Easy As Pie

"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.)

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.)