Hoarded Ordinaries

Whereas most normal folks feel the impress of depression in the winter when light is scarce, I find Nature’s green months to be the heaviest. There’s something about the crowd of foliage that comes towards the end of May that seems sad to me, along with the onslaught of graduations and weddings that invariably follow in June. Summer, it seems, is when time speeds up, careening to an unseen finish, and that always, inexplicably, fills me with an indescribable and utterly illogical sense of dread. Already spring is ending: can August, fall, and then winter be long behind? Having wasted much of my morning doing nothing of note, how easy is it to waste entire days, weeks, months, and years doing nothing but falling aimlessly toward a cataract that has loomed greenly from the get-go?

Summers, you see, are downtime for teachers, a time of free and easy schedules and (in theory at least) long, languid and leisurely days. I’m a schedule-slave: I need the structure, order, and stability of a set calendar of events, due-dates, scheduled appointments and even a laundry-list of to-do’s. When faced with an uninterrupted expanse of time–when faced with something like summer with its opportunities for “relaxation” and “spontaneity”–I literally don’t know what to do with myself. Now I have a chance to kick back and have some fun…if only someone would show me how. Now that I’ve finished the damn PhD, I have time to do all those things I’ve always wanted to do but never had time for…if only I could remember what those things are.

Before you grow too alarmed at what sounds like a major life crisis, let me assure you that I go through this same let-down at the end of every academic year: once the end-of-term crunch has passed, grades are submitted, and we’ve returned from whatever family visit we always seem to cram in right at the end of my academic term, I feel completely and utterly tapped. All my usual coping mechanisms–my tendency to schedule every last iota of time with useful activities so there’s nary a moment to sit and ask “why”–suddenly seem inadequate in the face of a large expanse (an entire summer’s worth!) of uninterrupted, unscheduled time. By the end of each May, I find myself lamenting the fact that I’ve missed another spring migration: by the time the leaves are out, it’s difficult to see treetop warblers, and the leaves always seem to appear when I’m not looking, before I’m ready for them. Before you know it, summer has arrived without giving you enough of a chance to cherish spring: then you barely saw it, now you don’t.

The cure for my malady, of course, is simple: I need a summer schedule. As obsessive-compulsive as it sounds, I need the structure and regularity of a set timeline: I can’t just sleep in until whenever and then rise to do whatever. I need to know that I get up at X and then do Y. I need to have a sense of when I’ll write, when I’ll walk the dog, when I’ll read. I need to know that Monday is when I shop, Thursday is when I do laundry, and Friday is when I take the day off, an entire day to do whatever I want to do, alone or accompanied, at whatever time and for however long as I damn well please. But only after, of course, I’ve done the usual morning ritual, my fidelity to which earns me the right to take the rest of the day off. Doing anything but would be too slovenly, too sinful, too…scary. Time is the ultimate wild beast, but a schedule is the chair and whip with which I run Time though his red-fanged paces: now you’ll roar, now you’ll bow.

When we lived in the Cambridge Zen Center, I was understandably in my element. Zen Center living, like any sort of monastic regime, is perfect for schedule-slaves: wake-up is at 5, bows are at 5:15, chanting is at 5:45, sitting is at 6:30. By the time 7 am rolls around, you’ve done nearly 2 hours of focused practice, so you’re perfectly ready to shower, grab breakfast, and head off to whatever the day holds. To paraphrase that old Army slogan, Zen Center residents do more before 7 am than most folks do all day.

Living outside of a Zen Center is different, and (for me) more difficult. Any and all structure is self-imposed: if I don’t want to practice, I don’t have to. If I want to sleep in, I can. If I want to stop practicing entirely, who will know? If I want to waste my hours, my days, my weeks, and my life, who’s going to stop me, or care? It’s my life to spend as I wish: if given the chance to waste it, I probably will. Some people, I’ve come to believe, shouldn’t be trusted with a lifetime of time, and I’m certainly one of them.

Although I know myself well enough to know that I need a schedule even (especially!) in the summertime, I always hesitate to make one. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get around to making a schedule: surely I deserve another day off. Like Augustine, I pray that God may make me chaste…but not yet. And so every summer I gradually come up to speed, gradually re-introducing those aspects of my temporal “diet” that I absolutely need for my own psycho-spiritual health: I need to walk, I need to write, I need silence and a space for solitude. Those last two I’m still working on: when we lived in the Zen Center, I’d regularly schedule days of silence–days when I’d brush elbows with but not speak to our various house-mates–and I’d schedule several months in advance those weekends and weeks I’d go off by myself for retreat. This ritual was something no one ever questioned: it was just a normal part of my own preventative maintenance, like changing the oil in one’s car.

Since we’ve left the Zen Center, I’ve grown careless with such self-care; these days, I practice sporadically, retreat seldom, and cultivate silence much less than I’d like. Last summer, though, I gradually fell into a mundane ritual that worked for me: I’d wake, I’d walk, then I’d write, first thing, six long-hand pages, everyday. Some days I’d sit, some days I’d bow, some days I’d chant, but everyday, rain or shine, I woke, I walked, then I wrote. Today I did those three things (wake, walk, then write), and I did them in that order even though other things–too, too many other things–intervened. But at least I’m on the road again, gradually, to the place I need to be, a place I can’t locate but at least I can schedule.

Not only did we return to New Hampshire from Ohio to find that the landscape here in Keene is much greener than when we left, there are other slight changes in our neighborhood. At the end of our goes-nowhere street are two grassy fields where neighboring tenants used to park their cars, and now both of these fields are blocked by a series of large concrete cubes. Someone has stretched a span of cord between these cubes with short lengths of yellow “caution” tape tied to it: a clear sign to car-driving evil-doers to do their transgressive parking elsewhere.

Normally I’d not be concerned about a landlord’s choice of where tenants can and cannot park: now that it’s after May 1st, citizens of Keene can park their cars overnight on city streets, and the assortment of junked cars that accumulated in these fields was certainly an eyesore. But the introduction of these yellow caution flags raises an interesting ethical question: are they intended solely for motorists who would park here or are they also intended for camera-wielding neighbors who would walk here?

The dark spot under the spruce tree in the above photo, you see, is the shortcut through the woods I’ve written about before. Although spring mud has kept the dog and me from recently sneaking through this green tunnel, now that the earth is hardening into summer, I fully intend to resume my lot-crossing, and I don’t see why several short lengths of yellow caution tape should keep me from such important business.

Henry Thoreau was a notorious lot-crosser, as I’ve mentioned. When we lived in Boston then in Cambridge, I’d regularly get into the Thoreauvian spirit by trespassing at none other than Walden Pond. Walden, you see, is a popular swimming hole for both locals and tourists, so on a standard summer day, the parking lot and beach are filled to capacity with screaming children and exasperated parents. Since I fall into neither category, I’d shun both parking lot and beach, walking from the commuter rail or hopping off my bike to slip into the woods behind Walden Pond unnoticed. The backside of Walden, beyond convenient access to bathhouse, restroom, and concession stand, is quiet on even the most busy weekend: although everyone goes to Walden to swim and sit on the beach, few folks actually walk around the entire pond. So if you, like me, go to Walden to explore the conservation trails that stretch beyond its borders into Lincoln, MA and beyond, you can walk all day without seeing anyone apart from an occasional horseback rider or mountain biker.

To eshew Walden’s parking lot and beach, however, you have to do a bit of trespassing, a form of civil disobedience that Thoreau himself would relish. For as you approach Walden from downtown Concord, you’ll cross Rt. 2 to find a big wooden sign marking a woods criss-crossed with trails: “NO PUBLIC ACCESS.” This, of course, is the backside of Walden, the very trails that will take you behind the pond toward Thoreau’s homesite, across the railroad tracks then onto the Lincoln conservation trails without ever coming near the parking lot, beach, or park rangers who patrol both.

NO PUBLIC ACCESS. In a move that is simultaneously Thoreauvian and Clintonian (think, “It depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is”), I’d always ignore this sign and enter the woods at this very spot, muttering under my breath, “I’m a private citizen, not ‘the public.’” Hair-splitting? Perhaps. Willful trespass? You bet. A large part of the fun of walking, of course, is the thought that you might be doing something dangerous, rebellious, and even illegal, turning the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other into an act of social subversion.

So will I heed the caution flags and stop walking across this grassy field, my favored shortcut to the abandoned parking lot beyond? Probably not. The dog and I will just walk around those concrete cubes and the cord that spans them. That yellow tape, after all, says “Caution,” not “No Trespassing,” so I’ll take care to watch my step as I keep an eye out for similarly transgressive Cooper’s hawks and waxwings. We lot-crossing, socially subversive, border-transgressing evil-doers tend to step lightly (and carefully) anyway. It’s how we’ve always slipped from mainstream notice, moving like an invisible, silent threat into those very places that The Public perpetually overlooks and avoids.

We got back from Ohio last night while it was still light; the lawn had been freshly mown and everything was wet from late afternoon showers. This morning the dog and I reacclimated ourselves to Keene by doing our usual walkabout the yard, as I’ve described before. Coming home after visiting with family for nearly a week is a welcome sensation, like settling into a pair of old, broken-in shoes: comfort. The house was just as we’d left it, but the yard was greener and lusher: the lilacs bloomed while we were gone, as did the irises and some unnamed white-flowering shrub in the dooryard.

Out behind the house where we rent a first-floor apartment stands a wood storage shed where our landlord stores, I assume, yard tools and other household implements. Behind this shed is an assortment of random stuff: boards, a rusty barrel, a bag of garden mulch, a water-soaked tarpelin. These parts, I’m sure, are merely the pieces of a larger work-in-project, something started then abandoned or something never yet begun. These parts, then, can represent either failed dreams or the hope of a promise yet fulfilled, a dream deferred but not abandoned. Like anything, how you see these parts depends in large part on how you look at them, whether you view the glass as being half empty or half full.

Call me an eternal optimist or merely a slob, but I love this old shed and its sprawling arrangement of stuff, a sentiment I feel as well for our back porch with its motley assortment of castoff kitchen chairs. Although Chris’s Germanic nature would straighten, clean, and tidy-up everything in sight, I have a soft-spot for the random and the ragtag: I prefer the sight of chipped paint on old wood to the pristine perfection of new siding or a pre-fab storage unit newly purchased from the likes of Home Depot.

As I’ve said before in reference to my fondness for old abandoned buildings, I have a strong aesthetic ken for the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, the “beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” Abandoned buildings, old weathered sheds, and cast-off project parts all point to the passage of time; perfectly homogenous houses with “vinyl is final” siding do not. Gradually, those boards out back will return to the earth as will the shed that props them up; so too will the hands that made them as well as the hands that placed them. In winter-time, these parts were covered with snow; today, they lay dappled with damp and shrouded in green, looking entirely different from even a week ago when the yard was browner, colder, and less lush. Viewed from above, as a whole, Keene shows only slowly the passage of time, but when viewed up close, on the level of backyard storage sheds and screened porches, time’s hand comes into sharp focus, its passage and effect looming large amid minutiae.

As I mentioned above, the lilacs bloomed while we were gone this week: their buds had been bursting when we left, and now on our homecoming they are in full flower. Lilac is my mother’s favorite color, lilacs her favorite flower; I remember from childhood a lilac bush that blossomed in the backyard of a house where my parents no longer live, having moved into the house across the alley when I was about eleven. When we were visiting my folks in Columbus this week, I don’t remember whether that lilac bush was blooming, but certainly it must have been: in fact, I can’t even remember seeing that lilac bush even though it surely must still be there in my parents’ old backyard, a yard visible from the rear kitchen window of that house across the alley where they still reside.

In my mind, I remember that blooming lilac bush as being the backdrop of much of my childhood; I remember my mother looking forward to its blooming every year. In my mind, I have a vivid memory of a photo taken beside that lilac bush: after my First Communion, I posed there in a long pink dress with my mother in a long green dress and my father in a shirt and tie. Looking back on that picture now that I’m back in Keene, I am shocked to see that there is no lilac bush in it: in the background instead is the maple tree that grew in the middle of the courtyard between our house and the house next door. The tree that I considered my closest childhood friend, that maple is older and larger today but still flourishing, a new crop of neighbors having put a bench swing under its crowning shade.

In theory at least, it should be possible to date both time and place by the blooming of lilacs and other plants: here in Keene, the lilacs bloomed in mid-May whereas in Walt Whitman’s New York, lilacs were in bloom when President Lincoln was shot in mid-April, 1965. Psychologists say that smell is the most evocative of the five senses: in Whitman’s case, the smell of lilacs always reminded him of Lincoln’s death and the procession of his flower-draped casket across America. In his masterful elegy to Lincoln, Whitman used the image of the flowering, heart-leaved lilac, a western fallen star, and the mournful song of a hermit thrush to represent the tragic loss of a man cut down in the prime of a noble life: a flower-draped casket is the ultimate statement of wabi-sabi, a touch of care that points to life’s impermanence, the way that life continues even though its parts fall prey to time.

Whitman’s New York is several hours south of New Hampshire, as is the Ohio of my childhood: the lilacs in both places will inevitably bloom earlier than those here in Keene. Thus a trip that transgresses latitude will also transcend time: visiting Ohio brings me back to the scenes of my past while submerging me for a time in a natural world several weeks more advanced toward summer than that here at home. Again, these subtle temporal shifts are not visible from a far: they cannot be mapped on any satellite photo or radar scan. But when the parts themselves are viewed apart from the whole, time’s movement across the seasons and across the years is revealed, an unmappable motion that none of our grandest projects or storage sheds can track or ignore.

This is a double-duty blog-entry, serving as my contribution to the Photo Friday weekly challenge, “Parts,” as well as the Ecotone biweekly topic, “Time and Place.”

You would think that in a town the size of Columbus, OH, it would be easy to find a coffeeshop with wifi access. You would think that the swank Starbucks in Bexley, one of central Ohio’s toniest suburbs, would be a magnet for caffeine-addicted techno-geeks. But, alas, the very cool, very large, very funky Starbucks in a renovated old bank in Bexley, Ohio has no Internet access…but the cooler, smaller, funkier coffeeshop next door–a Ma & Pa joint called Cup O Joe–saved the day. Chris has been clean from caffeine for over a month now, and a cup or two of tea is all the caffeine I do in a typical day (if that). But after less than a week of visiting relatives, including (currently) my non-computer savvy parents here in Columbus, we were jonesin’ for an online fix.

Beam me up, Joe.

So here I am at one coffeeshop table sharing an electrical plug with a gray-haired, pony-tailed regular (also a tea-drinker, I might add). Chris, in the meantime, is at a table up front, his battery having died in the middle of his fix, there being only a handful of electrical outlets within “reach” of the wifi network. I can only imagine how desperate and pathetic we each looked as we roamed the joint, laptops, wireless cards, and electrical plugs in hand, trying to find the perfect spot to plug in, like heroin addicts digging for a vein.

Apart from such symptoms of Internet withdrawal, things in Columbus are good. (I’m not an online addict…I swear. I can give it up anytime.) It’s warm here in Ohio, and muggy: both Chris and I had forgotten that Ohio is warmer and more humid than the quasi-arctic reaches of New Hampshire. This morning as my Dad, who turns 70 on Monday, was out digging in his garden, looking to plant a handful of tomato plants by tomorrow, the dog and I enjoyed the warm Ohio air: Reggie lying in the shady grass, me on a sun-soaked lawn chair. Whereas the New Hampshire landscape is still gray with a hint of budding green, Ohio is in full leaf: the trees are green and flowering, and the ground is carpeted with wildflowers. In New Hampshire it’s still winter-thinking-about-spring; here in Ohio it’s spring-definitely-tending-toward-summer.

As I sat in my parents’ backyard watching Reggie pant in the shade and Dad sweat over dry, hard dirt, I realized a nutrient that’s been sorely lacking in my sedentary, New England what-passes-for-a-life: Vitamin D, gleaned from the sun. “Aren’t you hot sitting there in the sun,” my Dad called out as he sat for a breather in the shade, a Willie-Nelson style red bandana around his sweat-beaded brow. “Nope, I’m just sitting here toasting,” I replied as I stretched out arms and legs in that lawn chair, entirely relaxed.

It took driving 12 hours from New Hamsphire to Michigan then another 3 hours to Columbus to get a simple fact through my bony skull: I need more downtime, more time in a sun-drenched lawn-chair or (before that) in a living room rocking chair. I’ve spent too much time this past week, these past months, this past decade movin’ and shakin’: seems it’s time right about now to sit down and rest a spell. Ohio’s good for resting: it’s not like there’s much else to do, unless (of course) you’re plugged into an Internet oasis. Seems about now, though, I need to pull the plug on such sedentary pursuits in order to head back outside, unplugged, for another dose of Vitamin D.

Before you unplug, be sure to click on over to unsettled to wish Kathleen a happy birthday.

One of the readings I assign in my freshman composition classes at Keene State College is N. Scott Momaday’s short essay, “The Photograph.” In it, Momaday recounts a memory from a visit with his father to a Navajo Indian reservation. The elder Momaday brought a camera, and an old Navajo lady begged to have her picture taken then showed up every day thereafter to inquire after the photo. When the photo was finally developed, young Momaday claims that it was a true likeness of the old woman; when she sees it, however, she becomes violently upset and begins to wail loudly and unintelligibly.

I assign this essay as part of a larger assignment sequence on “Capturing Memorable Moments,” which focuses on the arts of photography and videography as memory-makers. (I’ve mentioned before another essay we read as part of this sequence, Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”) The main question I raise as we discuss this essay is the definition of the term “true likeness.” Why was the old woman so offended by a photo that Momaday insists reflected her actual appearance? What is it that makes some photos “look like” a person whereas other photos don’t? As part of this discussion, I ask students to bring in two different photos: on one day we do a “show and tell” with photos that capture a moment of human emotion whereas on another day I ask students to bring photos of a memorable “rite of passage moment” such as a graduation, prom, or birthday.

I’ve done this same “show and tell” exercise for several semesters, and the results are suggestively homogenous. When I ask for “moments of human emotion,” I get the requisite shots of grimacing athletes and joyous lottery winners, but most students bring in candid shots of their high school friends: here’s a gang laughing at their favorite pizza parlor, a handful of buddies drunk and goofy at a football game, or a group of girlfriends giggling at a slumber party. “Moments of human emotion” are always unposed, and they’re never taken by parents. Instead, they result when you hand a camera to either a journalist or a friend, and the shots are almost accidentally composed: at just the right moment, somebody snaps the shutter on a scene that perfectly captures a particular spot in time.

My students’ “rite of passage” photos, on the other hand, are homogenous in a distinctively different way. These photos are always posed, and they are often taken by doting parents. Students bring in childhood pictures of themselves boarding the bus on the first day of school, family snapshots of young couples in formal dress posing beside stretch limos, and photo after photo of beaming students in caps and gowns holding diplomas. These photos all look remarkably alike: your (or your children’s) graduation pictures probably look remarkably like mine. Although the particular nuances of our various rites of passage differ from individual to individual, the posed photographs of these moments typically do not. The similarity of these moments, the homogenous uniforms, props, and poses, allow us to create in our minds a narrative that makes each picture unique: my story is different from yours even though our photos (compositionally) look pretty much the same.

So what is it that makes for a true “true likeness”? Is a candid snapshot of drunken teenagers at a prom after-party more “true” than the staged photos Mom took of the reluctant, corsaged and cummerbunded couple hours before the prom began? Do the impeccably posed and perfectly coiffed visages that smile out from formal portraits express a more genuine image of personality than a blurry snapshot of rowdy, tousle-haired hijinks? Is a “true likenesses” necessarily flattering, and are pictures where we look our best (or pictures where we look how we’d imagine our best to be) necessarily “true”? John Keats notwithstanding, truth and beauty might not be synonymous: a beautiful picture might not be true, and a true likeness might not necessarily be beautiful.

Although Momaday’s essay is titled “The Photograph,” the story of the old Navajo woman and her picture takes up only the last paragraph of the essay. Elsewhere, Momaday spends his time describing his father and the trips they took, the landscape around the Navajo reservation, and his memory of seeing the reservation from the air when he was learning to fly. Why would Momaday spend a mere paragraph talking about the photograph that gives the essay its name, and why would he include these seemingly irrelevant snippets about family and landscape and visual perspective?

My best guess at an answer to this question–a guess that my students usually come to gradually and eventually with some prodding–is that Momaday believes the only way to capture a true likeness of a person, old woman or otherwise, is to describe where they come from, how you relate to them, and how your perspective has changed over time. As such, you can’t possibly judge whether a likeness is “true” unless you’ve spent time with a person, have made yourself at home in their habitat, and have in some way befriended them. Once you speak a person’s language and have walked a mile or two in their shoes, you might possibly be able to see and judge their true likeness. Otherwise, you’re no different than a portrait-taker who is trained to capture perfectly posed but essentially homogenous superficialities.

And so how can I capture the “true likeness” of these past several days? Driving into northern Ohio, Chris and I saw from afar a distant thunderstorm: Ohio is flat, so you can see storm-clouds from a distance, rain appearing on the horizon as a gray slanted smudge. The earth was spread flat as a ruler and divided into agricultural squares of brown and green; as raindrops the size of peas pelted our windshields, we followed the tail-lights of tractor-trailer trucks headed eastbound from Iowa and Nebraska. As we left this isolated thunderstorm, the kind of tempest that brews tornadoes, I marveled at how quickly the sky changed from brooding to gleaming, slants of sun trickling down from pinkly lace-fringed clouds. What camera could capture the scene? Even the most wide-angle lens would be inadequate for such an infinite and quickly changing sky.

Today’s stint with a digital camera and a graduation cake can’t possibly capture the “true likeness” of today much less the course of my academic career, the places I’ve been, or the person I am. And so as Chris’s mom took photo after photo of me with a cake, the task at hand seemed to grow more and more ludicrous: what possibly could these pictures capture other than a several insignificant moments that happened to fall at the culmination of a memorable goal? Is Chris’s mom any more or less qualified to capture my “true likeness” (whatever that is) than any random stranger or professionally trained photographer? What is it that she hoped to capture, and what is it that I would have liked to express? Is “true likeness” able to be captured via any means or media, or is it eternally evolving, as elusive as time itself? Perhaps we cherish photos because we subconsciously recognize that photography is a flawed medium, a way of freeze-framing moments in time in a way that defies the rules of nature and of personality: now you see me, now you don’t as my true nature bends and morphs as quickly as a spring storm-cloud. Are these gestures and poses “me” or are they another disguise: is there an ageless maiden hidden under even the most cantankerous Navajo crone? When it comes to both place and personality, is what you see ever what you truly get?

It’s bright and early, and after I check in with my online classes and pack my (and the dog’s!) bags, Chris, said dog, and I are off to see our families in Michigan and Ohio. I’ll have unpredictably sporadic Internet access until we return to Keene on Sunday, so blogging will be light in the interim. Have a good week, and rest assured I’ll take pictures of the great American flatlands.

Yesterday Chris and I went down to the Cambridge Zen Center to see our friends Kathy and Andrzej get married. This was only the second Buddhist wedding I’ve attended: when Chris and I got married in Ohio a dozen years ago, we had a Catholic wedding.

Buddhist weddings range widely depending on the couple who plans them. When our friends Bill and Natasa got married, Natasa wore our friend Jane’s wedding dress with no meditation robe while Bill wore a shirt and tie. Yesterday, Andrzej wore full Dharma teacher robes and Kathy wore her short meditation robe over an intricately embroidered white smock and simple white skirt. Both couples were married in the Dharma room at the Cambridge Zen Center; both brides were barefoot. Our friends Jane and Piotrek, on the other hand, got married on a seaside cliff in Rhode Island, no Dharma room necessary; I missed that wedding because at the time I was sitting three weeks of retreat at the Providence Zen Center in landlocked Cumberland, RI.

Regardless of where the ceremony is held or what the happy couple wears, Buddhist weddings as practiced in our Zen school have a few core elements. Both the couple and the gathered sanga recite the Threefold Refuge in homage to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The couple bows to one another and offers incense at the altar, and both the couple and the gathered sangha chant. (During yesterday’s ceremony, there was a poignant moment when everyone lost their place in the middle of a chant dedicated to the Bodhisattva of Compassion, a swelling moment of silence suggesting that yes, we’re all in this together.) The couples exchange rings, and yesterday’s ceremony had another particularly human moment when the ring-bearer hesitated to give Kathy’s ring to Andrzej, who then nervously put the ring on Kathy’s right ring-finger. (Oops, dude: other hand!) There is a talk by the presiding officiant as well as various congratulatory talks by friends and family. And then there are The Vows.

The recitation of vows, of course, is the central moment in any wedding, Buddhist or otherwise: in the West, at least, you aren’t really married until you say your “I do’s.” Buddhists, however, are even more vow-crazy than Christians, so although yesterday’s ceremony featured no “I do’s,” Kathy and Andrzej reciting in unision a series of vows based on the Buddhist concept of the Eightfold Path. Through their individual and shared practice, Kathy and Andrzej vowed to keep a correct view, correct thoughts, correct conduct, correct speech, correct livelihood, correct effort, correct mindfulness, and correct meditation. Instead of focusing on what each partner promised to the other, these vows focused on what they each promised to themselves and to all beings: Kathy and Andrzej vowed to see clearly, to let go of attachments, to be compassionate, to speak honestly, to support others in work, to create a loving home, to be mindful, and to walk the bodhisattva path.

These eight marriage vows are simply a variation on the Four Great Vows that Zen Center residents recite every morning:

Sentient beings are numberless
We vow to save them all.

Delusions are endless
We vow to cut through them all.

The teachings are infinite
We vow to learn them all.

The Buddha Way is inconceivable
We vow to attain it.

The eight vows that Kathy and Andrzej recited sound doable enough, but the Four Great Vows point to the utter impossibility of the task. In vowing to find their true selves and save all beings from suffering, Buddhists commit themselves to a daunting task: a real Mission Impossible. Keeping marriage vows is difficult enough: saving all sentient beings, cutting through endless delusions, learning infinite teachings, and attaining an inconceivable path is, well, inconceivable. And when you stumble out of bed at 5:00 a.m. to recite these vows in a bleary-eyed stupor before hitting the mat to do 108 bows, they seem absurdly unattainable.

The message of any wedding and of practice in general, though, is that you try anyway. The thought that you can stay committed to one person for the rest of your life, through sickness and in health, for better and for worse, and in the face of personal and universal vicissitudes is absurdly preposterous: only someone young, idealistic, or in love would dream it possible. But from time immemorial, people have tried it anyway. It isn’t possible to save all beings from suffering–heck, most days I can’t even save myself from suffering–but I try anyway. One of Zen Master Seung Sahn’s favored sayings rings particularly true in this context: “Try, try, try, 10,000 years nonstop.” Or in another Zen turn of phrase, “Fall down six times, get up seven.” The impossibility of the task doesn’t keep us from trying; in fact, the impossibility of the task is the very reason why we try and why we vow to keep trying.

As he and his lovely new bride cut their vegan wedding cake, Andrzej thanked people for coming and reminded us all of a bit of advice Zen Master Seung Sahn once gave a student. “If you want enlightenment, you should become a monk. If you can’t become a monk, get married. And if you can’t get married, go to prison!” The moral of this story, Andrzej pointed out later, is one of commitment: we vow to try, and so we try, and try, and try… “Being married is easy,” my grandfather used to say. “It’s only the first 50 years that are tough.” Zen Master Seung Sahn would agree, I bet. Finding your true self and saving all beings from suffering is easy: it’s only the first 10,000 years or so that’s tough. And so each morning, we renew our own individual vows to practice, to try and to try again, whether married or single, man or woman, monk or layperson. The world is a lovely partner, and each morning (and every moment) we vow to love her and her sentient creatures as best as we possibly can. We have, after all, 10,000 years to get it right.

Congratulations again, Kathy and Andrzej: may you “just do it” for many happy years to come!

The Ashuelot River, like any river, has two sides. You can access the east side of the Ashuelot River by parking in the lot for Blockbuster Video on West Street, where you’ll find the river tumbling over a dam right behind the long-out-of-business Taco Bell. There is a landscaped park on this side of the river which culminates in a smooth gravelled fitness path. This path enters the woods and skirts the river all the way to Route 9 on the edge of town, where it crosses the river on a walkway and then snakes under the road toward Wheelock Park, where it ends.

If you cross the bridge from the landscaped park, though, you’ll find yourself on paths that are unimproved and multiple. These typically muddy footpaths wend their way along the river but also venture into the weedy fields under the electrical pylons: at any moment, you can look up and see the backside of any of a number of West Street businesses. This side of the river isn’t untamed–it is, quite literally, a wasteland choked with litter, criss-crossed with electrical lines, and droning with traffic noise. This western side of the river, though, always feels wilder than the eastern side: the people who walk here are purposefully shunning the joggers, dog-walkers, and other weekend recreationalists to crowd the other, more park-like side.

This morning Reggie and I walked early, around 6:30 am, on this western wild side. Civilized folks were still in bed, it being too early for either church or Mother’s Day brunches. Reggie and I had the muddy woods to ourselves: in the parking lot, we saw one of the homeless guys who lives in the woods making his rumpled way into town, and just across the bridge was a slightly more respectable-looking fellow who was eating a fast-food breakfast out of a bag. By the time Reggie and I had snaked through the woods and walked out under the electrical pylons, this same fellow was walking the tractor-gutted path toward us, toward the woods, where we eventually lost him: if he intended to follow us for nefarious purposes, he should have walked faster.

Although I’m a mud-loving wild-child, I always end up calling Reggie back from his explorations of the western wild side. Today after crossing one tannin-rich rivulet and ending up in a muddy confluence of woodsy trails and streams, I ultimately turned back at the edge of a 4-foot wide dark black stream. Although Reggie forged ahead through the mire, and although someone had made a feeble attempt to span the stream with a sparse pile of saplings and boards, crossing the tributary would have meant wading, and the morning was cold. So I called Reggie back and we returned, but not before we’d both muddied our feet and stumbled upon not one but two different cardboard lean-to’s, the erstwhile resting place of that homeless fellow and his friends. It seems there are more than a few of us who like to walk on the wild side.