Category Archives: Dharma Reflections

THE PURITY OF SNOW ROADS DRIVEN

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Take it Slow
Make this your mantra: ice and snow, take it slow. When snow is covering the road, reduce your speed, accelerate slowly and steer gently. Keeping your speed down will help prevent spinouts and keep your vehicle safe on the road.
Don’t Rely on Technology
Your vehicle may be equipped with all-wheel drive, electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes, but no technology can guarantee your safety on icy roads. Safety devices are designed to enhance safe driving techniques, not compensate for a lack of them.
Two of ten snow road driving tips offered by an auto insurance company in 2012.

Ice and snow, take it slow.
Don’t rely on technology.
The basics never change.

Most of us fortunate enough to live in and/or spend significant amounts of time in snow country are familiar with the pleasures, terrors, skills and mechanical demands of driving in snow. Those who take it slow will better appreciate the landscape of snow opened up to man’s incursions, for better or worse, by those snow roads. Those for whom safe driving techniques are a form of respect and attention to the present moment of moving through snow, not an inconvenient impediment to the final destination, the impressive goal or the self’s delusion of separateness from and control of the landscape (not to be confused with self-control), have more freedom to see and in some small way be formed by the persistent whiteness of snow layered upon all the dramatic and subtle shapes and forms of the land.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote, “The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us. Self-discovery comes when man measures himself against an obstacle. To attain it, he needs an implement…..” He also wrote, “Through all the centuries, in truth, the roads have deceived us.”
But we are mostly deceived through our own doing, our own lack of attention, our own failure to care, or, at least, to care enough. In the case of snow covered roads, we are deceived by moving too fast to be able to perceive the functional beauty of the snow driven roads and the landscape through which they weave. The earth can teach us nothing when we move too quickly across its surface, and we take that ignorance off the road and into our homes, offices, governments and personal lives. Relying on technology institutionalizes that ignorance.
Think of that.
Driving the snow covered roads of America is a metaphor for modern life in our country. Ice and snow, take it slow. Don’t rely on technology. The basics never change and they can never be institutionalized.
At this writing I am within a few weeks of my 74th birthday and I tend to think more about basics than I did in other, yes, speedier years. The bard himself, Shakespeare, used snow as a metaphor for purity, and it is worth considering that how we are with snow roads driven, with snow itself, with hands on the gently steered wheel in a white-out blizzard at night on an unknown side road leading to a fabled mountain lodge where awaits the best companionship, food, ambience and backcountry skiing in the known world, is a reflection of our own purity in that world and of what efforts and consciousness we might possess to attain (regain?) that purity. Those efforts include the goal, impressive or not, of reaching the lodge without psychic or physical injury to oneself or to another; and the consciousness that we drive no snow road or any other alone.
Like most drivers of snow covered roads, my earliest memories of the pure white roads of America (in my case, Lake Tahoe) were in the company of my parents. My mother hated to drive, dreaded the road and would only drive in snow if she perceived no alternative. I was a junior ski racer in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before I was old enough to drive, and my parents, usually my father, drove me to the races around the west. By that time of his life Father had wrecked a couple of automobiles with impatience and inattention (and, I suspect, a bourbon or two too many), and he spared no effort to make sure it did not happen again. We spent many days and into the nights taking it slow on the blizzard obscured snowy roads of the Sierra Nevada. Dad’s ethic that getting to the race and back home safely was at least as significant and adventurous as the race itself was, alas, lost on my inattentive, impatient, goal oriented young competitive mind. Eventually (keeping it slow) Dad’s wisdom emerged from the fog of my own delusions into the (relative) clarity of the basics and I recognized the wisdom of his awareness in action.
I particularly remember one epic early 50s journey back from the North shore of Tahoe to our home at Zephyr Cove in a raging Sierra blizzard. The hour and a half drive took three times as long and we never saw another car outside our 1941 Plymouth coupe. Halfway home modern technology failed us. The chain on the left rear tire broke, came off and, by the time we had stopped and searched for it, disappeared in the snow of the incompletely plowed road near Spooner’s Summit junction. For the rest of the drive home Father, with intense concentration despite a frightened and vocally hysterical wife and a silent but equally terrified son staring into the abyss of the canyon above Glenbrook, kept it slow and gently steered the right rear wheel as close to the edge of the road as possible, the least slippery path in his judgment. It appeared to be inches but was probably feet to the edge of the canyon which dropped to infinity behind the blizzard, and Mom berated him the whole way to stay more in the center of the road, away from what Dad determined was the less slippery edge where the remaining chain would have maximum traction. Eventually we arrived home and, while the storm continued, we built a fire and Mom cooked dinner and Dad relaxed and I listened to the radio and there was a purity to the comfort, safety and attention to detail in action that I have always associated with taking it slow on ice and snow.
At the other end of the purity spectrum of snow roads driven is this: On March 6, 2011, Janne Laitinen of Finland, gently steered an automobile to a world ice driving record of 206.05 mph on the black ice of the Gulf of Bothnia in Finland.
Think of that.
And then think of the safe driving techniques, the gentle steering, the attention to detail, the finesse required to safely slow down and bring to a stop a vehicle traveling 200 mph on a gulf of black ice. And then think of the purity of the comfort, safety and satisfaction of dinner that night before the fire. Remember it as a metaphor for modern life on earth the next time you are taking it slow on the ice and snow roads of a world where the basics never change.
And remember it as a metaphor of a metaphor of snow as purity in this time when the snows of childhood are vanishing into the denials of human caused global climate change. Both the denials and the global climate changes are metaphors for impurity, and they are real.
Think of that.

THE LOTUS FLOWER

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On the east wall of the Spirit Room upstairs in the Ketchum YMCA is a large (about 8’ by 12’), lovely painting of a lotus flower. I spend a few hours each week under that painting in one of Richard Odom’s yoga classes, and the lotus, Richard and the practice itself are inspiring and nutritious. They are daily reminders that the exquisite, organic growth of anything, a lotus flower for example, is literally rooted in the mud from which it grows. That is, beauty is the culmination of a natural process that is not always pretty. Everything in life—the perfection of a flower or the catastrophe of war—is part of a process, and the lotus is an ancient symbol in several religions and cultures of the process leading to beauty, fertility, prosperity, spirituality and eternity. I like this Hindu description of one aspect of the lotus: “As a lotus is able to emerge from Muddy Waters un-spoilt and pure it is considered to represent a wise and spiritually enlightened quality in a person; it is representative of somebody who carries out their tasks with little concern for any reward and with a full liberation from attachment.”
The lotus represents the purity and beauty of life that rises out of muddy waters. Think of that.
Six months ago the east wall of the Spirit Room was dark blue blank and, when lights were low during yoga classes, uninspiring. The south end of the Spirit Room has windows overlooking the YMCA swimming pool and sometimes the reflections from the pool create a rippling of light on the east wall. One of Richard’s students, Deborra Bohrer, a local artist, was observing the undulations of light on the wall during class and had the inspired thought that the lotus grows from water and one needed painting upon the wall. Deborra approached Jason Frye, CEO of the YMCA with the idea and spent the next several weeks working on the painting. Frye said, “We needed to add some personality to the Spirit Studio. The lotus is known to help connect us to nature and our true selves. Deb’s beautiful work has added a wonderful new energy to the studio and the practice for our instructors and members.”
And so it has.
The lotus flower inspired Confucius to say, “I have a love for the lotus, while growing in the mud it still remains unstained.”
In Buddhism the lotus is similar to the path of a person’s life—from seed to emerging from dirty water to fully blossoming into a fully awakened person.
The ancient Egyptians associated the lotus with the sun which disappeared each night and re-appeared each morning, that is, the cycles of life itself. Every person has days that seem closer to the bottom of the pond than to the fully blossomed lotus flower floating upon it, and, of course, vice-versa. For me, every day in the Spirit Room practicing with Richard and Deborra’s lotus flower is an encouragement and inspiration to persevere, keep growing, let go, learn liberation.
Thanks Richard.
Thanks Deborra.

DESKTOP REMINDERS

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Every person is well-served by continuous reminders of the consistent and larger story within the various and variable smaller stories that we all tell and hear. Such ethical/intellectual prompts help keep the story rooted in reality and the story teller entrenched in the awareness that humans have always lived by stories and that those stories help shape the world. On the tiny desk in my office on which I write are three such reminders, two poems and a platform. Their size and significance are too large for this small space, but I encourage the reader to track them down for contemplation and, if inspired, action.
The first plank in The Deep Ecology Platform reads, “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value; inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, “Please call Me By My True Name” includes,
“I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons
to Uganda.”
And in “…Not Man Apart…” Robinson Jeffers writes,
“In the white of the fire…how can I express the excellence
…I have found, that has no color but clearness;”
These are reminders that everything is connected in the natural (real) world, that the material well-being of the ‘developed’ nations is built upon the poverty of what the Cold War termed “Third World Countries” but modern PC labels “Less Developed Countries,” and that the task of the story teller is to continue to express life’s inexpressible excellence that has no color but clearness.
My desktop reminders are not random.
Deep Ecology is a term (and now a foundation) introduced in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess to differentiate between two different but not necessarily incompatible forms of environmentalism—deep ecology, which involves deep questioning, addresses root causes and calls for changes in basic values and practices of industrial civilization’s “business as usual,” and shallow ecology (think Sierra Club), which favors short term often technological fixes to the earth’s human caused environmental crises. That is, the shallow environmentalism of recycling, fuel efficient automobiles, organic farming and other worthy practices are beneficial but do not go far enough or sufficiently include values independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
Thich Nhat Hanh is likely the best known Buddhist alive besides HH Dalai Lama. He was born in Viet Nam in 1926 and now lives in France. He is a Zen master, writer and poet and a world leader in peace activism. When war came to his native country he founded the engaged Buddhism movement which encouraged both laymen and monks to apply the personal insights of meditation practice to the larger social, political, environmental and economic and injustice issues of the world. Martin Luther King called him “An Apostle of peace and nonviolence.” Thich Nhat Hanh is a constant reminder that we are all connected to and part of both the starving child in Africa and the profiteering merchant of deadly weapons which, in turn, are connected to each other.
Robinson Jeffers is one of America’s great poets and was rightfully recognized as such during the 1920s and 30s, including being on the cover of “Time” magazine in 1932. He was always controversial and expanded both the form and content of American literature in the tradition of Walt Whitman. He studied medicine, forestry and literature and graduated from college at the age of 18 by which time he had determined that poetry was his passion. Jeffers developed a philosophy which he termed “inhumanism.” He explained it as “…a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence… It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy.” His work fell out of favor in the popular media during the 1940s in large part because of his opposition to America’s entry into WWII. One of his books included a publisher’s warning about the potentially “unpatriotic” poems found inside. In 1965, three years after Jeffers died, the Sierra Club, at the time under David Brower, published a book of photos of the Big Sur coast interspersed with Jeffers’ poetry. The book’s title “Not Man Apart” is from these Jeffers lines:
“…the greatest beauty is organic wholeness
the wholeness of life and things.
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that…”
That’s the best reminder of all.

REMINDERS FROM YOKO

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During the winter of 1963-64 I worked as a bartender/pizza cook at the Sun Valley’s employees bar in the Quonset hut behind the Challenger Inn that later became the laundry. Called the Holiday Hut, it had a full service bar, pizza, ping pong tables, sofas and a television and was in business to discourage off duty Sun Valley employees from hanging around the guest bars in the lodge and inn. My old friend and boss, the wonderful Ned Bell, had set me up with this job that included room and board, a lift pass, some spending money and enough time to ski and train at the gentle levels required to recover from recent surgery and sickness.
Thanks in part to Ned it was an enjoyable, unusually relaxed winter and period in my personal life, a vacation from the concentration of competitive skiing, allowing room and energy for the contemplation of larger issues. And it was a strange and unsettling time in American culture when such issues encouraged contemplation, reassessment and personal connection to and responsibility for them. Just a few months before, President John Kennedy had been assassinated. A year earlier, George Wallace’s inaugural address as Governor of Alabama included, “…segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!” Six months after Wallace’s shameful (and shameless) racist polemic, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And the obscene disaster that a few months later would become known as the Viet Nam War was already underway under the radar but being felt and heard like the distant thunder of an imminent shift in and expansion of the consciousness of the unsettled American culture.
A milestone in my own awareness of and participation in that shift and expansion happened in the Holiday Hut one February 1964 night, the 9th to be precise.
Usually the Holiday Hut had about 10—15 customers doing the things young people do in such places after work, but early that evening the place unexpectedly filled up. I had never been so busy making pizzas, serving drinks and trying to keep customers happy. I asked someone what was going on and was properly chastised for being clueless. The Beatles were appearing on the Ed Sullivan show that night and the Holiday Hut had the available TV. Since I had been out of the country for most of the previous year I didn’t even know who the Beatles were.
I, along with 73 million other people who watched Ed’s show that night, soon found out.
And the Beatles were more than fine musicians and pop stars. They embodied, inspired and gave literal voice to both shift and expansion in the culture’s consciousness, at least for those not too mired to shift or/and too tight to expand. The Beatles were the right people in the right place in the right time to be the literal and musical voice of an era. It was an era of change for many, but even many of those who couldn’t embrace, for instance, peace and love as a mantra for social organization or getting America out of Viet Nam as a political goal, incorporated the Beatles music into their lives. The Beatles’ personal and professional lives were part of the cultural fabric, not because they were celebrities but because they were the public face of shifts in perspective and thinking of a significant part of the culture. The lyrics of their songs were studied and oft repeated. “All You Need is Love,” “Good Day, Sunshine, “Let It Be” and, later, “Imagine” made far more sense for all people than, say the systems analysis thinking of people like Robert McNamara who orchestrated the Viet Nam War and for whom some people were more disposable than others. I mean, anyone with half or less a brain knows that Gandhi is a better role model than Attila.
So, even though life moved on and the Beatles broke up and went separate ways the music and the message lived on. Even when John Lennon joined Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and thousands of lesser known oblations to the gods of America’s gun culture the music of the Beatles endures with lyrics like:

“But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait”
And then just the other day a book called “Acorn” by Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, showed up. She calls it a book of ‘conceptual instructions’ and notes, “I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the good old ways. Great!”
Among Yoko’s instructions:

“Mend an object
When you go through the process of mending
You mend something inside your soul as well.”

and
“Take your pants off

before you fight.”
The beat goes on.

The War Prayer

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“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolate land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave & denied it—for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of one who is the spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek His aid with humble & contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord & thine shall be the praise & honor & glory now & ever, Amen.”
Mark Twain, from “The War Prayer,” written in 1905 during the Philippine/American War.

Mark Twain was vice-President of the anti-Imperialist League and America’s most prominent literary opponent of war at the start of the 20th century. One of literature’s great satirists, Twain was writing during and against the American invasion/occupation of the Philippines. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that war over on July 4, 1902, but the date was only patriotic symbolism, the gesture just a political move to circumvent a Senate hearing into embarrassing atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the Philippines. In reality, neither the war nor the inevitable atrocities were over. The two best remembered (in the Philippines, though not in America) massacres of civilians took place in March of 1906 when the 6th Infantry, commanded by General Wood, massacred 900 Muslim men, women and children at Bud Dajo, where they had taken refuge in a dormant volcano crater; and in June 1913 where U.S. soldiers under the command of General “Black Jack” Pershing slaughtered 500 Muslim men, women and children at Bud Bogsak. These slaughters took place after Twain wrote “The War Prayer,” which, like most anti-war literature, was suppressed and long unnoticed. Anti-war literature makes people uncomfortable with the deep substance of the consequences, as well as the small-minded hollowness of the supposed glories, of war. Discomfort, of course is its intention.
Harper’s Bazaar, which regularly published Twain, rejected “The War Prayer” as “not quite suited to a woman’s magazine.” Of Harper’s refusal to publish the prayer, Twain wrote to a friend, “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.” He also mentioned that his Harper’s editor was “responsible to his Company,” and “should not permit laughs which could injure its business.” In fact, “The War Prayer” remained unpublished until 1923, long after Twain was dead, and it is a truism of commerce that uncomfortable truths are often bad for business and as a consequence are suppressed.
Mark Twain was the first great 20th century American of letters and the arts to use his craft in the service of anti-war belief. He was not the first in history or the last of a century in which more than 200 million people died in wars, the great majority of them civilians.
Film was the art form of the masses in the 20th century and my favorite two anti-war films are “Coming Home” (1978) which won academy awards for best actor (Jon Voight), best actress (Jane Fonda), and best original screenplay (Nancy Dowd, Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones); and “Born on the Fourth of July,” (1989) based on the autobiography of Vietnam war hero Ron Kovic who went to Vietnam as a true-believer/patriot/warrior and came home to America a paraplegic and one of America’s leading anti-war activists. Each film, one a true story, is a powerful portrayal of a man who went to war in the belief that he was doing the right thing, and came home crippled in body and spirit and questioning the premises of war itself. In my opinion, every American teen-ager should view these films in the course (sic) of public education.
But the ne plus ultra treatise of anti-war thought is Dalton Trumbo’s novel “Johnny Got His Gun.” Published in 1939, it won a National Book Award. The protagonist, Joe, is a WWI American soldier who is in a British hospital. He has no arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouth, tongue, or face. No one knows who he is, and he cannot tell them. Nevertheless, he is ceremonially decorated as an anonymous war hero. All that’s left are his mind and his memories and his humanity. Joe can move his head and he begins banging his head in Morse code, attempting to communicate. At first they think he is having seizures and he is sedated, but finally his nurse figures out what he is doing. She notifies his doctors and they communicate, Joe banging his head, the doctors drumming on his head with their fingers. Joe realizes he is a hero and a monster, and he wants to go on display with his disfigurement to graphically illustrate to the world the true horrors of war.
The reply, literally pounded into his head in Morse code, is, “What you ask is against regulations.”
It is against regulations to display the monsters that result from the horrors of war. Only the dead are permitted to tell the truth. Laughs are not permitted that could injure business as usual, but, a hundred years after Twain wrote “The War Prayer” and the 21st century settles into (military/industrial complex) business as usual, Johnny is still getting his gun, in the unlikely event you haven‘t noticed.

Searching For Simplicity

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“A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

A friend recently dropped by for a visit while on a vacation trip of indeterminate length on a search for a simpler life. The bumper sticker on the back of his traveling home on wheels was familiar: “Your worst nightmare is my favorite vacation.” Like so many bon mots this one can be interpreted in more than one way, including that your nightmare and my vacation as well as vice-versa are not separate events. For various reasons involving recent readings and the on going awareness that the health of planet Earth in all areas (water, air, land, human population growth, the growing number of extinct species, global warming, environment in general, etc.) is rapidly deteriorating, it was a reminder to never confuse standard of living with quality of life. All too many people do not differentiate between such two very different realities.
They are as different as the inner life of the heart and mind and the outer landscape of conspicuous consumption, or organic farmer/ citizen of the earth and derivatives trader of its extractive resources, or devoted, skeptical scientist and devout, true believing Creationist. And each can be interpreted in more than one way, including just the opposite of what the standard bearer intends.
The worst nightmare of, for instance, the CEO of any large corporation is that the business of the corporation ceases to grow. At the same time (the present moment), for the earth and all its inhabitants, human and otherwise, the worst nightmare is that the business of corporations continues to grow. The world’s economic model is based on the lurid fantasy of unlimited, endless growth, each increment of which compounds the complexity of life. Simplicity is an alternative, even an antidote to complexity and boundless growth. It can be viewed as a vacation from the prevailing worldview, economic engine and ethic of every multi-national corporation, perhaps best and most famously summed up by Ed Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Cancer is a nightmare for everyone, it is no one’s favorite vacation and growth for the sake of growth is its ideology. The implications of relentless growth for individual, society and the earth itself are obvious. Author and Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at MIT Peter Senge, who was named a ‘Strategist of the Century’ by the Journal of Business Strategy and who describes himself as an ‘idealistic pragmatist’ says of the current state of Earth, “We are sleepwalking into disaster, going faster and faster to get to where no one wants to be.” That is, by 2050 the capacity of the planet to renew itself (clean air, water, arable land, sustainable fisheries and the like) will be 300 to 500 percent beyond sustainability. And there will be 9 billion people struggling (and waging wars against each other) to survive. It is difficult to imagine that there will be much in the way of vacation.
The antidote to sleepwalking into disaster is to wake up and to take a vacation from walking to where no one wants to be. Wake up and take a vacation from the nightmare crisis of complexity caused in large measure by growth for the sake of growth. As every study one can find involving the demographics of both standard of living and quality of life clearly shows the resources supporting both are quickly running out. The problem is enormous—more than 7 billion humans and growing by 50 million a year at this writing—gargantuan enough that one person might understandably feel overwhelmed, helpless, resigned. But Mahatma Gandhi, who had some experience in such matters, pointed out, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” You—one person—can take a vacation from and thereby shake off the nightmare. You can shake the world, gently, or, if you prefer, you can let it shake you, perhaps not so gently.
As a place to start I like what Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia, Inc., says: “I think the simple life really begins with owning less stuff.” Very few, probably none, reading this can say with a straight face that they don’t own too much ‘stuff.’ In a gentle way you can shake the world—and take a vacation from the nightmare of endless consumerism—by nothing more complex than taking, say, ten things you don’t need to the community thrift store. It will put you ten steps closer to a simple life and, gently, help wake up the world.
Give it a try. Those steps might lead to others.

Dharma Exchange

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An old friend who has survived the normal vicissitudes of life as well as cancer and its chemical and radiation opponents recently sent me the following:

On Being Almost Sixty-eight

Maybe it’s because you’d gotten in and out of bed more times during a single night than anyone since Wilt Chamberlain. Unlike Wilt, you did it to pee. It’s as if you’re hung over, only you’re not, haven’t been in forever. You’d like to fall back asleep. You would if you could.
Out the window you see two deer drink from the creek in the yard. Snow gleams on the peak rising from the far bank. Triple blue sky above. Your first cup of coffee is strong the way you like it. Real cream, three spoons of sugar, stuff you avoided when you thought you’d live forever and would want to.
Your favorite mug. A present from your son a hundred years ago. “Dear Dad, You are the gratest.” You sit alone at the kitchen table. On the stove is the teakettle you got for your wedding and got to keep in your divorce. You drink your coffee listening to music because you can’t read the papers anymore or watch the news. The pious certainties of politicians. The young, pretty actress reciting insincerities she memorized from her publicist.
Once she might have aroused an almost unbearable longing in you. Now she’s like a new baseball glove or a hundred million. What would you do with her?
On the wall is a picture of the dog dead now how many years? Nights you still feel for him at the foot of your bed. There’s the photo of the little guy with snow in his goggles and snow in his hair and his ski hat pulled funny and his cheeks red as‑‑‑red as the blood you just now noticed dripping from the back of your hand. You try to think how you might have cut yourself. A butter knife could have done it.
The pills, all those pills. A round pink one, two blues, a big white lozenge, a capsule, ibuprophen for your back, glucosamine for your joints, multi-vitamin, saw palmetto, gingko biloba, ginseng. This one with food, that one without, one in the morning, one before bed, may cause nausea, dizziness, headache. Don’t operate heavy equipment.
These are the pills that mother gives you. None will make you taller. None will make you small. You need others for that.
The coffee is so good you brew yourself a second. You know it won’t taste like that first and that your jaw won’t unclench until noon. You used to like that feeling, driving to work, jacked on caffeine. Ready for anything, ready for freddy. Bring it on! Back then your word for it was coffeedence.
A song catches your attention. West African percussion, fado melody. It touches you like music can. Something in her voice. She’s lived, you can tell she’s lived. She sings what she knows. What they call saudade. Honeyed recollection of the love you had, the love you lost, the love you wished you had and never did. Of times past, old friends, people and places you’ll never see again.
You make your bed, plump the pillows. Your wife taught you that. Your mother tried. Satisfaction in small acts completed as if they mattered.
In the bathroom where once you preened, you now avoid the mirror. You haven’t owned a comb in decades. Every shiny surface‑‑‑store windows, sunglasses, the pupil of another’s eye‑‑‑once whispered to you: Look! Your face is no longer your face. It is not the face you remember nor want to.
Tough being you.
You shave by feel, not caring about the places you probably missed, under your nose, the cleft of your chin. In the shower you still wash with Dr. Bronner’s. The pepperminty smell is the smell of your hippie days. Your hand still drips watery blood.
Your skin, paper thin, stained like old plaster, nearly translucent. All those years you spent in the sun. Hawaiian Tropic, Bain de Soleil. The lotion smelled like summer to you, the beach, like good times. Now you have sun block, the odorless kind, SPF 2000. You don’t go out without a hat.
You had abs before there were such things. Eight biscuits to a tin. You could have hidden a paperclip in the cuts of your thighs. You look at your body now. What’s happened? Dad was a boxer, a lifeguard, a diver from bridges, chiseled, a god. You watched it happen to him. Stomach distending, butt disappearing. How did you not see this coming?
You don’t even know what’s in style anymore. What’s comfortable is what you wear. T-shirt. Khakis. Running shoes. Faded ball cap. Your uniform. You remember shopping up on Forbes Street, taking the streetcar downtown. The big department stores. Tassle loafers. Monogrammed shirts. Back when your father bought your clothes. When your mother washed and ironed them.
Walking down the stairs your left knee reminds you of that fall afternoon fifty years ago. Moore Park, your father in the stands. Pryor, the great South Hills quarterback, number 9 in blue. You weren’t worthy of his notice. You were nothing to him, a weed in his path. He left you tweaked and crumpled in the dirt. You were seventeen years old. When courage was all that you aspired to.
The coffee shop. The cute barista who takes your order never lifts her eyes. You are invisible to her, a talking dollar tip. You talk baseball with the regulars. You talk colonoscopies, PET scans, CAT scans, knee replacements, hip replacements, procedures, operations, ones you had, ones you need. Had you wanted to know so much about aches, ailments, syndromes, chronic conditions, ACL’s, MCL’s, all manner of malady, you’d have gone to medical school.
The gym. The brown lunch bag your mother used to pack for you weighed more than these pink dumbbells in your hands.
On winter mornings, it’s the mountain. The sun is bright, the air frigid, the snow unwrinkled, rolled flat as a fitted sheet. Kids bomb down the hill. You can’t imagine. You only hope you don’t get hurt. At least you’re still up there. The air, the view, the sky. At least you’re still upright. You think of your old buddies who would like to be. After a couple of runs you call it good. You only need a taste.
Afternoons in the library. Authors you never read in your youth and wouldn’t have understood if you had. A nap by a sunny window, the open book on your chest.
A friend has had a stroke. You bring him magazines, spend an hour with him in his hospital room. Years ago you worked together on a framing crew. Back then he could stack a roof with 4×8 plywood sheets, 5/8ths inches thick. Heavy mothers. Awkward, too. Fifty sheets, fifty trips up the ladder. These days they use a hoist.
“You’ll be good as new,” you say to him. “Give it a month or two.” He needs a nurse to help him out of bed. He needs a nurse to help him shit.
You park your car at the trailhead, start out the path. Ten minutes out you double back, think that maybe you hadn’t locked your car.
The great stands of fir, their needles carpet the ground. Across the valley elk graze high on the sage covered hill. Twenty of them, thirty, heads down, rumps to the wind. You take it easy, jog within your breath. A mile or two is all. No more medals to be won or lost. There’s still the pain. There is no gain.
You’d been hypnotized by the myth of self-improvement. Constant striving. Always getting “better.” Never good enough. The ever present discontent. Now you see. It was there all along, hidden in plain sight. The striving is the discontent.
Here, in your sixty-seventh year, under the high, white clouds, among the fragrant trees, on this mild, sunny Idaho afternoon, you know that this as good as it will ever get. There is no hope. No hopelessness, either. Things are as they were meant to be.
What great selfless deed has earned you this?
Mexican food with an old old friend. Cold Pacificos. Salsa and chips. Salad for her. The usual for you. Burrito, black beans and rice, hold the sour cream, please, easy on the Poblanos.
Decades ago you were lovers. She was a different person then. So were you. She shows you pictures of her grandsons. You assure her that she’s not boring you. You’ve learned something over the years. One day, maybe you’ll have pictures of your own.
It’s your turn to pay the check. You walk her to her car. You hug, affectionate, deeply felt, prelude to nothing. A brief kiss. You remember when the taste of lipstick was an invitation. She goes her way, you go yours.
At home you flip through the channels. Fox News, Real Housewives. Conspiracies, cosmetic surgery, blowjobs for jewelry. You see the absurdity. People will do whatever they do. You can’t control them. Why annoy yourself? But you can’t help it. You do.
You undress, fold your clothes. You’ll wear the same outfit tomorrow, and the day after, and maybe the day after that. You pull down the comforter. Flannel sheets. Feather pillows. The mattress cost more than your first two cars combined: the white ‘56 Volvo, two hundred and fifty bucks, surf racks included; Five hundred for the red MG TD. You loved that car. You love the mattress more.
Not yet nine o’clock. You open a novel. Your reading glasses are not on your nightstand, nor in the drawer, though you are sure you left them there. You’re screwed and McGoo’d without them. You have twenty pairs stashed around. In the desk, two in the car, in the silverware drawer, your shaving kit, your backpack, your gym bag, your toolbox.
You climb out of bed, grab a pair, climb back in, locate the place where you’d left off. Hadn’t you already read this page? Not long until your eyes get heavy. Takes you months to finish a book.
Daylight leaking from the sky. The creep of night. You turn off the lamp. The welcome of the sheets. No thoughts of tomorrow, of emails, managers, or where you have to be at noon. There’s nowhere you have to be at noon. There’s only tranquil blackness, the trickle of the creek, the lonely bark of a dog down the road. Peace descends like anesthesia.
If someone had asked what you thought dying was like, if you had to guess, you’d say that you imagine it might be something like this.
And if you were right, if it is as you imagine, then what is there to fear?


I replied:
Nice. Even if you were wrong, what is there to fear? There is no fear to hold on to, no fear to let go of, just like the past and the future. Right now, at 75, I need to make dinner.

The World Clock

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“Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness are, by their own nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

Everyone who spends much time on the internet has favorite sites. One of mine is called World Clock, one aspect of a larger web site presented by Peter Russell who has been and is perhaps best described as “Eco-Philosopher Extraordinaire.” He is also a businessman/self-help guru who, through his web site, will sell you books, tapes, DVDs, meditation instruction and speaking engagements to help you find happiness as described by Arthur Schopenhauer. As such, Peter Russell is not for everyone.
But the World Clock is, and I check it out about once a month just to monitor some of the changes in our highly uncertain, precarious world.
World clock presents approximate data continuously updated by the second, day, week, month and year about a wide range of the earth’s dynamics, including its human population, species extinction, shrinking forests, expanding desertification, CO2 emissions and military expenditures. The clock gives concrete numbers to many of those highly uncertain, precarious and ephemeral and subject to chance sources that, whether or not we pay attention to them, affect our individual happiness and the collective lives of all creatures that live on earth. Like everything in this world, including each and every person reading this, the data and the dynamics they represent are inextricably connected.
At this writing, according to the clock, there are about 7 billion 116 million humans on planet earth with 170,000 more arriving each day. Almost 70,000 acres of forest are leveled each day and another 32,000 acres become desert. Each day, day after day after day. You can watch in real, present time the average temperature of the planet, and that figure never fluctuates, it only raises a miniscule amount every second. Hardly enough to notice (and all too many people don’t) until one realizes there are 315,576,000 seconds in ten years, and then those miniscule amounts noticeably add up.
One disturbing if interesting and surprising (at least to me) statistic from the clock is that each year more than 110,000 people commit suicide, more than the numbers of loss of life to war and all the other less organized forms of violence combined, at least for this year. During our nation’s search for phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for instance, loss of life to war numbers were considerably higher. There are more than 4.5 million new automobiles produced each year and more than 150,000 people are killed in traffic accidents. There are almost 14 million bicycles built each year. The clock doesn’t report how many people are killed and injured riding those bicycles, but it can be surmised that a significant percentage of bike riders are sufficient unto themselves and whose happiness belongs to them. At least compared to drivers of the automobile, especially, say, those in a southern California freeway gridlock where happiness is not the prevailing state of mind.
One of the most fascinating, unhappy items on the clock is “Military Expenditure.” The numbers in each time frame from day to year change so fast the human eye cannot keep up. These expenditures are not broken down by country, but every responsible U.S. citizen knows that the U.S. spends more on military than the next ten nations—China, Russia, UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil‑‑‑combined. Combined!! The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s military expenditures, paid for by nearly 50 percent of the U.S. budget. When you see the military expenditure numbers on the world clock moving faster than the eye can follow, it is useful to consider that 40 percent of those whirling numbers represent your tax dollars at work (or war or waste, depending on perspective). At this writing, the whirling military numbers were reporting just under 5 trillion (TRILLION!!!) dollars a week. This indicates that every week of every year more than 2 trillion dollars of your taxes are spent supporting what the U.S. military is doing in the world. Two trillion dollars a week.
The thought arises from contemplating such data that even, say, half a trillion dollars every week could be put to better use in America than it has been in, for specific instance, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. We could start with a health care system, the infrastructure of road and water systems or mass rapid transit systems. Personally, I would favor using that money for education. The U.S., which spends more on the military than any nation in history, is today ranked 54th among nations in education expenditures. And it shows. The U.S. is ranked 17th among world nations in education. Idaho, where I live, is ranked 47th in education among states in the 17th ranked Unites States. The implications are obvious. The possibilities are as vast as the data on the World Clock.
Check it out at www.peterrussell.com

What Are You Doing?

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Many years ago I participated in a weeklong, intensive, silent, Zen sesshin that began each morning at 4:45 with 108 prostrations and included 10 periods of meditation interspersed with kinhin and ended at 9 p.m. with the last sitting. I’ve attended many sesshins and other Buddhist retreats, but an incident in the zendo from this particular one often comes to mind and I consider it an ongoing dharma lesson.
There were 30 or 40 students at the sesshin and about halfway through the week a small but significant episode took place. By that stage of any retreat most participants are usually fatigued, invigorated and highly tuned into inner space and immediate outer surroundings. It is a time when deep and repressed thoughts and feelings often surface. We were doing kinhin between periods of sitting, slowly walking with precise steps, evenly spaced in a line around the dimly lit zendo, each of us attending to our own practice, our own space and every breath of meditation. One could be forgiven for viewing such intense, peaceful, focused experience as the very essence of Zen Buddhist practice.
Suddenly, the silence exploded.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” a male voice boomed.
“YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT! WALKING TOO SLOW,” another male voice replied in a shout.
A brief scuffle between two students about 10 people in front of me shattered the atmosphere of the retreat day. It was shocking and disorienting. For the next few minutes chaos and confusion prevailed in the zendo. The roshi intervened and escorted the two Zen combatants outside the zendo. Kinhin and sitting resumed. An hour or so later the roshi and one of the students returned to resume practice. The other student was not seen again.
What had happened was this: the accepted protocol during kinhin is that students keep the same space between them. Student A was in front of Student B and was, apparently, lost in his own thoughts and not aware that the space between him and the next student in front was larger than the space between the other participants. Student B, apparently, was not lost in his own thoughts but was acutely aware of Student A’s kinhin pace. To speed things up and to set them right, Student B violently shoved Student A from behind, almost knocking him down.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!”
The roshi talked with the two and decided to exile Student B from the Zen center for a year and he was told to and did leave immediately. I do not know if he ever returned.
This event has come to mind many times in different circumstances and I consider it worth contemplating as an example of the dharma in action. How many times in our daily interactions with and observations of others do we have the thought, “YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!”? And how many times each day do we think about others, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” And how often do we each give voice to those thoughts? And, then, how often (much less I would hope) do we give physical action, aggression, even violence to that voice, those thoughts? And how do we respond when they are given to us?
Deconstructing this incident or any confrontation in any of our lives, with the Eightfold Noble Path in mind is a useful dharma tool for better understanding. What part does right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration play in this incident? What can we learn and use in our daily lives from the actions of Student A, Student B as well as the roshi? Do you recognize yourself in the role of each of them? If so, what have you learned? If not, what are you doing?

Anger

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The foundation of Buddhist practice is sitting. Just sitting. Just sitting and letting go of all the ‘stuff’ filling our minds, everything that keeps us on the wheel of karma, the wheel of life as we know it. At the center of all depictions of the Buddhist Wheel of Life are a rooster, a snake and a pig representing greed, anger and ignorance, the three poisons that lead humans to evil action and personal suffering. Anger is the snake. Anger encompasses hatred, ill-will, animosity, rage, fury, wrath and aversion. Its poison causes far more destruction in this world than that of the rattlesnake or the cobra.
An essential component of Buddhist practice is letting go of anger which, among other things, is a huge hindrance to realization. That is, for a Buddhist ‘righteous’ or ‘justifiable’ anger do not exist. Think of that: anger is never righteous, never justified. Metta, the practice of loving kindness toward all beings, does not permit anger…not toward the driver who cuts you off in traffic, the friend who betrays, the liar who misleads, the greed and ignorance that travel with anger. It is not the person, event or situation toward which anger is directed that is the issue. Anger itself is the root of the problem. That is, the root of the problem of anger is in you, not outside.
But anger happens to every human being. Anger is part of the human condition. Anger and aggression are too often confused with strength, but that is delusion. Anger is a poison and makes one weak, but no one entirely avoids anger, even Buddhists, not even Buddhist masters. The path is not easy. Buddhism is not for sissies.
What to do?
According to the Dhammapada, Buddha said, “Conquer anger by non-anger. Conquer evil by good. Conquer miserliness by liberality. Conquer a liar by truthfulness.” Keeping in mind while contemplating the words, “Conquer anger by non-anger,” that Buddhism is a practice, not a belief system. You do not defuse another’s anger before you have conquered your own. John Daido Loori summed it up this way: “…what you do and what happens to you are the same thing…cause and effect are one, not two. And when you realize—not understand, not believe, but realize—that what you do and what happens to you are the same thing, there’s no way to avoid taking responsibility for your life. There’s no longer any way you can conceivably say, ‘He made me angry,’ because you know that only you can make you angry. And when that fact really comes home, you empower yourself to do something about anger. So long as he made you angry, you will continue to be a victim.”
Einstein said, “Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.”
What to do?
Mindful Buddhist practice requires honesty and the first step when you are angry is to acknowledge that you are angry. “I am pissed off.” Do not be one of those people who is clearly angry but for some reason insists they are not. It is crucial that the recognition of your own anger includes the realization that your anger is created by yourself. No one makes you angry. You make yourself angry. Your anger is your responsibility and you need to conquer it. Don’t lay it on the world which already has more anger than it can handle.
People who hang on to anger tend toward depression, obsession with political ideologies, real or imagined enemies or one or more of life’s very real negative aspects. Anger causes us to reject without reflection whatever displeases us or infringes on our ego without understanding our inescapable connection to the object of that displeasure. Anger and ego are illusions born of the mind. Anger is the easy way, the dishonest way, the poisonous way, and it always creates more anger, more dishonesty, more poison.
Let it go. Let go of anger by (literally) sitting with it. Letting go of anger requires patience, sometimes a lot of it, compassion (especially for yourself), honesty, lots of time on your zafu and the realization that your anger comes from your own mind. Do not indulge your anger. Thich Nhat Hahn says, “When you express your anger you think that you are getting anger out of your system, but that’s not true. When you express your anger, either verbally or with physical violence, you are feeding the seed of anger, and it becomes stronger in you.” Again, anger is not strength. It is weakness. It takes patience, compassion and courage to look at your own anger and realize that it is poisoning you and that you are the only one who can get rid of that poison.
Let it go. Sit with it. Let it go.