While sitting my 100 Days on the Mountain, I sometimes daydreamed about founding a North Coast-native order of forest monks. And should that fancy ever gel, we will sit in the forest of my forebears, wearing the habit of our Douglas squirrel hosts: a hooded robe of honest Cascade umber, over an ochre jersey.
(Text edited from the notes for my book, 100 Days on the Mountain. Photo of Tamiasciurus douglasii courtesy of Ivie Metzen, the US National Park Service, and Wikimedia Commons.)
(Pieris japonica, known here as popcorn bush, is a popular landscaping shrub on the North Pacific Coast. Native to the same latitudes on the far side of the ocean, where climate and soil types are about identical, I'm told it fills whole ravines in Japanese forests. This must be brilliant to see, given its heady fragrance and dense sprays of sparkler-bright blossoms.
The early-spring show, and the fact that we had one at every house I can remember – always right by the front door – made this a favourite flower from early childhood. It's also a good carving and turning wood, fairly soft and light but fine-grained, taking an oil finish well; properties apparently unknown outside of Asia, given the absence of mention online, at least in any of my languages.)
(Here are a few of the largest rings I've collected for makingfudos. [Among those not yet deployed, of course.] Most of the malleable washers came off the beach, wrenched from the wreckage of docks and shoreworks cast up by storms over the years. Their condition betrays particular power. Note as well a rare wooden ring.)
Reading this, I'm reminded that my own depression never "just happens". It's a response to targeted violence from others around me, and common among those who take refuge in a spiritual path. Because when we pill depression away, we green-light further abuse, typically on grounds that our society profits in some way from the consequences.
I'm on record as endorsing the treatment of depression with meds. I also endorse plaster casts for broken arms, but I don't pretend broken arms are the result of an innate cerebral dysfunction; even less that the occasional need for a cast indicates disability.
Yet the medicalisation of depression implies both. When I question this, I often hear that depression patients are a kind of evolutionary beta release; we're just not bundled with the latest DNA upgrade that allows us to function productively in a society whose survival relies on toughness and insensitivity.
This in spite of the fact that it's the animalistic members of the human family who are by definition the atavists.
Thus my various intellectual reactions to objections that the nation will fall unless citizens are permitted to abuse one another, none of which are, "Oh, I see – carry on, then."
So check out the post linked above. My brother's two paragraphs are short and to the point. At minimum, they prove I'm not the only one who's noted a touch of self-service in our culture's take on this matter.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(Last Christmas I got a tiny cellophane envelope containing half a teaspoon of hard, opaque, plastic-looking multicoloured beads, about the size of pinheads. Amidst a certain amount of Chinese text, the only English was two brief directions.
Make that "English", because the best I could decipher was:
1. Pour water on these.
2. Don't eat what happens.
Not a word about what these things were, or what the water was going to make them do.
So I poured water over them, and next morning found this.
Apparently all they do is sit there being miraculous.
"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing."
This is the opening statement in the above-embedded excerpt from a Northwestern commencement address by Illinois governor JB Pritzer. It caught my ear because it reminded me of my own rule of thumb: Nothing stupid is Buddhist. Listening further, I found similar agreement with several more of the governor's insights. Take this one:
"The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel."
Been relying on this one since childhood. Beware: it's not just for those you dislike. For example, though I long binned ideology as the only thing dumber than dogma, I live mostly on the left. And these days, I'm surrounded by fellow travellers who believe focussed cruelty is an effective retort to racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, sexual predation, a catch-all crime called "insensitivity", and literally any other arrogance conceivable by monkeys. And so they ramp about, rightwinging anybody they can spin into a target.
Which is why I'm uneasy in their company. Because without you're an idiot, you know that sooner or later, by that standard, we all hang.
The governor does have a somewhat outdated view of our evolution, however. As I recently explained, far from securing our survival, we had to skim our ancestors' reptilian instincts off the gene pool to avoid them scrubbing us. But Pritzer is exact when he points out that empathy and compassion are evolved states. They are in fact seminal to our extraordinary run on this planet.
So the cruelty so fashionable to this era can't be forgiven as innate. The vicious make a conscious human choice.
No natural selection there. Just a mountain of karma.
Anyhow, I won't spoil the rest of the video for you. It's an excellent – one might say, prophetic – 3 minutes, that quite stands on its own.
Be sure to note Governor Pritzer's closing declaration. That we've so long allowed cultural authorities to teach us and our children the opposite reflects poorly on our own selective fitness.
I respectfully propose that reversing this trend is the essence of engaged Zen.
