Not Zen 212: Not Power

wikimedia commons, rene boulay

Not Power

She studied the stretch of land between the sea and the swamp. With careful her strides, she turned towards a grove of reeds in the swamp.

The flamingo had decided to stay here, among the ferns and trees, the sand and rocks, the mud and beetles. She had remained when the flock left. She had known, when it happened, that her leaders were wrong to go. Besides, she liked the other denizens of the isthmus, the turtles, the alligators, the fish, and the flies. She enjoyed the drama of the marshlands and, on the other side of the land, the calm rhythms of the sea.

"Good morning," said another flamingo. This one and a few others had returned a few days ago when the flock had broken up, dispersed by a storm.

She nodded to her friend. Although her friend preferred the sea, she herself felt drawn to the marshes this morning, so she didn't change course. Her friend followed.

"You have your mystical power today," remarked her friend. Flamingos knew there were souls among them for whom life was different. They didn't always follow the flock and could go their own way. Now her remaining compatriots from her old colony regarded her as one of those. She had known the flock leaders were shepherding the rest into a storm. To her, it had been obvious.

At the time, unfortunately, she had found it hard to describe. The change in the sea waves, the way the wind swept north, how the dragonflies stopped darting, where the small flowers closed, and where the bigger and sturdier tree flowers angled to their boughs, all these things added up. No single, particular thing meant a storm was coming from the west. But when they were understood together, these things let her know.

She walked her usual path for a moment but she stopped. The alligator who liked resting on this muddy bank had adopted his fear pose. Her friend started to pass behind the alligator.

"No, wait," she said.

A moment later, the alligator pushed off the bank. In the dark water, he met a shadow. The two reptiles burst to the surface. They wrestled for a moment, reasserting the boundaries of their territories, reminding each other of their strength. To them it was a dangerous ritual but a normal one. For any other animal caught in the roil of the waters, it would have meant injury and death.

"Oh my," said her friend.

"It's fine now." She resumed her walk along the marshy shore. Nervously, her friend followed.

At the edge of the marsh, she stopped to nibble the bracken. She picked up a few seeds. She put a claw into the water and dipped in her beak to gather algae and snails. A snapping turtle backed up to watch her. On the other side of the patch of reeds, the terns moved to give her room.

"You have a mystical power," her friend announced. "The turtles feel it, even the alligators."

She thought this was nonsense. Her friend was not observing well, or she was interpreting events according to what she wanted to believe.

"The turtles felt me observing them," she began.

"Tell me more of your mystical power."

She closed her mouth for a moment and stilled her breathing.

"I will try to explain things." She stood, quiet and calm, for a while. Her friend fidgeted. "After a long time in contemplation, I realized I can detach myself from what I wish to be true. I can release myself from desires."

"Is that a power?"

"Perhaps not. The detachment is natural. But the consequences may seem powerful to you." She was sure everyone had the potential to release themselves from desires. "With detachment comes a sort of inner peace. The yearning part of your mind becomes quiet and doesn't interfere with the rest."

"That doesn't sound like a power." Her friend gazed around at the reeds, the flies, and the turtles. But then she said something perceptive. "Our leaders flew into a storm because they had the idea they should. You knew they were wrong."

"Yes. They followed their desires." This was the part she hoped her friend could see. "They remained attached to the ideas they had formed many days earlier."

"You knew better."

"Observing carefully is a sort of power. You can cultivate the skill of releasing yourself from ideas of how the world should be. You can see a little better about things as they are. You can know there will be a storm."

"That's not enough," announced her friend. "You can do more. I don't want detachment. I want your power to know things. I want the other animals to bow to my presence."

"They do no such thing for me," she replied.

"Well, they seem to do what you want them to do. It's the same thing."

Her friend had observed that she didn't want the animals around her to be other than they were. But she had mistaken the animals being that way as something they did for her. That made no sense. The plants and animals did not behave as she demanded. Instead, she had merely recognized other creatures for what they were.

When she was at her best, she observed what other animals wanted and needed, nothing more.

"You want power," she mused. "And I think I could give you better peace of spirit, better presence of mind, and more loving interactions with the world."

"Those are not enough."

"Those things seem small to you." She shook herself and resumed walking. "But the problem lies in your wanting. Even a small achievement would need to start with your detachment from wanting power."

She realized that her friend, and perhaps all the other flamingos, did not really seek any form of enlightenment. They wanted power. With a deep breath, she gazed across the reeds. She observed the turtles, the tadpoles, and the flies. Her feet took her farther, where her heart directed, and she wandered along the edge of the swamp.

Eventually, her friend grew tired of walking beside her in silence. She wandered away, back towards the sea. 

Not Even Not Zen 450: Poem - Hug the Thornbush

Hug the Thornbush

You can call me stupid.
You can call me dumb punk
And tell me to go hug a thornbush.

I call myself names, too.
Why wouldn’t I?
I hug thornbushes.
And they feel good.

I know people say
Why pierce your flesh with thorns?
You will cut and bleed,
You will shiver and cry,
Your body will be covered with scars.

I know people say
Why would you hug a thornbush
And I reply, why wouldn't I?

I will cut and bleed.
I will shiver and cry.
My body will be covered with scars.

Someday I'm gonna make it.
I'm gonna be one, big scar someday.

You can call me stupid.
You can call me dumb punk.
I embrace those names. I hug bad things.
I hug thornbushes.
Why wouldn’t I?

If I'm too dumb and ugly
For people to hug
I'm gonna be one big scar.

I know people say
Why would you hug a thornbush
And I reply, why wouldn't I?

Scars make flesh thick and ragged
They make you tough.
You get better at hugging thornbushes
and that’s going to be my life.

Call me what you want.
Stick me full of thorns.
I embrace it all.
Why wouldn’t I?

Look at me, smelling like roses
And my body one big scar.
 

 

 - Eric Gallagher 

 

 

Not Zen 211: Strong Recovery

via wikimedia commons, matt felperin

Strong Recovery

The male cockaded woodpecker took longer than his neighbors to emerge from his nest. His neighboring home builders had left themselves large, open doorways. He had made his as small as possible. He could barely squirm through. When he finally popped out, he ruffled and smoothed his feathers. He gazed up at the newcomer to the neighborhood, the female.

She had arrived and sung out, presumably answering a male call she'd heard. She rested on a branch overlooking the homes built by the single males. Her plumage looked crisp. As she hopped to a higher branch, he saw her feathers shone with silver, black, and white in the pattern of a lacebark pine. The cap feathers on her head were dark. She had a silvery cockade stripe on the side, very attractive.

Although she looked no more than a year old, she gazed at the five roosts with a calculated eye. He felt his heart go out to her, seeing how she had judged the roosts and found them lacking. That was the right way, he felt.

"Over here," called one of his rival males. He had a beetle dangling from his beak. "Over here!"

"Hey pretty, hey pretty," called another.

The female puffed herself. Then she flew to a lower tree to reach the male who was offering her a beetle. She accepted his food. She leaned into the door of his home and inspected it. A moment later, she popped out and strutted along a branch away from him. She studied the others.

Finally, she spotted the latecomer. He stood straighter under the weight of her skeptical gaze. She watched him for a moment. She tilted her head. Her decision made, she fluttered over to him and alighted on a branch in his tree. Now that she was close, he could smell the old grove that had formerly been her home, a musty scent. 

"I didn't realize there was another roost here," she said. "Where did you come from?"

He pointed with his beak in the direction of his door. The female studied the tree trunk a while before she spotted it. He had taken care to make his home as invisible as he could. He wondered if he would regret it. But he saw that she wasn't skeptical only about him. She was that way about everything.

He found that he liked it. Her cautiousness gave him hope.

"How long did this take you?" She flapped and hopped to a branch near the entrance. She peered in. "Oh, it's large!"

"I took my time," he said.

"May I go in?"

"Yes." He refrained from saying, 'I made it for you.' Even if he hoped this would soon be her home, it was his alone for now. She was polite to ask.

The female squeezed in through the door more easily than he did. He gave her a moment so her eyes could adjust. Then he clambered in to join her. She studied the nest at the bottom. Her stride took her to one of the pools of sap he had built along the sides. The smell of resin startled her, he saw. Her mouth fell open.

He felt he should apologize for how much protection he had built into his roost

"It's not that I can't defend us," he said. "My home was attacked when I was young. Hatchlings can't fly, so I was trapped with a snake. It climbed up from a lower branch. Then it ate my brothers. But it couldn't reach me or my sister through the ramp of sap my parents built."

"And so you have pools ready to pour down the sides of the tree. I have seen one before. But you have three."

"My father made a single reservoir. After he used it, the sap dried. And there was another snake." He gazed at the narrow entrance, which was the source of their limited light in the home. "There can be more than one snake."

She shivered.

"When I was young," she murmured to him. "A bobcat came to my nest. It could fit the whole front of its body through our door. It took all of my siblings it could reach, all in its claws. So fast."

He nodded. A great cat would do that, of course. It was amazing she had escaped.

"Yours is the first roost," she observed, "where I feel safe."

"Would you defend our home?" he asked. Suddenly, he felt this was an important question. In his heart, he had committed to her. Now he was struck by a sense of fear. He needed to know more about her. "Not from a bobcat, I mean. No one could."

"From a snake? A squirrel? A crow? Yes." She stood a little taller. "All of them, yes."

She shivered her feathers. Her gaze passed over the tiny, narrow door above and to her left. She hopped toward the northmost pool of sap and tapped it with her talons.

"You are better for the snake," she said.

"You are wiser for the cat," he replied. "Sometimes these things make us better."

They gazed around the home in silence for a minute. She avoided catching his eye.

"This is very fine," she said. She pushed against him. She had to test him, he understood, to make sure his body was strong. He knew he was tough. He pushed back, prompting her to laugh. She hopped in a circle and returned to him. "Oh yes, this is very fine."
 

Not Zen 210: The Ancient Decision

CC BY-SA 4.0

The Starting Decision

"You're a guest, man, but you sat in." The leader turned in his chair. He gestured to the circle of people around him. "Everyone else shared a childhood story. If you sit in, you have to share, too. That's the rule."

"That is the rule," his wife agreed. He hadn't paid much attention when she had warned him the day before.

He sat up. He hadn't participated beyond being present. Out of politeness, he had listened to each story and to the ensuing discussion. No other, deeper thoughts about the therapy session had occurred to him. He had spent his time trying to learn everyone's name. He knew his wife loved the group.

He was pretty sure he would be seeing more of the members. He had already gone to dinner with a married couple that his wife knew from the therapy sessions.

"Okay," he said. He nodded to the members around him while he tried to remember what they had each said. He needed to gauge the severity of their tales of childhood. Everyone had childhood trauma. Growing up was that way. Parents set rules. They enforced boundaries. Inept parents set them inconsistently and enforced them arbitrarily, which created greater traumas and confusions for the children. But even good parents caused tears. And every generation had its failings. It was up to the next generation to improve.

"Pull your chair into the circle, please," said the group leader.

"Fine. Okay, this is a thing my father did." He pulled his chair closer, settled into it, and glanced at his wife. She nodded for him to go ahead. He related a brief story, although still a longer one than he would have liked, about a type of punishment his father had exacted.

After most of the stories, members of the group chimed in with supportive statements. Sometimes they didn't say anything insightful. Still, he was aware that their words were meant to at least acknowledge the shared experience. After his story, people fell silent. They looked at one another. They looked at his wife. She nodded to them. What her nodding meant, he couldn't guess.
 
"Uh, how often did this happen?" asked the group leader.

"Every week or thereabouts." He had lived without that particular punishment for as long as a month, sometimes, in the summer. But he had endured flurries of it, day after day, at other times of the year. "Until I grew up and left home."

Finally, the group leader ventured an opinion, cautiously. One or two others thanked him for sharing. The session timer rang. At the tone, everyone shuffled to their feet. They looked relieved. One of the men nodded to his wife. Again, he couldn't see the meaning of it. And afterward, everyone avoided him. They kept their distance from his wife, too, although he had arrived at the end of these sessions before and he had seen her trade hugs with the other women.
 
His wife took him by the arm, as she usually did. She led him to the waiting room and took her sweater off the coat rack. For a moment, she gazed up at him and opened her mouth to speak. Then she glanced around and took a deep breath.

Outside, in the cool evening air, she finally found her voice.

"Why aren’t you hobbled by trauma, like the others?" she asked. "Or angry like me? I knew what your father did to you. And that he did more. The others didn’t know. Just me. And to me you seem so healthy."

"Am I?"

"You act it. You say it, sometimes." She swayed for a moment, as if leaving the emotional trauma aside for a moment and remembering to flirt. She smiled. "I've always liked it."

"We are supposed to transcend our parents." It was a principal he had read in a book as a child. The concept had stayed with him. "My father never had a father, so he seems terrible when I talk about him. He wanted to be a good parent, sort of, but he couldn't get there. He did bad things. After I left home, I decided it shouldn’t bother me."

"Just like that?" she narrowed her eyes.

"I had to work at it for years. You know that." She had quizzed him thoroughly after they married, as if she had forgotten to do it before, which was the case. The change in status from girlfriend to wife had awoken a fresh set of concerns in her. "It's not like I could transcend everything that happened to my family all at once."

"You did it, though."

"I worked for years to improve. Although, yes, the change started with the decision. You have to decide you're going to get better."

 

Not Zen 209: The Right Fit

from wikimedia - helmut schaar

 The Right Fit

In a large company with many departments, the management team promoted a woman to lead their worst-performing research office. In her first month, the woman reviewed her staff assignments. She moved some people into technical positions, others into clerical work, and made a few of her staff into supervisory specialists. Then, for her most controversial move, she demoted her second in command. She didn't lower his salary but she restored him to a research position.
 
Many of her staff and some of her peers wondered if she didn't want competition from a senior researcher.

Two months later, her oldest section chief retired, which opened up the technical lead job. Her company told her she could fill it with an in-house hire or an outside researcher. During the next month, she interviewed a dozen candidates. Eventually, she decided to hire the man she'd demoted. Her supervisor objected.

"You didn’t like that man!" the boss said after calling her into the central office. “Are you admitting to a mistake?”

"This is a different job,” she explained. She stared at other woman for a moment and realized her supervisor, wasn’t much older than she was. Her hair was still dark. 

The boss had started out as principal investigator instead of getting promoted to the position; and then she had advanced quickly. She was known for her insight into science and to the people conducting it, so it was alarming to have a disagreement with her. 

“It’s a job he excels at,” she continued.

“It looks bad.”

“Well, it isn’t. When I demoted him, I said he was a good worker but not the right fit for the job." She put her hands on her hips as she gazed around the office. There was a lot of wood furniture. It didn't look like the labs.

"I thought you were being polite." The older woman leaned back in her chair.

"Isn't he actually an great worker?" She posed a question to which they both knew the answer.

"Interesting." Her supervisor nodded. "No one thought you realized that he was."

"Doesn’t this move put him in the right job now?"

"Yes.” The chief swiveled in her chair. She stared at something beyond her office window.

After a moment, the younger researcher decided the discussion was done. She turned to go.

Behind her back she heard her supervisor whisper,

"Maybe so are you."

 

Not Zen 208: The Panicked Crowd

from wikimedia, totodu74

The Panicked Crowd

In a shallow lagoon, reef lizardfish took advantage of the natural protection of a hollow in the sea bottom. They rested, surrounded by the coral and rocks. Soon, their scales adjusted color and they blended in with the sandy floor. They barely moved, drifting just enough to let water slip over their gills. They lay in wait for their prey. 

A pair of blue crabs crept across the edge of the rock shelf. 

Later, a few more crabs shuffled through. Two of them clambered over the ridge of coral and down into the hollow. Then a larger cast arrived. A handful of the crustaceans passed close to the predators. The lizardfish did not lunge at them. They waited. The fish were still the color of sand and hard to see, motionless and impossible to detect. They knew the tide was going out. More crabs would come. 

The numbers of travelers continued to rise. When the hollow started to fill, the crabs finally noticed the lizardfish. As they did, the predators attacked. 

The entire cast of blue crabs exploded in panic. Many of them ran in random directions. A few scrambled to the top of the rock shelf and escaped. Others gathered in a defensive structure, a ball of pincers facing all directions.

In the midst of the puffs of sand, the scuttling legs, the claws, and frenzied motion, the lizardfish each struck once. They plucked panicked stragglers as they ran by. Only a single lizardfish failed to find an easy target. That one tried to take her victim from the defensive ball of crabs. However, she found it too spiky. 

"Run, little ones," she said. She feinted at the defenders. 

Several crabs shuffled to avoid her but they did not leave the group. They did not waver as they kept their pincers raised high. 

"Run!" shouted a crab at the top of the rock shelf, above. She waved to her recent mate. He gazed longingly at the ridge of the hollow and the safety there.

"Don't be foolish," said the crab next to him. 

"But these lizardfish," he complained. "They will take one of us." 

"Hold steady," the big crab insisted. 

The lizardfish kept diving at them. Once, the biggest blue crab managed to snip an edge off a fin. However, after eight false strikes, one of the crabs broke position. He and ran for the west wall of slope. A second crab followed. The lizardfish grabbed the second one. Like the rest of her school, she crunched the body of her prey with her mighty jaws and sharp, thick teeth.

"You see?" said the big crab to the one whose mate awaited them at the edge of the hollow. "When you panic, you make it easy for the predator. When you calm yourself and direct your actions with care, you make it harder. Now, finally, we may climb this rocky ridge together."

"Still together?" the smaller crab asked as he watch the lizardfish eat.

"It's a small thing," replied the other. "But yes. Not panicking and achieving something small is worthwhile. Your see? Come, do another small thing." 
 

Not Even Not Zen 449: Biomythography - Note 153, The Plate Dancers

The Plate Dancers

In the Hampshire College library, late at night on an upper floor, I found it. My memory of the moment is so dim, I'm not sure if I simply thumbed through my notebook to find a copy that I had been given previously or if I located the original article somewhere in the journal archives. In either case, I started reading. And I understood it was going to be as good as one of my classmates described it to me when he enthusiastically endorsed the multi-page feature in Science magazine.

The piece told a story about our physics professor, Herb Bernstein - or rather, it described his solution. He and a partner had worked out a valid model for an integer spin value of a neutron. They had based their work on an inspiration Herb had while watching African plate dancers. During a recital at his university, the dancers had balanced a stack of plates in one hand, twisted their wrist to turn the plates 360 degrees counterclockwise and then, instead of turning back, they had kept turning the plates counterclockwise again.

They made a complicated motion to do it. However, it wasn't so complicated that Herb couldn't duplicate the motion while he was sitting in the audience. Years later, at Hampshire College, Herb repeated his dance move for us in his quantum physics class.

"See?" he turned his arm and wrist. Then he twisted again. "Look!" 

After the first move, the dancer's arm is out of position. After the second, both the stack of plates and the hand holding them return to the start. It takes two turns for a dancer to come back to the original position. The move looks beautiful, even when done by an amateur.

When Herb first saw the performance, the dancers had made the moves seem natural. Their arms flowed like water. Plates rose and fell in a hypnotic pattern. Of course, Herb found that he couldn't balance things on the plates the way the professionals could but, as he imitated them, he realized that two spins could indeed return to the same place. For a physics student, it was an important realization.

The spin value of a neutron had been defined as a fraction. Apparently, that bothered some theorists at the time. Herb realized the spin value could also be two, a whole number. He was pretty sure the math would work. The formal announcement of his full-blown theoretical model was hailed as a success. 

Looking back on it, though, the theory never became mainstream. The math seemed to work but the experimental verification of the model somehow never panned out. The spin value of a neutron is still accepted as 1/2, which makes it a type of fermion. At the time, the wonderfulness of Hampshire College, a place where I could hear about why neutrons have a spin value and how it can make intuitive sense - even though it doesn't have to - made me love the promise of the place. I read the physics story with a joy I had usually associated with science fiction.

The college library was a cozy place to study. The friendliness of the Hampshire classes, the ability to design our own coursework, and the closeness we could have with professors all added up to my re-discovering a love for learning - or maybe I was discovering it, really exploring it, for the first time. Pursuing my interests was a powerful sensation. The idea that I could learn something for the pleasure of it and not be measured by anyone was a liberating one. So was the concept that I could self-teach or direct my own intellectual explorations.

For me, an era of passively accepting what someone decided I should learn was coming to an end, although I didn't know it. I was starting to realize I could participate in the decision, at least. I could push back against a nonsensical requirement. I could reach out and choose to learn something that only I felt was related to what I needed to know. 
 
It was a daunting idea for the lazy me. When you explore an area on your own, well, you're on your own. There's no one to help you, no one to make the material easier. There's no one to figure out how one field of discourse applies to another, no one to say that boolean logic can apply to electricity, or that botanical details apply to poetry, or that a plate dancer's arm movement can apply to particle physics. Sometimes, that has to be you. 

Not Even Not Traveling 78: Canada - Touring the Countryside

Touring the Countryside
and Running Out of Chores

My wife took it upon herself to do deep cleaning in Donna's house. Basically, when she realized she couldn't finish the gazebo alone - we were going to need multiple sets of hands working at the same time, one of them belonging to someone tall - she started looking for other ways to help.

Diane can be surprisingly thorough about cleaning. Well, I've lived with her for over thirty years so it's less of a surprise to me nowadays. But I haven't stopped being impressed.

1. She decides an area, which may look tidy to me, is hiding dirt
2. Usually, she shows me a cleaned spot, proving, for instance, that the tan-colored tiles should be white
3. Then she approaches the dirt with so much determination you can see the steam rise off her (and off the floor or counter or the couch, which is sometimes, I admit, the color of our pets)
4. If I volunteer to help, she growls until I go off to my own project
5. When we next meet, the offending area is a different color

I grew up in a household of all boys. I had not been aware that dried soap counted as dirt. I'd considered it to be the opposite, in fact. Soapiness was, by definition, cleanliness. That's why I had never been bothered by the twenty years of soap scum on the walls of the shower I grew up using. Whereas Diane had to disinfect her eyes to look at it a second time.

Our host woke up to the partial results of my wife's cleaning decision. Fortunately, Donna could see Diane was in an unstoppable 'don't even look at me I'm working' mode and decided to roll with it. In fact, she labored side by side with Diane. And after a while, she decided to pursue her own project, which was finding someone to help build the gazebo.

She found someone, too, a young man named Jack who was looking for side jobs.

As they introduced me to him, Donna and Diane mentioned that he was building the gazebo for me and that I wasn't going to help. He was mildly amused to see mosquitos start to land on me while we shook hands.

"Oh, I see," Jack said. He continued to smile. In fact, he kept his pleasant attitude the whole time he worked on the gazebo roof.

I put on layers of clothing and insect repellent so I could finish stacking the woodpile. When I finished and cleaned up after myself, I headed indoors again to telework. (I've been leaving that out of the Canada trip descriptions, I guess. I was doing a lot of remote work and it helped extend our stay.)

A few hours later, Jack was still laboring away on the gazebo roof. Donna and I had reached stopping points in our telework. We took a look at the construction process but it was clear Jack didn't need help yet. With Diane, we decided we could afford to take a break while Jack continued. This would be our third visit to Tweed.

It's a really nice town. Tweed is so cozy (and pretty) that it reminds me of Frederick, Maryland in years past, back when Frederick was not so cosmopolitan. We visited the shops. Diane and Donna bought gifts. I got a paperback at one of the bookstores. In an herb shop, Donna finalized our plans to visit a lavender farm. 

Finally, we headed home and helped finish the gazebo. Jack had done a lot but the job needed many hands near the end to move multiple pieces in place at once. With the aid of insect repellent and a special candle, we all helped, even me.

#

We knew the next day would be our last in the area - at least for a while.

At the lavender farm, we saw yet another gift shop. Of course, we'd seen plenty in Tweed. This one, isolated, sold more product categories than the farm grew in its crops. The shelves offered herbal products from neighboring and not-so-neighboring farms. Now, if you think I was there because of the company I kept, Donna and Diane, you would be correct. But I also didn't mind. I'd never been to a lavender farm. I had never even considered that someone would farm it. But they do.

We got a tour of the lavender plants and the four types on the farm. We picked our own lavender, which sounds fine enough although it mostly involved crouching at various spots in a field while bees conducted surveillance on us.

Afterward we sat down to a lavender-themed menu — lavender scones, lavender honey, lavender shortbread, lavender soda, and a tea that tasted like someone had brewed a bar of fancy soap. We drank it because it's rude not to and talked about the trip and the general mystery of rural Ontario. Rather sadly, we started planning our drive back home.

The drive north had not been too bad. But it was hard to look forward to our return. Queensborough had been beautiful and Donna, a great host. The weather had seemed lucky, too, almost always perfect.

#

Rural Canada - A Review

Don't go for the food. But aside from that, it's highly recommended. Really.

Queensborough: small. It's got a hundred people. And it's a difficult place to visit unless you know someone there. If you do, it's fantastic.

Madoc: The town's principal export is the outdoors. It has got enough people to need a few stores. Still, if you visited Madoc deliberately, it would probably be to spend time in the parks. There are a lot. On the whole, there are fun things to do in the Madoc area but you're probably doing them on the back of a horse or a snowmobile.

Tweed: a full, if small town. Good stores. Pretty. Tweed is what economists call 'emerging,' which means there are three new stores and an optimistic sign advertising a fourth if you know what I mean. The town has a hotel and bed and breakfast apartments. It seems interesting in the longer term, too, because I know that I, at least, looked around and considered living there. I don't know where I could work but I saw plenty of homes where I'd like to move in.

The "Front Porch Ruckus" music festival was great. It wasn't a singleton attraction, either. Tweed hosts lots of other events during the summer. There are film festivals, art events, music, and more.

For a lot of the time, the folks in rural Canada - all over the small towns - did not look at their phones. They looked at one another, at us, or at least at their pets. People were hardly ever so busy they couldn't hold a pleasant conversation. And the dogs were friendly.
 

Not Even Not Traveling 77: Canada - The Tibetan Temple

The Tibetan Temple

For days, Donna had been offering to take me to a Buddhist temple. And for days, I had felt unsure about going. I know my reaction was puzzling to Donna and my wife. They were keenly aware I had been reading about Buddhism and talking with Buddhists for forty years. Why wouldn't I want to visit a temple?

There are so many reasons, I'm not going to try to list them. Among them, though, are how Western Buddhism, Zen, and Pure Land Buddhism are all different from one another. Navigating among the slightly different faiths can get tricky. And then there's Tibetan Buddhism, which is differently different from any of those. 

Pure Land emphasizes scriptures and devotion to Amitabha. (I realize I'm being so brief it seems flippant.) Zen focuses on meditation and koans. Western Buddhism is in the process of sifting through the parts of the philosophy that appeal to westerners. Tibetans, on the other hand, incorporate a lot of rituals, tantra, incarnations (think 'saints' if it helps), and a hierarchy of instructions under the guidance of lamas. It's not like the others, at least outwardly. And Tibetan temples, as all buildings do, tend to gather a lot of material goods. 

No one has a choice about being material. We live in bodies. Lots of other forms of Buddhism - there's plenty more - have temples hosting rituals and sacred objects. But avoiding attachments is a significant, guiding principle behind the practice of Buddhism in all its forms. That's why it can feel odd to be confronted by the imperfect people, their ceremonies, and their attachments to rituals or ritual objects. 

We were going to have a guide, though. That seemed helpful. He was a longtime resident of the area. He worked as a volunteer caretaker at the temple and he could meet us there. Plus, Donna's friend who knew the guide also sounded like an appealing person to meet. Basically, I thought we would at least meet good people if Donna could make the logistics work.

In the end, she did. Donna made the friendships and appointments line up. And so I leapt at the chance to go.

We arrived at the compound to discover a closed gate. That was usual. Donna's friend had the key to the gate. We rolled on in after shutting it behind us. The place looked beautiful. It also seemed deserted, which I hadn't expected. I didn't understand how the temple made sense here, how it did its business. 

The roof of one of the buildings was slate red. Someone had painted its walls a warm yellow, too. I hadn't expected the colors. The place didn't seem as fancy as some other holy sites or even churches downtown. Likewise, we parked behind a second building that was mostly red and yellow, this one with aluminum siding to keep out the Canadian winter weather. At the door, we met a gray-haired couple. They seemed to be weeding and doing chores. Sure enough, one of them introduced himself as Sangha, our guide to the grounds. The woman was his wife, apparently also a volunteer.

"I'll have to replace this weather stripping," he said as we stepped through the door. He ran his hand over the left side of the doorframe. 

He and his wife were the caretakers for the temple when the monks weren't around, which was most of the time. The monks treated the temple as a summer retreat and a place to hold special events, perform ceremonies on holy days, and hold meditation seminars.

Sangha gave us a private tour. How often do you get a private tour of a holy place? I gathered he had given it a few times before, though. And a minute or two after we started, his manners changed. He asked a few questions. I asked a few in return about Tibet, about the ceremonies, and suddenly he relaxed and grew more energetic. Any reservations I'd had about the visit melted away in the face of his warmth. 

He seemed delighted, and a little surprised, to find I was genuinely interested in Buddhism. And I wanted the details about Tibet and the history behind the establishment of the monastery. He beamed. He wasn't a dogmatic ritual-minder at all. And Sangha wasn't simply a janitor, either. He was spiritually drawn in. He took care of the trappings around him but he didn't seem particularly attached to them.

He didn't quiz me about Tibetan incarnations or rituals. Instead, he told us about how some of the art had arrived here after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, about the practices held here, the statues of incarnations, and more. He seemed happy I knew enough about Tibet to understand details of its geography and history.

(I absolutely did not let on that some of what I remembered came from reading and re-reading Seven Years in Tibet. I was pretty sure everyone even slightly associated with Tibetan Buddhism must get tired of hearing about a single book, however popular and respectful it is.)

As it turned out, Sangha was giving us a tour of the retreat house. It had once been a hunting lodge. To the south of us lay the lama house.

(Backstory on the corporate hunting lodge: for their very first hunting trip at the lodge, the company bosses invited their secretaries with them, not their wives. When the group returned home, someone told one of the wives. And that was the beginning of a scandal, a lawsuit, and the end of the hunting lodge. Apparently, there was never even a second company trip.) 

The monastery bought the land after the lodge closed. Monks converted it to a holy site. It was attractive because the lodge sat with a mountain to the north (as required for temples in Tibetan Buddhism) and a river to the south (again a requirement). All that remained was to orient the monastery facade to the south or east. (They did both.)

I could have spent hours talking with Sangha. We covered philosophy, history, and religious ceremony. He was spiritual and thoughtful. His wife stepped between us to remind him of the time and the chores he still had to do. Maybe everyone started looking at their watches, too. (I don't really think so, though.) 

Normally, when I describe a place I try to recommend it or warn everyone against it. This time, well - I highly recommend getting a private tour of a Tibetan Buddhist temple, especially if Sangha is your guide. It seems sort of hard to arrange, though. 

Next: Touring the Countryside

Not Even Not Traveling 76: Canada - Even More Golf

Canadian Golf

The rules may be different. 

We set out the next morning for golf our lessons, which required a drive of twenty minutes. From Queensborough, it always seems to take twenty minutes. To anywhere. This might be a rule specific to rural Canada: no matter where you are or where you're going, you will drive for twenty minutes (rule enforced by the Mounties).

Our destination was a golf course in Tweed, where we met our instructor, a young man who I am fairly confident was old enough to drive. He wore a light blue shirt, khaki shorts, a baseball hat, and sunglasses.

He led us past the driving range and past the putting green to a fairway just east of those. On the way, he grabbed a super-bucket of golf balls. He seemed to have picked our spot based on my request to learn the fundamentals — chip shots, putting, a whole beginner's curriculum. He started in the half-sleepy way of a young man who has taught the same lesson before and will again.

After rubbing his bleary eyes, he watched us. He made corrections. He seemed to wake up to our beginner status.

By the time we strolled over to the driving range, our pro seemed almost alert. He spent time on Diane's straight-legged stance, getting her to take more of a karate, bent-knees approach. After that, he seemed almost encouraged. It was like having a driving instructor relax because he thought we were going to stop knocking over mailboxes.

He kept asking us to switch clubs. He wanted us to find the ones best suited to our style and, at nearly three dollars a club, I thought we were doing our fine. But the instructor excused himself for a few minutes. He returned with a new five iron.

I didn't have one good enough for Diane, he thought.

"People lose clubs here all the time," he explained. "We've got a bunch. Don't worry about it."

It wasn't until I was loading the car that I discovered the full scope of the operation: there was already an extra club in my bag, one I hadn't thrifted. Apparently, Paul had done the same thing the first time we played golf. I think he left me with a three iron.

At this point I started to feel a little like the golf equivalent of a stray cat that keeps showing up and getting fed. The more I thought about it, though, the less bad I felt. These people were being nice. Maybe the stereotype is true, and Canadians really are polite, generous, and appalled by my ancient, thrift-store-special golf clubs. Of course, Paul is American, so maybe the attitude isn't limited to Canadians.

I'll admit the alternatives might be simpler: it could be Donna knowing nice people or it could be a small-town way of living. Tweed was the biggest town around for miles. At a booming population of six thousand, however, Tweed could still the kind of place where everybody's business is everybody's business and good people have the power to exert more goodness.

#

In the afternoon, we went to play golf with Charlie. Charlie was a genuine resident of Queensborough. He had bought the old hotel and fixed it up to be his house. When his family were away, he liked to golf. That's why he met us outside of the clubhouse. 

We shook hands and arranged to rent carts. We figured out how to handle our bags and take turns with the clubs. We had gotten lucky with the weather - it was a calm afternoon, sunny, and the temperature was right for short sleeves but not so hot we broke a sweat.

All four of us played. We relaxed and took shots, lost our golf balls sometimes, socialized, sank our putts, and kept moving. Charlie and Donna are neighbors and they started off most of the early conversations. But soon enough we were all making remarks, mostly about golf. Charlie found himself drafted as our golf coach for this session and he was a good sport about it.

The next day, I found another golf club in my bag. I think it must have come from Charlie.

I'm not sure how he did it or why. Anyway, two days later Diane and I returned to the same little golf course, this time for golf lessons. We so clearly still didn't know anything, the instructor seemed a little scandalized. We practiced for a while and then he told us to go ahead and play without him. We hadn't paid the course fees, so it seemed odd. He dashed off to the clubhouse and returned with two sand wedges, one for Diane, one for me.

"People just leave them," he explained. "Don't worry about it."

In the end, we decided to return to the clubhouse after a partial round of golf, and I donated money to a charity golf event prize. After all, I had still not paid my greens fees or even for the golf lessons and I had gathered two more clubs. So I donated. The lady at the front desk, apparently our instructor's mother, seemed very happy about it.

 

Next:  The Tibetan Temple