seen any progress on that front, to invoke an apt metaphor.

Like most men – virtually all; I've never heard one object – I accept this status implicitly. It doesn't annoy me, really, this notion that I might get a sword run through me at any time, whether protecting others or making a buck for the boss. We're all literally raised to die. And so it's always passed as the Way of All Things with me. It's just the pretexts arrogated by some non-men that make me grumble.

Life is hard all over. That's why everyone requires compassion.

And bodhisattvas are also all over. That's why everyone requires appreciation.

I respect the Russian people for understanding that – a vestige of their Communist past, perhaps. But the conflation of men with soldiers is disturbing. It's not true that soldiers are a gender – and to suggest otherwise devalues both.

It'd be great if we could receive every newborn as endless potential, promising everything and owing nothing.

But while we're waiting: С 23 февраля! to all my brothers and those who love them. The feast may be a little flawed, but it's a start.


(Photo of a US Navy corpsman in 1st Medical Battalion USMC, feeding his daughter at an on-base Father's Day event, courtesy of Lance Corporal Sarah Wolff, the United States Marine Corps, and Wikimedia Commons.)

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.)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Wrong

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came from my dad. I was in high school, and on the horns of some dilemma.

For some reason, my dad – whose counsel trended to the brief and prescriptive – heard me out this time, as I explained my choices and why I feared I might be censured either way.

My dad nodded a few times, and after a brief silence, said:

"Well, in the end, it doesn't matter."

I hadn't expected this.

"What? Why not?" I asked.

"Because you're always going to get criticised. No matter how carefully you choose your course of action, someone's going to call you an idiot, or a jerk, or a traitor. There is literally no decision a man can take, about anything, that isn't morally reprehensible to somebody."

"Great," I said. "So what do I do?"

"You choose your critic," he said.

I raised an eyebrow, and he continued.

"Suppose you're walking down the street and a panhandler asks you for spare change.

"If you give it to him, I guarantee you somebody will say, 'Nice going, you jerk! You know he's just going to spend that on booze. You're keeping him addicted, undermining the economy, making it possible for freeloaders to live off society. People like you make me sick!'

"On the other hand, if you don't give it to him, someone else will say, 'You selfish bastard! You wouldn't go hungry tonight without that 75¢, but he might! You can't spare a handful of coins for a brother who's down on his luck? Even drunks have to eat. You're the reason life is so lousy!'

"So that's the choice: which gripe can you live with?"

In my life I've consistently found that this formula busts up ethical logjams like nobody's business. It doesn't always lead to the safest decision – to put it mildly – but it does generally reveal the one I'm least likely to be ashamed of later, even in the face of inevitable criticism.

My dad's gone now; he died in September. And since I don't have any kids of my own, I figured this was as good a time and place as any to pass on his thunderously effective mindfulness tool.

In these morally challenging times, when even the citizens of heretofore principled societies face dubious and potentially dangerous demands on their allegiance, this is the sort of advice we can all use.

(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson.)

Good Movie: The Way

The Way is a movie you've seen a dozen times: angry/critical/selfish/
disapproving/distant father comes to regret his bullheaded incompetence at the whole human thing. It's also a movie you've never seen before, and I recommend that anyone who has a dad, or is a dad – or is a man, or knows a man – remedy that.

The plot, as I said, is well-travelled, but what saves the film from that (and sometimes itself) is its lead actor's astounding fluency in silence. If nothing else, The Way proves that if you want to make a movie about a man struck speechless by suffering, you're gonna need Martin Sheen. Guy's like the Robin Williams of stillness.

For reasons I can't reveal without spoiling, Tom Avery decides, without a lick of reflection or experience, to hike the Camino de Santiago. This ancient Christian pilgrimage route, winding through the daunting Pyrenees from one side of the Iberian Peninsula to the other, has lately become très chic among aging Boomers. But very few of them actually do it; as a range cop at the trailhead advises our hero, that takes two to three months. If you're in shape. And you have the fire.

Which Avery may; I'll leave that for viewers to discover. But in his desperate search for solitude, our man ends up, Jeremiah Johnson-style, a reluctant surrogate father to a gaggle of young, equally wounded fellow pilgrims. The fact that he has the same prickly dynamic with them that he has with his actual son, is a bit heartbreaking. Yet, pointedly, it works. The filmmaker seems to be telling us, in hauntingly familiar tones, that eighty per cent of fatherhood is just showing up.

Which is particularly bittersweet, given that filmmaker Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed the screenplay and played Avery's son, is in fact Martin Sheen's real-life son. All told, the project involved three generations of Estevez men – father, son, and grandson – before and behind the camera.

I was bemused, while researching this review, to find most commentary about The Way on Christian sites. Thus do we chop complex realities into simplistic tropes. Yeah, hiking the Camino is a Roman Catholic thing. And yeah, Tom Avery is Catholic (as are the Estevez family). His faith is apparently one of the tools he takes into the mountains. I say "apparently" because he never utters a Christian word. Neither, come to that, does anyone else; even a priest they meet is refreshingly circumspect. Nobody totes a Bible; nobody prays, at least not formally; nobody mentions Jesus. If it weren't for Avery's briefly crossing himself during a specific repeated ritual, you'd have no idea he was a believer. In anything.

Yet mainstream outlets seem terrified of the sectarian implications of a pilgrimage, while the Christian market glommed hard onto a film with a big-name star. (The fact that many sources were Evangelical underscores the general confusion over "whose" movie this is. Estevez has verified that this was a conscious strategy on his part.) Basically, The Way is several films; sooner or later, it ends up being about everybody.

But one way or the other (get it?), this is a very Buddhist film. C'mon, brothers and sisters: this whole "way-path-journey" thing is our metaphor, eh? And the Estevez spin it particularly well. I defy any Zenner, having seen The Way, to tell me it's a "Christian" movie. (And I defy any Christian to tell me it's not.)

Of course, the viewer-pilgrim is bound to get a few pebbles in his or her sandal along the road. There's a digression involving the Rom that reads like an episode from an old American TV series. The actors' raw commitment carries that off, but harder to dismiss is a subplot that plays smoking as poetic, inconsequential, even cute. It is none of those things. Hollywood is largely responsible for the perpetuation of this devastating – and goddam rude – addiction, and I earnestly wish it would grow the hell up and get over its teeny-bopper fascination with tobacco.

But the film survives this lapse, even if the character will not. Its

decidedly fly- (or walk-) by-night production model delivers scene after magnetically attractive, entirely authentic scene, drenched in immediacy. Estevez has a rare gift for spotting eloquent shots, and here he's inadvertently made one of the best tourist board adverts ever. Watching it, I'm thinking, "What this trail needs is a Zen hermit monk."

Best of all is the ending, which – and here I don't think I'm giving anything away – is realistically open-ended. This reviewer gets a little weary of cinematic "happily ever after" (and its evil twin, "broken forever") outcomes. Life goes on. It's easier to relate to, and to care about, lives that continue after the credits roll.

Why we keep making this movie over and over would be an excellent topic for a doctoral thesis. Why we keep watching it is grist for meditation. I highly doubt The Way will be the last damaged-dad picture ever made. I am equally sure that while some of its successors may be as good, none will be better.

Shipbuilding

I was about nine when my dad took me to visit a friend who was building a large wooden steamboat. It was all framed in, and really impressive. Giant ribs, each pair cut to unique curvatures, fitted into the keel at precise tolerances; each structural member crafted out of a specific wood for that part of the ship. It was a true work of art.

I asked my dad how they did that, and he said, "They study all their lives. Just learning how to read the plans is a significant accomplishment." And then he said something that's stuck with me: "Imagine: it took these guys a lifetime to learn how to build boats, and a year to get this far on this one, but you and I could pick up an axe and a sledge hammer and completely destroy it in minutes with no training at all."

I think about that when people admire military prowess, or consider torture an "art", or are proud of their ability to shoot holes in others' theories. It's a very cheap skill.

Show me what you've built.


(Photo courtesy of Rondal Partridge, Federal Security Agency - National Youth Administration, and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Father's Song

Dick Gaughan is like the voice of his entire people. Not merely its inflection; also its spirit, its passion, and its vision. As Scots debate (endlessly) the question of their national anthem, I'd like to propose a novel solution: anything sung by Dick Gaughan. At football matches, they can just drop the needle. Wherever it lands, that's the anthem of the day.

By way of Exhibit A, I offer, on this, the cusp of Father's Day, Dick's rendition of Ewan MacColl's The Father's Song. A collaboration across time of two powerful Scots artists, it encapsulates in unflinching terms a father's duty by his son. (And these days, by his daughter as well.) To wit, to protect and comfort; to inculcate a sense of justice, and of outrage in its absence; to reject all powers that would demean and diminish.

No sugar coating here. And no lies. Just "Here's your inheritance. You and me'll face it together."

THE FATHER'S SONG
performed by Dick Gaughan
written by Ewan MacColl

That's another day gone by, son, close your eyes
Now the moon is chasing clouds across the skies
Go to sleep and have no fear, son
For your mam and dad are near, son
And the giant is just a shadow on the wall
Go to sleep and when you wake it will be light
There's no need to fear the darkness of the night
It's not like the dark you find, son
In the depths of some men's minds, son
That defies the daily coming of the dawn
Lie easy in your bed and grow up strong
You'll be needing all your strength before too long
For you'll soon be on your way, son
Fighting battles every day, son
With an enemy who thinks he owns the world
Stop your crying now, let daddy dry your tears
There's no bogeyman to get you, never fear
There's no ogres, wicked witches
Only greedy sons-of-bitches
Who are waiting to exploit your life away
Don't you let 'em buy you out or break your pride
Don't you let yourself be used then cast aside
If you listen to their lying
They will con you into dying
You won't even know that you were once alive
No more talking now it's time to go to sleep
There are answers to your questions but they'll keep
Go on asking while you grow, son
Go on asking till you know, son
And then send the answers ringing through the world

Forgiving Our Fathers

The advent of Father's Day puts me in mind of Sherman Alexie's riff on Forgiving Our Fathers, a poem by Dick Lourie. This is something many of us must do, because, for reasons as complex as the culture itself, fatherhood is a controversial undertaking. Fortunate are those, child or parent, who come through unscathed.

The poem is hauntingly declaimed by nerd shaman Thomas Builds-the-Fire in Smoke Signals, one of the most undeservedly obscure movies of the last century. That performance, narrating the heart of a young Cœur d'Alêne man as he consigns the ashes of his own complicated father to his people's holy river, can be savoured in the video below:



Forgiving Our Fathers
(edited by Sherman Alexie from an original text by Dick Lourie)

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream.
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?
Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers?
For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning?
For shutting doors?
For speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent?
Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs?
Or in their deaths?
Saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

(The Lourie original is here.)