In the wake of the recent earthquake in Japan there were widely-publicised tsunami warnings for the coast and several friends contacted me with fears for my well-being. They didn't know we get tsunami warnings every third Wednesday; it's our version of the Mauve Alert. It's just that this time it was newsworthy.
And the experts say our waves were in fact a whole 1.7 feet higher than normal. Of course we were also experiencing a winter storm at the time, so whatever the heck "normal" means, in the North Pacific, in March...
Anyway, next day I found this on the beach. It's old. It's big. It's heavy.
It's a whale rib.
So maybe something powerful did surge up out there.
And maybe I don't know everything.
But surf is a dogmatic mind, and almost always spits the offering right back into the launcher's footprints. Which is what happened this time, as I learned when I emailed the address it bore.
The bottle was crammed with folded paper, and one dried rose. I didn't open it, because a note visible from outside advised the finder to email its position and toss it back. Since I found it very near the campground, I suspected it hadn't got far, and my suspicions were confirmed by the response I received. This read in part:
[My wife] and I were married just this 1.11.11 at 11:11, a crystal clear cold but beautiful day, under the canopy of plum trees at Seattle's Volunteer Park. We invited all the wedding party to post their own hopes dreams and wishes into the bottle. We then enjoyed a walk along Alki beach to throw the bottle but the current was not right. [We] headed to Golden Gardens Park... again wrong tide. We sent off the bottle with parents going to the ocean. It was tossed this weekend into the ocean.
Hmmm. I have long experience with drift bottles, and told my new friend I'd give this one the benefit of same. First I threw it in the river; sometimes that will get it past the surf. The next day I found it right back where I'd been standing. It was time to stop playing around.
The best way to lodge a bottle in the grey Pacific is to give it to an outbound fisherman and have him dump it overboard when he reaches the horizon. Unfortunately the nearest fishing terminal is quite a distance away and I had no foreseeable plans to travel that far in that direction.
So I took up my stick and humped the bottle out to Damon Point. This long, low spit of sand stands well into the harbour's throat, where it confronts open ocean swell to the southeast and shelters still bay water to the northwest. On a stormy, rain-soaked winter Monday I slogged its two miles of soft sand to the end, to the mighty pushing and shoving of colliding seas.
With an east wind at my back, on steep shingle beach and a turning tide, I pitched the bottle over a single line of surf. And it came right back. So I pitched it again. And left.
I got soaked to the skin in the process, and caked with grit. That's how I know the job was done.
The bottle probably came right back, but that's OK; from Damon Point it will soon be sucked out to sea. It's the best beachcombing in the county; but for a hundred feet of sand, you could be adrift on a raft in the middle of the harbour's mouth. Any wind save a true NNW will sweep anything off that beach, and the entire contents of Gray's Harbour busting back into the main will drive it away for good.
And if it comes back again, by God, I'll drive to Taholah. The Tribe'll get it done, you may count upon it.
The unedited version of this photo documents two vultures eating a human body in a Tibetan burial ground. I use it for asubha. I've edited out the scary parts and declined announcing this post in other fora so as not to impose on anybody.
I look at this picture every day. In fact, it's the desktop picture on my computer.
Sometimes when I look at it, I see the woman who used and abused me and left me for dead. I got bad news, babydoll: you ain't all that and a bag of chips. Just ask my friends, here. You're just the bag of chips. Same as us all.
Sometimes I see the man who worked violence on me to get his own way. It's hard to hate you when I see where all your scheming is going to get you.
Sometimes I see someone I love and cherish, someone without whom I might not have made it this far. The time to love is now.
Sometimes I see the Buddha, because this is precisely what happened even to his enlightened backside.
But mostly, I just see me.
Brothers and sisters: don't waste time.
Bald eagles like to roost in the trees in my front garden, as they're the highest point on the ridge. They have a clear, clarion scream they like to loose up there, a slide-whistle aria like a loon singing opera. As near as I can tell, it means, "Check it out, dawg: I'm an eagle. And I'm 'way up high."
Giant birds; they glide in just over the eaves, casting a shadow like a pterodactyl on the sitting room rug. They're also devoted spouses, rarely apart from their mates. The bond seems more emotional than evolutionary; eagles seldom hunt coöperatively, and they certainly have no need for mutual defence.
When I was a kid, seeing one of these was a rare treat, never to be forgotten. Today it's extremely illegal to kill them, calling down a force of judiciary second only to homicide, and the logging and agricultural activity that undercut their ability to survive have been regulated in their favour.
So now such sightings are commonplace. Even boring.
But not for me.
(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright RK Henderson.)
Because the choice is ours.
Many years ago, when I was a student, I entered a supermarket. A lady stood out front with a coffee can, collecting for charity. She was a cheery sort, a plump, maternal woman with a rosy Anglican face.
Ahead of me strode a man in a green coach's jacket. "Would you like to give to the Church relief fund?" she asked.
His voice had all the silk of a snow shovel on wet asphalt.
"I was poor all my life, nobody helped me!"
Taken aback, the churchwoman bobbed, and he stalked past, shoulders hunched, fists jammed in his slash pockets.
I never saw the man's face, but his greying comb-over and spare tire are stamped on my mind.
I should have pulled out my grocery money, a single twenty, and handed it to her right there. I should have said, "Here's ten for me," and dropped it in her can, "and ten for him." But I didn't. In the moment, all I could think to do was raise an eyebrow, as who should say, "No good deed unpunished, eh?", and keep walking.
But the guy bothered me. He was rude. He was ungrateful. He was angry. It was years before I solved his riddle.
You decide what it does to you.
You don't decide what happens. When you're born, where you're born, who you're born, how you're born. Land slides, fields flood, markets crash, families fail, houses burn, dogs bite, lovers leave, people die. Dashboards dash and draught boards draught.
You take a number and you watch the wheel. Same as us all.
But you decide what it does to you. Whether it makes you hard or soft. Hot or cold. Mean or mindful.
Poverty doesn't do that. Pain doesn't do that. Heartbreak doesn't do that.
You do that.
Walking the beach after a fierce NNW, I found this small Japanese squash, washed up generally intact on the tide line. It's about the size of a large grapefruit.
It was delicious. A little salty. But worth the walk.
Blessed be the sea, that gives as good as she gets.
UPDATE (27 September 2012): My review of Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, the book that inspired this film, can be found here. Among other things, it points out that hermits have actually sat in the Zhongnans for seven thousand years; it's just the Buddhists who arrived two thousand years later.
This week I saw Amongst White Clouds, a terrific documentary on Chinese hermits. You can buy a copy at Amazon, or see it on YouTube with upgraded subtitles, until/unless they take it down.
Made by American hermit Edward (Ted) A. Burger, this film is a rare jewel of multiple facets. To begin with, very few American scholars learn other languages, even those that are central to their specialities. Burger, for his part, has devoted his academic life to mastering Putongua (Mandarin Chinese), and is likely conversant in one or more regional dialects as well. (But I was unable to confirm this; Burger's Internet presence is remarkably spare, for having made such an important film.)
Burger is also the disciple of a Chinese hermit master, and though the linguistic path may seem obvious for such a person, it is actually very rare for an American to "bother" with language under those circumstances. Burger's personal investment in his tradition's cultural context invests his work with unique authority. (Unfortunately, his convictions didn't extend to the film's subtitles. Though their tone suggests an unusual grasp of the original Chinese, many flash by so fast they'd qualify as subliminal. I found this frustrating, and I read fast.)
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| Burger and his master. |
The work itself is deceptively basic: Burger simply takes his viewers along, by virtue of video equipment, on a hike through China's daunting, breathtaking Zhongnan Mountains, seeking out whatever hermits word of mouth says are up there. It turns out to be a lot. In spite of a ban on their vocation after the Communist Revolution, a recent easing of policy has revealed that the region's 5,000-year-old eremitic tradition has not in fact died out; estimates place the number of hermits in those mountains today between three and five thousand.
The fact that Burger makes no effort to define his terms leaves some ambiguity in the work. He appears to consider a hermit someone living in a master-disciple relationship, as he himself did, though he doesn't 
verify that all of his interviewees walk that path. (In an excellent interview with the Kyoto Journal, Burger uses the verb "ordain" to mean "become a hermit," i.e., "She ordained at a young age." Again, he doesn't define this term.) He also considers "Buddhist" implicit in the term "hermit," though I can virtually guarantee that if there really are 5,000 of us in those hills, at least some reject such labels.
But that's my hang-up; Burger's point is simply that old-timey hermits still exist in China. On the way he films about a dozen, of both genders and all ages, half of whom he interviews in depth. Each reveals a unique personality, 
with a custom-designed practice. There are some wonderful moments of human warmth: a man my age laughs to think anybody would be interested in his unremarkable life; another is mystified that the hairy young barbarian introduced to him as "Edward" is called "Ted" by English-speaking friends; and my all-time favourite, the teenage monk who respectfully ignores the repeated orders of his deaf, 87-year-old master to "Speak up, boy! The man's making a movie!"
In the end, Amongst White Clouds avoids the pitfalls of pious tribute on one hand and insensitive judgement on the other, to become an authentic if maddeningly limited glimpse of an ancient Zen path. It's also an amazing feat of anthropology, and an impressive cinematic accomplishment in which the land itself, the remote, densely-forested, canyon-steep slopes of this massive open-air monastery, is a character in its own right.
See it. You won't lament the time.
