WW: Yellow flag lilies

(Iris pseudacorus; an invasive from the Old World, infesting all
North Coast shorelands salt and fresh. Beautiful all the same.)

A Million Tiny Shipwrecks: Velella

Science has made incredible bounds over the past few centuries, but unsolved mysteries still persist, even in everyday phenomena. Case in point: Velella velella. The precise nature of this common, extraterrestrial-looking cnidarian still confounds biologists. Some say it's an organism; some say it's a colony of smaller organisms. You wouldn't think such a question would be hard to settle in this day and age, but the debate rages on.

Velella – the word means "little sail" – is called sail jelly here on the North Coast, sea raft or by-the-wind sailor elsewhere, and the confusion over its basic composition is just the start of its weirdness. It also has a two-stage life cycle, giving birth to tiny jellyfish that somehow – no-one is quite sure how – come together later to form the sail-driven second stage pictured here. Far out at sea, great shoals of these tiny living sailboats run before the prevailing winds, the polyps below their waterlines straining plankton from the water.

Because they have no other means of propulsion, or even a rudder, they are liable to shipwreck on the beach in vast numbers if conditions take a turn for the unforeseen. When I was a boy, a sail jelly raid of this type, produced as it was by a radical deviation from usual wind and current patterns, signalled optimum pickings for prized Japanese glass net floats. Sadly, virtually all floats today are opaque plastic; not half as fun. But you can still smell a raid half a mile away; those tonnes of decaying flesh on the sand let you know it's happened again.

I for one am happy for it, all the same. Sail jelly raids were annual occurrences when I was a kid, but it's been years since I saw one. I was beginning to fear they'd passed onto the growing list of species we'll never see again.

WW: Christmas cactus blossom

(Genus Schlumbergera; no less beautiful for tardiness. Interesting trivium: the six species of Schlumbergera occur only on a short stretch of coastal mountains in southeastern Brazil.)

Autonomy Kyôsaku

By oneself is evil done
By oneself is one defiled
By oneself is evil left undone
By oneself is one made pure
Purity and impurity depend on oneself
No one can purify another

Siddhartha Gautama, Dhammapada XII, verse 165.




(Photo of a Buddha from the Yungang Grottoes courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Castaways

(I found this Tupperware tub washed up on the sand, literally miles from any fresh water. Spring squalls filled it with rainwater, and some desperate tree frog had come by and laid eggs in it. By the time I happened by, thirty tadpoles were living off algae generated on the sides and detritus. They must've been there, egg and larva, for weeks, somehow avoiding being knocked over or slopped into by lethal salt surf. But they wouldn't survived much longer, as periods of full sun become longer and more numerous. I brought the tub home and released its inhabitants in a promising pond.)

WW: Tornado forming

(Waterspout, actually: a tornado at sea. Just off the port bow. Click to see bigger, or open it in a new tab.)

The Koan of Non-Hypocrisy

As a writer on Zen practice, and more generally on ending suffering, I often need to express the concept of not-being-a-hypocrite. And therein lies a quandary: we have no word for that in English. Try it: finish the following sentence with any of the fourteen suggested antonyms in my online thesaurus: "The behaviour of an enlightened person is..."

• forthright
• frank
• genuine
• honest
• humble
• open
• real
• truthful
• actual
• authentic
• just
• reliable
• righteous
• sincere

Not one of those attributes, laudable though they be, means "not hypocritical".

Let's try again. Given that "hypocrisy is the opposite of faith", its essence must therefore be:

• fairness
• frankness
• honesty
• openness
• trustworthiness
• truth
• truthfulness
• uprightness
• forthrightness
• righteousness
• sincerity

Again, none of those means "the character trait of not doing the opposite of what one insists others do."

And finally: "A true man of no rank is first and foremost not a hypocrite." He is therefore… a what? My online thesaurus refuses even to try on this one; it doesn't list a single antonym for "hypocrite", weak or otherwise.

I smack into this wall every day. I can exhort the reader (and much more often, myself) not to be a hypocrite, but "Be a… um… person who reflexively and instinctively monitors his or her behaviour and speech for consistency with the teachings he or she espouses!" does not fit on a rubber bracelet. In English, there is no positive exhortation; we can only condemn. And you know what that makes us. (Hint: "ironic" is only the beginning.)

This is a serious problem, not just for our language, but for our minds and souls. Even etymology abandons us here; hypocrite literally means "one who criticises (him- or herself) too little", but the opposite ("hypercrite") would mean "one who criticises others all the time," as in the adjective hypercritical.

And that isn't the opposite of hypocrite. It's a synonym.


Wu Ya's commentary: "Solve for X."

(Bandage of Faith [artwork] courtesy of Danny Sillada [artist], Wikimedia Commons, and a generous photographer.)