Every hermit needs a rushlight. It's a meditation candle, a trail light, and general illumination where there is no electricity. I made this one before I went into the woods last summer, and it served daily and well.
As you can see, this is bindle technology: a tin can with holes punched in. (I used a power drill for cleaner, more uniform holes.) Ordinarily you'd shift every other hole column up half a space, so that its holes are midway between those in adjacent columns. This maximises light and conserves metal strength. For even more strength, make the staggered holes smaller.
That said, you'll note that this rushlight has slits instead of staggered columns. I cut them with an angle grinder, thinking I'd get more light. And I did, but I probably won't do it again; the slit sometimes focuses a beam straight into my pupil when I meditate, forcing me either to endure it or break posture and poke the lantern with my monk stick. And a few minutes later it rotates back and lasers me again. A hole can only do this until the flame burns past it, but a slit can pester you all night.
Worse still is the metal lost; with ten full-length cut-outs, this rushlight crushes easily in my pack. The situation is not helped by the fact that both holes and slits go all the way to the bottom. This is overkill; both should stop about two inches up. The extras don't give much more light for the removed metal, and they leak wax that might otherwise extend candle life.
It's a fine design for home, though. The bottom tray is a candy tin cover I added
after I came out of the woods, to catch run-outs. These aren't a disaster outdoors, though messy and wasteful, but unconfined dripping is a deal-breaker inside.
The tray also makes the rushlight much more stable when standing, which is otherwise a concern. The rubber feet (see photo below) were cut with a half-inch gouge from a tire I found on the beach, and attached with Gorilla Glue. They grip surfaces and eliminate marring. The tray does prevent me from stuffing the lantern into a pack pocket, but the detachable upgrade won't be a hard brainstorm.
I used hoarded notebook wire for the bail, because it's cheap, heatproof, and easily worked. The bail must be long enough to carry the light without burning your hand, and to hang without setting the support on fire. You'll also need a mesh cover (not pictured) outdoors to keep insects out. This is not just good karma; the dead will otherwise catch fire, inciting the chain reaction described in the next paragraph.
Possible complications include drowning wicks, blow-out, and worst of all, the Volcano of Atonement: molten wax breaks through the rim of the pool, cuts a channel that prevents a new one from forming, and the whole thing melts down in a single gushing flare. At best you're left with a cinder cone of wax and utter darkness. Other times you set the forest on fire, producing more light than is ideal for meditation.
Therefore, always keep your rushlight in view when you sit outdoors. I like to hang it just above and to one side of my field of vision in lotus. That way I can check it just by shifting my eyes.
A final note: there's a small trick to carrying one of these. If you just, like, carry it, the unshielded flame blinds you till all you see is it, surrounded by a giant doughnut of pitch black. If walking around with a tractor inner tube around your waist isn't your idea of safe navigation in a dark forest, turn your palm upward, slip your index finger through the loop in the bail, and carry it that way, hara-high. (See photo below.) That way your hand blocks the direct light, saving your eyes for the rest. For improved effect, carry something else in that hand as well, like a book or folded handkerchief.
In another post I've illuminated (sorry, couldn't resist) a cheap and easy method for making the candles that go inside. There are also plenty of storebought ones that fit. Just slide one in, whatever the provenance, and banish the darkness.
Not bad for stuff you were gonna throw out, eh?
(Adapted from 100 Days on the Mountain, copyright RK Henderson.)
This haiku is my solution to the koan, "Why do I write this blog?"
Zen emphasises no-self, that is, that the sense we have of existing apart from everything else, with distinct interests, is false. There is no you. There is no me. And our refusal to admit that is the source of all evil.
One of the pitfalls of recognising this truth is the tendency of institutional Zen to reject the validity of experience, in the name of subduing the delusion of ego. Since you have no self, you're not allowed to say, "I've done" or "I've seen." Unfortunately this is a misreading of the Buddhic concept of anatta. The only ambiguity in those declarations is the "I"; the experience is real.
Still, like most sangha rats, I feel uneasy raising my voice. First off, if there ain't no me, I feel silly blogging about it. And after that, there's the uncomfortable suspicion that somebody out there is saying, "What business has this guy talking about Zen? He's nobody."
You and me both, crow-meat.
So that's why I write this blog. Because it's what I do.
I reverently request all sentient beings reject it, pending corroboration.
Deep bow.
(PS: Aren't you glad I didn't think of "Dharma Toilet" when I was naming this blog?)
I'm currently writing three books, any one of which is likely to show up on this blog from time to time. For the benefit of readers who encounter them, these books are:
100 Days on the Mountain. There's an ancient Zen tradition, called A Hundred Days on the Mountain, of retreating to a mountain and meditating for a hundred days. Almost no-one does this anymore; the only teacher I know from the last many centuries who did was Seung Sahn, who sat his hundred days on a Korean mountain in 1948. Taking my inspiration from his story, I set out to do it myself on the other side of the North Pacific. 100 Days on the Mountain is my account of that experience.
Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands. In which I set out to trace the borders of Washington as nearly as possible in an old rear wheel drive pickup. The journey takes me into deep solitude 'way out in the middle of nowhere, where the land itself is the story, and the people I meet only characters in it. As was I. And my truck.
Growing Up Home. I've reached the age when men become grandfathers, but am not allowed to be one myself because I never had kids. (Apparently that's a prerequisite. Who knew?) Therefore, I am forced to publish in book form my stories of wisdom gained much against my will. The essays make short reading (Selling Point #1), are Certified Wise by an authentic old man (Selling Point #2), and you can put them down anytime you want and go back to your own youthful misadventures (Selling Point #3). Or your nostalgia for same.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the New York Zoological Society.)
"Where to now?"
I leaned on the truck's hood and stared at the back of the ram's head, but my chromed companion remained cast in silence.
A magpie burst out of the waving grass half a hundred yards away, caught a blast of air, and banked screeching over the rise.
We'd been down this road before. Three times, in fact. I smoothed the road atlas open, holding it down against the gusts, and frowned. Everything irritated me; the filth on the fender, the reek of hot engine, the sun's glare on the page beyond the shadow of my hat, and the persistent smell of rain.
And the wind. Especially the wind.
We wanted south; all the roads ran east and west, switching back through vales of hilled prairie. Even those tracks the map promised would eventually plumb out, bowed to peer pressure and veered east.
The first time I'd come to the golf course, away out in the wheat, I'd trundled slowly 
past, rubbernecking like a kid at a carnival. Then the dorms. Three times I retraced my route, tried another, and three times ended up back on campus.
Where the hell was this? Either I'd gone all the way around the world, and come back to Pullman, or this was Moscow. But the map didn't go to Moscow, so either theory was plausible.
I knew from my college days that the University of Idaho was just a projectile puke from WSU. And as neither is often mistaken for a Mormon school, to say no more, the highway between was reputed to host more drunken tragedy than any other seven miles in either state. So solemnly and reverently was this fact repeated in the residence halls of Bellingham that I've never insulted it with research.
I sighed west, over the giant surf of the land. Now I was navigating by lore and legend, like the Polynesians of old, checking my work by the smell of the sky and the taste of the sea. And in this I was at a decided disadvantage, for unlike those ancient Pacific voyagers, who plied their watery heritage with sublime confidence, my own ancestors had left me blind and deaf.
And so it is that to this day I judge I've been to Moscow, because that's where it was and that's where it had to be. But who knows? Maybe there's some anomalous college out there, some phase-shifting Hogwarts of the prairie, into which I thrice blundered, and lacking any real sense, called the University of Idaho. Like Columbus, perhaps I'd stumbled on something much grander than my mercantile imagination could grasp, out there off the charts, and will go to my grave as big a fool.
The wind whistled through the ram's helix, ruffled my shirt, batted my hat. I tugged the brim down and thumped the hood through the atlas.
"Anywhere you want," it replied.
I jumped, and the wind shuffled the pages back to one.
"That's where to," said the bighorn.
"Anywhere you want."
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Dodge Ram hood ornament by Christopher Ziemnowicz; magpie in flight by Ken Billington of Focusing On Wildlife; Palouse hills by Bala Sivakumar.)
