Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #3234: A trip to the dentist, and money well Spent
Well look at that, it’s Friday again. The last Friday of the month which makes it a Comfort for the Apocalypse day (Issue #19). Now that’s out of the way, I need to get on recording some violin tracks this weekend for Brian’s latest album project.
The past week has felt quiet, even though I had to go to Nanaimo for a dentist’s appointment. Going to town for things has not been on my radar lately, and I had forgotten that with all restaurants shut, there is little to do but walk around while waiting for entry to things. Because of the way ferries work, I had an hour to kill before my appointment, which I spent walking around the old neighbourhoods above downtown and I was struck by how much that part of Nanaimo reminds me of Victoria in the 80’s. Esquimalt and Vic West still have a bit of that older (Edwardian, WW2,) house thing going on, and it makes me nostalgic for a time when everything wasn’t shiny condos and uber-modern houses.
During my pedestrian travels I discovered that my new dentist is close to The Common Foundry, which a friend posted online about recently. To reward myself after the tooth cleaning (yuck), I went back there to investigate their small, beautifully curated collection of stationary, pencils, paperclips, and fountain pens. I won’t tell you how much I spent, but I can tell you that my quality of life is greatly enhanced with high-end pencils and cotton paper to write notes on.
In addition to the stationary supply, I also bought a 5000-yard cone of fine silk for weaving with. I was discussing plans to weave a very fine, overshot shawl in the future with one of my weaving-neighbours and she told me that she had the right weight in white silk for my project for sale! Even though I don’t plan to weave that shawl right away, I took it as a sign that it really should be on the agenda this year, and so I swung by yesterday for a visit and yarn purchase. True story is that I had a very spendy week all round.
I have been weaving a lot this week, with a cotton-linen warp on my loom I am just now weaving off the last of four hand towels for the bathroom. I also finished knitting a shawl that I started six weeks ago, and it is packaged up to go out as a gift later today. I had not planned it as a gift when I started it, but for reasons related to the timing, it become apparent to me that it was meant for someone else. Still, when I put it on yesterday after blocking, it was hard to take it off and fold it up in the bag to go out. That likely means I’ll be making another one in slightly different colours. This is a pattern by Isabell Kraemer – whose knit designs I adore.
There are more handmade gifts on my near-term agenda, plus dish towels, napkins and a sauna towel for myself. After a long absence from weaving, I’ve returned to it a bit rabidly – which is funny given that spring/summer is when I should be outside! If this continues into the warmer months than I probably will set my small loom up on the deck as it’s easy to move with a bit of help.
Work has been strangely quiet this week owing to a number of folks being away sick and dealing with family crises. Since I have next week off (for a union convention, not vacay), I’m just as glad for time to tidy up my paperwork and get things in order – but I do prefer being on a team that is active and vocal – the opposite of where folks are at the moment. On the other side of things, there have been a couple of union blow-ups lately, including one that has me questioning whether I should just leave my position as local president now. Of course that won’t happen because I always fulfill my obligations, but am I ever ready to quit that role.
One highlight of the past week was getting out for an evening kayak on Monday. The tide was up, the water was like glass, and the rain stayed away long enough to get out and paddle in the sunset. That’s twice that I’ve had the boat in the water this season and I look forward to a lot more paddling in the near future. I finally got a rack for my car so it will be safer to travel distances with the kayak (right now I just strap it down to the cross-bars, which is fine for short distances but not highway driving). I am hopeful that with the vaccine roll-out we’ll be allowed to leave home for little trips this summer and fall. I have a few days booked on Cortes with a friend and plan to take my kayak and paddleboard both!
I am definitely feeling a little lonely and sad lately, though perhaps it is just nostalgia for the way things were eighteen months ago. I really do want to be able to come and go, see friends and family, plan all the fun things – and even though my shot is coming soon (May 9th!) I know that it will be some time before things are socially more relaxed. I worry too that with the variants, we may never be truly ahead of this thing. What is happening in India right now is nothing short of horrifying, and we know that many mutations will result (as they have everywhere that the virus has proliferated), some which may be even further out of our control. I am sure not going to be one who cries about lockdown when I have the privilege of a home and all the distractions I want. But still, this long emergency takes its toll in big and small ways and I’m feeling it this week as we wait in the queue to get the vaccine.
I hope that all of you are finding ways to stay safe and support others out there! The only way we’re getting through this is together, even if we’re mostly apart.
Post #3233: Beach Fort
Someone put an awful lot of effort in to building a lean-to fort on the beach down the road from my house. Inside, they left this note held down by rocks on a small table:
We live in an area with a lot of wood refuse, the tides and inlets trap logs that escape from the booms or wash off other beaches close by. Driftwood forts are not uncommon on BC beaches. But this one is more impressive than any I’ve seen before – larger and with more structure, artful in its overlay of logs. Inside it feels stable, though I don’t trust makeshift shelters built by strangers and so wouldn’t camp in it overnight, but it *is* well above the high tide line. There is evidence of small campfires close by which makes me think that perhaps the builders did sleep overnight, though the evening I found the fort no one else was around.
I don’t know how long this fort will last. Some responsible grown-up is bound to come along and knock it apart out of concerns for the safety of small children. Or else the waves will come up and shift things in such a way that it becomes unstable and collapses in the next gust of wind. Such projects are temporary which is what imbues them with magic.
This fort existed four days ago and I wonder now if it is still there. The next time I go to that beach I will tense as I step off the trail, hoping it continues. I will hold my breath until it becomes driftwood again.
Post #3232: Run, Lift, Weave, Write, Repeat
According to the forecast, the weather is about to turn to rain – but what a glorious ten days it has been. Even though I’ve had to work, I’ve managed to get outside for a kayak, a run, and a bike ride in addition to getting some solid gardening (read: weeding) time in this week.
Until Tuesday, I hadn’t been for a run in six weeks. Even though my Doctor cleared me for running a month ago (no bone deterioration, nothing to worry about around the embedded plate), I wasn’t really feeling it. But in the last couple of weeks, the pull has returned and so I’m going to start fitting runs into my workout schedule again. In particular, I miss covering long distances on my own propulsion and seeing my island-world at that pace. As the weather warms and the mornings lighten, I hope to fit runs in before work to escape the heat, but for now anytime is a good time to get the runners back on.
I’ve continued at the loom this week with some sampling. At the start of the year I set an intention to use as much “stash” yarn, fabric, and weaving material as possible. I have several projects worth of stuff in my cupboards, and before purchasing more, I’d like to use at least some of what I have. Case in point, I have some beautiful lace weight alpaca yarn in three colours, as well as some tencel yarn (also in three colourways) that I bought for some project that never happened. In the world of making fabric, it’s always a bit of a crapshoot how things are going to work when you put them together, and it’s a lot of work (and wasted material) if you get it wrong – which is why weavers create samples and sample books. My samples this week included using the tencel fibre as a warp (it’s quite strong) with the alpaca fibre as weft, woven at two different setts (densities). I’m quite happy with the result of the less-dense sett woven in a herringbone twill. It has excellent drape and after washing/fulling it is very soft. Once I get the big loom cleared off (it’s got a bathmat on it that I’ve been hung up on weaving due to a problem with how I tied up the treadles) I will be putting the first of the three shawl projects on. In the meantime, I’m warping the small loom with some spring-coloured hand towels this weekend.
Writing continues every day, whether I feel like it or not. Somewhere this week I ran into this quote which sums up my approach to essays and book ideas and the craft in general. For all the good writing I do, there is a ton that gets thrown away and though it sometimes feels like a bit of a churn, it is necessary to anything good getting done.
If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.
Linus Pauling
Relatedly, music practice requires that one must sound awful a great deal of the time in order to eventually sound good. I am working on some violin pieces currently that make me feel bad because I play them so poorly, but there is no way to play them better without going through this awfulness (which can go on for weeks and months). Just this morning I sent an inquiry form to the Victoria Conservatory of Music to see if I could find an appropriate teacher to meet with online and eventually in person in order to get some help overcoming my technical limitations. While poking around the site it was hard not to notice that the director of the strings program there is one of my contemporaries – someone who studied with the same teacher as me, and who I sat beside in youth orchestra when we were thirteen (I was second chair to his first chair, first violin – he was a much better player even then). Though I have no aspirations to great playing at this point in my life, I would like to return to playing classical music with other people at some point and that requires a greater skillset than I currently have. I’ll see if the Conservatory matches me with someone; I don’t know how many folks they have there teaching adults or how many of them are teaching virtually.
Beyond that, it’s been a week of regular work, decent food, and finishing a bunch of books that I’ve been reading (plus starting new ones). I’ll be glad when the warmer weather is here to stay, but for now we could use some spring rain to get the plants and trees really going before we are plunged into the summer dry season.
Post #3231: No Self isn’t No Identity
In the last year or so, I’ve been troubled by some of what I’ve been hearing from the corners of North American Buddhist and meditation circles with regards to social justice and identification to a racial or social group. Most recently, a popular secular meditation teacher, literally called politics motivated by racial identification “an ethical and psychological dead end” and “a mental illness“. I am not going to drive you to that individual’s site, but you can read Matthew Remski’s piece for more information. This isn’t the first white meditation teacher to use the Buddhist doctrine of no-self to chastise politicized communities. Brad Warner, a Zen teacher whose writing I really connect with on some levels, questions the right of individuals to have their gender self-identification respected by others, and then goes on to describe how he has worked at getting over this problem of the need to identify. (In a post I can’t locate at the moment, he also suggested that there is no room for politics in the Zendo).
Now, I’m not a popular meditation teacher, nor do I claim enlightenment, but when I read or hear these kinds of pronouncements I prickle because no matter how definitively they speak to their particular audience, they do not represent the totality of Buddhist thought on the matter. Additionally, these teachers rely on us to believe their profound insight gives them access to a truth the rest of us don’t have, and therefore accept their position as inarguable. In this case, we are left with some pretty retrograde ideas masquerading as spiritual enlightenment: there simply is no place in our culture for a politics that coalesces around racial or cultural identification; we must not have discussions about politics in our Zen centers; political activity is frivolous. Etc.
Though both of these individuals are experienced meditation practitioners, they seem confused about the difference between attaining the state of no-self in our practice, and how we are identified, and thus treated by our society. As a cis-gendered woman, I don’t have to tell people I’m female to be treated to the sexism of my society. A visibly Indigenous individual does not have to tell others what nation they originate from on Turtle Island before they encounter the racism of the settler state. This has nothing to do with our spiritual insight (though what we do after we encounter abuse based on identity will be informed by our vows and our practice).
I will illustrate using the example of feminism, without which I would not have the right to vote or control my reproductive body (or work, or drive a car, or wear pants). The feminist activism I have engaged in over the course of my life is not borne out of a need to identify myself with other women, irrespective of context. The joining of women in a political movement called feminism to march, protest, petition, and demand change comes about because we want a kind of justice that is otherwise denied due to our body parts, or self-presentation that challenges the masculine in some way. In other words, we may come together as female-identified people, creating a politics of identity, but it’s not for the sake of identity in and of itself. It’s because we want to change something. And wanting political change is not a kind of mental illness, nor is it “superficial and needlessly noisy.” It is necessary to the liberatory project we find in the roots of our Buddhist practice.
No-self is a state we might access in our practice, and I believe I have had glimpses of understanding the bottomless well that appears when body and self drop away. This tells me something about my experience of the Dharma through practice, and I can take that understanding into my daily life in various ways. It’s a radical state (or non-state) to be sure. But even having touched no-self in my practice, it doesn’t mean that in my everyday life I want to live the politics of misogyny, exclusion and physical violence enacted at my gender.
In order to understand this dilemma of no-self versus identity in political movements, I turn to the book Radical Dharma : Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, a work by three non-white Buddhist teachers in the United States. In it, Zen teacher Rev. angel Kyodo williams unpacks the shortcoming of sticking too closely to the purity of our spiritual traditions as the sole way to escape our hardwired human tendencies. She says, “neither Christianity nor any other faith alone can deliver us into a systems analysis that can unravel the massive entanglement that white supremacy is in every aspect of how we think, feel, dream, and act toward ourselves and others based on our perception of their place in the social order. Rank is still the evolutionarily Neanderthal mode by which our social and religious cultures are organized, and it systematically undermines every enlightened impulse we have. ”
She challenges modern Buddhist teachings that promote “the acceptance of a ‘kinder, gentler suffering’ that does not question the unwholesome roots of systemic suffering and the structures that hold it in place.” Roots that are firmly planted in racist and colonial structures that persist in how we are identified, which means that a one necessary locus of political change is going to be found in those identifications.
I practice in the Soto Zen tradition and am attached to the lineage with North American origins at the San Francisco Zen center (first brought by Shunryu Suzuki in the 1960s) . How I stumbled from secular meditation practice into a whole scale commitment to Zen is a story for another day, but one thing I discovered early on is that my adopted tradition does not shun discussion of real-world issues. In dharma talks, tea-circle, or “engaged” practice discussions, we are free to raise the worldly oppressions and identifications that we work within. We discuss how to approach these issues through the lens of our precepts, and to develop skillful means when approaching social problems. We commiserate with the suffering that racism, sexism, transphobia, ecocide, and other painful manifestations bring to one another’s lives. I have never once encountered any of our long-committed teachers suggest that someone’s identification with their race or gender expression was a sign of mental illness, or that activism as I have participated in it is superficial and needless. And while it is true that founding teachers like Norman Fischer do not speak out through social media on every issue that arises, to listen to his talks (all freely available online) is to understand how we thread our worldly lives (including our politics) into our understanding of the dharma.
We are fortunate to have choices about what kind of teachers we follow in this era. There is no monolithic church, no single mode of faith. When one person proclaims they know the truth, it is a simple matter to turn elsewhere and listen to the guidance of others. I hope that in the modern Buddhist and meditation world we continue to evolve our understanding, just as the world around us evolves, and that together we may break down the illusory divisions of our culture. Be we aren’t going to do that by calling great swaths of individuals committed to social change “mentally ill” nor by exposing our the privilege it takes to “stay out of politics”.
I don’t believe there is only one way to do social change. I am sometimes critical of the tactics or rhetoric I see people employ. But instead of loudly disavowing the activity of those whose cause I otherwise support, I have learned to first stand back and ask whether this is a space or argument I need to enter into. Mostly, it turns out, the skillful answer is no. In this case, however, I am entering into the discussion because I believe it is crucial to developing a modern Buddhism with social justice at its core, “a radical Dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies the systems of suffering,” (Rev. angel Kyodo williams). And I hope also, to contribute a different perspective for the person who feels they must abandon their political community in order to become enlightened, or a “real Buddhist”. There is not a single truth of how politics, mediation and spiritual community interconnects, nor how each of those things informs our path to enlightenment. Not one truth, and definitely not one teacher who knows it.
Post # 3230: Many projects, little sleep
This morning I scared a racoon in the garden as I left the tiny zendo after-meditation. I wish I could have gotten a picture of it scampering away because it was undoubtedly the fattest raccoon I have ever seen. Compared to when we lived in East Vancouver, I don’t see raccoons here nearly as often, but springtime definitely brings them out into the open a bit more and I’ve heard them fighting on the other side of the fence some nights as well.
It’s been a week of trying to get things done despite intermittent insomnia. I can only blame the shift in weather and energy for my sudden inability to sleep through the night, so I hope that calms down again soon – because it’s very difficult to move forward on projects when I’m exhausted all the time.
Workwise things have been in a bit of a lull the last couple of weeks.. This is always the case when the fiscal year flips over and we do our project plans for the next year. Up until year end is a flurry of activity and then things get pretty quiet again while we wait for the budget to drop and new projects get approved. I’ve been focused on work planning, and performance management – and getting the two people on my team properly assigned with work now that I have them as permanent staff. I had my own performance review as well this week, and received the highest praise I have ever achieved in my working career, which stemmed from the huge shift in my work unit I’ve helped motivate over the last year, first as acting manager, then as supporter to the other acting manager. While I’m glad that our regular manager is back now, her year of absence did afford me some pretty great work opportunities. I’ll be interested to see the government priorities outlined in the upcoming budget, because that guides our work to some degree.
On the studio front, I’ve become re-obsessed with weaving in the last couple of weeks. As I’ve written here in the past, weaving is a time-consuming and somewhat complicated undertaking (not to mention, expensive). All fiber arts have dimensions of this, but weaving more than any of them. I think this is why I tend to drop out of it periodically. Only a month ago I was talking to Brian about possibly selling off all my weaving supplies since I had not been able to rouse my interest in weaving in close to a year. This last week I got a warp on and off the loom (to make four tea towels) in record time. I am starting a new project today (hand towels for the bathroom), and am re-tying up the treadles on the large loom (although I did manage to get it warped at Christmas time, I tried a new tie-up that it turned out I don’t like). The problem with weaving is that I’m hot/cold with it. When I’m hot, it’s all I want to do. When I’m cold, I want nothing to do with it. Few other of my interests work like this for me – and I can’t ascribe it to one season or another. It just happens when it does. Go figure that it would happen just when the weather is getting so nice!
Around the house we’ve started working on our latest project – a canning kitchen! While I have long had an outdoor burner for canning in the summertime, we are going to go all the way and install a sink and counter alongside that. It will sit directly in front of our actual kitchen so we can share the plumbing going in, though we will greywater into the garden going out. To start with, we invested in a (kind of pricey) stainless steel sink and countertop which we will then get some cabinetry installed around. The three-burner will also get a cabinet front to hide the propane tank. Because this is at the (covered) entrance to our house, we are paying a professional to make cabinets. I want it to look good and not cluttered. We got the sink/counter last week so we popped things into rough place last weekend:
I know I’ve said this before, but the more we tool our home to be specifically for our needs/interests/comfort – the less likely it is that I am ever going to leave. A properly set-up area specifically for canning and outdoor entertaining is something I have dreamed about, and we are making it happen!
This is one of those weeks that has dragged a bit (insomnia) so I am pretty glad to nearly be seeing the weekend when I can catch up on my sleep and make some more headway in the garden and studio. Hope you all are seeing sunnier days out there!
Red Cedar 