Yogi Berra-roshi

Major League baseball player and manager Yogi Berra was an iconic figure in the America of my childhood. Not so much for his stats, though they were impressive, but for his way with language. Several of his declarative statements – "It ain't over 'til it's over;" "It's déjà vu all over again;" "When you come to a fork in the road, take it" – have become clichés in American English, declaimed by speakers who neither realise the syntactic complexity in what they've just said or know who they're quoting.

And there are many more of these Yogiisms. So many that entire books, and even websites, are given to preserving this wisdom that flexes so many neurons we seldom use. But at least one of Yogi's aphorisms has always intrigued me.

"We made too many wrong mistakes" was his response to a journalist who asked why, in his opinion, his team had lost a game. It got the usual good-natured laugh from fans, but I maintain this is perfectly logical and not a malapropism at all.

Because mistakes are not created equal.

Sometimes you defer to another's opinion, even though you know his or her proposal is non-performing. In other moments you allow your own arrogance or apathy to determine a course of action without due consideration. Or you fall back on a method that already hasn't worked several times, in the lazy hope it magically will this time.

These are wrong mistakes, made against better judgement or scruples, arising from beginningless anger, greed, and ignorance, predisposed to fail or complicate other issues.

Then there are instances where you try a thing that should theoretically work, though you can't control all the variables. Or you press a strategy that's borne fruit other times, only to discover its limitations. Or you set an untried course because the standard response is unethical. You take your best shot, something else that might work, in the conviction that the experience will ultimately lead to a principled alternative, whether the present experiment pans out or not.

Those are right mistakes. You make them in good faith, for good reasons. And pass or fail, that kind of mistake clarifies data and contributes to future endeavours.

They are in fact the driving force of progress, without which we stagnate and die.

So I try to apply the Yogi Principle to innovations in my Zen practice. Am I yielding to a wrong temptation – how does it fare on the Eight Worldly Dharmas scale? – or is my proposed change grounded in a genuine desire to optimise my well-being and that of others, now and in future.

It's easy for eremitical monastics to wander into cul de sacs, given the paucity of human sangha around us. So you've got to keep your own ego in view, and that of teachers and other influences.

Because ninety per cent of this game is half mental.


(Photo of 1951 Yogi baseball card courtesy of Bowman Gum and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Kintsugi bowl

(A few years ago my sister gave me a kit for making a kintsugi bowl, probably because she knows how deeply that artform speaks to me. I greatly appreciated the gift, but for one reason and next – mostly that the skills required are fairly wide of my talents – I ended up offering it to an artist friend, in a bid to fulfill the kit's destiny. My friend agreed to assume this responsibility on one condition: that I take ownership of the finished article.

And now it resides with me.)

WW: Skeleton house

(The past decade has seen the rise of a strange new cult where I live: skeleton houses. Why here? Why now?

I don't know, but I'm about certain it started with people erecting prodigious osteology in their yards for Hallowe'en and then deciding just to leave it up year-round and skip all that work in future. Like they started doing with Christmas lights when I was a young man – up and lit all year.

And now these spooky giants haunt the county. Every time I pass a new one I'm back in the rollicking days of the Black Death, when we carved, painted, and drew Old Boney everywhere to remind the rich and powerful what their riches and power are worth.

Hmm. Might've answered my own question, there.)

The Path Not Taken

In his most famous apothegm, Christian apologist GK Chesterton wrote:

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

Chesterton was not an outlying critic. He was in fact a prominent ecclesiastical conservative, the sort of religious influencer I grew up calling a "professional Anglican". All of which raises the impact of his observation, accepted on my watch as indisputable.

It's also true of Zen. Over the generations, we too have found every means to occult our stated programme, which is powerful and effective, but leaves little leeway for human ambition. So we've reintroduced rank to our true men of no rank, ritual and liturgy to a path our ancestors named "meditation" (the literal translation of "zen"), and absolute religious authority to a practice our founders gave one objective: to transcend separation.

This walking repudiation of Bodhidharma first takes us into the morass of peer pressure, where sitting with the cool kids (pun intended) is the first, and often only, goal of our organised sangha. Along the way we've come to teach that our koanic texts are contextual rather than literal, and that the notions and forms of practitioners in the past are inapplicable to us, in our advanced and complicated time.

To state it plainly, those outside our tribe are judged separate from, and irrelevant to, us.

We converts to Zen from Christianity have already seen this movie in Technicolor, yet we don't seem to recognise it in this theatre. (Op. sit. Shadow Gospel, c.f. parable of man living with demons @Matthew 12:43-45.)

But let's be real: there is not now, nor has there ever been, on this suffering rock, a religion that fewer than 99.999 per cent of declared adherents didn't blow off, in full and in part, while brandishing random flecks of rhetoric to justify their egotism. Zenners are not the only, nor indeed are we the worst, examples, and neither are our Christian brothers and sisters.

But I must say, though I participate fully in the ebullient apostasy, actually practicing Zen – that's Zen, as our Ancestors taught – has never failed to push me further and faster along than anything else. That's why my hermit practice has been in a constant state of Reformation since it was… well, formed. Where enlightenment practice is concerned, I'm always grilling myself about my fears, my ambitions, my motivations, and my actions.

And even when I conclude that I can't resolve those questions right now – business as usual here at Sabita Yubiwa-ji – I keep my windows open, and that fresh Vatican II breeze blowing through my hut.

Because it does get stuffy in here.


(Photo courtesy of Thomas Quine and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Vertical tidepool

(This chunk of 30-inch concrete culvert was probably rolled off a construction barge and into the bay as surplus at some point in the past. In the meantime it's been colonised by a wealth of sea life, including most conspicuously at least two species of starfish. The community is located well below mean low tide, and only fully exposed at minus 4. I'll bet it's a great visit at high tide, with diving gear.)

Anitya Pool

A museum is an exhibition of things that aren't broken yet. They're interesting to us because they've made it this far, and we're holding our breath to see how much longer they'll exist.


(Photo of Imperial War Museum, London – specialising in exhibits that had even longer odds of reaching our time than most – courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Mystery mostly solved

(Last week I posted a photo of feathers mysteriously left by an extremely fastidious predator. Just a few days later I found, 50 yards away, the above remains. So whatever left the feathers seems only to have plucked its prey on that log before transporting it to a less exposed position to eat.

Still no skull, but most of the other bones are here. So though the exact culprit remains unidentified, given all the data points, I'm leaning toward a raptor. Likely a great horned owl or bald eagle.)