Glamorous Mystery

When I encountered this florist-worthy flower on a bike ride through local prairie country, I was certain it must be a garden escapee, persisting on ground that was once a yard, or arriving more recently in a load of soil. A dozen-odd volunteers had formed a loose colony, with random pioneers scattered along the trail beyond for perhaps a hundred yards.

I was so taken with the glamour – and mystified that I couldn't identify this stranger, given moderately wide experience of garden blooms – that I emailed a few shots to a friend who's a recognised expert on the topic.

The mystery only deepened when she couldn't identify it, either.

At last, my friend worked her resources and reached a verdict: Clarkia amoena.

Thus was I thoroughly humbled, because not only does this eye-catching bloom turn out to be native – while in theory I'm Mr. Wild Plants Guy – it's a fêted member of the freakin' Lewis and Clark herbarium.

Named after William Clark, for God's sake! (Way to rub it in, karma.)

Clarkia amoena, also called farewell-to-spring, is an evening primrose relative, which accounts for another common name: satin flower. It prefers well-drained and –sunned soil, and as that first common name suggests, tends to burst into glorious blossom just as things start to hot up. Which is exactly the moment in which I passed that day.

Indigenous peoples made a staple of this plant's tiny, grain-like seeds, eating them toasted as-is, steamed into porridge, or brewed into a thick, nutritious drink. In addition, Clarkia was one of several field-forming flowers on the pre-settlement prairie that sustained multiple species of butterflies and other insects that have since become endangered.

Finally, it counts among the relatively few North American flowers to pivot to cultivation, thanks to a ready willingness to thrive anywhere that supplies its minimum requirements.

And also, of course, its magnificence.

So, why has this once-classic local suddenly (re)appeared? Well, the land on which grows is actually a reserve, donated to prairie preservation by former owners who'd run a horse-training facility on it. As such it's undergone incremental restoration, some of which might recently have included inoculation with Clarkia seed.

The reserve trust has also taken to conducting controlled burns on their property, as fire is important to prairie health – among other things, nudging Clarkia seeds to germinate.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad it's back.

WW: Giant yellow bamboo

(Suspect Phyllostachys vivax. This is very big stuff - diameters up to 4 inches and heights to maybe 60 feet. This grove occurs in the neighbourhood where I grew up, on a tract of land that was once a farmer's backyard, but has been untended for 50 years now.

Always surreal to see such an iconic plant of the tropics growing so happily here on the North Pacific Coast.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Theory Kyôsaku

The theory is really simple.

The only problem is that theory alone will not help us to be content with our practice.

Although practice of the buddha way is supposed to be the easiest thing in the world, I think it is a fact that we are never quite content with our practice.

Why?


– Though unattributed in the source, this very Soto teaching apparently comes from Muhō Nölke, former abbot of Antaiji.


(Photo courtesy of Antoine Taveneaux and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Crane

(On my recent visit to Spokane I was struck by the sci-fi aesthetics of this building going up on the far side of the river. The crane dramatically frames and accents the distopian structure below, its bold red steel startling against a classic vibrant blue Gold Side sky.

Tourists often complain about cranes ruining their photos, but I find them uplifting.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

If You Can't Fix What's Broken, You'll Go Insane

The title of this post is a line from Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2015 instalment of the Mad Max film series.

Much has been said about these Australian productions. Unlike virtually every other movie "franchise" (a fast-food industry term that often denotes similar entertainment), it contains no weak links: every release is genetically different, and all five succeed both as stand-alone works and episodes of the larger story.

Reasons for this are highly speculated among film geeks. Suffice it to say that creator-director George Miller came into cinema with no formal training (he's actually a doctor – odd how often that happens) and aside from not knowing any better than to just go out and make a movie, he's also a bit unhinged.

In the best possible way, I mean.

Anyway.

Fury Road is a tale for our times. Made on the very cusp of the current collapse, it takes place, like all Mad Max movies, in a thoroughly collapsed world that was fanciful when the series began. In this respect, it's hard not to read it as allegory – nay, prophecy – of all that's pounding down on us now.

I don't want to spoil this epic for those who've yet to see it, but to service my theme, I'll just say that unlike previous Max films, Fury Road has two protagonists: the titular figure, whom we know well (though played by a new actor), and Furiosa, a newcomer who is in many respects his female prosopopoeia. (English. Use it or lose it.)

The two share a common if involuntary struggle – the old, damaged, half-crazy man, and the younger, vital, ultimately righteous woman – and in the end, Max quietly issues her the above warning.

The Zen of which is undeniable.

As a young man, I was determined not to give in to the hypocrisy and self-centred self-destruction of unworthy authority. Not to serve it, certainly, but also not to enable it. This is why I get both Max (who's my age) and Furiosa.

I understand the ambition to cast down the wicked, even if no-one else has your back, and the danger of accepting that crusade at heart-level, on behalf of others; you can't stop fighting without defecting.

In Zen we have an uneasy relationship with activism. Classic teaching condemns it outright, as wasted effort at best, and multiplying delusion at worst. The fact that this means we've given de facto (and sometimes active) support to unspeakable evil over thousands of years renders that reading of our practice unsound in my eyes.

In the late 20th century, Thich Nhat Hanh came up with the notion of Engaged Zen, of which Kevin Christopher Kobutsu Malone became the head of the arrow in North America. That Kobutsu was ultimately crushed by his ministry in no way invalidates it; if anything, it's a mark of honour. But it does go to Max's point.

I never served like either man, but I've experienced that crushing. And I think all Zenners should consider this thing that I wish I'd learned much younger than I am now.

That the main reason inquity always prevails is because it isolates its opponents, leaving them outgunned and outnumbered.

And that's why you can't beat evil without accepting it.

If that makes no sense, you're in the right room.

WW: Century-old wiring

(This ancient outbuilding, one of a few derelict structures still surviving from what was a working dairy farm near my home when I was a child, has knob-and-tube wiring. As you can see, it was a two-element system consisting of cloth-covered wires strung on insulators. In living areas they were usually hidden inside walls, but in basements, attics, service buildings, and outdoor applications, they were hung along rafters, down siding, and under eaves, as here. [Note the old-school porcelain insulators – no longer wired – on the rafters.]

Though alarmingly primitive to modern eyes, knob and tube wasn't much more dangerous than recent methods. The main reason it disappeared was that it required twice as much labour as the single integrated cable introduced in the 50s, and was therefore twice as expensive to instal.

I believe that old farm dated to the 20s [the other 20s, I mean], when knob and tube was industry standard. But this shed was apparently still rocking it in the 70s, while in active commercial service.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Everything Is Time

"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

"We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.

[…]

"Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. […] The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

[…]

"A stone is a prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event.' It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

"The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. […] They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events."

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

What Dr. Rovelli, internationally noted theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, is saying here, is that a rock isn't an object; it's an event. Which is true of literally every "thing"; they're phenomena, not matter. They only exist for a specific time, their natures changing from moment to moment. So time is the only thing objectively present in that space.

We think objects are solid and exist because we can't grasp the temporary (the word means "subject to time") nature of matter and energy – which are the components of "stuff".

But stuff is an illusion. (More accurately, it's a hasty conclusion, leading to a practical fiction.)

So the good doctor has at long last caught science up with Zen, of which this notion of an "empty" universe, where things don't really exist, but are instead an ever-changing stream of dependent co-arising (scientists call it "attraction") that never attains stasis, is a fundamental teaching.

Which is why every "thing" in the universe – you and me and rocks and trees and amœbas and planets and galaxies and Labrador retrievers – aren't objects or things at all, or even matter, but events.

Literal products of time, having a beginning and end, because the agglomeration of attractions that make us all up never settles on a permanent relationship, and eventually dissipates entirely, its components running off to join other processes, in the manner of a wave or a cloud.

Thanks to Brad Warner, whose latest book, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space, and Being, alerted me to Dr. Rovelli's thoughts on this matter.

(Who, by the way, is also a professor emeritus of L'Université Aix-Marseille Luminy, where I spent a year in the late 80s. An observation à propos of nothing but my startled satisfaction.)


(Photo courtesy of Neil Owen and Wikimedia.com.)