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32. The Thoughtless People

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 26 April 2009| 2 Comments »

When my son, Alexander, was a child we often took walks around the village of Alfred on Sunday mornings. We had no agenda, other than to spend some time together and to explore our surroundings.

Being closer to the ground, Alexander sometimes noticed things that I overlooked. On one April morning, he spotted two crumpled plastic cups near Seidlin Hall. They reeked of stale beer. “Who put those there?” he asked.

“Thoughtless people,” I replied.

A few weeks later, Alexander noticed some crushed soda cans in the Kanakadea Creek. “It must have been the Thoughtless People,” he concluded. In his imagination, I surmised, the Thoughtless People had become a band of feckless nincompoops, who roved the streets of Alfred, New York, dropping refuse wherever they went.

Perhaps he was not far wrong. But in retrospect, I wonder whether my response to his question, however fatherly, was all that wise. At best, it was incomplete.

If there are Thoughtless People, there must also be Thoughtful People. The one implies the other. In my eagerness to teach a moral lesson, I had created a moral duality, from which my six-year-old son had fashioned an image of his own. In the technical language of philosophy, he had reified an abstraction. On the one side were the Thoughtless People, on the other the Thoughtful People. People who know better. People like ourselves.

Twelve years earlier, Joni Mitchell had done something similar in her song “Big Yellow Taxi.” In that 1970 song Joni complained that an unspecified “they” had “paved paradise / and put in a parking lot”. In a subsequent verse she admonished farmers to “put away that D.D.T.” before it destroyed “the birds and the bees.” On the one side of her moral polarity stood avaricious developers and pesticide-wielding farmers; on the other, the trees, birds, and bees—and virtuous enviromentalists like herself.

To be sure, such polarities serve a practical purpose. Certain people, and certain aggregates of people, tend to be greedy, thoughtless, and destructive. For the sake of ethical clarity, if not also for the common good, it is sometimes necessary to call a spade a spade: to identify such people and such groups, using the familiar language of dualistic thought.

The danger lies in reifying our abstractions, which is to say, in mistaking our moral categories for reality. And one of the benefits of meditation, regularly practiced, is to reveal to us that in the flux of undifferentiated reality, prior to the imposition of moral concepts, there are no Thoughtless or Thoughtful People. There are only actions, our own and others’—actions that have an impact on the web of life.

In his book Coming to Our Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it this way:

In any given moment, we are either practicing mindfulness or, de facto, we are practicing mindlessness. When framed in this way, we might want to take more responsibility for how we meet the world, inwardly and outwardly in any and every moment—especially given that there just aren’t any “in-between” moments in our lives.*

Viewing the past in this perspective, we can recognize and regret our thoughtless and destructive actions without being held forever in their thrall.  But by the same token, we can no longer take refuge in images of ourselves as Thoughtful—or Mindful—People. At any future moment, our words and deeds may be thoughtful or thoughtless, mindful or mindless. And much will depend on the difference.

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*Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses (Hyperion, 2005), 71.

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31. A single gentian

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , on 20 April 2009| 3 Comments »

The Burren is a limestone plateau in County Clare, Ireland. Occupying more than a hundred square miles, it is one of the quietest places on earth, and its gray expanse has often been likened to a lunar landscape. Yet it also hosts more than six hundred varieties of flowering plants, which thrive in reflected light.

Here is a poem set in the Burren. Its author is Michael Longley, one of Ireland’s finest poets and a lifelong resident of Belfast:

AT POLL SALACH

Easter Sunday, 1998

While I was looking for Easter snow on the hills

You showed me, like a concentration of violets

Or a fragment from some future unimagined sky

A single spring gentian shivering at our feet.

Poll Salach (pronounced pole sol-ock) means “dirty pool” in the Irish language. Poll Salach is situated in the northwest region of the Burren, where the limestone pavement runs into the sea. Despite its name, it is an austere and beautiful site.

The narrator of this poem is walking at Poll Salach, and with a little help from an unnamed companion, he discovers a spring gentian (Gentian verna), a solitary flower. Its five petals are a bright blue, and to the poet the flower resembles a “concentration of violets.” At its center is a pure white throat. According to Irish folklore, to pick a spring gentian is to precipitate an early death. To bring one indoors will cause your house to be struck by lightning.

It is significant that the narrator of this poem was looking for one thing—Easter snow—and discovered another. As the Zen teacher Toni Packer has remarked, most of the time we are looking for something, but we can also cultivate pure looking, or looking for its own sake. In that way we open ourselves to what is present in the here and now.

Something of that kind happens to the narrator of “Poll Salach,” though he is also thinking of the future. For him, the blue of the gentian conjures a “future unimagined sky,” which is to say, a future that has yet to be envisioned, much less determined.

Michael Longley wrote “At Poll Salach” on Easter Sunday, 1998, two days after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast. The Good Friday Agreement signaled an end to the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which had claimed more than 3,000 lives. In the ensuing decade, paramilitaries on both sides of the conflict have relinquished fighting and put their faith in peace and reconciliation.

Last month that truce was threatened, when dissidents from the Irish Republican Army killed two unarmed British soldiers and a member of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is now composed of Catholics as well as Protestants. This time, however, the leaders of the once-warring sides united in condemning the atrocities and renewing their commitment to peace.

It remains to be seen whether that peace will hold. Edna Longley, Michael’s wife and a prominent literary critic, has described the “shivering” gentian in her husband’s poem as a “tentative floral image,” which indeed it is. But it is also an image of hope, as potent in its way as the lilies of Easter Sunday.

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“At Poll Salach” appears in Michael Longley’s collection The Weather in Japan (Wake Forest University Press, 2000). It is reprinted here by permission of Wake Forest University Press (http://www.wfu.edu/wfupress/index.php).

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30. The Mother Road

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 1 April 2009| Leave a Comment »

“The present contains the past,” writes the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. “The materials of the past which make up the present become clear when they express themselves in the present.”

A few months ago, I was reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, as I sat in the main room of Flint’s Auto Center in Almond, waiting for a new battery to be installed in my wife’s car.

All around me, the present made its presence felt. As I surveyed the room, I noticed the tall stacks of virgin tires, the bright green batteries on the racks, the factory-fresh fan belts hanging near the ceiling. The phone rang, and someone left a message. Moments later, a hurried young man came in, asking if his car could be inspected that very day. Over the next quarter of an hour, three more customers arrived.

Yet amidst these signs of a thriving business, the past was also expressing itself. High on a shelf lay a vintage copper washboard and a stash of antique toys—a model airplane, a red bus, a metal chicken. On the shelf below stood well-worn cans bearing their famous names: Boraxo, Prince Albert, Gilley’s Beer. Not far away were a Ranger fire extinguisher, a Woodman Bee Smoker, and one of John Flint’s family heirlooms: a manual, cast-iron meat grinder, with which many a sandwich was prepared.

Beyond these evocative relics, what caught and held my attention were the gas-pump signs on the far wall. Esso. White Star. Sky Chief. Fire Chief. Sinclair Dino. Some readers of this column may know that Fire Chief referred to Texaco Fire Chief, a gasoline with an octane high enough to be used in fire engines. A popular radio show of the thirties featured Ed Wynn, the Texaco Fire Chief. “Sinclair Dino” referred to the company’s hugely successful logo, a benign brontosaurus. As part of its imaginative promotion, Sinclair put out, in 1935, a dinosaur stamp album that could be filled only with Dino stamps issued at Sinclair stations. That the gas-guzzling cars of ensuing decades might themselves become dinosaurs was not on anyone’s mind.

“The car used to be greatly admired and desired,” remarks John Casesa, a leading automotive analyst, “but now some people see it as something that is not good for us, like tobacco. . . . The sound of a gas engine, the V8—those are going to be increasingly rare commodities. Maybe we’re going to have to give up that seven-tenths of a second from zero to sixty.”

Maybe so. But as Thich Nhat Hanh often says, the present is made up of the past, and we can learn from contemplating the materials of a bygone era. “If we observe these materials deeply,” he suggests, “we can arrive at a new understanding of them. That is called ‘looking again at something old in order to learn something new’.”*

If you would like to reflect on America’s long romance with the car and the culture of the open road, while also having your car or truck reliably serviced, you need look no further than Flint’s Auto Center in Almond, New York. And while you’re there, don’t overlook the rows of original license plates that line the walls or the roadsign that reads New Mexico, Route 66. Spanning the 2,448 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles and celebrated in Bobby Troup’s famous song, Route 66 was the trail of choice for migrants, dreamers, the Dust Bowl poor, and all those headed west. Some called it the Main Street of America. John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road.

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*Thich Nhat Hanh, Our Appointment with Life (Parallax, 1990), 33.

The full text of John Casesa’s remarks may be found at http://www.onearth.org/article/motown-blues. Flint’s Auto Center is located at 63 Main Street in Almond, New York.


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29. As surely as one’s shadow

Posted in 1, tagged , , , on 17 March 2009| 2 Comments »


As I look out our kitchen window, the most prominent presence in my field of vision is the fifty-year-old pin oak tree in our backyard. Embedded in its trunk, halfway up, is a red metal hook, which the bark has nearly concealed. Running up and down from the hook is a long, deep crack.

Twenty years ago, I screwed that six-inch bike hook into the trunk. At the time, I owned no clothes dryer, and it occurred to me that I might run a clothesline between the house and the tree. My notion was innocent enough, and, by today’s ecological standards, admirably green. What did not occur to me is that I might injure the tree.

As injuries go, the one I inflicted is less than catastrophic. Over the past two decades, the oak tree has thrived, and now it towers above our house, providing shade in the summer and a year-round habitat for birds and other creatures. It is, in fact, in vigorous health, as shown by the volume of acorns it dumps on our deck, the piles of leaves it deposits in our gutters.

Yet that red hook remains, as does the ugly scar it caused. And together they illustrate the principle of cause and effect, which in Zen teachings is known as karma. In popular culture, that word carries mystical associations, conjuring a chain of causation that extends well beyond the boundaries of this life. But the root meaning of “karma” is simply “action,” and, as used in Zen, it usually means just that. This is because that is. Our words and deeds have consequences. In the words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, what we say and do creates “our continuation, whether we want it to be so or not”.

To those of a reflective disposition, that is hardly news. Live long enough, and you will observe the long-term effects of even the most casual compliment, insult, reassurance, or rebuke. And that is to say nothing of our major actions, personal, social, and political—actions whose effects may ramify for generations. But in Zen teachings, as in the law, it is not only words and deeds that matter. So do the thoughts that gave rise to the words and deeds.

“Mind,” we are told in the first verse of the Dhammapada, a fundamental text in the Zen tradition, “is the forerunner of action. / All deeds are led by mind, created by mind. / If one speaks or acts with a corrupt mind, suffering will follow, / As the cart follows the hoof of the ox.” Conversely, if one “speaks or acts with a serene mind/ Happiness will follow, / As surely as one’s shadow.”*

Taken seriously, these lines have serious implications. We are responsible, they imply, for our thoughts and states of mind as well as our words and deeds. And we are also responsible for cultivating a “serene” mind, which is to say, a mind that looks deeply, sees clearly, and causes as little harm as possible.

As I look out our kitchen window in the early mornings, I am sometimes reminded of those admonitions.

March 12, 2009

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* The Dhammapada, tr. Ven. Ananda Maitreya (Parallax Press 1995), 1.


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28. Attention, attention, attention!

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 5 March 2009| 4 Comments »

For the student of Zen, the world provides a multitude of teachers. From rooted, resilient trees we can learn the posture of meditation. From the birds we can learn directness of response. And from other people, particularly those whose trades have taught them to live in the present, we can learn a fundamental principle of Zen practice.

Thirty-five years ago, my first wife and I were living in a rundown farmhouse on Elm Valley Road. Asphalt-shingled and lacking insulation, our house was drafty and expensive to heat. To make ends meet, we installed three woodstoves, which we fed with maple, beech, and ash throughout the winter. Most of the firewood came from our woodlot across the road. I bought a 14” Homelite chainsaw at Carter Hardware, and though I’d had no experience with such a machine, I learned how to use it.

Or at least I thought I did, until I met Howard “Chainsaw” Chilson, my neighbor from down the road. Driving his little Ford tractor past our house, as he often did, Howard spotted me cutting wood and stopped to help, offering some pointers along the way. He showed me how to adjust the chain and how to trim branches without jamming the bar. Most important, he exhorted me to pay attention—full attention—to whatever I was doing. Although I did not quite realize it at the time, my eyes, limbs, and indeed my life depended on it.

Howard had served as an MP in the Second World War. A rugged, lanky man with a bone-crushing handshake, he proudly claimed to be “one-quarter Indian”—Cherokee, as I recall. His own chainsaw was a green, 20” Poulan, which looked as weathered as its owner. But in Howard’s hands it might have been a scalpel, so prodigious was his skill.

Howard’s prized tool had also earned him his name. As he told the story, he was refused service at a local bar, having come in drunk. Disappointed with this lack of courtesy, Howard went out to his truck and returned with his chainsaw. “Either serve me,” he bellowed, “or I’ll cut your bar down!”. Although he did not make good on his threat, he was known ever after as Chainsaw Chilson.

Howard could be moody, but he was an amiable companion, and we spent many productive hours in the woods, cutting and hauling enough wood to heat two houses. Although he’d had little formal education, Howard had a woodsman’s expertise, which he generously shared, and a keen observant eye, which he often turned in my direction. In three summers of working together we never had an accident or sustained even a minor injury, thanks mainly to Howard’s vigilance. Although he called me “Boss,” it was he who kept us both from harm. And though he chided me for wearing something so unmanly as ear protectors (“ear muffs,”he called them), he provided protection of his own, bringing my sometimes wandering mind back to the work at hand.

That is exactly what a good Zen teacher does, and though Chainsaw Chilson, who passed away in 1991, had probably never heard of Zen meditation, he had something in common with the long lineage of Zen teachers. “Will you please write some maxims of the highest wisdom?” a man asked Ikkyu, a fifteenth-century Zen master. “Attention, attention, attention!” Ikkyu wrote. And in a well-known poem, Layman P’ang, a C’han master of the eighth century, trains his own attention on ordinary labor. “Who cares about wealth and honor?” he writes, “Even the poorest thing shines. / My miraculous power and spiritual activity: / drawing water and carrying wood.”

 

February 26, 2009

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22. The tow rope

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , on 20 February 2009| 1 Comment »

Three weeks ago, winter arrived in Western New York, catching some of us off guard.  I was reminded of a poem by the twelfth-century Japanese poet Saigyo:

Neglectful, we’ve yet

to fix the towrope

to the sled—

and here they’ve piled up already,

the white snows of Koshi!

*

Tayumitsutsu

sori no hayao mo

tsukenaku ni

tsumorinikeru na

koshi no shirayuki *

Perhaps as you read this poem, you were thinking of something you’ve left undone. For my own part, I’m thinking of a heavy wooden storm window, which I should have put up weeks ago. Across the centuries, it would seem, some things don’t change.

Saigyo, however, was no ordinary homeowner. His real name was Sato Norikiyo, and he was born in 1118 in Kyoto to an aristocratic military family. Skilled in the martial arts, he became a private guard to a retired emperor. But at the age of twenty-two, Norikiyo renounced warfare to become a Buddhist monk. Living a solitary life, he traveled widely, writing lyric verse under the pen name Saigyo. Today he is one of the best-loved poets in Japan, second only to the haiku master Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), who took Saigyo’s life’s work as a model for his own

The form of Saigyo’s poem is the waka, the conventional form of Japanese court poetry. A five-line syllabic form with a pattern of 5-7-5-7-7, the waka resembles the haiku in the first three lines, but the addition of two extra lines allows for greater expansiveness and complexity. Often, as in Saigyo’s poem, an abrupt shift of perspective occurs at the end of the third line. In Saigyo’s mature poems, subjective and objective elements are held in balance, the former expressing the poet’s feelings and the latter describing a natural phenomenon.

In this particular poem the first three lines report an oversight: Saigyo has neglected to fasten the towrope to the sled. Buddhist monks are supposed to be paying attention at all times and to be attuned to seasonal change. Perhaps Saigyo was too busy to bother with the towrope. Perhaps he forgot about it. In either case he realizes, here and now, that he has ignored the advent of winter and overlooked a necessary chore.

In the next two lines, the perspective shifts abruptly, as Saigyo turns our attention to the newfallen snow. Koshi is a coastal province, known for its heavy snows. Although Saigyo does not develop the scene, we can well imagine its natural beauty, which contrasts sharply with the human situation he has just described. If the human error is cause for consternation, the natural scene is cause for joy.

“Like many great Japanese poets,” writes Burton Watson, a distinguished translator of Saigyo’s poems, “he was not afraid of saying something very simple.” Nor was he afraid to look at his human failing in the light of the impersonal natural world. In Saigyo’s vision, human error and unforgiving nature are parts of the one body of reality. Open to both, he gives them equal standing. Engaged with both, he sees them as they are.

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* Saigyo: Poems of a Mountain Home, translated by Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 1991), 94.

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