(Nice minus tide today, so I decided to have a good wade. I grabbed my sandals – the ones I took to the mountain, where I wore them all day, every day, under very demanding conditions. They never flinched.
Since then these Tevas have remained my mainstay… until I went to put them on this afternoon and found a sole about to fall off. Eager to catch the tide, I slapped on some duck tape and made off down the steep access to the beach.
Duck tape is a rescue product, enabling temporary fixes but not much more. Among other things, it's not impervious to water. So I didn't push it any further than my first intentions. As you can see, both tape and sandals delivered.
But I'll have to glue that sole back on. Which means it'll eventually come off again, and some time later, my prized sandals will have to be discarded. Sad it's come to this, but I can't complain about the performance. They've given undaunted service for 15 years.
Still poignant. Like the man said, all things made of parts.)
(Nootka rose [Rosa nutkana] heralds impending summer on the North Pacific Coast.)
"You cannot eat a recipe."
Shunryu Suzuki, on the relative value of religious teaching.
(Photo of the epilogue to an 18th century Guru Granth Sahib manuscript, wherein the scribe shares his ink recipe, courtesy of Sikhmuseum.com and Wikimedia Commons.)
(You find the Buddha in the strangest places here in the West. Exhibit A – this disembodied head. If that's not weird enough, figure this: it's intended to be placed at the bottom of an aquarium.
Indeed. You read that right.
I looked around the pet shop a bit more, but found no heads of Christ or Ganesh or Heile Selassie. In fact, no other religious imagery at all.
Just ours.
I'm not in the least offended; it's a chunk of concrete. But mystified? Yeah. Yet again.)
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
This is one of Carl Sagan's most repeated quotations, and it has all the genius his fans came to prize in him: brief, direct, plain-spoken, trenchant. Less noted is the pure Zen that Carl – a convinced, though deeply respectful, atheist – also encoded here. It's a complete and concise summary of dependent co-arising. Easily recalled and memorised. The only part I might gently dispute is "from scratch".
Making a pie – any pie – requires all of Creation.
Carl was referring to the fact that every atom in the ingredients, and all the physics required to produce, process, and bake them, and all the energy all that takes, from generating the materials to heating the oven to your own mental and physical effort, has to proceed from somewhere. As do we, down the eons-deep path back to the Big Bang. Every day and each step of which has engineered, in excruciating detail, not just your dessert recipe, but indeed, the mind that ponders it.
Skip one spec? No pie for you.
Kind of makes you want to tip your baker, eh?
Contemplating this truth helps me to think like a grown-up. To understand that circumstances have a long tail of origination – and that's after you've determined what those circumstances really are – a step people tend to drop. And that until you've delved as profoundly and as honestly as possible into both questions, you've no right to an opinion.
And that's just for scientific matters. (AKA the kindergarten of the intellect.) Make it a human issue, and it's back to GO.
Zen has that peculiarity of all religions, that it hawks an esoteric, unknowable Dharma, then metes out a drumline of simplistic rituals that followers are told is "Zen". Despite the obvious irony, there's a certain logic to this, but the problem is, that as in all binary systems, we tend to judge the superficial wing "fundamental" and dismiss the other as pretty but impractical.
Because given the choice, humans will cleave to observable, assessable behaviours while suppressing the justification for them.
Which is why our rules never work.
So today I'm sitting with Carl Sagan-roshi's teaching:
If you wish to avoid half-baked practice, you must first create the universe.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
(If you've been there, you know.)
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.)
