June 2010
Monthly Archive
Jun 29, 2010
This past weekend, at the 2010 Master Sand Sculpting Competition at New Hampshire’s Hampton Beach, I came face-to-face with my new American idol: the Coca-Cola Buddha, the patron deity of appetite and abundance.
This wasn’t the first sand-sculpting competition I’d been to; last July, J and I checked out the crumbling masterpieces that remained weeks after the New England Sand Sculpting Festival at Revere Beach in East Boston. But among the various sculptures at that event, there was nothing even remotely Buddhist, so I wasn’t expecting to come face-to-face with divinity on the New Hampshire seacoast this weekend. Like any genuine spiritual experience, my Coca-Cola enlightenment came as a complete surprise.
In the interest of iconographic accuracy, I should note that the Coca-Cola Buddha isn’t technically the Buddha; he’s Hotei, a fat-bellied monk who carries a cloth bag filled with treats. If you’ve ever rubbed a Buddha-belly for good luck, you’ve had a close encounter with Hotei, the Buddhist equivalent of Santa Claus: a fat, jolly man who brings happiness wherever he goes.
Whereas the historical Buddha is an emblem of regal detachment, Hotei is a reminder of life’s sweet abundance. Buddhist monks live on alms, so a fat monk is one that is particularly well-loved. Because Hotei is such a happy, jolly fellow, his begging-bowl is always full, and he is happy to share that abundance with others.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether the Coca-Cola Buddha is the Buddha, as Hotei carries a bag full of lessons all his own. In his guise as the Coca-Cola Buddha, Hotei reminds us to fully enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Whereas the historical Buddha was a pampered prince who renounced his wealth and then experimented with various ascetic practices, you get the feeling that the Coca-Cola Buddha hasn’t said “no” a day of his life.
The historical Buddha eventually abandoned asceticism, deciding that the Middle Way of moderation was the proper spiritual path…and both Hotei and the Coca-Cola Buddha take the Middle Way one step further, suggesting it’s better to occasionally over-indulge and enjoy a soft-in-the-middle belly-laugh (and share that glee with others) than be a Seriously Religious sour-puss concerned only with philosophical intangibles. The Coca-Cola Buddha believes, in other words, that life is short, so have dessert first!
The Coca-Cola Buddha also reminds us to, in the words of a famous soft-drink slogan, obey your thirst. In a time when obesity has become an epidemic, it’s easy to view food and appetite through the lens of fear. As Michael Pollan argues convincingly in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Americans suffer from a national eating disorder whereby we obsess more and more over the healthfulness of our food while simultaneously growing fatter and fatter; in the words of Raj Patel, we live in a world that is simultaneously stuffed and starved. Given conflicting medical reports about which foods are and aren’t good for us, it’s no wonder our mealtimes are often fraught with worry.
The Coca-Cola Buddha offers diet plan far more simple than even the most popular fad or fast: when you’re hungry, eat; when you’re thirsty, drink. This is the wisdom of intuitive eating, a philosophy embraced by Zen masters, psychologists, and self-help gurus alike.
Too often we allow our head or our heart to make our culinary decisions, eating (or abstaining) from a particular food because we think we “should” or smothering our emotions with aptly named comfort food. If you listen to your gut, however, your body will tell you loud and clear when you’re hungry and when you’re full. The Coca-Cola Buddha knows that our bellies are usually far smarter than our brains. While our brains send us to the kitchen in search of Chubby Hubby to distract us when we’re sad, anxious, or bored, the wisdom of our gut is eager to tell us how much food we really need. Once you’ve learned to listen to the wisdom of enough, then you can share that abundance with others.
Lastly, the Coca-Cola Buddha knows that appetite can be sated only in the moment, and only for oneself. I can dream, imagine, and anticipate the soothing refreshment of a cool drink, but that imagined idea won’t quench my thirst.
Several weekends ago, I gave consulting interviews at the Cambridge Zen Center, and in lieu of hot tea, the Head Dharma Teacher left a small pot of ice water in the interview room for me to drink. The day was steamy, so I was sweating beneath my heavy Dharma Teacher robes…and when I raised a cup of cool water to my lips, I was delighted to smell the tang of a lemon slice floating among ice cubes. Just like that, a cup of cold lemon-water was more refreshing than Nirvana, a full serving of Ahhhhhhh soothing my summer-shriveled cells. But as much as I try to describe the deep-seated satisfaction of enjoying a cool drink on a hot day, the only way you can “get” this experience is to go to your own kitchen and pour your own glass: drink up!
A long time ago in New York, a student questioned Zen Master Seung Sahn about the efficacy of mantra meditation: do I have to understand the words of a chant or mantra in order to benefit from repeating it? Seung Sahn insisted that only three things are important when you meditate upon a mantra: first, your reason for doing it; second, your faith that it will work; and third, your tireless effort to keep that mantra.
“So you can chant Coca-Cola all day long and it will work,” the student asked, amazed, and Zen Master Seung Sahn’s reply was even more amazing. “If someone tells you that the words Coca-Cola have power in them and you really believe that, then Coca-Cola will work for you.”
This is the timeless wisdom of Zen Master Seung Sahn, big-bellied Hotei, and the all-American Coca-Cola Buddha. This Present Moment is a brimming glass filled with both sweetness and sorrow, and only you can belly up to the bar called Life to savor it, moment to moment, good to the last drop.
Click here to more photos from the 2010 Master Sand Sculpting Competition at Hampton Beach. If you want to visit the Coca-Cola Buddha and his sandy friends in person, the sculptures will be on display through June 30th. Enjoy!
Jun 26, 2010
Jun 25, 2010
It’s an interesting artistic conundrum. How do you capture the motion of an athlete in the fixed medium of sculpture? The statue of famed pitcher Cy Young on the campus of Northeastern University–the former site of the original Huntington Avenue Grounds, and my alma mater–captures Young in a naturally contemplative moment when he reads his catcher’s signals, plans his pitch, and then coils for his delivery. The statue doesn’t capture movement; it preserves the moment before movement.
Many statues of athletes try to freeze-frame movement, suggesting the fluidity of athletic prowess through the graceful curves of cantilevered limbs. The statue of Michael Jordan outside Chicago’s United Center, for instance, captures Jordan in mid-leap, his ball-wielding arm outstretched toward an invisible basket while his earthbound defenders watch, helpless. Looking at this statue (or looking at any Michael Jordan highlight reel), you truly believe the man could fly.
The new statue of Bruins legend Bobby Orr recently unveiled outside the TD Garden similarly commemorates a moment of flight: specifically, that moment when Orr, having scored the game-winning goal for the 1970 Stanley Cup, lunged forward, his arms and hockey stick outstretched, a skater turned Superman. For one split second–a second captured in an iconic photo–all of Boston believed Orr could fly.
Baseball pitchers are typically more grounded than basketball or hockey stars; on a normal day, baseball pitchers don’t fly. The lightning-quick power of a fastball or the unpredictably quirky curve of a knuckleball is too fast for the human eye: only in slow-motion replays can we fully appreciate the power of a pitcher’s preparatory coil, split-second spiral, and fluid follow-through. Just like that, the ball crosses the plate, and we rub our eyes, not quite understanding how a human arm can do that.
The statue of famed knuckleballer Phil Neikro outside Atlanta’s Turner Field, for instance, freeze-frames the beginning of a pitch, with Neikro’s arm coiled behind him in the split-second before a throw:
A nearby statue of Warren Spahn is the most dynamic statue of all, freezing the gravity-defying arc of a Hall of Fame pitcher’s delivery. The ball’s power and speed, you realize, doesn’t come primarily through muscle; it comes from the momentum of the pitcher’s contortion, a kind of dance turned deadly as a projectile is released at just the right moment, the hurling offspring of arms and angles.
The earthbound statues of Jordan and Orr capture the belief-defying fact that some athletes can fly. The motionless forms of Young, Neikro, and Spahn remind us of the undeniable power of a muscular spiral uncoiling.
This is my contribution for today’s Photo Friday theme, Motionless. I shot these (and more) photos of Northeastern University’s Cy Young statue last August; the photos of Neikro and Spahn come from a game between the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves last June.
Jun 24, 2010
Jun 23, 2010
Yesterday afternoon I submitted end-term grades for my latest online term…and just like that, my summer has officially started. For the next two months, I’m not teaching anywhere: not face-to-face, and not online. For the next two months, I’m officially “off.”
It’s been years since I’ve had a summer off: that’s one of the harsh realities of being an adjunct instructor. My face-to-face and online semesters, taught for different institutions, typically overlap, so apart from a week in the summer and a few weeks in December, I teach year-round. Because the typical semester involves a grading-grind at its end and a flurry of preparation at its beginning, having a week or two off between semesters is never enough downtime. By the time you finish grading last semester’s papers, you have to turn around to prep next semester’s classes.
This year, I made a conscious decision not to teach any face-to-face summer school classes at Keene State. Although it’s nice to have some summer income, I’ve been looking forward to a few months of not making a weekly commute between Massachusetts and New Hampshire. When I decided not to teach summer school at Keene State this year, I had envisioned teaching online throughout the summer, as I typically do…but it turns out SNHU Online doesn’t need me to teach this term. So quite by accident–in the way adjunct instructors’ course schedules are always contingent on chance–I won’t be teaching anywhere until the end of August.
When I first found out I’d be unemployed for two solid summer months, I was initially anxious: how will I pay the bills while I don’t have any paychecks coming in, and will one unemployed term lead to others? But my almost immediate second reaction was relief. I really need a break from the juggling act of teaching at multiple institutions, and two months completely off from teaching will be an unimaginable luxury. Full-time professors have their summer months to unwind from teaching, and tenured professors get sabbaticals. These next two months are the closest thing I get to a vacation or sabbatical: a time to recharge the proverbial batteries.
Given the next few months of downtime, what am I looking forward to the most? Being able to read anything I want, instead of reading stacks of student papers. Earlier this week, I finished Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I’d started last week; last night, I finished reading Jackie MacMullan’s When the Game Was Ours, which I’d started at the beginning of the NBA Finals; and this morning I finished Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, which I’d started sometime last semester. After spending so many months with barely enough time to keep up with my teeming paper-piles, it feels great to start and finish reading entire books.
This morning, facing the question of What To Read Next, I simply stood in front of my bookshelves until something (in this case, Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw) said “Read me.” It’s tempting to make lists of what I “want” to (or “should”) read over the summer, but right now I’m letting my heart guide me. It’s not a matter of accomplishing anything or checking anything off a list; it’s a matter of finding something that interests, intrigues, and even entertains. During these next few months of precious downtime, I don’t want to waste a single minute trying to be too productive.
Today’s pictures come from a Sunday stroll through Central Square, Cambridge. Enjoy!
Jun 21, 2010
Jun 15, 2010
“Are you a real Celtics fan,” a fellow wrapped in a Brazilian flag asked J as we made our way to our seats at Sunday night’s exhibition game, or “friendly,” between the New England Revolution and the Brazilian soccer team Cruziero. When J nodded that yes, we’re real Celtics fans, the man in the flag asked the obvious question. “So what are you doing here?”
Sunday night was Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, and with the series tied at 2-2, Game 5 was a crucial game. If we were “real” Celtics fans, we would have spent Sunday night at home glued to our TVs, or we would have paid an arm and a leg to buy tickets to see the game live. Instead, we were at Gillette Stadium rooting for the Revs.
Sunday night’s friendly between the Revs and Cruziero doesn’t officially count toward either team’s season record, and judging from the 4-0 loss the Revs suffered in last month’s friendly against the Portuguese soccer club Benfica, we suspected we were in for another drubbing. As much as we love the Revs, we know they aren’t a world-class team. Watching the Revs play Benfica or Cruziero is like watching a college baseball team take on the Red Sox, as happens every year during spring training. The experience is awe-inspiring for the college kids, who get to take the field with their heroes, and it provides some good practice for the pros as they prepare for another long season. But no one expects the college kids to actually beat the pros.
And so it’s been with the various friendlies we’ve attended. We love the huge crowds of colorfully dressed fans who show up for these matches, and we love the chance to see teams with an international (rather than merely local) fan-base. But we knew going into Sunday night’s match that the Revs would probably lose…and we were okay with that, knowing the role of any friendly is to give fans a good show and players a chance to stay in shape during mid-season hiatuses.
So while we did our part to cheer on the New England Revolution simply by showing up, we left our Revs hats, jerseys, and soccer scarves at home and came to the game dressed in Celtics green. Knowing that the Revs would probably lose to Cruziero, we put our sartorial eggs in a whole other basket. With a crucial championship game on the line, we wore our lucky green Celtics shirts and discovered that basketball is one thing that both Brazilian and American fans can agree on.
“Did you see that game where Ray Allen was on fire,” the guy in the Brazilian flag asked once he’d determined our status as real Celtics fans, “and then the next game, where he couldn’t make a shot?” After spending a few moments trading Celtics stories with the flag-wrapped fan, we later encountered a pair of Brazilian women looking for someone to take their picture. “Look,” I overhead one remark to the other. “The lady in the Celtics hat…ask her!” Perhaps because Celtics green and white is a bit reminiscent of Brazilian green and yellow, Sunday night’s Cruziero fans seemed much friendlier to us than they probably would have been if we’d been decked out in Revolution red, white, and blue. Because we were advertising our allegiance to a world-class basketball team, we didn’t look like rivals, just crazy fans who’d wandered into the wrong sports venue.
During the half, we discovered we weren’t the only real Celtics fans in attendance. Wandering over to the Gillette Stadium footbridge, where you can see the billboard-sized television screen outside CBS Scene restaurant, we encountered a throng of fans watching the opening tip-off to Game 5 from afar. As we walked back to our seats, we met a pair of diehard Cruziero fans who were gesticulating at our green shirts. “Let’s go, Celtics!” one woman shouted, and I countered with a one-woman version of the classic “Beat LA” chant.
It was nice, in other words, to let our Celtics pride shine while we got friendly with soccer hooligans. After watching Cruziero score two goals against our beloved Revs, we left the match ten minutes early, before Cruziero scored a third and final time, so we could listen to the Celtics game on the drive home. As luck would have it, we got home in time to watch the second half, and the Celtics won. Tonight, we’ll be glued to our TV for Game 6, like any real fan. It’s fine and good for Cruziero to beat the Revolution, but tonight is all about the Celtics winning their 18th championship banner by beating LA. There’s nothing friendly about that.
Click here for a photo-set from Sunday night’s friendly between the Revs and Cruziero…and go Celtics!
Jun 13, 2010
Jun 12, 2010
This morning I took some pictures of the stumps that remain after the tree removal I’d mentioned yesterday, when a local side-street was closed while crews cut down every single pine tree in a yard I walk past nearly every morning. It completely changes the look of this particular house and street corner to have bare sky where there used to be pine bough: a drastic change to the local landscape.
I have a picture of what once was: a shot I blogged back in November, when I looked back in retrospect on my first marriage. It’s a picture I particularly like, and one I’m now glad to have taken, given the fact that I’ll never be able to take it again.
How strange it feels to refer to “my first marriage,” but that’s what I’ll have to say now that I’m two months away from embarking on my second. One of the things that’s troubling about divorce, I’m finding, is the way it makes your life two rather than one. Instead of having one husband, one marriage, and one solemn vow of “forever,” you suddenly have two. You have those memories of then, and you have these soon-to-be memories of now. Most of the time, these two worlds keep cleanly separate–then vs. now–but sometimes the memories blur.
J insists, for instance, that we’ve gone together to a particular grocery store, but it’s a store I’ve never been to. J’s memories of shopping with his first wife–a completely mundane activity with no traumatic overtones–have blurred with his similarly sanguine memories of shopping with me. At times, my ability to separate this soon-to-be-husband from my first one is equally shaky. Is a particular inside joke something I shared with J or with C? Is a given memory from a years-ago hockey or basketball game something I did with Husband #1 or Soon-To-Be Husband #2?
“You can have this, or you can have that.” There is a car commercial right now featuring hip-hop hamsters dancing to that rap, a musical version of the classic choice of either/or. You can have this, or you can have that, but you can’t have both: you must decide. In the commercial, the hamsters point to the car being advertised–this–and then to some absurd alternative–a toaster, washing machine, or cardboard carton–as the obviously inferior that. Why would you want that when you can have this?
I’ve had that song in my head all day, ever since seeing these stumps this morning. Why would you choose stumps when you can trees? And yet, there must be some valid reason for clear-cutting your own yard: perhaps there is a tree disease or parasite spreading among local pine trees, and these homeowners decided to amputate just as their neighbors had previously?
You can have this, or you can have that. To have a second marriage, you have to lay waste to your first, leaving nothing but the emotional wreckage of a half dozen stumps. When I first announced my decision to divorce almost six years ago, the most difficult question people asked was the simplest: “Why?” Why clear-cut your own heart? Why leave a swath of devastation in your and your partner’s soul, dividing the emotional landscape into the either/or of Before and After?
Now, I have a clearer answer to that long-ago question of Why, but I needed six years of soul-searching and the unimaginable possibilities of new beginnings to come to that conclusion. In six years, who knows what sort of “that” will have sprouted from all of “this.”
Jun 11, 2010
If only keeping a clear mind were as easy as heeding the warnings on a piece of heavy machinery! Today’s Photo Friday theme is Heavy, so I’m revisiting some photos of cherry-pickers and wood-chippers–heavy machinery–I’d photographed at the Dillant-Hopkins Airport in Swanzey, NH back in May, 2007.
In the aftermath of last weekend’s stormy weather, tree and landscape crews have been out in force throughout Newton, cutting broken limbs and fallen trunks. Dismantling windblown trees is hard work, and the sound of chainsaws and wood-chippers has been a prominent part of this week’s ambient soundtrack: an auditory reminder of the heavy-handed influence of heavy weather.
Even in the absence of heavy machinery, storm clean-up has been ongoing: this morning I saw a librarian outside the Waban Library Center doing her part to clean up tree debris, dragging small branches into a pile by a city waste basket. Dressed like a quintessential librarian, she was wearing a long skirt and sensible shoes, and she was carrying a small stack of children’s books in one arm. Even if you aren’t dressed for heavy lifting, there are always small things that need tidying.
Walking down an accustomed road on our usual dog-walk this morning, Reggie and I had to turn around, the road blocked with those aforementioned wood-chippers and tree-crews. The particular house where they were working, though, didn’t have any storm damage that I could remember, and the tree they were chainsawing into logs looked healthy. This particular house recently changed hands, and I’ve been worried that the new owners would make radical changes to its landscaping: their neighbors had cut down a couple of tall pines last autumn, and this particular house is surrounded by a woodsy fringe of unkempt undergrowth where I regularly see the year’s first snowdrops and crocuses along with wildflowers such as trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit.
The woodsy fringe around this house, in other words, is a small spot of almost-wildness in an otherwise immaculate suburb: a small strip of real estate I’d prefer be left untidy. It’s a curious habit I’ve observed in neighbors nearly everywhere I’ve ever lived, though: you buy a charming house that caught your eye because it was shaded by trees, then you move in and cut them all down. It happened with my old house in Hillsboro, NH, which used to be screened from the street by a half-acre of pines–the last time I drove by, I saw a half-acre of stumps–and it seems to be happening here and there in Newton. It’s enough to make your heart feel heavy.
This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Heavy.
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