WW: Camas

(Camas [Camassia quamash] is the clarion of spring where I grew up. Back in the day it covered hundreds of miles of open prairie, and its marble-sized, onion-shaped starchy bulbs were a pillar, along with salmon and salal, of the North Coast aboriginal diet. I used to gather it myself, until they put a shopping centre on top of my camas ground.

Thus I've been accustomed to view camas in a mostly utilitarian light, but lately I'm noting how beautiful a flower it is. Must've been something to see those vast prairies, rippling purple in the new-made sun, to the horizon.)

Invisible Monk

I normally turn to one of several online public-domain graphics services to illustrate these posts. But figure this: on most or all of them, if you search for "monk", virtually every image will be Buddhist.

Some are Hindu, a decided few are Jain or Taoist, but almost none are Christian.

Take Unsplash. Its very generously free photographs are of such Condé-Nast quality that I rarely use them myself, this being a dirt-floored hermit blog, but click on that hyperlink. See how many of its monks are Christian.

And Unsplash is not an egregious case. Though the most widely-used service – Wikimedia Commons – does somewhat better, if you subtract historical depictions you'll find that its Christian orders still score well behind those of Asian origin.

Which renders me thoughtful. What's at work here? Is it the natural ambivalence of people in Christian-dominated societies to the Church? Or do we view Christian monastics as anachronistic – as indeed many Asians view their Buddhist counterparts? Or is it the common delusion that Asian religions are less hypocritical than Abrahamic ones?

It might simply be that Asian travel is hipper among trendy young Westerners, so the photos they take tend to depict Asian subjects.

Or maybe it's those flaming orange, red, and yellow vestments most Buddhist monks wear. Perhaps they're just more photogenic than the typical earth-toned Christian habit. 'Course that wouldn't explain why snapshots of Zenners, in their black, brown, or grey okesa, outnumber those of Catholics.

One way or the other, I think this is related to the Buddhist statuary often encountered in Western gardens and sitting rooms. But it's not just exoticism; Christian monks have become almost as novel to us in these times, particularly since they rarely go abroad in uniform these days.

Yet somehow they don't command the same mystique. When you consider all the old-school Christian cœnobites still afoot in the Mediterranean countries and Eastern Europe and Latin America, it's astonishing how few make it into our stock photos.

I'm convinced that somewhere in there is a fundamental misconception about the nature and reality of Buddhist monasticism.

Because the fact is, life and practice in Christian and Buddhist monasteries are astonishingly similar.


(Photo of Zen master Seung Sahn uncharacteristically outnumbered by the brothers of Our Lady of Gethsemani courtesy of ZM Dae Gak [Robert Genther] and Wikimedia Commons.)

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.)

WW: On the road

(I don't know why I like this one so much;
somehow it just looks like me.)

Outbacking

Travelling so far so long in isolated country produces a kind of elation. The muttering millions bugger off, leaving you in boundless creation, under a sympathetic God.



(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo courtesy of Anthony Burden and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Spring stirfry

(The giving season. Morels [Morchela conica] and fresh asparagus.)

Knobs

Me at my station. Note how state-of-the-art it looks now that I've replaced all the knobs with rotary encoders.

Last year, after a prodigal decade, I got back into ham radio. Digging out my old gear and catching up with the new had a Rip Van Winkle quality; like all things tech, radio evolves at astounding speed.

There were also the inevitable jargon shifts. It's a universal human phenomenon – constantly adjusting our codes to confirm insiders and bar outsiders. Tech fields, with their giddy rate of material change, are especially given to it.

So it was that I spent weeks working out what a "rotary encoder" was. Something to do with Arduinos? (This after looking up "Arduino", which clarified but little. Now, having read some more and watched a few YouTube videos, I own one. And someday I hope to get it to do something.)

But "rotary encoders" appear on Arduino-less equipment, too. I soldiered on through the blizzard of rotary encoder references, till at last I cornered this majestic creature for close and thorough inspection. And lo I was enlightened.

It's a knob. You know: the round plastic thing you twist to turn up the volume, or change the frequency.

Apparently, in my absence, the rest of you figured out what a knob is, so we had to upgrade that terminology before you began to suspect we aren't as great as our game.

And that's why, starting tomorrow, I'm refitting all my doors with rotary encoders. Because I insist on cutting edge. I won't actually have to do anything; just call all my doorknobs "rotary encoders" from here on in. And I'll be miles ahead of you other dweebs.

Which meditation puts me in mind of a broader trend in my life these days. To wit, all of my religious and political opinions have dwindled and melded into one single iron principle:

Show me results or sod right the hell off.

As I age, I've quite lost patience with shell games. I'm not the least bit interested in thrice-busted cons (capitalism, Marxism, any scheme to sum up all human aspiration in a single sentence) and pseudo-science (economics foremost, along with a great steaming chunk of the other social sciences, yea though that's my academic preparation).

Nor do I retain any faith in religious eschatology. Try to sell me some Nigerian scam whereby I tolerate or cause suffering in this world in exchange for a pay-off in the next, and you'll see my veil of courtesy slip. Same with attempts to shame me into collusion. "You think too much of yourself. You can't possibly grasp the genius of God/guru/gospel."

Listen, O Knowing One: show me results or piss off. Validate your success. I want unspun stats, discrepant data, objective evaluation, adult-level honesty, sensitivity, and complexity. I don't care whether or not your approach is consistent with my religion, culture, or assumptions. If you've fixed something, I'll muck in.

If not, I won't let you finish your sentence.

This is the sword of Zen, as I've lived it. In my experience, "don't know mind" is both the essence and the action of this practice. When I fail at that, I fail at other things as well. When I succeed, I tend to reap results.

It's difficult not to get bogged in the quagmire of "knowing 'don't-know mind'". Humans are wired to "find" things, and then to conclude that others' troubles come from not having found them. (Or even from wickedly obscuring them.)

So not-knowing is a constant chore. Putting down the stuff I know, which I pick up every day, is a goal I'll ultimately never attain. But reaching gets results, so I keep doing it.

In the end, I guess the best advice I can give to myself or others is, respectfully:

Don't be a rotary encoder.


(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Newark Sunday Call.)