The Way...

"In Tao the only motion is returning...": So I woke up today a little anxious (ironic, as you will see in a moment). A warm pressure front has pushed into my region bringing a promise of 50+ degrees in February the day before (and to be followed tomorrow by) more freezing weather. This winter has been most disappointing... According to the NOAA seasonal snow accumulation map, we are in the 12-24 inch band. Last year at this point we were pushing 100 inches (albeit it was a record-ly excellent snow year). This latest warm front also brings with it a crushing headache on a day that I need to grade a pile of essays and wish to turn a wrench on a 40 year old motorcycle engine at the Kevin O. School of Motorcycle Maintenance... [My son says that I should say "do mechanical stuff" instead of "turn a wrench," but I do so love that turn of phrase.]

"...": I lay in bed late into the morning hoping for sleep to drag me into a little functional oblivion... but alas, it was not to be so; just dream snippets of a most fragmented nature. And so, I awoke, dowsed my night in two cups of dark roasted pleasure, and downed a bowl-or-so of honey-nut sweetness. I'll add an ibuprofen chaser soon if I my brain feels no relief from the pressure... And I was anxious that I needed to find a topic for this week's blog entry. Some Sundays there is an obvious topic that has been brewing for weeks; other Sundays I react to "the moment" I am in as I boot up the computer. Today all there was in the frontal lobe of my brain was a pounding pressure and no clear thoughts...

"...The only useful quality, weakness...": So I took a stab at a simple google search on a trusted topic of my interest in Buddhism. I typed "Buddhist Wisdom, images." I was hoping for a piece of text or an image to inspire ongoing thoughts I am having about how to behave or react in relation to the world around me. Perhaps I would see something to convey "peaceful acceptance," or "insight gained." I might even follow up after hunting down some words from Thich Nhat Hanh's poetry—not lyrically all that good, but packed with well intentioned kernels of revelational truth. His peace is like a resonating bell in my soul...

"...": I scanned the images and memes that flooded my screen, disappointed in what I was seeing. Much of it was all too cutesy; lots of smoothed imagery of stones, Siddhartha's head, or the Dalai Lama and sparse text. In the midst of this was a cartoonish depiction of Lao Tzu and a quote that read like wisdom from the modern age of self help rather than that from a philosophical Chinese sage. Although Lao Tzu's philosophy influences Buddhism as it moves through China on its way to Japan, Lao, himself, is considered the father of a different tradition. I was looking for Buddhism, not Taoism. But google is less concerned with accuracy than with an algorithm based on popularity (clicks), and anticipating my intentions. The quote on the image did not bother me so much. It was about anxiety, and I was feeling anxious. The focus on the moment was a refreshing thought for finding my Buddha-self, but the language and context was not right. [Not to mention that so much of my peace comes from positive memories, and so much of my hope comes from looking optimistically to the future. Sometimes living in the present can be quite un-peaceful.] This language attributed to Lao Tzu reminded me of something heard in an Alcoholics Anonymous room, "If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow you are ready to [poop] all over today." I love Lao Tzu. I have read his Tao—four score nuggets of poetic philosophy that forms the foundation of the entire tradition—several times. I could not for the life of me remember ANY passage even remotely similar to this translation...

"...For though all creatures under heaven are the products of Being...": So I continued my google searching looking for the true author of the quote and found my way to several blogs on the same realization I had. One that I particularly enjoyed reading is called Scripturient: Intellectual Brownian Motion, by Ian Chadwick. He writes:

Poor Lao Tzu. He gets saddled with the most atrocious of the New Age codswallop. As if it wasn’t enough to be for founder of one of the most obscure  philosophies (not a religion, since it has no deity), he gets to be the poster boy for all sorts of twaddle from people who clearly have never read his actual writing.

This time it’s a mushy feel-good quote on Facebook (mercifully without kittens or angels) that reads,

"If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present."

"...": What follows is a fun, half intellectual/half rant about the very quote I was researching. I was hooked with the words "codswallop" and "twaddle." I disagree with Chadwick's outright dismissal that this quote is "nonsense,"—he argues the quote as junk philosophy and is insultingly critical of those who would find value in it—but his underlying critique that people post without verifying their sources echoes a frequent complaint I have in the internet age. He writes:

Wisdom isn’t a series of quotable sound bites. Or a poster with kittens.

Stop sharing stuff if you haven’t verified the source.

"...Being itself is the product of Not-being.": It's easier to say "Stop sharing stuff if you haven’t verified the source" than to do it. How do we know when what we read is not accurate? How can we find time to verify every last thing we hear/read? So often we find the "right" thing to say, offered by others, and pass it along. I think we need to develop a "Spiedy-sense" that something is wrongly quoted or attributed, or that a statistic seems out of whack, or that a story seems implausible. The best defense for this is to be a healthy skeptic, and to read and dig a lot. The power so share easily on the internet may create part of this problem, but the solution is also in the relatively easy action of searching the internet for verification as well. Sadly this very simple solution is easily atrophied in an age when a quick question into the butt of one's iPhone yields just as quick answers to so many of our questions...

"...": So here is some of the wisdom I was originally looking for, taken from the work of Thich Nhat Hanh. When a bell sounds...

Listen, listen,
This wonderful sound
brings me back to my true self.

Puppy love...

Puppy love: I wanted a puppy in the worst way when I was young. I read Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows and became infected with puppy love. It has remained my go-to answer for "What is your favorite childhood book?" There are other contenders like A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, a number of the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, but Where there Red Ferm Grows trumps them all. I was reminded of my love of this story twice in recent years; the first time when I recommended it to my voraciously reading son who loved the book as I did, and then again a few years later when I chose to read it out loud to my daughter. At one point I was unable to read the words through my tears, while my daughter sobbed in my lap. When we were done, she said "That's a really good book! It's so sad." We were such a sight...

I SUPPOSE THERE’S A TIME IN PRACTICALLY EVERY YOUNG boy’s life when he’s affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love. I don’t mean the kind a boy has for the pretty little girl that lives down the road. I mean the real kind, the kind that has four small feet and a wiggly tail, and sharp little teeth that can gnaw on a boy’s finger; the kind a boy can romp and play with, even eat and sleep with.

I was ten years old when I first became infected with this terrible disease. I’m sure no boy in the world had it worse than I did. It’s not easy for a young boy to want a dog and not be able to have one. It starts gnawing on his heart, and gets all mixed up in his dreams. It gets worse and worse, until finally it becomes almost unbearable.

--Opening of Chapter 2, Where the Red Fern Grows

Never Cry Wolf: I fantasized about Malamute-Husky-Wolf mixes after meeting my dream-dog in the wintery mountains of Garrett County, Maryland. He was 1/2 wolf, had the most piercing eyes, and was as well behaved as any dog I have ever seen. His owner let me bury my hands in his dog/wolf's thick winter coat... and this majestic winter-creature just leaned into me and let me hug his neck. I was in love... and had a million questions for his owner. My God, I wanted a dog just like his! [I cannot remember how young I was when I had this encounter, but young enough that the memory is vague in detail, and intense in emotion...] I was dismayed to learn that the wolf in the dog made him a bad family dog, and that he was loyal to his owner, but no one else. It was part of his pack mentality. I also learned that his excellent behavior was not the norm for half wolves, and was a product of near constant training. I still wanted one in the worst way possible...

Maximilian: We got a cat when I was seven. He was the coolest cat I have ever met, then and since. He acted like a dog. He walked into a room like he owned it, never acted prissy, and came to bed with me almost every night. I loved my cat for his loyalty to me, and that he would put up with almost anything we kids dished out; hoisting him wrapped in a blanket pouch with pulleys up the stairwell to the second floor, strangle-holds of hugs, and countless hours of patient lying around in sunspots. When I was sad, he seemed to know, and would place his paws on my hands. In my darkest moments in high school there were nights in my despair when I thought my cat was my only true friend. Silly, I know, but perception is everything! He was a unique blend of cat-like independence and dog-like solidness. What an amazing combination of traits. When Max died while I was in college I was grief-stricken. I had no interest in trying to replace him. How could we? But I had learned I was a cat person, yet still had this wolf crush that simmered somewhere in my child-self...

Puppy Love, again: And then I met a girl in college. I had puppy-love of a different sort. It would mature over time and I would spend the next 24 years of my life with her. When we were first courting (in a way) we spent a week-plus in the Keys with some friends. There, we came across a perfect northern-breed puppy with those same steel blue eyes that I loved so much from my childhood-found perfect-dog. This new stranger's puppy was also perfect! I got down in a squat and put my hands out to draw in the little ball of cute perfection... and he walked right past my smiling self to the open hands of my girlfriend. I was so jealous! Didn't he know that I was the one who loved him the most, and deserved to wrap my hands into his soft black and white coat? My girlfriend had told me that she was severely allergic to animals. She wasn't allowed to have a dog. Now she had mine. It was so unfair... He offered her all the love I wanted from him, including licks to the face. I do not like my face licked, but would have accepted it from an untrained puppy that was so adorable, nonetheless. Oh well... And we walked on to gather with friends by the beach and open sea. As we walked I head a muffled voice say "Thee, thith ith why I can't haff a dog." I turned to look at my girlfriend's face—which was so adoringly licked by my puppy a few minutes before—and saw how it was now swollen, puffy, and red. My God, I had never seen such a reaction! I understood for the first time that allergies were not just sneezes and drippy noses. There was no way she could ever have a puppy... ... ... And we married. Puppy dreams were buried for something much, much better...

Dillon Murphy: And the years went by, and my wife got shots and treatments, and more shots... and then one day was told she no longer had dog allergies. I had moved on, no longer wanting a dog—nursing the insatiable longing I had for a cat that could be exactly like my unique childhood friend Max—but reluctantly agreed to allow her to rescue a puppy from a high-kill shelter in Dillon County, South Carolina. Somewhere in early 2013, Riker—an abandoned, sickly, "pure-bred southern black dog"—was rescued, and then brought north on St. Patrick's Day to become Dillon Murphy, my wife's new love...

Puppy Love, yet again: I didn't want a dog anymore. The responsibilities of adulthood and the ideas of care overwhelmed that childhood passion for something loving and fluffy and warm. I was promised that I would not need to do much. I put out arguments against getting him, but once he came north he was family. And you love family "no matter what." They kept their end of the bargain doing the lion's share of the care, training, and work... but I played my part too, helping out more and more as I was able to invest emotionally. And Dillon grew on me. I had to concede quickly that he was the best puppy, because he was our puppy. He often sits beneath my Bodhi Tree and reminds me of the moment. And sometimes he comes to lie at the foot of the bed in the afternoon sun. And he is warm, and soft, and loving... and he lets me wrap my arms around his neck and he leans into me...

The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget...

"Time" —Pink Floyd (recorded 1972)

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away, across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell

"Time takes a cigarette...":  I was born in 1972. Almost 44 years has passed for me, and I am now in that stage that folks call "mid-life." It is a time for reflection (and crisis perhaps), a time when wisdom is supposed to take root (we all know to watch out for these "supposed tos"), and it is a time when often the next stages of life are forced upon us (when we are no longer allowed to be taken care of but when we need to be offering the care). In the 40s, the body begins to lose its elasticity, and the reflexes slow a touch; injuries seem to not heal quite right, but we feel like we should still be in command of it all... And the 50-somethings and 60-somethings just chuckle when I say this... like they know more and aren't telling... Is this how we measure time, in our hair line and laugh lines?

"...puts it in your mouth...": So much about how time affects us seems to be more about our perception of it than of its actual passage. I've been reading up on how our system of time was most likely developed, and much of it goes back to ancient civilizations; the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Concepts based on how many joints can be counted on a hand and numbers easily divisible by others led them to 12s and 60s and eventually seconds, minutes, and hours. The observations and cleverness of people many thousands of years ago led to a pretty orderly system of measuring the passage of that thing that Einstein hinted at being less than constant in extreme circumstances. (Relativity freaks people out!) Orbits around the sun, revolutions on an axis, cyclical patterns of gravity were forced onto us by our very existence, yet we are afforded roughly four or five score trips around a star to figure out what we need, to live how we want, and to perhaps make it all better than we found it as we go. When you are young there is so much time ahead that the fear of a loss of it is not as constant as when you start losing it. Once you have been around for a while, what remains becomes more valuable; the worry over losing that value can be crippling if not put in its proper place...

"...You pull on your finger...": But it is not the measure of time that affects us nearly as much as our perception of its rate of flow. I remember the weeks, then days into hours that led up to Christmas-eve celebrations in my house when I was little. Our house would be transformed into a candle-lit sanctuary from normalcy—from the days at school and work and dealing with all the hard parts of growing up. Holidays in my house were far from that normalcy. Darkness all around with the hope for cold and snow outside, contrasted by greens on the mantle and banister, and flickering flames on the tables and eight foot tree just topping out at the ceiling of the living room. Little lights everywhere and presents to be given and opened. Such wealth of love, and warmth, and "stuff"—added to a an intimate dinner of picking-food served outside the normal space of the kitchen or dinning room—made Christmas-Eve one of the best events of the year! Deviled eggs, banana bread, strip cocktail, cheeses & breads, herring salad (yuck), cookies, crackers & dips, and wine were the menu served buffet style. We ate by the tree, plates on our laps, all around that magical timeless escape from the mundane. No phone calls were allowed in, save the one that inevitably came from Opa. What a night! And the weeks leading up to it slowed; and the days before were anxious, and the hours, torturous. The only redeeming part was that Christmas Day was as lazy as a summer day in the country with nothing to do for miles around... Lazy until he waves of guests arrived for a late afternoon dinner and desert in front of the crazy German family's candle-lit tree. Time seemed to stand still in those moments after arriving home from church on the 24th in the early evening until the next afternoon. But the time leading up to those moments slowed and crawled until it was almost unbearable... Perception is everything, despite what science tries to tell you!

"...then another finger...": What about those times when we in deep within the fun—whatever it was—and time flies so fast that the reality of a setting sun, or a parent picking us up from the best play-date ever, brings disappointing awareness. Or what about those miserable moments where we try to measure time with footfalls on a dreadmill, or counting feet forward with a 50 pound pack on in the cold pouring rain knowing there's still 2000 feet elevation and four miles to go, or in repetition of a mantra to move forward in time (not sop much as to find inner-peace). In the darkness of a night where anxiety and discomfort chase sleep and reality into the corners, and the clock seems to hold on each moment long beyond the seconds and minutes afforded to it. Or what about the transformative moments when we get lost in a story, and then leave the theater, or put the book down only to realize whole weeks, months, years, had passed in a matter of hours, blissfully lost or gained (depending on your perspective) in the name of adventure...

"...then your cigarette...": As we move through life stages and watch our children accelerate toward the place when they leave our direct care into something better but more lonely for us, we try to capture the moments and slow down the good ones while trying to endure the long ones knowing that time cannot be squandered. I panic when I leave "the moment". I worry that it's all too fast when I am enjoying things, and all too slow when I am worried, sad, anxious...

If I could save time in a bottle The first thing that I'd like to do Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away Just to spend them with you —Jim Croce "Time in a Bottle" 1972

"...The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget...": And then I remember to breathe, to keep my feet on the ground, and feel the earth beneath my weight, imagining it humming as it spins and circles in far greater patterns than I can fully perceive in my smallness...



Section Headings: David Bowie "Rock in Roll Suicide" 1972

L...

The rules are simple. One must type something on Sunday, even when the rest of the country is watching TV and eating fun food, or mocking the whole process...

"something" 

...so there.

(Next week... How do we measure time?)