(Scrambled eggs and coral mushrooms foraged in the forest last week comprise this delectable disc. I didn't bother to ID the fungus, but believe it wasRamaria. Chopped celery leaves round off the feast. Or maybe finish off the round feast.)
This month past brought Rusty Ring into its tenth year of publication, not counting the four-odd months that I sat ango. This blog has become so integral to my monastic practice that I didn't even notice that an anniversary had passed until this week.
There's an ancient Zen commandment that monks keep a journal of their lives and activities, and that such records should be accessible to all in order to support others' enlightenment practices, present and future. Rusty Ring, and the regular posting schedule that I imposed on myself from the beginning, with the resulting pressure for material, quickly filled that gap in my monastic programme.
And then it added something else as well: sangha. As I've mentioned before, the third is the hardest Treasure for hermits to acquire, and the lack most keenly felt. In the case of Rusty Ring, just the blog itself, absent of readers, is already sangha; somebody for me to talk to. That it's also attracted a modest but loyal cadre of regulars, with similarly serendipitous stop-ins from visitors all over the world, provides a cogent counterpoise to my monk game.
And so I feel like this is the moment to let a small but significant cat out of the bag: that this is in fact an actual primordial 'blog. That is, in the original intent of the medium – by its full name, a weblog – it's a personal thought journal, with the appended late-90s enhancement that others can read it too if they wish.
Thus, all of the posts here are messages to me. Reminders, for the most part, practical and philosophical.
The sesshin and practice points I consult while organising my own.
And crucially, the moral and political exhortations that frequently appear here are all addressed to me.
Spoiler alert.
Not quite The Sixth Sense, but there may be a touch of O. Henry in that revelation for some, all the same.
Any road, I hope the reflections that I share here – or at least make available – or at least don't hide – are useful to those who must, with increasing difficulty, dig them out. (I have got to move to a better host!)
Your company and contributions have been invaluable, and I'm deeply grateful for your influence on my life and practice.
In pleasant anticipation of the years to come, I remain,
(Found this all alone in the middle of the swamp that has figured in many recent posts. The white trunk that so gleams 'midst the dead winter foliage and sulking North Pacific sky is none other than Betula papyrifera, the famous paper birch from which Eastern First Nations build their canoes.
Emblematic of the Eastern Woodlands and not uncommon in the Prairies and Rocky Mountains, canoe birch is perishing rare on the Pacific Slope. Hence Whatcom County's Birch Bay, whose endemic birches were noteworthy to early settlers.
But south of the Fraser Valley, B. papyrifera drips and drabs into scarcity, before disappearing entirely around Everett.
Which is 100 miles from here.
Nor is this the site of any disappeared habitation, which lets out persistent landscaping. So I'm flummoxed. I don't believe there are any other paper birches within five miles in any direction; probably a great deal further.
But I'll tell you this: when I saw it there - after I recovered from my disbelief - I almost cried. B. papyrifera covers the Laurentian Shield, and was the dominant species in the Québec hills that I lived in and loved, and where my Zen practice began. There I got to know it intimately, hiking under and through it, burning it in my woodstove through the winter, and meditating on all of its phases and stages.
This one may stand awkward and alone in this alien forest, but happening on it brought a kind of joy that is hard to explain.)
Here's another burst of insight from that cagey lot down at Monty Python.
This time they put humanity in context with a song drawn, fittingly enough, from The Meaning of Life. One fated from the outset to become a seminal text in my spiritual training, because I too have long asserted that this whole Great Mind thing is just a largish vaudeville show. And here Eric Idle (aka the Pythons' resident Zen master) confirms my suspicions.
For the rest, kindly note that the figures cited in the work are scientifically demonstrable. (Making this is a rare example of a novelty song that contains, like, verifiable data, and is therefore acceptable to Wikipedia, among others.)
And that Eric's knack for a penetrating conclusion is the most electric since Lennon and McCartney.
Follows the tablature:
GALAXY SONG
by Eric Idle
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth
I just read Isabel Allende's Largo pétalo de mar, a novel of the epic genre, in which a Catalonian family is cast adrift in the wake of their Republican stand against Franco, to wind eventually up in post-Pinochet Chile. In between is a lot of striving, living, and suffering.
Allende has a Hemingwayesque gift for trapping powerful unspoken emotion between terse, concrete lines. I'm not a big Hemingway guy myself, but Allende's command of the technique is effective here.
Case in point: at one juncture, one character tells another, "El mundo no tiene remedio." ("There is no cure for the world.") Being a more incisive take on that dilemma we anglophones dismiss as the "way of the world".
It's particularly à propos in this context, but as a Zenner, I feel the need to add, "Yes, but you can cure yourself."
The Spanish aphorism is exact: it's best to give up the "one candle in the dark" model, by which, given enough candles, you hope eventually to light the world. There lies madness.
But washing your hands of the cruelty here isn't skilful, either.
Instead, concentrate on fixing yourself; it's a prerequisite to changing the world, anyway. Worst case scenario: at least you'll have fixed something.
And that's what fixes the world.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(Because the North Coast has only been densely populated for the past two centuries, we have nothing like the glorious mudlarking they get in the UK. [On the other hand, we also don't need a licence to do it.] Generally, unless you stumble on something pre-contact, you're looking at a 20th century Euro-American artefact. Maybe 19th; very rarely 18th. The above probably falls in the first two categories. I still wonder how it comes to be there, and where in the bay it was lying before the tide fetched it up.)
Well, I finally did it. I dumped the IntenseDebate comments widget.
It was a hard decision, for several reasons. Worst of which was losing full nine years of reader comments.
As I always say, my intrepid half-dozen readers make up in quality what they lack in quantity. As a result, there was almost a decade of thoughtful, supportive, and informative participation locked up in that abandonware, that couldn't be transferred to any other host. Dumping IDC meant losing all of that.
But keeping it meant many couldn't comment in the first place; in some environments there wasn't even a "Comments" link available. And finding a back door was fiddly and time consuming, when it was possible at all. The glitch dogged me as often as readers, who had been gently complaining about it for some time.
The lesson here is, never use a third-party feature for content. Off-site upgrades are inevitably deserted by their inventors, leaving their users recourse-free. So only use host-native resources for core services.
There were a few other issues. Worst was that I'd lost the ability to delete spam or abuse. Fortunately neither have been a problem on Rusty Ring, but this is still the Internet. It was just a matter of time.
Not that IDC was short of attractions, of course. Most notably it allowed readers to edit their comments. No matter how vigilantly you copyedit, the instant you post that paragraph all manner of typos and missteps bob to the surface. Therefore you need the power to fix it afterward. But sadly, Blogger's crude comment interface, with its attendant lack of up-thumb (they can keep the down-) and ugly typeface, robs readers even of the ability to delete a comment, let alone change it.
In other words, it's worse than Twitter.
And "worse than Twitter" is grounds to dump anything.
But I'll tell you what that rock-knocking Internet v.2 Blogger comment utility does allow you to do: it lets you comment at all, which IDC, for all its elegance and convenience, was no longer doing. And since it's built in to Blogger, it's unlikely to simply go numb one day, unless the entire platform does.
The good news is that I immediately heard from readers who had been chafing at the inability to continue our conversations – and a few new ones who had never been able to start one in the first place. In less than a week I've racked up more comments than I've had at any week in the recent past.
So welcome back, friends! If it hadn't been for that lost material I'd've done this a long time ago. My deepest apologies to those whose contributions got poofed into the ether at a stroke of my keyboard. (Make that several; hoovering out all of the IDC code and troubleshooting the result took the better part of an evening.) I look forward to seeing you once again in Rusty Ring's new/old bindle-technology comments.
(And for those wondering, yes, I'm still planning to move this blog to an entirely new host. It's just that I've got too much going on at the moment, what with my mom's in-home hospice and a few other things, to take it on yet.)
(Photo of a reader comment scratched in Robert Burns's Commonplace Book 1783 – 1785 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
