WW: Climate disruption on the North Pacific

Salal (Gaultheria shallon)


Western red cedar (Thuja plicata)

(A particularly disturbing consequence of global climate disruption is the rapid perishing of species unique to the North Coast.

Because we have until recently had a specifically regional climate, a great many types of plants and animals have evolved to live only here. [Or here and and similar places they've invaded, such as the UK and the South Island of New Zealand.] These species have become emblematic of this place and the human cultures that developed here.

Like the disappearance of our starfish and the dying crowns of our bigleaf maples, watching these symbols of my homeland suffer and die in the arid blast-furnace heat of the new "normal" is heartrending. Other key examples are the salal and Western red cedar pictured here.

I saw several abnormally hot, dry summers in my youth, but the salal and cedars never died.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

The Jackalope Koan

If you think a horned rabbit exists, then you know nothing. For there is no such thing.

And if you don't think a horned rabbit exists, then you know nothing. For it clearly does.


(Extrapolated from versions of a teaching found in three sutras [Surangama, Platform, and Lankavatara], in which the Buddha or an Ancestor is said to have referred to a horned rabbit.)

(Graphic courtesy of MaxPixel.com and a generous contributor.)

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.