Bi-Weekly Topics for Oct. 15, 2004
Energy of place
By P.
I don't know nothin' about energy -- Mama! Don't make me write about energy, I'm a lazy man!
I suppose the most energetic place I can think of in Cleveland -- that I visit regularly, anyway -- is Terminal Tower, home of Tower City, where folks bustle on all sorts of transitions -- off the "rapid" trains, up out of the bowels of the building and away to jobs downtown; off the street, down and away to their homes; in on their lunch hours to grab a bite to eat and buy a knickknack for somebody's wedding shower; in to kill some time before the ballgame; on the way from school -- there's no lack of bustle there.
I never seem to have anything in particular to do when I am there, actually, so I watch the scene as objectively as I can. The mall has a "dancing" fountain running the length of the old train station's passenger hall, in which computerized valves squirt jets of unnaturally unturbulent water through the air to land with a wet smack upon a stone stage with some sort of drain beneath it. It's always good for a few minutes of contemplation, though the music accompanying the dance hasn't changed in 14 years and is a tad too loud. I suspect they choose the classical stuff to discourage kids from hanging around. It's an active, happy place, though, even if security guards in Smokey the Bear hats giving you the eyeball.
Fat, middle-aged men aren't considered security risks, but the way I dress, I am sure they're looking for me to start asking shoppers for money.
You want energy? Stand in a high place and watch the vehicles streaming along the downtown freeways at rush "hour." All those people on their way somewhere! Or drive down I-71 to Columbus, and fall into step with the stream of travelers there. Molecules in a vast liquid, we move, for the most part, with the same lack of turbulence the gouts of dancing water in Tower City do. Then see the road constrict below Medina County, or around some construction project, and watch as the traffic becomes dense, then sprays out on the other side. Unlike the gases in the refrigerator, though, traffic loses energy when it slows and heats up when it begins to expand again.
But for my money, give me a lack of energy. What I seek most often is peace and quiet, for it's harder to find and easier to lose. Let me step out into a snowfall, or into the woods about lunchtime -- after the birds have finished their morning song -- and stand and listen to the tiny sounds around me. The foraging chipmunks. The scritching of leaf upon leaf in an invisible eddy of air. The hiss of flakes settling upon the ground.
Such a quiet is mighty, for all that is fragile. It can work its way into your soul, and heal what is chafed and inflamed, and give you rest.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Energy.html
Power source
By Hoarded Ordinaries
I just spent the past two days mingling with friends old and new at the Kwan Um School of Zen’s biannual Dharma Teacher retreat at the Providence Zen Center in Cumberland, Rhode Island. As I’ve mentioned before, I used to sit a lot of retreats at both PZC and the Diamond Hill Zen Monastery which sits across a pond and up a hill from the Zen Center. Because of all those hours spent meditating, walking, and breathing there, the property I sometimes jokingly refer to as the “cult compound” feels like home to me. The earth there is steeped with memories, and the buildings hold a special cumulative power.
Although this weekend’s retreat was held at the Zen Center, many of us stayed Saturday night at the monastery. Before you think that staying in a Zen monastery is an excessively austere practice, let me set you straight. Although the monastery itself doesn’t have a phone or TV, the Zen Center down the hill has a TV room where I watched the first half of Saturday night’s heart-breaking Red Sox game while sitting sandwiched on a couch between two Sox-cheering Zen Masters. Whether lay or monastic, the Zen Masters in my school are delightfully “real”: they watch TV, go to movies, and shout “bullshit” at bad umpire calls. When I told Zen Master Dae Kwang that I’d recently bought a TV, he gave me an emphatic high-five. You know you need to get out more when even 60-year-old celibate Zen monks tell you you’ve been living too austerely.
After even Zen Master Bobbie Rhodes had given up on the Sox, I made my way uphill from the Zen Center to the monastery. I’d forgotten a flashlight, so I walked the gravel driveway in the dark, my feet following a dimly lit path strewn with beech leaves. This is a path I’ve walked countless times before: among my favorite memories of Diamond Hill Zen Monastery are all those early evenings on 3-week summer retreats when I’d walk back to the monastery after taking a postprandial sauna and hot shower at the Zen Center: a brief spot of bliss for meditation-weary legs. All those times when I’d climb the hill back to the monastery, I was utterly certain that Heaven consisted of three simple things: a full belly, heat-loosened muscles, and clean, still-damp hair. Saturday night was chilly and dark, and I walked back to the monastery slowly, carefully feeling the path underfoot with every step. If I’d ever claimed to be able to walk the route from Zen Center to monastery in my sleep, Saturday night I nearly proved that to be the case.
The first time I sat a retreat at the Diamond Hill Zen Monastery, I slept fitfully: although the 4:30 am wakeup bell and rigorous day-long meditation schedule left me exhausted, I was nervous about a foreign practice form and unfamiliar physical setting. Having sat many retreats at the Monastery, though, I now sleep like a rock whenever I find myself there. Although 4:30 wakeup still comes too early, I usually find myself energized by the aura of practice that imbues the monastery. Just as sitting on a mat and cushion feels like returning, staying even for one night at the monastery feels like a kind of spiritual transfusion: here, I’ve found the power source, somewhere to plug into a site that is particularly charged with strong practice energy and good vibes.
Korean Zen monasteries are traditionally built on or near mountains: it is important to find a spot that is geomantically auspicious. Although I’m not well versed in the geographic features that make for good monastery-building, Diamond Hill has always seemed well-placed to me. Although both the Providence Zen Center and the monastery tucked behind it are surrounded by suburban housing developments, when you are in either the Zen Center or monastery, you feel like you’ve been removed from the ordinary workaday world. Yes, you can watch the Red Sox in the Zen Center TV room; yes, you can check your email from the communal computer also located there. Still, the sight of a Korean-style monastery on a suburban Rhode Island hill is surprisingly deceptive: it’s easy to think that incipient buddhas and bodhisattvas have been sitting here for thousands of years, not “only” since Zen Master Seung Sahn came from Korea to America in 1972.
In a word, this site in Rhode Island is more than merely the Kwan Um School of Zen’s administrative head temple: it’s the School’s power source. Whether because of the particular way Diamond Hill’s bedrock is aligned or because of all the people who have practiced there, PZC and its monastery pump out a seemingly endless supply of high-octane practice energy. How many souls have gazed loosely on these floorboards as they followed their breath in and out; how many ears have hearkened at the sound of this bell as morning and night it shatters even the deepest realm of hell? The Dharma Teachers who gathered this weekend are merely the latest in a long line of practitioners past and present who have come to this particular corner of Rhode Island to find their true self and save all beings. Each one of them has soaked up a spot of this site’s energy, and each one of them has left a drop of their own. From the moment you arrive and lasting days after, you feel the power surge of sincere intentions and great compassionate vows.
This is my contribution for the Ecotone biweekly topic Energy of Place.Comments
Source: http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/2004/10/17/power-source/
Almost heaven
By Via Negativa
The bi-weekly Ecotone topic is Energy of Place. "What the hell am I gonna write about that?" I thought. But a weekend jaunt in West Virginia gave me plenty of material, as it turned out.
It was a cold, windy night. I had a knit cap pulled down over my ears, but several times an hour I was awoken by especially strong gusts that made my jerry-rigged tent fly flap violently, like a large bird trying to gain altitude. I dreamt not of flying, but of walking through endless, enclosed spaces where some sort of conference was in progress. I also dreamt that all the other tents but our two had blown away, and we woke to find ourselves alone in the campground.
*
I get up at 5:30, brew coffee in my tent, get bundled up and sit outside to drink it, gazing at the stars. At ten after six there's still no sound from the other tent. I'd better start walking if I want to stay warm. It can't be more than a mile and a half to the trailhead at Seneca Rocks.
The highway passes a couple of small farms with yard lights. I wonder briefly if people who install yard lights are more likely to vote Republican? I'm heading northeast, more-or-less, which means that Venus is a little to the right of straight ahead and the big dipper a little to the left. Just after I pass the last farmhouse, a meteor streaks through the bowl of the big dipper. Fire in the hole!
I cross the acres of empty parking lot and reach the bridge over the North Fork at 6:45. All but the brightest stars have faded, and the jagged outline of the huge stone fin known as Seneca Rocks looms above the trees. I decide to follow the trail a little ways into the woods, pausing at a bench that affords a good view of the Rocks through thinning foliage.
At 7:05, ravens start calling from the vicinity of the Rocks - I presume they must have a nest somewhere on the ridgetop. Their first cries are high, like the wails of lost children. It's now light enough to distinguish yellow from green in the trees around the bench.
The wind up on the ridgetop must be terrific - the pine tree growing out of the cleft in the middle of the Rocks is dancing wildly against the lightening sky. Now the ravens are calling hoo HAH, hoo HAH.
7:10. The red from the red maple trees is now visible, along with dark patterns on the cliffs - patterns that will, I know, soon resolve themselves into ragged files of table mountain pine trees, growing from cracks and small ledges. It amazes me that these trees can grow without any soil, other than what they bring with them. If anything ever killed all the pines, I wonder, would Seneca Rocks get more than a small fraction of the visitors they attract now?
It occurs to me that this bench was situated solely for the long-range view; the foreground view of trees and boulders is more impressive a little farther along, I recall from the day before, and decide to walk on.
I pause to admire the fur of miniature shelf fungi on the north side of a monstrous dead tulip poplar beside the trail. Just as I look up, a raven circles through the window of sky above the bare limbs. It lets out a series of ruarks - the sound ravens make when they're enjoying themselves, surfing in a high wind.
Small cumulous clouds are sailing rapidly across the otherwise clear sky. From my perspective, each cloud disappears behind Seneca Rocks, as if dropping into a toothy maw. At 7:30, the sunrise turns them pink. The first sunlight glows along the crest of the Allegheny Front.
7:40. I'm back on the bridge with its unobstructed view of the Rocks. Now all the clouds' bellies are golden, and I notice that each has a backspin. That is, they're rolling on their axes as if to travel west, but the wind pulls them rapidly to the east. Yellow sycamore leaves ride the wind above the river. Since this is the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac, I think, I could spit in the water and it would get to Washington.
At 7:45 a blue jay calls; at 7:50 I hear a flock of white-throated sparrows in the thickets along the river. It's time to head back.
*
By 11:30 we're at the parking lot at Spruce Knob, at 4,863 feet the highest point in West Virginia. We might have gotten here sooner, but kept stopping to admire the snow. When it rained yesterday afternoon at Seneca Rocks, some two inches of snow fell above 3,500 feet. It's especially striking against the orange and yellow leaves of sugar maples, but here on the crest of the Front and on the rolling plateau beyond, most of the trees have already lost their leaves.
The short trail around the summit is called Whispering Spruce Trail, after the almost-krummolz forest of wind-buffeted red spruce. But today, the spruce aren't whispering so much as roaring. We have a hard time standing upright in the strongest gusts.
On the southwestern end of the summit, we look down across open talus toward the brown, Novemberish hills for a few minutes, then retreat to a large grove of spruce where the wind immediately dies and yesterday's snow, sheltered from direct sunlight, still lies deep. The contrast between the fury without and the stillness within points toward something deeper than words.
We find a seat overlooking North Fork Mountain and the other ridges of the folded Appalchians, still a mix of green and orange and yellow. On the northeastern end of the summit, the Forest Service has tastefully situated picnic tables among the trees and patches of open rock. Each table is invisible from the others, and each is spread with its own serving of snow.
A small tower gives an unobstructed view in all directions, but after a few minutes I climb back down, find a nice, sunny spot out of the wind and take a brief nap. A., wearing a wind-proof parka and lined pants, enjoys the experience of being rocked and buffeted by the wind far more than I do in my quilted shirt and jeans. But I understand the attraction. One can get almost drunk on a wind this strong. Between the wind, the snow cover and the strong sunlight, the overall effect is mind-altering - especially for minds still attuned to the look and feel of mid-October. Theories of aesthetics err, I believe, when they ignore the connection between the experience of beauty and the experience of power from outside or beyond the self. That connection, and the joy that accompanies it, is one experience denied to the powerful themselves, I think. But I could be wrong.
*
This part of West Virginia is exactly like central Pennsylvania, only more so. The same geological formations cap the ridges, but they're much harder farther south as a result of being more tightly compressed during the main Appalachian orogeny, 210 million years ago. Thus, the Tuscarora quartzite that forms talus slopes of smallish boulders along the crests of mountains in central PA, such as the one I happen to live on, can produce spectacular fins in West Virginia, most famously at Seneca Rocks. In other words, some of the mountains in the Mountain State have so much attitude, they actually sport mohawks!
We take a roundabout route home, driving first northward on the Allegheny Plateau, past Canaan Valley and the town of Davis. A line of giant wind turbines looms over the horizon like the invaders from War of the Worlds. Their triquetra-shaped blades are spinning merrily, though a bit more slowly than I would've expected. I think about the conservationists I know who are contesting plans to situate wind turbines along nearly every ridgeline in the area, posing unknown hazards to migrating birds and bats. Now, seeing a large wind farm for the first time, I want to cry: Hand me my lance, Sancho! But the things do have a bit of grace.
We follow a long, lonely road to the east. "INDUSTRIAL PARK - FOR LEASE" says a sign just outside Davis. There's nothing there but trees and little wetlands. But after a few miles, we begin passing active and abandoned coal strip mines. Just west of the Allegheny Front, we are startled by a high wall along the highway that turns out to be the breast of a dam for a large reservoir. Smoke billows from smokestacks in what we presume to be the power plant.
There's just enough daylight remaining for one last swing through the ridge-and-valley section before heading home on U.S. Route 220 - as it happens, the same highway we returned from the Adirondacks on two and a half months before. If we had had more time, a longer hike would've been nice, but it's enough just to drive in a place where virtually every bend of the road discloses another stunning view: a rocky gorge filled with long-legged rhododendrons, sunlight glinting off foaming water. An unpainted house flanked by apple trees and a clothesline flapping with brightly-colored scraps of laundry - or are they prayer flags, transplanted from Tibet? A high, steep pasture with a white horse grazing halfway up it, and a black horse immediately below. One faces north, one south. Both raise their heads to watch as the car speeds by.
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic Energy of Place:
A few miles from the mild hills where I live, on a finger of land with spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, 613 men, sentenced to death, wait. Some while away their time playing chess and doing crossword puzzles. Others spit at their lot in life, as if the saliva, like holy water, like fire water ... or whatever magical potion, could wash away, if not their sins, their surroundings. These are the men on death row in San Quentin prison, which was opened in 1852. A fortress with walls the color of vanilla ice cream, this prison is visible to all who pass through Central Marin on US 101.
Every year or so, one of the men on death row is executed. Lengthy appeals have kept the machinery of death barely in operation, while the population on death row has been growing. When all appeals have been exhausted and there is an execution at the prison, those who oppose the death penalty turn out in great numbers at the gates. Relatives of the victims of the crimes committed by the condemned men also turn out. The relatives come seeking closure, or whatever else they hope will finally release them from their torment.
#
When I was a new mother, still raw from the hormonal rollercoaster, we lived in a house that gave us an unparalleled view of San Quentin prison and the San Rafael-Richmond bridge. I saw many a dawn break over the water and illuminate the prison walls as I tried to calm and comfort my crying infant.
Sometime during the first months that we lived in that house, there was an execution at San Quentin. I had this fear, this odd notion, that the soul of the man whose life was going to be taken so precisely and according to regulation that night, would rush forth from the walls, rip across the water and rush up the hill looking for a place to alight.
I could not fathom that soul's intention: healing or revenge? I was simply seized by this belief that the condemned man's soul would wonder into my small world in which, at that time, everything was at it should have been. I was enmeshed in my dream of suburban bliss: a husband who went off to work in the morning and whose return I awaited with dinner on the table, an infant who was a bundle of promises of a bright future. I wanted to stop time ... put it behind bars. I wanted a peculiar stay of execution of my own.
#
Every year about 30 more men join the others already on death row in San Quentin. Outside the prison walls, ferries take well-heeled commuters back and forth, the river of cars ebbs and flows with people on their way to or fro from the East Bay, windsurfers sail past the aging walls ... all is in motion around the place, whether powered by wind, water or oil. Inside the walls might as well be another country.
#
Every now and then, there is an execution at San Quentin, and a cold shiver goes through me, but it doesn't seize me like it did that first time. For a few days, after an execution, it seems to me that there is bad energy everywhere. People seem more aggressive on the roads, angrier in stores ' a bit uglier, too, in spite of all the flattering light that this part of the world has plenty to spare. But then, I tell myself that I am imagining things.
I have asked others around me if they found it odd living in this place of plenty ' excesses, really ' with the largest death row prison so much in view (but so rarely in sight) as they go about their daily business. They (at least those I asked) said that they didn't find it strange. It's just the way things are. It's all part of what makes this place what it is.
#
You would think that after living so close to death row I would know a little more about San Quentin and the death penalty. The prison is in my sight nearly every day still ... and yet, I barely notice it. It has become a part of the landscape.
Posted by maria at October 30, 2004 06:40 PM
Comments
I have a friend who teaches meditation at various prisons in Florida. He's an ex-military/CIA man: needless to say, he's tough as nails. Several years ago he was the presiding clergyman at the execution of a Buddhist he'd been ministering to...and his account of that experience was absolutely heart-wrenching. The men on death row have done heinous crimes, but the suffering they endure is dehumanizing. In the end, my friend couldn't look into the eyes of the man, his friend, they executed: he was too ashamed of what society was doing in the name of "justice."
Posted by: Lorianne on October 30, 2004 07:20 PMLorianne: Thanks for your comments and for the account of your friend's experience at the execution. My first experience with the death penalty and execution comes from living in California ... and I find it really, really difficult to grasp the whole issue, let alone be able to discuss it with people around here. That an ex CIA and Buddhist could not look the condemned in the eyes goes to show you what morass we are in when it comes to crime and punishment....
Posted by: maria on October 30, 2004 07:46 PMMaria, this beautifully written post really spoke to me. I cannot bear executions, whether the real ones we read about in the papers, or re-enacted executions in movies, or stories in books. For some reason, no kind of death or illness affects me in the same way. Maybe I'm super-sensitive, and take on a part of the guilt I feel at what to me is a terrible, societal wrong. Maybe it's that I contemplate my own death under similar circumstances, and am horrified at that. Maybe both. But your comment about the soul of the executed man rushing up the hills into your secure home seemed like something I would have imagined, too. Thanks for writing this and for your own sensitivity to something we all probably try to ignore.
Posted by: beth on October 31, 2004 07:23 AMThe first time I saw it from the ferry I thought it was a beautiful building. That was before I knew what it was.
Posted by: Tish on October 31, 2004 11:30 AMMaria, are you writing this from one point of view on the death penalty or the other? I sense you are avoiding the question itself to dwell instead on the feeling of the place rather than the issue. I think it's actually almost more interesting to look at it through those words than through the controversy.
I thought I was against the death penalty, but then I followed the trial of what had to be the most cruel, horrific murderer, one who had already served a regular prison sentence for a prior murder. I guess that the details were too much for me, I decided I would be very comfortable pulling the switch personally on this man. I suppose you could label me inhumane, looking for revenge in a moment of callousness, but this still remains for me the right answer in that case.
But back to your original thoughts... I also wonder what people think about who live in sight of funeral homes, crematoriums. We lived next to a graveyard for a couple of years, it never bothered me, even when a fresh grave was dug next to our parking spot. We've elminated so much of the real visible reminders of death, while immersing our popular culture in media images of violence. Interesting trade.
Posted by: susurra on November 1, 2004 05:06 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20041120084156/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000443.html
By The Cassandra Pages
Late October, 2004. Small town in Vermont. Outside the window, bare maple branches toss in a gusty wind. Beneath them, a carpet of russet, beige, brown leaves, drying, and a crimson burning bush. It’s Sunday morning, and I can hear the wind, and a four-wheeler recently purchased by a neighbor, running up and down the street for the entertainment of his two daughters, bundled into the vehicle. This is new in the past few weeks, but the sound of internal combustion engines is all too familiar; a month ago, the sound would have been a lawn mower, or the leaf-blowers from another neighbor’s lawn service.
I feel a little slow and thick this morning; maybe it was last night’s wine or the lingering conversation, which tipped, teeter-totter-like, between talk of middle age - physical complaints, aging parents, teeth, and medical care – and politics, America, the future. The greyness of the late fall outside has a similar, worried torpor. We wait for Tuesday to know our fate, like the newly shown hostages, young UN workers captured in Afghanistan. I went outside to see if there was any Swiss chard left in the garden, and startled an unfamiliar cat, who stared at me from my own back porch as if I were the intruder.
In my other home, a different scene would be unfolding. Montreal wakes up about now on a Sunday; last week at 9:30 I was on my bike riding from the Plateau into downtown, on my way to the cathedral, marveling at the empty streets. By ten or eleven, other cyclists are emerging, necks wrapped in scarves; people are starting to enter the park, hand in hand, children in strollers. No one is rushing, although the roller-bladers glide by like water. Café owners and shopkeepers begin to come out, sweeping the streets, greeting their neighbors, ready for the first customers of a day that will stretch into night. There will be a few cars by now, but rarely the sound of a car horn. Montreal is the quietest big city I’ve ever been in.
What is absent is not energy, but anxiety. The energy I notice is mostly human-powered, and on a human scale: people walking, biking, talking, at the pace of a heartbeat or a footstep, or the lift of a coffee cup to the lips. The frantic, endlessly circling four-wheeler would make no sense there; even the boy who spends long hours in the park bouncing his mountain bike on the children’s big flat rocks in the playground is not aimless: he is practicing a skill, and he’s intent on it, as are the skateboarders who take over the large shallow children’s wading pool as soon as it’s drained in the fall. People stroll together in the parks, talking and smiling: women friends, male friends, couples, people with dogs who seem to be friends. And people aren’t afraid to be alone: everywhere you see them, quietly sitting, looking, drinking coffee, smoking, or, most often, reading.
I’ve gone back and forth enough now to know that the difference in energy is not imagined but real, even though I can only see its pathology or health through symptoms, some subtle, some not so. The anxiety, stress, and fear that insidiously worked on me before are at least obvious to me now; even when I am in the midst of them I have some choice about what to take in and what to keep at bay, what to fight or challenge and what to ignore.
What keeps the spirit alive? Books and art; creativity and spirituality; music and color; sensuality, nature, relationship. We should be glad for this virtual place, where these things are still topics of discussion, and sources of shared joy and refuge.
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2004_10_31_cassandrapages_archive.html#109923910023522994
Oct 18, 2004 at 10:49 am
The energy at Diamond Hill Monastery *is* just tremendously strong, you’ve captured that here.
Oct 19, 2004 at 12:26 pm
Ji Hyang, you ever notice how everywhere *you* go is tremendously strong? I don’t think it’s mere coincidence…