WW: Catnip

(If you've been there, you know.)

Hermit Rules 6 & 7

6. Be quiet in body, mind and spirit. Don't hurry either in speaking or responding, distrustful of your own urgency.

7. Be firm in your convictions, but be always willing to embrace the truth.

– A Franciscan hermit in my Bluesky sangha.

(Statue of St. Francis meditating courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Thrift store moktak

(Another Buddhist thrift store find. This time it's a Thai frog rattle – essentially, a moktak-style percussion instrument with added sawtooth ridge. This last produces the familiar creak of a frog's call when the chukpi [the striking stick, meant to be clenched in the subject's jaws, but absent here] is run along it. Frogs are a common theme in Asia, where they're a talisman of good luck.

Though not a uniquely devotional object – despite clear parentage with doan paraphernalia, children often play with these, too – I'm always bemused to find this sort of thing amongst the rummage in such places.)

Walking Between Water

Survival = Anger x Imagination.

[…]

Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named Forgiveness.

Sherman Alexie.

(Drawn from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. I elided two lines referring to life and struggle on the reservation, in order to demonstrate the universal reach of Alexie's work. This passage is typical of the koanic images he often uses to convey concepts the discursive mind might be unwilling or unable to grasp.)


(Photo courtesy of József Szabó and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Dogwood signs on

(Here's another icon of North Pacific Coast spring: Cornus nuttallii, or Pacific dogwood. Along with trillium, which blows before the dogwoods do, and native rhododendron, which blooms later, it forms a triumvirate of forest blossoms widely adopted as totems in this region. [In fact, all three of these were until recently protected by law in British Columbia.])

Diaper Practice

"No man is too big to change a diaper, but some are too small."

– An Evangelical radio preacher whose name I didn't catch, encapsulating the true man of no rank principle of Zen.


(Photo courtesy of Tembinkosi Sikupela and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Neat sailing pram

(Encountered this remarkably serviceable dinghy moored to the seawall back under the trees. Sort of boat I grew up in, before about the age of 10. The design is classic: pram-faced, with simple, clean lines, daggerboard trunk, hole-in-the-wall mast step. All in good shape.

I don't know if this boat floated in on a storm and was tied up here so the owners might see it, or belongs to whoever lives on the bluff above, but as you can see it's been pretty neglected for some time. Shame, really; she's a fine little build, with topflight materials. You don't see many hulls equipped for serious rowing these days.)