About Me

Updates in italics

I was born in 1958. I've been happily married twenty-five years. I have a daughter, 21, and a son, 17.

I've worked developing and testing software for the last ten years. But I've moved on.

My favorite job so far has been washing dishes and chopping vegetables in a restaurant. Not now. I like both my present jobs better even than that. I work for a terrific non-profit half-time, and do massage on evenings and weekends.

I know most of the constellations visible in the Northern Hemisphere, but not all of them. I stopped because I thought it was a bad idea to have a name for everything in the sky. But still, if you ask me what that bright star or planet up there is, I can probably tell you.

I play solitary, improvisational congas, from time to time.

I practice Buddhism, in the Tibetan tradition. Meaning I meditate. Except when I don't.

I have a shrine on top of my dresser.

I have an M.Phil. in English, which is the degree some institutions give you when you've been a grad student so long that they can't in good conscience send you away with just an M.A.

I wrote half of a dissertation on Old English Poetics, and half of one on Chaucer and Abandoned Women, before I gave up on all that.

I have a B.A. in Computer Science, too.

I'm starting school to qualify as an LMT (Licensed Massage Therapist) this Fall. Yes, 48 years old is rather late in the day to start a new career. But it's what I've always wanted to do. 49 now, got the license. I love it as much as I thought I would.

For highschool I went to a hippie free school, as a boarding student.

In my youth I wrote a couple short novels. They were very bad.

My beard is mixed up white, blond, gray, silver and copper. It's short.

My favorite poet might be Blake.

My favorite artist might be Cezanne.

My politics used to be radical. I suppose they still are, but I don't take them very seriously anymore.

I love Oregon, and the city of Portland, passionately.

Being more than a couple hundred miles from the ocean makes me panicky.

I once wanted to be a (literary or visual) Artist, with a capital 'A'. Everything about that desire fills me with loathing now. So I am not very tolerant of Art or Artists (although I love good writing and good pictures.)

When I was quite young I wanted very badly to be an astronaut. Since the career path to being an astronaut was being a military pilot, and I could not stomach much of what military pilots are expected to do, I gave up on the idea. I've borne a grudge against American militarism ever since, on that account.

I love wind and rain and clouds.

Before I die I want to travel to the southern hemisphere and see the southern stars.

I love learning enough of a language to be able to read it, laboriously, with a dictionary. After I get that far I tend to get involved with another language.

I sometimes invent alphabets.

I draw pictures on napkins.

By the time I was twelve, I had climbed many of Oregon's mountains (though not Hood or Jefferson), and hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

I am shy and a little hard of hearing, so I avoid the telephone whenever possible. I've gotten better about the phone. Honest!

About "About me"

Writing a summary of myself makes me uneasy -- after all, we Buddhists think that the reification of the self is the beginning of all suffering and wrong-doing, so why deliberately undertake it? -- but on the other hand, I'm always grateful to bloggers who post an "about me," and I like reading them. So I've written one, posted below. Let me know if anything, or everything, seems misleading. Or if there's outrageous lacunae.

Santiago

This burning haunted summer, dry wells,
The taste of ash, the smoke
Of creosoted beams. Wildfire
Licks the grass.

I am tired of all this talk of heaven and hell.
I try, but my mind can find no purchase
Scrabbling like a great dane on an ice rink --
I understand the stars pounding, thud thud thud
In the night sky, hurting my ears, stinging my eyes.
But all the rest, your cloisters, sitting-boxes --

No. But you are right about one thing:
There is something wrong, something twisted,
A breech presentation, a convolution
To confound the midwife. A foot wrong here;
An umbilicus wrapped around the neck.
A rope is simple, said the philosopher, but
To untie a knot in it you must move it
In complicated ways. But the rope is simple.
Perhaps it's like that.

Or perhaps it is as simple as the dying master
Who had one thing to say. His pupils leaned close
To hear his final teaching.

"I don't want to die," he said.

Now the snow is sifting down in Santiago;
It falls on tongues speaking soft Spanish;
It is winter in the Antipodes.

I lie down beside you in the little tent.
I say my prayers. I hold you tenderly:
The ghost of summer, holding winter
In its arms.

The End of Summer

The path to Bridal Veil Falls has been closed for months. Quietly reopened again, so that even though it's one of the falls that are closer than Multnomah, and it was a hot August sunday, there weren't many people there.

Bridal Veil is unique among the Gorge waterfalls in that the trail to the falls goes down, not up; the falls is actually below the highway. We went slowly, on account of Martha's knee; on some of the steeper patches she walked backwards, a trick I learned when my own knee was dodgy. What makes going downhill so hard on knees is that going forwards you come down hard on your uncushioned heel; if you turn around you can come down gently on your toes. Of course, you also can't see where you're going.

Across a little bridge. A miniature promontory stands out into the splash pool. Beyond that is a little protected cove. The sun can't get to it. Cool even on this hot day. A mist of spray wafting over. Dark wet basalt walls on either side. Martha negotiated the climb down, took off her shoes, and soaked her knee in the cold water. Beside her, a couple feet away, was a large frog, glowing green and gold. For a long long time it didn't move at all. We all got to take a good look at it. Eventually it got a little worried, or remembered that this was a frog life, and he was supposed to watch out for predators, and he scuttle-hopped away to disappear into a crevice in the rocks.

Up above, the sun poured green through the thick leaf-canopy. The white falls -- it's really a skitters, not a falls, hence the whiteness of the Veil -- played endlessly, and the pitch black water was lit weirdly and beautifully, at the tips of its little waves, by the green and yellow glints reflected from the shining leaves -- the same color scheme as the frog, and as striking against the black background.

As we usually do at a falls, we didn't talk much. We wandered about, or found rocks to sit on, or climbed up the little headland. There was really only one way to climb, and the handholds were smooth, and gleamed with the oil of thousands of human hands.

On the way back we talked about camping. But we all knew that this, really, was the end of summer. The poison oak was already the red of raw salmon, and since there wasn't much snowmelt left to feed the creeks, the falls were small and quiet.

Visit

He came in bundled up, drowning in a huge mound of ratty brown knit scarf, bulky sweaters stuffed into an overcoat like sausage into a sausage-skin, a hat covered with a hood, thick glasses. Mild watery blue eyes, magnified, gazed at me more in sorrow than in anger. "I think we need to talk," he said.

Oh, Lord. "Look," I said, "I know what you're going to say, and..."

"No you don't. No you don't. This is why people don't talk to me, they imagine they know what I'm going to say. They don't."

"Okay, I don't," I agreed. Anything for a quiet life. "But still, you're wasting your time."

He was unwinding his scarf, which now enveloped his head, and fell in loops like a boa. Or perhaps more like a boa constrictor. A muffled "Hmmph!" sounded from under there. "I'm wasting my time? Don't be ridiculous. Time is tricky to work with, I'll give you that, but I never waste it." His head emerged from the coils of yarn, his hood fell off, and he swept his knit cap off his head. His hair stood up in tufts.

"Look," he said, "I'm not trying to make you give up anything, okay? You're thinking of some other guy."

"I know what the rules say. And everyone says the same thing. So I'm out. Not in the game any more. You can concentrate on your other clients."

"Doesn't work that way, and you know it. This isn't an optional relationship, not for either of us. You think I answered an ad, to get this gig? 'Troubled universe needs firm, loving God, infinite compassion, omnipotence a plus.' That how you think it works?"

I was starting to get irritated. "How do I know? I'm not even a theist. What are you hanging around me for? Tons of people believe in you. Go talk to them! They need to hear from you, believe me. They get up to all kinds of screwy stuff when they're on their own."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone wants to talk about other people. This is about you, bucko. Don't you worry about other people. I'm on it. The point is... you listening?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm listening," I grumbled.

"The point is, you got to meditate."

He folded his arms and pursed his lips.

"I have to meditate? That's all?"

"That's what I said! That's what I come for! You want it on stone tablets? I'm supposed set a bush on fire and crouch behind it and talk in a big voice, is that it? Jesus." He started winding himself up again.

"Well, but wait, wait just a minute. Do you mean like shamatha, vipassana, ngondro? What are we talking about here?"

"'Give us a sign! Give us a sign!' they always say," he muttered. "And you show up and give a perfectly good message, and then what? It's not good enough." He pointed a finger at me. "I don't give a damn what practice you do. It's all the same to me. I sent Penny, sometimes you listen to her, but this time I could see it was no use, I had to come myself. Meditate. That's it. That's the message. Don't make it complicated."

"Hey, but wait just a -- that's not fair, you could at least --"

But he was out the door.

Delight

I am so grateful.

Only Joy

That's all. After lying awake for hours, we went out and sat in lawn chairs, and talked quietly in the finally-cool night air, in our pyjamas. Vega cold and blue and beautiful through the branches of the apple tree. Three pairs of racoon eyes glowing in a flashlight beam. A ghost in the kitchen, in a white dress, when we came back inside. Turned out to be Tori.

So much grief and fear and pain. I don't believe in any of it. I only believe in the joy. But I have no language to explain that. And so many dead, so many lost, it's true. And soon enough we'll spin off into that distance too, and other people will have to adjust to the discomforts and dislocations of our disappearance. They'll get over it.

We speak of radical hospitality, of radical inclusion. But of course it's trickier than that. It would be a fairly simple matter if people only wanted to be invited. But of course, they want to be invited on their own terms. And that -- that we can't do for them, even if we would.

The slow wheel of heaven over our heads, the summer stars sinking in the west.

Changing a Lightbulb

I trotted downstairs to the basement, where we keep our stationary bicycle. For the past few months I've been putting in "seven miles" -- so it assures me, I suspect it's more like four -- every other day on this contraption, which we refer to as "the stuck bike."

But to put in seven miles on the stuck bike you need to be able to see its odometer. At the bottom of the stairs I flicked on the light for that side of the basement. Nothing happened.

I hesitated. Could I see the odometer by the light of the dim narrow window? I took a look. Not a chance. Could I track by counting my "steps"? I'd taken to counting lately. 140 regular steps, 70 faster, 105 regular, that made a mile. I could count it out. But could I keep track of the number of miles at the same time? On my fingers, perhaps?

The watchman I've posted in my mind stirred uneasily. "Hey, boss?" he said. "Take a look at this. I don't think it's quite right."

Reluctantly I brought my attention to it. Oh. Yeah. There is another way to handle problems like this. And the place we keep new lightbulbs is in the basement, five paces away from where I was standing, in fact.

With an effort of will I made myself do what most of you would have done without thinking. I changed the lightbulb. And it occurred to me, as I did so, that for two days, since we got back from the beach, I've been working around the fact that the light in the bathroom has been burned out, without it ever once having occurred to me that I might seize the initiative and change the lightbulb there.

Such is the strength of my habit of passivity. And of my children's. All initiative in our family is delegated to Martha, a burden she staggers under -- but also relinquishes reluctantly. My automatic response to a difficulty is to change, not my circumstances, but myself. Which has its upside of course. I'm temperamentally less easily fooled by the blandishments and threats of Samsara than many people; I'm not always imagining that a million dollars or a newer car will give me a new life. But it has also, obviously, a downside. I spend a lot of time in the dark, concocting workarounds.

The habit has to be undone, piece by piece. I have to notice when I'm being pathologically passive, and I have to respond differently. It is not a glorious task, it's not even a dignified one, but it's the work of my life, at the moment.

The joke is maybe so old that some of you don't know it:

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?

-- Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.

Fluency

I hold a spoonful of coffee, light brown, trembling. A tiny line of light where the sky reflects from its convexity. All the answers are trembling there.

Well. I put the spoon in my mouth. Bitterness runs over the sides of my tongue. Warmth soaks through the skin of my palate, and into the bone above it. My teeth answer to the heat, waking into the world. Morning. Maybe there's nothing to be learned.

Twin threads of sadness and joy are tracing their way along my veins. Melancholy and sanguine humors. Medieval European medicine has always made immediate sense to me. Grief and happiness move through the body not like winds, as the Chinese have it, and certainly not like electricity, as modern scientists believe. They seep, suffuse, saturate, spurt. They are liquids. A trickle of tears. A small translucent fountain of seed.

I wash my hands in the clean water of the Bull Run River. It's nothing but fluids, bitter or salt, sweet or sour. Running into our bodies and out of them. I cup my hands and the water overflows my fingers. So many stories we tell, and believe. Don't trust anything but your hands, that's my advice. If your hands don't understand it, it doesn't make sense, no matter how many words affirm it.

When we arrived at the Coast there was a disquieting brown cast to the ocean, as though flakes of old bronze were floating under the surface. Whether that had anything to do with the dead zones up north, I can't say -- by the end of the week the sea was green and gray again, laced with white.

I picked up a shard of mussel-shell, and rinsed the sand off it in the little creek that wanders down the beach. Like the bowl of a spoon; inside, where the mussel had been weeping, was an opalescent film. I turned it towards the light. The colors shifted, veils of lavender and violet, hints of green and blue. Over all the silver gleam, cloudlight and seashine.

I understand why people have asked questions of shells and tea-dregs. Ossified fluids, liquids that have stopped running long enough to form an answer. That I might hold in my hand.

But not really. What remains is beauty, not answers.

Back from the Beach

It's still there. So are the whales.

Gone to see the Whales

I'm probably un-netted for the next week or so while we make our annual pilgrimage to Otter Rock.

Five Threads

In October I'll begin taking massage classes. One evening class at a time.

1) This is what I have always wanted to do. This is my vocation. This is my calling and when I'm doing it my life will be wonderful.

2) I'm just excited because I've always loved taking classes. In the event I'll want to do massage no more than I wanted to teach college or program computers.

3) The external circumstances are irrelevant. The problem is not what my work is, my problem is my relationship to it. What I really need to do is meditate, and fix the problem where it actually is. (Hospital patients fretting to change their beds, and all that.)

4) I'm excited because I can communicate by touch, as I can by writing, as I usually feel I can't in speech. What I really ought to do is learn to speak, so I can communicate as other people do.

5) Always, always, I have waited overlong to change my circumstances. I have tried to accomplish over years, by sheer force of will, or by the cultivation of clearer perception, what a change of circumstances would have done overnight. I should have done this years ago.

Hospital

Across from me, Martha dozes in a recliner. To her right Alan is sleeping, his head on the hand that has the monitor connectors taped to it. From the other hand the IV tube snakes away up to the clear bag of steroids and antibiotics and painkiller.

He's okay. What we thought was strep was in fact a nasty tonsil abscess. A couple hours ago the ENT doctor lanced it, and after a period of spitting out blood and pus and looking miserable, he was looking a little more cheerful and asking when we could go home. And not long after that he fell asleep. Martha and I went out to grab some food. Came back, and he was still asleep. So now we're just waiting to see how he feel when he wakes up -- good enough to come home, or should he stay the night?

The setting sun filters through the blinds. It's very peaceful here. I've never been in a hospital where it was peaceful, before. Maybe it's because we're in the pediatric wing, for reasons I don't fully understand -- Alan is sixteen and I'm guessing the the only six-foot patient in this wing. But anyway, it doesn't have the constant irritating sounds, the insistent ringing of bells and beeps and pagings that generally make hospitals hellish. I've never quite understood the theory behind making sure that people can't rest in hospitals, though it seems to be widely accepted. But anyway, here, and now, it's actually pretty quiet. The high-pitched almost-whistle of the air conditioning. The occasional fussing of a baby. Alan's barely-audible snoring.

Update: Alan's home today and much improved. Thanks for all your kind words!

Watermark

It is with amusement -- I'm sitting here grinning -- that I consider how just now, at the nadir of my confidence in Buddhist institutions and in some of its claims, I have been busily preaching the Dharma in several unfortunate people's comment-threads. Who am I hoping to convince? Three guesses.

Well. The rose blossoms across the sky.

I say, I know this, or I know that, but I don't. There's the hugeness of the sky, and the sweetness of the rose, and beyond that, who cares? Not me.

Ring the bell once, twice, three times. Bow to the Buddha, bow to your own awakened mind. Suppose you are looking at the blue sky through a fragment of blue glass. And someone says: which blue are you looking at?

You remember, from the high places, you look down on the western sea, at about five o'clock? And it's nothing but shimmering. Like that. And you realize that the sea isn't made of water at all -- what a ridiculous error! -- it's actually made of light, and the light is made of metal. Steel, maybe.

And then when the sun drops over the horizon you forget all this. You look at the gray heaving sea, and you say -- oh yes, how foolish! the sea isn't made of water; it's made of fog. And the fog is made of dirty rags. Everyone knows that.

Knell of the Magi

Flames swirl, and servants
Lay three shrouds in the coals;
A shivering brotherhood
Shudders and swells in the shoals.

Sweet burning, the purling
Extravagance of light;
Endwarped cedarwood,
Curling and turning to white.

At play in the plunge of fire,
In the glowing shallows of hell,
Still longing to be understood,
Each pulls at the tongue of a bell.

Some Great Sudden Hest

And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest.

All of Oregon seems to be laboring under some great sudden hest, this weekend: a damp hundred-degree heat and a gray haze; a breathless restraint, a sullen crawling yellowish heaven. What treason the sky may be contemplating, I can't say, but its dependents must fret until they know.

My mood is unsuited to this oppression. I, for once, am breathing freely. I've made a rash decision and scrambled on board a ship bound for God knows where; but now that we're fairly underway, and land is disappearing astern, there's no point in regret, and no way to second-guess my decision even if I wanted to. Obeying a great sudden hest of quite a different sort.

Among my rash acts has been applying to massage school, to begin evening classes in the Fall. I have an interview there Thursday evening. Suddenly all sorts of unthinkable things are thinkable. A binding has broken loose, since Montreal, and I am unstuck.

Also unsecured. I've thrown up all my sangha work. I am taking refuge in Samsara; and no doubt Samsara is already thinking of ways to let me down. But at present I feel I simply have to throw a tuft of grass up for the wind to catch, follow it, and take the adventure God sends me.

Campus

A perfect day, sunny but not too hot. I bought a sandwich, which they gave to me in a bag, and then I climbed a grassy embankment, and dodged across the five-lane road. There was a campus here that I'd always meant to visit. I knew they held community college classes; I'd considered brushing up my Spanish here. And there were offices of the University of Oregon System and a couple high-tech training institutes. Well and good. A campus, I thought. I'll sit in the shade, eat my lunch, and watch the students walk by.

There was a banked wall of lawn and then a moat of parking lot -- for which you needed a quarterly pass, I presumed to keep interlopers such as I from just drifting in -- which surrounded the campus on all sides. The lot was more than half full. But there were no students to be seen. Half a dozen very large buildings, inscrutable in their reflective, smoked-glass windows. Evidence of a couple hundred people having arrived, in the form of empty cars. But not a soul in sight.

I walked clear around the campus. In that time I saw exactly four human beings. Outside a job-training office a young woman sat on a bit of lawn, spreading sunblock on her bare legs. Outside a -- what? an industrial arts building? -- a stout young man hesitated, casting anxious surreptitious glances at me. Around by the System offices a tall woman walked briskly, talking into her cell-phone, also glancing sidewise at me, determined not to meet my eyes. And around the back, marked "staff parking" -- the servants' quarters, by the dumpsters -- an anomalous woman in heels and dark elegant suit strode past me, rummaging in her leather bag.

There was a shady bit of lawn. I did sit down and eat my sandwich. But a crawling horror of this place began to prickle around my neck. To walk from a sandwich shop to the campus -- my subversive scheme for visiting the campus even though I wasn't purchasing any education -- involved crossing pristine, never-trodden lawns (presumably soaked in weed-poison, to maintain that unearthly green purity), and then crossing the parking lots to arrive at the first sidewalks. No sidewalks led from the street into the campus. Why would they? Who would do such an outlandish thing as walk into the campus from the road?

I had thought that the place and its parking were designed to keep me out of some inner place, some courtyard where students laughed and played. I could understand this plan, even if I didn't approve of it, and planned to flout it.

But there was no inner place. There was no place at all, here. They were not keeping me out -- there was nothing to keep anyone out of. This was not a creation of over-controlling authority. It was the naturally occurring loneliness of the suburbs. Nobody had to encourage these people to dart from car to classroom, from classroom to car. They did this by instinct. I had pictured questioning, or at least flustering, authority; but I was the one getting flustered.

Back across the banked pristine lawn, the five-lane road, and down the banked pristine lawn on the other side, that walled off the mall parking lot. Into my beat-up van. I drove back to work -- driving in through yet another wall of poisoned grass, and into yet another moat of parking lot. Not a soul. This is how you do it, I thought to myself, not very coherently, as I parked. This is it. This is how you train people to drop bombs on civilians. If they're lonely enough they'll do anything.

A New War

Here, slightly edited, is part of mail I sent today to a friend I've been in some conflict with since the latest fighting began in the Mideast. I copy it here in hopes that it may make my otherwise (I'm afraid) erratic and difficult behavior more intelligible.

I should know by now that when new war starts, I should simply leave cyberspace for a week or two. The hatred is just too much for me, it's so toxic to me, and I start thrashing, and trying to make everbody who comes down on one side see the other side with love and understanding, and it's just stupid, the worst possible time to try to do that. I can't seem to help myself, though. I forget -- since I don't do television and only occasionally do radio or newspapers -- that I'm talking to people with the images fresh in their minds: they're seeing the children bleeding in their parents' arms, and that's what's important: preachy little buddhists are very far away and very unimportant.

Shorts

There's a short short of mine up at Qarrtsiluni, titled the 5th of July. The latest Qarrt topic is turning up some really interesting stuff. Extra credit: devise the plot of the novel that would have as integral parts all of these short shorts.