Responsiblity Kyôsaku

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
Exodus 23:2


(Photo of Fudo Myō-ō statue courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Evening spectacle

(Garlands of old man's beard [Usnea longissima], catching the winter sun at this specific moment of day.)

The Most Lost

I practice the religion that suits me.

The one that says I'm right and you're wrong.

That I'm the ideal, and you the mistake.

We all do that.

Except the most lost,

Who commit the sin their sanghas condone

In full knowledge.


(Photo courtesy of MC1 Chad J. McNeeley, the United States Navy, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing

Samuel Hoffenstein was my parents' poet-laureate, which explains why several of his anthologies dwelt upon a shelf in our house, already well before I was born.

My parents also had a brilliant take on the transmission of literature, generally. They never attempted to introduce us to their appreciated writers and poets, unless by passing quotation in context. Instead they stored representative works in a floor-level bookcase, and waited for us to get around to wondering what might be in those books we'd seen all our lives and never opened.

Which is where, a year or two after I learned to read, I pulled out Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing.

I'd cultivated a budding interest in poetry as a genre, but really, it was that title: the mutual contradiction of "poems", "praise", and "practically nothing", flouting the piety with which the first two words were always presented in school.

Satirical versifier of a populist American school that includes, to list just three, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, and Dorothy Parker, Hoffenstein also had – as did those other three – a grown-up day job. (Hollywood screenwriter, in Hoffenstein's case.) But he found time to fill several volumes with typically brief, slightly mind-bending poems.

Better still, he was able to get them into print, and therefore into our hands.

If Hoffenstein has since dropped into obscurity, he was quite as widely fêted and bemoaned in his day as the above contemporaries.

I still remember the first Hoffenstein verse I encountered, having opened Practically Nothing to a random page. I was soon laughing out loud, and when my mother glanced to see what I was up to, she rolled her eyes and told my father, "He's reading Samuel Hoffenstein." Which he too found amusing.

But really, whose fault was that?

These many decades later, I find a certain koanic character – even Zen chic – in much of the Hoffenstein œuvre. I mean, come on! Who else praises nothing? In fact, that first-discovered sonnet, which remains my favourite to this day, is outright literary dharma combat.

Read it for yourself. Isn't this Issa-grade haikunist-shaming?

The camel has a funny hump—
Well, what of it?
The desert is an awful dump—
Well, what of it?
The sun it rises every day—
What about it?
Roosters crow and asses bray—
What about it?
The stars shine nearly every night—
Don’t bother me with it!
Grass is green and snow is white—
Get out o’ here!

Some tastes are in-bred, I guess.

If you'd like a deep dive into these lost treasures, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing is available free on the Information Superhighway in at least two places:

• Archive.org's Digital Library, where this title and several others may be read online or downloaded.

• And this compendium of Hoffenstein's entire shelf, available for download.


For as the Master himself taught:

Let the winds of fortune blow
To the metres that I know:
There are always better times
Waiting to corrupt our rhymes.


(Photo courtesy of Mrika Selimi and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Abandoned barn

(No stronger proof of disuse in an old barn than a rotten hay hoist. Because this tackle can easily kill people if it fails, farmers tend to obsess over its health.

This classic old red barn is part of the miraculously preserved dairy farm in my old neighbourhood. It still housed the herd, hay, milking machines, and cold storage for the milk when I was a kid. Whole district, including the pastures that used to be attached to this operation, has long since gone suburban.)

Emptiness

"It's the hole that makes the doughnut."

The Tao Te Ching. (Probably.)


(Pre-certified doughnut courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Sunset on the Columbia Plateau

(Another shot from my trek through Eastern Washington last summer.)

Zenola

I brought rather austere food when I sat 100 Days on the Mountain. Lunch and dinner were an identical bowl of rice and beans, spiced up with hot sauce, and curried after about the midway point. I brought very little in the way of snacks or sweets.

(I don't recommend this approach, by the way. An important practice point I learned out there is that discipline can be as egocentric and obstructive as indulgence. It's wise to keep your diet simple, wholesome, and habitual. It's unwise to eat like a zek.)

But breakfast came from a large trash bag, and it's these morning meals I remember with the most affection. Because from those unpromising origins rose each morning a braw bowl of zenola.

Zenola is a marriage of trail mix and cereal developed in the months before I left, for the express purpose of launching each day of practice. The ingredients supply essential nutrients deficient or absent in my other staples. And the rainbow of bright colours and flavours is a proper party when you're living on rice and beans.

The recipe is as follows:

30 lbs rolled oats (I like thick-cut the best)
1 1/4 lb powdered milk
3 3/4 lbs salted mixed nuts
1 3/4 lb each:
  cranberry raisins
  dried apples
  dried apricots, bananas, or other fruit
1 1/4 lb crystalized ginger

(If you don't require a metric tonne of zenola all at once, reduce these quantities proportionally to get the amount you want.)

At a cup a-piece, this comes out to about a third again more than 100 breakfasts, but when you're living alone it's a good idea to bring more food than you think you'll need. (And also to store it in several secure places.)

I almost always ate this in cold water, but you can use boiling water for a soft and steamy bowl. I find rolled oats most satisfying uncooked, but once or twice, on biting cold nights when I needed encouragement, I rustled up hot zenola and tea by the light of my candle.

Under the strict daily regimen, this stuff became such a treat that I used it as incentive, denying myself the pleasure if I rose too late. Other times it was a reward, to celebrate milestone days or cheer me up in bleak moments.

In all of these occasions, zenola was hearty and sustaining, and excellent support for practice.

WW: Sky on the Hanford Reach

(Here's a photo from my outbacking excursion to Spokane last summer, taken on the northwest limit of the Pasco Basin, just a few hundred yards short of the Priest Rapids of the Columbia River. This view is west to Umtanum Ridge. [Open the link in a new tab to see it bigger.]

I never get used to those electric Gold Side skies. People who live there walk around under them like nothing's going on, oblivious to the Greensider ratcheting off shots of nothing in particular above them.

But I recommend you avoid driving these backroads – lowest elevation in the state – in July if you have the shadow of a choice. Especially if your truck has no air conditioning. A thermos of heavily-iced tea was all that stood between me and posterity.)

Sobriety Kyôsaku

An intoxicant is any external source that draws you deeper into yourself, your beliefs, your egocentrism, and away from direct experience of the real, present moment.

Samsaric life is floating down a river of intoxicants; it’s difficult to go against the flow but it’s the only hope.

– insight from a fellow Zen hermit in my Twitter sangha.


(Photo of Oregon's Rogue River courtesy of Hamad Darwish and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: King boletes

(Boletus edulis. Part of a generous outbreak that burst up not far from my house during the record rains of last month. Some of them were the size of dinner plates. Unfortunately I neglected to get a photo of one of those, but had quite a feast on the lot notwithstanding.)

Buddha and Budai

(A point I made in greater detail here.)

WW: Neighbourhood pond

Passing Through

incola ego sum
apud te
in terra
et peregrinus
sicut omnes patres mei.

Psalterium Sancti Hieronymi, 38:13

(English translation here.)


(Photo courtesy of Atlas Green and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Ancient testimony

(Another electrical artefact from an old shed that's figured in these pages before. This time it's a full grown tree used as a power pole at some time in the shed's early life. Note that the wire now erupts directly from the centre of the tree's rather large trunk.)

A Prayer for the New Year

I first encountered the oft-cited invocation below in a newspaper column by United Congregational minister Dale Turner. At the time I assumed he was the author, but when the Internet happened years later, I found that its provenance is indeterminate. (No shade on the Rev. Turner, who frequently shared gems from his own tireless study, and undoubtedly flagged this as another in the column I read.)

In fact, no-one seems to know where these memorable lines come from. One source claims it's a traditional Kenyan prayer, but I was unable to verify that, either.

As for me, its very anonymity is value-added. Those many pithy, compelling observations that knock around the world, repeated for generations, unattributed or misattributed, are often the most profound; the mere fact they've travelled so far demonstrates how powerful they are.

Any road, this one became a form in my Christian practice. Now twenty years further, having taken the Zen path, I see no reason to change that.

So may this teaching from the great Zen master Anon be a guide and a buttress to fellow seekers in the coming year.

The Truth Testimony

From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth
From the laziness that is content with half truths
O God of Truth
Deliver us.


(Photo courtesy of Seiya Maeda and Unsplash.com.)