Sounds pretty good

Grasping, in the Buddhist sense, has two forms: grasping for something, as in consumerism, which is the sort of thing we usually think of when we use the term "greed," but also aversion -- seeking another outcome than the one currently presenting itself to us as likely, unless we intervene in some way. I think of Kurt Lewin's approach/avoidance theory here.

That which we feel will benefit us or those whom we value (provide negentropy, mainly), we approach; that which we feel will harm us (speed up our entropy), we avoid. We also tend to evaluate our coping mechanisms and decide if they are up to the approach or avoidance task; and we may also decide whether approach or avoiding is the right choice in such an instance.

When the author of the Xin Xin Ming advises we have no preferences, this may be simply a shorthand way of recommending Buddha's Middle Way.

Where there are no preferences, there is wu-wei. Less is more, here.

Consider a practice of restraint. What might such a practice entail (without, of course, straying into extreme asceticism)?

Perhaps I might realize I do not need air travel, or, indeed much in the way of travel and tourism at all. Also, I might not need to subject myself to television commercials and all the forms of advertising. Perhaps I do not need sports fandom, fashion, or events at crowded venues. Perhaps I decide I do not need pesticides, herbicides, and complex household chemicals and beauty products. Expensive furniture may be unnecessary, along with shelter with a very large footprint. Perhaps I can get along without a large lawn, a riding lawnmower, gasoline-powered tools, "natural" gas. One winter coat might suffice, rather than, say, five. And I hardly need a motorboat or jet ski.

It can be a useful exercise to go to the big box store with a clipboard (perhaps several times, to avoid raising the eyebrows of employees) and make a list of all the things we do not need. It might be a very long list; or we could simply say with Socrates, “How many things I can do without!” He was famous for his simplicity of lifestyle, as was Diogenes who took up abode in an abandoned jar and is said to have tossed away his cup on realizing he could drink well enough from his hands. 

This accords with what is told of Xu You, an ancient Chinese hermit who drank from his hands and, when offered a drinking gourd, used it once, hung it on a tree, and walked away. That story is referenced in hundreds of works by poets and essayists of simplicity, from Tao Yuanming to Chomei.

Xu You lived long enough ago that it's clear Buddha has no corner on simplicity, yet Buddha's (and many in his wake) take on it has a certain ring to it. Look at the rules in the Vinaya to get a sense of what he regarded as necessary to a fulfilling life ... not many possessions, eh? Three robes and three bowls, or maybe just one, and pillow your head on your arm. Mind you, nights are relatively warm in India, but still. There's some kind of principle here.

As a teenager, I had some sense that freedom consisted in freedom from possessions as well as freedom from being possessed, and was known to "run away" from home (with tacit permission, leaving a note of duration and location) and live for days at a time in the woods with some jerky, a hatchet and some matches. 

I was fascinated by this kind of reductionism, and upon discovering Thoreau, read my copy until it disintegrated, and have never been without one since.

Yet Buddhist advice on simplicity goes far beyond Thoreau. Aside from having only a tiny cabin with fireplace cookery and one table and two chairs (one for the visitor) and a bean patch, Buddhist literature extols the simplicity of sitting very still, eyes half closed, "non thinking." Such practice is, at least while one is doing it, the ultimate in poverty -- it does without the radio and television and cell phone, does without even food and drink and "did I pay the taxes" for the duration of the sit, and can serve as a baseline for kindness, compassion, shared joy, and equanimity, none of which require one to own a single thing. 

Practice leads to practical applications of that which has been practiced, as a rule. What you have not needed during shikantaza, zazenkai or sesshin you may not need ever. There are limits to this, of course. To live, eat food ("not too much, mostly plants," as Michael Pollan says), drink clean water (who needs sugary pop, really?) and breathe clean air if you can get it. The rest as applicable.

We had here in Eugene back in the last century a well-to-do man, Charles Gray, who, after donating his way out of the embarrassment of money, lived for a number of years on what he called the World Equity Budget, which was the average income of humans -- which was low enough that to do this in Eugene confined him to a rented room, cooking on a hot plate, and getting about on a bicycle (with a bike trailer as needed). It was, he said, the happiest time of his life. 

If everyone did it, ... "Gracious, that would be wonderful. It would all be green. There would still be fish in the sea; there would be trees on the mountains." [Source]

I'm not him; he devoted much of a lifetime to the standard he set for himself, whereas I was that poor by choice maybe from age twenty-one to about thirty at most. I'm seventy-six now, living on a fixed income, but by World Equity Budget standards it's certainly easy street. Philanthropy helps, but I feel in my diseased bones that simple is better; maybe it's time for me to try more of less again.

Fish and trees; sounds pretty good.

  --shonin

Just fail

We face a world which is threatened not only with disorganization of many kinds, but also with the destruction of its environment, and we, today, are still unable to think clearly about the relations between an organism and its environment. What sort of a thing is this, which we call ‘organism plus environment?'   -- Gregory Bateson

Since the question was asked in the 1960s, evidence has continued to accrue that organisms are dissipative structures ("me") made up of dissipative structures (organs, tissues, cells, biosyntheses, gut bacteria)  and also constitutive of dissipative structures (families, tribes, cities, nation-states, ecosystems, biospheres). 

All these accumulate matter and energy for reproduction at their constrained scales (negentropy), and all continually drop crumbs down their shirt fronts (entropy).

You can "rewind" a video or movie but you can't rewind life; there are no prior frames except in the form of constructs in your brain, running on the electrical potential between synapses. 

Likewise, you can't fast-forward. There's no "there" to jump to.

Everyone you meet is already, in a sense, dying; you encounter them in the now on an arc of motion: the energy they accumulate, perhaps while having lunch with you, also dissipates; and it's eventually going to dissipate at a greater rate than their capacity to maintain stasis. 

And then there's a corpse, and it too begins immediately to disincorporate.

We have, to a greater or lesser degree, an impulse to live forever; but DNA's brief does not support that. 

It jumps to new substrate, beginning from a single conjoined cell in each instance, and leaves prior generations like so many bugs on a windshield. 

Looking at it this way, we might conclude that DNA, not us as organisms, is what's alive. 

Carl Sagan was inclined to suspect so, though in summarizing the available evidence he left the question open in a way that suggests it can be tested:

 It is not known whether open-system thermodynamic processes in the absence of replication are capable of leading to the sorts of complexity that characterize biological systems.

That said, here we are, replicating, accumulating, dissipating, and, while doing these things, possibly mostly hallucinating. 

The hallucinating appears to be built in, one of DNA's strategies for protecting itself by giving us consciousness, an interplay of hormones and synaptical storage that statistically safeguards our reproduction rate.

If we find all this disheartening, well, it's where we are in the game, so to speak. Religions in general tend to deny all of the above, by doubling down on the hallucinating: play the game this way (insert doctrines and commandments) and thermodynamics will no longer apply to you (insert version of Heaven). 

Or don't, and we'll ply your ghost with clubs and matches (Hell).

Sagan's job was to prepare us to defend scientific method, the ground of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, against profiteers who, while themselves beneficiaries of the "modern miracles" of flight and laser surgery, nevertheless would, in search of bigger profit margins, upend the ballot boxes in favor of a return to medieval hierarchy -- God, angels, masculine rich men, and the rest of us, who can look forward to bullying maybe the family dog at best -- a hierarchy threatened by the discovery, which science could hardly eventually shirk, that everything is exactly equal in "intrinsic" value and utility to everything else in an interpenetrating and cyclical universe.

And Sagan was among those who had noted that neo-Darwinism, propped up as the justification of sociopathic rich men in their hyper-accumulative and hyper-dissipative activities, was flawed. 

Lynn Margulis, who was married to him at one time, had found evidence of symbiosis as the origin of eukaryotic cells, work that was resisted for decades within the scientific community, much of which had fallen under the spell of the rugged individualism of neo-Darwinists and their boosters among the profit-minded. 

If every living thing is made up of tiny cooperatives, what implications might that have for the model we are now living under, of maximized exploitation within a finite ecosystem?

Even the not-very-rich, embedded in economic structures created by and for the very rich, defend the structures vociferously when nature's networks are shown to be at least as cooperative as competitive. When Suzanne Simard merely found that birch and Douglas firs were sending carbon back and forth, it was enough to end her career with the governmental agency that employed her at the time. 

It is easy at this point for us, contemplating the effects of the activities of the very rich, to become angry at the state of the world and angry with those we have identified as the principal actors. Motivated by such anger, many become active in seeking out and applying strategems for opposing the rich, from boycotts to revolutions.

We can see from the history of applied Marxism in the twentieth century that the cure can be equivalent to or worse than the disease, taking into consideration the usual measures of human misery and environmental degradation. One might cogently observe that these revolutions and their subsequent political evolutions show evidence of a reversion to authoritarianism linked to the protected well-being of the authoritarians and their families and friends, much the same as the conditions that had engendered the revolutions. 

Greed, anger and delusion are not the peculiar province of the rich. They are endemic to all, and come to a boil when we too, impelled by impulses instinctive to us, subsequently become the rich, or at least those ensnared by the leavings of the rich.. 

I have some sympathy for us all. We're born dupes -- The process of replication that we call life has, in all living beings, its own project, and requires of us that we cooperate by being deluded as to our individual aims in life, reaching greedily for resources to further those aims, and angrily defending those resources from others who appear to be reaching for them. We're mightily stressed by all this. Is there a way out of what we may reasonably describe as our plight?

This is where Buddha comes in. Having seen the old, the sick and the dying, he gives up his possessions, his relationships and his United Health Insurance policy and heads for the hills, making his clothing from rags pilfered from a dump in a cemetery. Correctly surmising that the fourth sight -- a self-denying sadhu -- harbors a clue to a cogent reaction to his distress, he nearly starves himself to death, and then realizes one cogent reaction need not be the only cogent reaction. There's no need to stop eating. There's only a need to stop eating greedily. There's no need to snub society. There's only a need not to react to the foibles of others angrily. There's no need to tilt at the windmills of delusion. There's only a need to refrain from behaving in a deluded manner.

"The Way is actually very easy," declares the author of the Xinxin Ming. "Just fail to have any preferences." 

Ha-ha-ha, we reply and skip down to the, mostly, to us, incomprehensible verses that follow, looking for an out.

-- shonin

(To be continued)

she has work to do

She has work to do, establishing
Her anchor threads, her frame threads,
Even her bridge thread and all her radii,

Hub to be ready by dawn, herself resting --
All-powerful, so far as any lacewing can
See. Seeking out the ripest berries, she 

Works not to eat drupelets, but entirely to
Offer them as bait to fruit flies and their ilk.
Right away along comes another
Killer, a ladybird beetle, seeking the berries

Too, and for the same reason. He's caught,
Offers resistance, is overwhelmed, rolled up,

Done. Whatever comes in, if protein, her
Ovum will accept. Death it is brings life. 

upon slowly waking, she

rouses from a dream of fear.  Suppressing
a moan, spine filled with fluids overnight,
yes, again, and ankles still in pain. Across

the flanks of her beloved she now crawls,
stumbles round the room to find the handle
of her life, or only the door, sliding her feet along.

A floor creaks with dry rot as she steps among
the objects that reshape her: bloomers, slips,
half-slips, girdles, bras, tights, stockings.

She feels, Braille-fingered, for the small room where
all who seek may find that men or women are
only men or women; here they see themselves

before any other's eyes, and by a harsh light.
Her eye looks deeply through her from the glass;
tells her that her sorrows are contemptible. So?

She does not plan to die today, no, nor call in
sick, returning to the now cold sheets, seeking
to resolve that awful dream. Call it what you will,

habit if you like, but she carries herself into
the living room, satisfactory sight, remodeled
somehow, despite poverty: white walls

and ceiling, cleanly textured, fireplace patched,
mantel graced with oil lamps and seemly books:
here she dresses. Outside, darkness, low

clouds, and the rattling of busy downspouts.
She shrugs. Through kitchen to the cold mudroom,
listening to the change in foot-fall of her heels,

from wood to tile, to concrete, she moves on,
pace quickening. No entropy now stops her.
Gathering her bent umbrella and stained coat,

she opens a door. She walks out to the world.

How we came to Stony Run Farm

1. 
 
we went to see the place in Walterville.
Before we had even seen the house, the neighbor,
a man of some seventy years, bent with woods work,
stopped to chat. "The house isn't much, but the soil is good. 
Oh, it has some Scotch broom, I know,
on the pasture, but you can get ahead of that
if you keep after it. I helped the last folks with their fence, 
but they wanted the gate right here, where the tractor 
couldn't get in. They'd no sense."
We asked why no fence between his place
and "ours." "Oh, I don't need a fence. Don't want your apples, 
and you're welcome to mine."
The sort of thing we'd hoped. We walked 
over the pasture till we reached the 
incense cedars, each one five feet thick, and 
found a hanging branch worn smooth 
by generations of children's swinging. 
Good, and the valley here was wide, with 
mountains stretching east and west,
and sunshine access on short winter days. 
But the house wouldn't do; bedrooms dark and tiny, 
with telltale smell throughout
of dry rot underneath. Desire for land sets one dreaming. 
One acre, three acres-- not enough to farm, but who can farm
with these prices? It becomes a privilege
just to set out onions, and a cow
is not mere luxury, but even a kind of madness
to actually hope for. We have cross fenced
our high-taxed valleys so that to walk straight 
for five minutes can't be done, and all
the while buying our produce from five hundred miles away, 
where the tractors have as many wheels as your freeway rig. 
I want to put my hands into the ground 
and make it yield enough to make 
my children grow, and not grow poor in the process. 
We drove home, and quarreled along the way 
about land, the way people do 
who have gone to see not only what they could not 
have afforded, but ought not to have desired. 
The ducks were glad to see us; 
she watered them, and I picked tomatoes. 
We kissed and made up,
and lay awake in our small suburban house 
beneath the wheeling moon and stars. 
Why is it, I wondered then and wonder now, that no one
ever seems to know when they have enough? 

When sleep came, there was a vivid dream.
I met again the old man with no fence,
and saw him pointing to the earth. "This
was river bottom in here not too long ago,"
I heard him say. "When we drilled down forty
feet, we hit a driftwood tree, even though
the river now is half a mile away." 
He opened up the earth somehow, and showed me the tree,
still caught amid the smooth and rounded stones 
deep beneath the topsoil, which now I saw
was dark and rich, as he had said it was.
I reached to touch the soil, and awoke.
The northbound train was rumbling by the house, 
carrying produce from industrial farms,
and I was drenched in sweat, and found the moon 
had drifted far across the window to the west.

2.

She spreads the brightly colored packets 
round the table, and speaks of hope.
I lift a flat paper envelope, with its picture
of a perfect beet, and shake it like a rattle, "Hey-ya!" 
She sits across, nodding and smiling, and hefts 
a half pound of peas, offering its promise,
like incense, to the gods of our little life.
We've drawn out and made domains of the gardens. 
The east one, very small, is on the highest ground,
and drains superbly. It is all hers. She loves
to dig in early spring and late in the fall, 
coaxing brassicas, beets, chard, sugar snap peas
to grow in long succession through the year.
The south garden, sheltered from hot winds,
but prone to wetness, is mine. I've raised my beds
high as I can pile them, tossed away stones, and spread out 
golden chunks of bales of straw, redolent of the ducks 
who've nested on them. Here tomatoes and sunflowers, 
limas and vine crops broil in the sun by day and rest by night.
The north garden, on the only flat, gets sun
but stays colder longer. It is the largest,
so we share it, and here we fight. I look 
for long rows of corn and beans, and always more
tomatoes. She tries new things I can't pronounce, 
and seeks the permanence of berries: 
raspberry is her favorite thing under the sun, I dunno.
We fight over water, when to use, how much. 
We fight over planting depth, shade, what
to harvest when, and how long to blanch beans.
We fight all the way to the bedroom; its north window 
opens onto the windswept beds. In plain view
the rustling rainbow windsock
presides there over the rustling corn, and our fighting 
turns to sudden loving. We hold each other's 
life, like seed, in careworn hands,
and sleep, like seed, until the sun's return.

3.

She sell books from nine to six. They are good books, 
well bound, well written, colorful
to the eye, and children love them, but
the town is poor. She sits waiting for hours
for one grandmother to come in and buy one book 
for a favored grandchild. The owner of the store
is her friend; she cannot leave her just now, 
but the store, she knows, is not her place in life. All
she has ever wanted is to farm: at evening,
when the dinner things are cleared, and the hot sun 
drops behind the cottonwood, she farms.
Food for the ducks, and soapy water for broccoli;
old lettuce gone to seed comes out; the hay is rearranged, and 
fall peas go in. She stops only to hear the geese pass overhead,
then bends among her plants until the stars, first one 
and then another, leap and are caught in the hair of 
approaching night, so like her hair.
She comes in, soiled to the elbows, leans against the table, 
extending an open palm. "Look,"
she says, her eyes afire. "Marigold seeds!"

4.

It was not enough to see, in colorful magazines 
and costly books, the country homes
and garden walks that men and women build
who have only ready money and a few ideas. 
I too wished to sit sometimes drinking
tea by firelight, admiring a work of beams
and plaster, hanging fruit and herbs, good books 
liberally strewn, and a sleeping cat (or two).
To which end we labored without cash, days
and even nights with saw and chisel, scraper, 
hammer, knife, and plane, using such wood, 
such paint, and even such nails as came to hand.
Our friends and friends of our friends remembered us 
when their surplus had to go, and I went forth
with battered truck and pry bar, gathering decks
and fences long past keeping for those without 
the patience to rebuild. We have learned
to watch for stones of certain weight and shape;
to lay a course of ninety-year-old brick,
to scrap a window sash to get the glass
for cutting, and to fill the oddly angled wall
with joint compound. When supplies ran short,
we turned to the acre of ground, and forked 
and spaded, laying out long beds, piling them with straw,
covering the paths with leaves of oak, maple
 and ash. Seeds bought last year at sale,
ten cents a pack, were sown with trembling hand.
They all did well: the new shelves are fat
with harvest. This all has come late to me. Now
we do sit in chimney-corner like the English cottage-
keepers, tea in hand and cat in lap, ready to peruse 
an act of Winter's Tale or book of Faerie Queene, only to find
our eyes no longer focus on ten-point type
for an act or a book at a time. I call the youngest child; 
she reads to me from Sendak, or
our mutual favorite, Potter, haltingly, but with a will, 
improving as she goes. As she sounds out words, I watch a knot
of fir collapse into the coals, and fall
to long, light sleep, with not unpleasant dreams.