Midlife Meditation

  Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Wait and see,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “Wait and see,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Wait and see,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Wait and see,” said the farmer. --Zen parable Across America, families will gather around tables laden with comfort food and share their gratitude for events ...

Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...

  "Anything war can do, peace can do better." --Desmond Tutu   How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but the light bulb really has to want to change. --old joke   I woke up to it.   I was living in the Peace House on September 11, 2001. I awoke, as I did every morning in those days, to OPB. It was around 6 a.m. Pacific time, and the first plane must have just struck, because the story went something like this: "We're receiving reports that an airplane may have collided with one of the World Trade Center towers." It didn't take long for more detailed news to hit the airwaves, and then the second plane struck the second tower, I turned on my television, and watched the towers collapse.   Morning prayers were solemn, frightened; none of us knew what to make of it. In the days that followed, I found myself sinking into a deep melancholy. The world had just changed in a horrible way. One morning I was driving on F...

Brace yourselves for another descent into the world of Star Trek, specifically, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. (And if you're wondering what this has to do with Our Olympian Adventure and the huge photograph above, please be patient. I promise it'll all come together nicely in the end.) Among all the hit-and-miss chapters in the franchise, V stands out for a lot of reasons: the special effects (especially the rear-projection viewscreens) are laughably inept; the dialogue is overtly jokey; the plot is yet another retread of an original series episode, and not even one of the better ones; first- (and only-) time director William Shatner gives himself entirely too many actions scenes that come off at times like self-parodies--and you begin to get the picture. For all that, there is a philosophical center to this campy B-movie that has left a deeper mark on me than many an Oscar winner. The story is simple: Spock's long-lost half-brother Sybok, a Vulcan heretic who ha...

I have now updated this post to include photographs I took of the eclipse. There are not as many of them as I remember taking, but at least one of them--my friend Bruce with a box on his head--is well worth taking a second look at this. And the eclipse isn't bad, either!   * * * * * The sky did not look promising that morning. There were a busload of us sleeping on the gymnasium floor of Goldendale High School. It was a field trip combining Philomath High TAG students and my senior physics class. We rode up to Goldendale, Washington, on February 25, stopping at the Bonneville Dam to take the tour of the massive turbine room and watch a barge pass through the lock. Those were awesome sights, but what we were really there for was to come early the next morning. I had a cold, and slept even worse on that floor than I normally would have, but I was awake at 6 like everyone else. I can't remember what we had for breakfast. We were all outside by 7:00, filling the staging ar...

  To forgive others is to be kind to ourselves--Dharma Master Cheng Yen I'm not big on bumper stickers, but then again, this wasn't actually on the bumper of the minivan I saw this morning during my run. It was painted on the tailgate, along with a string of Chinese characters I assume stated the same aphorism in Mandarin. At any rate, this little motto stuck in my head more stridently than anything I've seen on a car in many years. The author of the proverb is a Buddhist nun who, since 1966, has headed up Tzu Chi, a Taiwan-based relief society with global outreach, including hurrican and tornado relief in the United States. I found this out with a Google search this afternoon when I finally had a chance to seek out the source of these words. Tzu Chi sounds like a worthy cause, and Cheng Yen (sometimes called the Asian Mother Teresa) seems a wonderful saintly woman; but all of that is a sidebar, a diversion from a teaching that cut me to the quick. You see, I h...