Truth Meditation

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I’m looking for the truth,' and so it goes away."

Robert Pirsig


(Photo courtesy of Felix Luo and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Morse code radio

(My thirty-year-old OHR high-frequency CW [Morse code] transceiver, set up at the home of friends. My friends are biologists, and their fossil-sorting table was convenient on several levels.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

My Hermit Hut

I've been feeling a bit nostalgic about the old meditation shed I had down at the beach, and it struck me that I've never actually posted on it, though others' huts have appeared here several times. (I did upload a named exterior shot ten years ago on Wordless Wednesday, but the others that have appeared from time to time were illustrating other topics, and so not identified.)

So in the interest of completism, here it is.

This tiny shack, the very picture of a true purist's definition of "hut", started life as my grandmother's potting shed. My grandfather carved it out of the bluff below their house, where I lived for ten years during the formative period of my Zen practice. When I arrived, the house and grounds were both in dire condition; eventually I hacked my way down to this cinderblock shanty, re-opening a steep, eroded goat trail through impenetrable brush. The door, which had been kicked in by a winter storm, lay on the floor inside; only the twisted wreckage of the lower hinge was still nominally attached.

In the intervening years blackberry and honeysuckle had invaded and filled the interior, along with bracken, lady fern, and infant trees, and the roof and wooden parts had rotted in places. Its concrete floor was completely saturated, covered with standing water and mud from infiltrated silt.

I really didn't need a place to sit, as the house – high on a bluff above the grey Pacific, with few neighbours – was already the best hermit hut in history. But rehabilitating one of my grandmother's work stations was an attractive premise, and the place would provide ground-level, fundamentally outdoor meditation, which I always prefer when available.

So I set-to, and after a lot of concentrated effort and scrounging of materials, ended up with this serviceable little squat. I even once sat an all-night sesshin there, hoping to glimpse the bear that left scat in front of it. (I didn't, but I did learn, not for the last time, that spring nights on the North Pacific are bitterly winter-cold.)

So here it is, my own hermit hut. Or to be perfectly accurate, my monastic playhouse. It might not have been strictly necessary, but I learned a lot of Zen there.

WW: Draught horse team

(Belgians waiting to compete in the driving event at the Northwest Washington Fair. There are other breeds here as well, but for reasons I don't understand, Belgians seem to be the regional standard.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

The Seventh I’d Really Rather You Didn’t

7. I’d really rather you didn’t go around telling people I talk to you. You’re not that interesting. Get over yourself. And I told you to love your fellow man, can’t you take a hint?

From The 8 I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

(Photo of devout Pastafarian courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Giant acorn barnacle

(Balanus nubilus. Found it on the tideline after a heavy storm. It was delicious.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hermit Nation

For some years I've enjoyed sporadic correspondence with a fellow Zenner in England. After a few less-than-uplifting experiences with her Zen teacher, she's decided to try the hermit path, and asked me for a little sanghic perspective. Inevitably, the exchange ended up clarifying some things in my own mind as well. (Hence the value of sangha. As any teacher will tell you, helping others helps the helper.) So I thought I'd excerpt a bit of that conversation here, to spread the support around.

The sister in question is feeling the pull of her nature, though uncertain she can sustain a solitary practice, or that it will prove as fulfilling as the organised model. At the same time she feels like the institution doesn't respect her – that it views her as an isolated failure that must be repaired, or in extremis, rejected. That has led her to question her teacher's "never hermit" stance on alternatives.

As always, I didn't advocate any path to her, since I lack comprehensive knowledge of the facts and entities in play, and anyway, it ain't my karma at risk. But on this issue of only-ness, I felt compelled to give witness.

And so I wrote the following, with allowance for judicious editing:

As is frequently the case, I've been struck by the similarity of our life paths. We are, as I often say, a nation. This is very hard for the gregarious to grasp.

Although the neo-traditional Zen institution views people of our nature as unevolved or learning disabled, the fact is we are and always have been a demographic. One unserved by the innovated monastery model.

The same one that gave us the Buddha and Bodhidharma, to name just two.

And we seem to be coming out of the closet in greater numbers since the Boomers – great believers in authority, their market stance notwithstanding – began their slide into irrelevance.

Hermits don't necessarily seek isolation from others – I don't – but most of my adult life I've lived in rural areas; was raised in one, and have chosen to live in others when choice was mine.

But we live in a time when the rural areas that used to be despised by the urban and urbane have become chic, and they're clearing us rednecks away so they can take our land. It's a big topic, and for me, a painful one. Reminds me of the age of enclosure, and the segmenting of the European countryside into landed estates, which was the driving force that colonised the New World. 'Cept there's no place for us peasants to go this time.

From a practice perspective it doesn't matter much; you can be a hermit anywhere. But my preference is to be comfortably buffered from the rest of my species, and to be in daily contact with what remains. And that's harder to achieve in town.

As for your musings on Zen, I quite agree on all of them. Most of us find, when we encounter each other, that we've had similar experiences, received similar openings, and have much to offer each other in the way of teaching and support. We're the Buddha's only given monastic model, but formal Zen teachers (as well as those of other faiths) are great ones for saying that an unsupervised monk will quickly go off the rails and begin spouting bizarre, self-serving nonsense.

Which happens, of course, but not more often than it does in the Institution. And the result isn't crazier or more dangerous. From where I'm standing, it's clear that ordination is a risky state that few survive. Whereas my formal eremitical practice of assuming I understand nothing, mixed with a disciplining lack of social acceptance, has done a pretty good job of keeping me in my lane.

Anyway, when you mention Zen masters who run their monks as servants, that's my immediate thought. As a hermit, I can't imagine anybody cleaning up after me. Aside from the presumption, there's the fact that cleaning up my own messes is central to my practice; confronting chaos, accepting the necessity of soiling and breaking things, understanding how entirely I participate in universal entropy.

I suspect teachers who don't settle their own accounts have forgotten how unimpressive they are; given their working conditions, they can't help it.

As for me, "I'm nobody" has been my breathing mantra for twenty years. And I still think I'm the lead character in a movie from time to time; that tells you how much harder ordained types must have it.

Any road, society creates us, through a sort of petty terrorism, and at some point we just shrug and pull on the robe, to its great indignation. It's one reason I won't accept spiritual authority from other humans. I'm sometimes asked to address groups about Zen, and I always start by pointing out that I've never been ordained by anyone but my mother, that I have no unique understanding of anything, and that the next Zenner they meet will probably tell them I'm wrong about everything.

And I finish by telling them that anyone who says different about themselves is lying.

We hermits are a very diverse crowd – if we can be said to be a crowd – but I suspect all of us would agree with that last statement, at least.


Robin

(Photo courtesy of Matt Sclarandis and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Beaver

(Castor canadensis. Note remnants of today's breakfast in the foreground.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.