Why We Sit

Zazen doesn't solve anything; it just makes things possible.


(Photo courtesy of Gerald Ford and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Kitty oryoki

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Starfish Report 2022

Maimed P. ochraceus with a replacement ray coming.

So here we are again, back at the usual beach, counting starfish. (On a -5 tide! The Woodstock of marine biology nerds.)

News on the viral front remains guardedly optimistic. In a nutshell, several species present that are susceptible to starfish wasting disease continue to indicate resilience to one extent or another, though the depredation of the virus is still evident.

The bad news is that there is still no Pycnopodia and no Pisaster brevispinus. Researchers suggest the first may now be extinct here, though I hold out hope for deep-water populations of both that may eventually repopulate the shallows.

Meanwhile, that other Pisaster – the iconic North Pacific ochraceus – continues to display real backbone. In addition to a few full-grown specimens that are looking very intact if a bit pale, I also found some badly maimed ones that nevertheless showed no signs of current infection, and were even regrowing eaten limbs. This acquired immunity – if that's what I'm seeing – bodes well for a return to former numbers.

Evasterias troschelli also maintains a pronounced presence, which is more good news, given that this was another species

Young Evasterias troschelli.

virtually wiped out on North Coast beaches the instant the virus appeared. Many juveniles dot the beach now – more, I believe, than last year – though so far no fully grown ones. That last point remains a bit troubling; these animals may still be falling to infection before reaching adulthood. But a few mid-sized ones, scattered among the bright, colourful youngsters, give hope that this species too will eventually surmount the plague entirely.

In any case, there was little evidence of active infections anywhere on the beach, which all by itself is huge.

For the rest, leather stars (Dermasterias imbricata) still mostly own the low intertidal zone. Formerly sparse in southern Puget Sound owing to heavy predation by Pycnopodia, the disappearance of that rapacious marauder, combined with Dermasterias' near-immunity to the wasting disease, has handed it a golden ticket. (Bad news for the anemones though, since this star goes positively Pyncopodia on their figurative backsides.)

Also of note were the continued presence of a few neon Henricia leviuscula, another genus that's largely, though not entirely, impervious to the virus.

So there you go. No miracles, but a heartening show of evolutionary vigour from those species that survived the first wave.

Two juvenile Dermasterias.

WW: Cascades frog

(Rana cascadae)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Reverse Psychology

The Buddha was a crafty devil. The stuff he most cared about (posture, vegetarianism, teachers, ordination...), he never mentioned once.

WW: Six-rayed leather star

(Same beach, different starfish. Individual from another five-rayed species [Dermasterias imbricata], randomly turning up with six. That early-days DNA showing its evolutionary bent again.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Does A Starfish Have Buddha-Nature?

I had the good fortune to be raised on the coast, and have spent a good deal of my life beside, on, and in the sea. The incredible diversity of the marine environment has always fascinated me; I never tire of turning over stones and gazing into tide pools for hours, every one full of intriguing new creatures for my consideration.

But from toddlerhood, what has captivated me most are the lowest phyla. And of these, my decided favourite were the echinoderms. I loved sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sand dollars, but most especially starfish, in all their myriad extraterrestrial forms.

At the risk of bathos, I believe they were my first Zen teachers.

Because starfish, like other faceless marine invertebrates, have no brain. Yet they get on just fine.

They move about, eat, reproduce, and apparently enjoy your typical animal lifestyle, all without hearing, seeing, or thinking.

Still, they have to experience their habitat on some level. They're highly active, constantly touching everything with thousands of tiny restless tube feet. They know light from dark, warm from cold, wet from dry. When I pried one from a piling and lifted it out of the water, it clearly knew something was up, demonstrating behaviours my species associates with animation and alarm.

But they were obviously incapable of grasping my nature. Those little translucent fingers must've telegraphed something on the subject, but the creature clearly had no idea what I looked like; the whole notion of visual appearance is foreign to organisms not programmed for vision. Or sound, so there goes that dimension, too.

Raised into the air and sun, every marine thing suddenly gone from tactile contact, it had to be completely bewildered; the simple displacement of a few feet having brought this limited being into a world so strange it literally had no idea how to proceed.

I used to think about this as a kid: that starfish, wholly competent and to all appearances supremely confident in their intended environment, were probably certain that everything in existence could be known by their tube feet and rudimentary photosensors. Growing older, meeting many more sea stars, it also occurred to me that "what can be known" to starfish must in places exceed "what can be known" by humans; their radically different neural network can't just fail to catalogue information that ours can; in some domains, it must also catalogue information ours can't.

Jump ahead several decades, and I've now tried and failed to read marine biology at university (chemistry proving one of the categories of information my neural net does not catalogue), to splash at length and exoatmospheric hypervelocity into the sea of Zen.

Where I'm reminded daily of starfish.

Because Zenners talk about perception a lot. And the lack of it. And the lack of perceiving our lack of perception. And the perception that we're perceiving perceptions that we can't perceive we can't perceive.

And then perceiving that.

Without perceiving it.

All of which I suspect starfish are too insightful to piddle with.

But my species is dead certain everything that can be perceived, we can perceive. With our so-so eyes, our so-so ears, and especially, our simply magnificent, climax-community brain.

It isn't belief. It's knowledge.

I run into it all the time. Near-death experience people. Atheists. Certainty addicts of one cant or the other. And those annoying "scientific mindset" people who can't even perceive science, let alone everything.

We are chronically, incurably ignorant of giant swathes of existence. Whole dimensions. Entire phenomena that we don't simply not see or feel, but indeed that our brains, constructed for seeing and feeling, can't even picture. The very existence of these characteristics of reality, we will never grasp.

Because we're starfish.

And I think if a human can grasp that, there's hope for that human.

Besides, now Pisaster ochraceus, the purple sea star of my own North Pacific, apparently hunts in packs.

You read that right. These echinoderms band together like wolves and pitch epic raids against terrified prey.

This fact was only recently discovered by the planet's most advanced species, by an amateur diver no less, who noticed something quizzical in footage he'd taken of a P. ochraceus colony off the coast of Oregon. Curious, he sped up the film, then watched in horror as a brainless swarm of purple and orange sci-fi monsters zoomed at great speed over the rocks and sand, implacably herding and finally engulfing their presumably screaming quarry under a heap of flailing rays and gnashing centre discs.

Starfish are not intellectually equipped to do that.

But these do.

WW: Beach plums

(Oemleria cerasiformis. When they ripen in about a month, they'll be deep purple – almost black – and have a strong flavour reminiscent of dark chocolate.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Street Level Zen: Instruction

"A mariner always casts the blame on his compass."

Henry David Thoreau


(Photo courtesy of Bernd Fiedler and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Ancient bench

(The city developed a small but interesting walking park here a few years ago, on utilities land it's owned for many decades. Part of it includes a long stretch of lakefront, all of it densely forested. One could believe this shore had never been developed.

Until one stumbles on this ancient park bench in the jungle, now reduced to just the two concrete end supports, its wooden seat long since melted away.

So this is not the first park to be located here, though this property has been wild and overgrown for most of the half-century I've known it.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.