WW: Red-flowering currant

(Ribes sanguineum)

Concentration Camp

Zen monastery.

Wait for it.


(Photo of Rinsaiji courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Vanilla leaf

(Achlys triphylla.)

I Want, I Fear, I Surrender

I learned this meditation from AJ Smith of Restoration Church, an urban Evangelical congregation in Philadelphia featured on Gimlet's Startup podcast. In a moment of self-doubt and uncertainty, AJ engages this mantra, which I gather is fairly common to seekers on his path.

"I want, I fear, I surrender" has a definite Insight ring, don't you think?

If "surrender" seems a little New Age-y, we can always substitute "accept". That formula you could easily sell as straight from the Ancestors, and none would be the wiser. (Hey, wouldn't be the first time.)

Anyway, I think this is a powerful meditation for those moments when you're paralysed by anxiety. Or just as a technique for confronting the koan of anatta.


(Photo courtesy of Nagesh Jayaraman and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Wanton destruction

(Excepting humans, vandalism is rare on this planet. Which is why I find beavers fascinating. The animal that felled this tree wasn't after food. [They only eat the bark.] Nor had he earmarked this trunk for construction. [Too big, too far from the water.] He was just obeying some maladaptive inner compulsion.

Because it burns massive amounts of time, exposure, and calories, while scoring not a single survival point, evolution normally frowns on such aimless violence. A glaring exception are the rodents, of which the beaver is the most imposing example, in every sense.)

Street Level Zen: Authority

"Most good poetry is written by people whose fathers told them to shut up."

Nelson Bentley





(Photo of Matsuo Bashō's The Rough Sea graffitied on a wall courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

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.)