WW: Good Housekeeping Seal

(This little figure, which my mom brought home from one of her trips up the North Coast, had a place in her living room for forty years. Early on I dubbed it the Good Housekeeping Seal, by which name it's generally been known since.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Dried kelp

(Nereocystis sp. Great toasted as a salty crunchy snack, or broken into soups, sauces and the like as a vegetable.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Karmic Kryptonite

The most dangerous thing a sentient being can do is to act on pretext. "Since you did that, I can do this."

That's policy, not principle.

Amœbic eye-for-an-eye morality is karmic kryptonite.



(Photo of Amœba sphaeromeleolus [fine life-form as far as I'm concerned, but not noted for circumspection] courtesy of Dalinda Bouraoui, the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de Genève, and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Forest memorial

(According to information painted on its crossbar, this marker memorialises a young person. It's nailed high on a Douglas fir on the shore of a pond that's accessible from a nearby trail. It's a deeply touching gesture, as much for the simple dignity of the testament as the peaceful seclusion of its location.)

The Lincoln Koan

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?

Four.

Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.


Abraham Lincoln


(Detail from the Lincoln Memorial courtesy of Steve Evans and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Black- and raspberry wine

(Here's a bucket of wine I put up on the fridge this week, made of equal parts blackberries and raspberries frozen in summer. It'll be ready to bottle in several months, and fit to drink a year thereafter.

The kvass in the plastic soda bottle was fermented from the second press. Its crisp dryness and beautiful jewel-like colour bode well for the wine to come.)



Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Mending The Roof

After 20 years of this I know that practice is not like mending a roof and now the roof doesn't leak. It's more like patching a roof and now it doesn't leak there anymore. With each subsequent sit you patch another leak, until sooner or later you're replacing that first patch again, and then the rest, and placing still more new ones.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

We don't mend things in this practice. We practice mending things. This isn't why they call it "practice", but from now on it's why I do.

For some this open-endedness is a hard truth. It leads some non-Zenners to reject our religion out of hand, on the grounds that it's unproductive. I've tried pointing out that it has this in common with everything else – that material productivity is ephemeral at best, in all contexts – but they tend to defend their thesis by defining their terms very narrowly. ("My family life isn't unproductive. My wife and kids make me happy." I sincerely hope so… but your investment won't return any longer or better than mine. This statistic greatly disturbs some folks, in a culture that encourages us to view achievement as a thing that somehow outlives the achiever.)

All of which is old news for any Zen student of average smugness. So it's a bit galling that many of those think practice can change your fundamental nature: stop pain from hurting, loss from evoking grief, discomfort and lack of control from generating fear and anger. The patches you lay today will remain in place forever if you practice properly, they insist. Eventually you'll have a whole roof.

Or to put it scientifically, that web of random gravitational attraction holding in momentary proximity a squirming conglomeration of volatile components, none of which is a roof, will become a roof.

The only roof in the universe, no less. Because that's the power of a single human being and its mighty attitude.

And so the eternal issue of why practice comes up again. As we face the daily failure and futility of this existence – the fact that the register of paths we didn't take is multiplying hourly – we start to feel like frauds. We aren't buddhas. We don't have control of our emotions and reactions. We're still getting angry and sad and disheartened. We aren't sitting enough, or right, or maybe at all, sometimes.

In these moments I try to stop beating myself up for not being fixed. To look beyond complaints that my progress isn't permanent, my product isn’t perfect, and my monkery hasn't made me greater than the human being I was when I started.

Bit much to ask innit, in a universe where none of those things are possible.

But I can nail a mean patch now. I can bang down others as well, at standard human speed, with standard human results.

After which the roof is less broken, even if it isn't fixed.

If not this, what would you have me do?


Fondest compliments to the Nation of Seekers. This thing we do isn't easy, but neither is anything else.



(Photo courtesy of Sergeant Gustavo Olgiati, US Army; the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service; and Wikimedia Commons.)