WW: Jack o' lantern 2022

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Grass Haiku

Sitting quietly.
Not giving a single fuck.
Grass grows by itself.

– Posted online by a fellow Zen hermit; identity unknown.


(Photo courtesy of Anis Ur Rahman and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Late summer still-life, August 2022

The Smokey Bear Sutra

Recently stumbled over this in the course of a Zen surf:

Smokey Bear Sutra

It's Gary Snyder's 1969 bid to raise Smokey Bear to vajra status. A contemporary of Jack Kerouac, Snyder was an early American adopter of Zen – such as it existed in Western Buddhism's hippy phase.

Buddhism was popular among freethinking Westerners at the time, in part because it was (and is) viewed as territory ripe for conquest. As a religion with little cultural hegemony, local converts could make it advocate any bohemian thing they wanted. (This stands in contrast to Christianity, which has high cultural hegemony, and is therefore press-ganged into conservative crusades.)

Case in point: environmentalism, still a bedrock value of our Zen, though largely absent from the Asian sort. (Zen has well-established cultural hegemony there, and is consequently a conservative sandbox. See how that works?)

As it happens, Snyder wrote his neo-sutra to serve as Buddhism's contribution to the first Earth Day. What's most interesting to me is that he took Acala-vidyārāja – called Fudo Myōō in Japan, and patron of my practice – as his model, apparently because that figure is often depicted engulfed in flames. Snyder even flat-out appropriated Acala's mantra (namaḥ samanta vajrānāṃ caṇḍa-mahāroṣaṇa sphoṭaya hūṃ traṭ hāṃ māṃ), albeit with some creative transliteration.

Not that Fudo, or Smokey for that matter, probably cares.

Anyway, the text, and the comments Snyder made about it almost 50 years later, are worthwhile. They definitely capture that era, with its (sometimes cloying) earnestness, but mostly, the hope and determination that briefly motivated a generation.


(Photo courtesy of [the US] National Agricultural Library and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Forest fire sun

(Sadly, only in the rearview mirror in the literal sense; not yet metaphorically.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Poem: Misunderstanding

Standing in the driveway, staring at the rising moon
My neighbor thought I was staring at her.
Awkward.

– a fellow Zen hermit on Twitter, channeling Issa.


(Photo courtesy of Aaron Tait and Wikimedia Commmons.)

WW: Headsaw blade

(Noticed this saw blade in the maintenance yard of a local parks department. Through the 1970s, forestry was one of the "F's" – along with fishing and farming – that sustained my homeland. Today none of them are major economic engines anymore, driven out by exhaustion of natural resources and the current primacy of non-productive industries such as tech, office work, and development.

But I remember when every small town here had a sawmill; big ones, several. This giant blade – tall as a man – was undoubtedly rescued from one of those when it closed in the 80s. I imagine it's been archived in this place with an eye to incorporating it eventually in a historical marker of some kind.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.