creepy naked guy

I have been on a quest lately to find a swimming hole within biking distance of my house. Living in Maine, and with the multitudinous rivers, streams and ocean inlets in my general vicinity, this would seem to be an easy task. But not so. Of course there are various places to swim, but I’m looking for a place a little more secluded, if you know what I mean. Thoreau and Ben Franklin are on my side in this quest for a place where I can indulge in an “open-air bath.” But there’s always the chance that I might get caught and viewed as some kind of freak. I had an experience last summer where I drove out to a secluded pond near my home. I hiked about a mile into the woods, and jumped into the water. Not seeing anyone around, I took off my bathing suit and threw it onto the rocks onshore. It was dusk, and the chances of anyone happening along were slim. And yet, who should appear out of the woods but four women. I was floating about twenty yards offshore and they called out to me, asking if I would mind if they joined me. Of course I agreed. What else could I do? They didn’t notice my state of undress, and, clad in their various swim attire, they jumped in as well. So here we have a great moral dilemma. Does a man, floating naked in the middle of a pond, admit to his newly manifested female companions that he is in fact naked and that perhaps they would like to take their leisure elsewhere? Or does he pretend that everything’s fine, just fine, nothing to see here? Well, I opted for the latter choice. But when the sun started to go down and the water got chillier, I had to make a decision. I slowly paddled towards shore, and gingerly retrieved my suit from the rocks at the water’s edge. You probably don’t know how difficult it is to put on a swimsuit while you are trying to tread water, but let me tell you, it’s not easy. As I climbed out of the water, clothed, I heard giggles behind me. They knew what had happened. I distinctly heard one of them say, “That must have been a thrill for him.” As if I was some kind of pervert. As if it was my plan to go skinny-dipping in a remote pond and hope that some women came along. Please. And yet, they had come out of nowhere, intruded on my privacy, and here I was, feeling like the creep. I remember swearing to myself that I would never let this happen again. But here I am, one summer later, looking for some kind of swimming hole utopia. I’m a married father of two, not some weirdo hiding in the bushes. All I want is someplace where I can be alone and feel close to nature. People can legally go off into the woods, drink a few Buds, and fire shotguns at innocent animals, or tear across frozen lakes on loud, belching snowmobiles, or plow through the woods on ugly, dangerous ATV’s, and all this is legal. And yet I, with my low carbon footprint, am some kind of freak. A man who goes into the woods with a gun to kill animals is called a sportsman. But a man who goes into the woods to swim unencumbered in a secluded pond is just a creepy naked guy, apparently.

endless vow

Sometimes I get depressed because I don’t think I’m a very good Buddhist. I’m prone to melancholy and quick to anger. I believe in universal love and forgiveness, but can’t seem to put these beliefs into practice. I’m not good in crowds and some would say I’m antisocial. I received the precepts, one of which says to refrain from alcohol, but I love beer. Another says I shouldn’t kill, but I just ate Russian wild boar at a charity fundraiser a few hours ago. I want to be at ease among all people, responding directly to anyone I meet with an open, wakeful, nonjudgemental mind, but can’t. I feel like a real misanthrope at times. I tell myself that I love to be alone, and like Thoreau, would say that I’ve never met a companion as companionable as solitude. But maybe this is just fear speaking. If only everyone were like me, I think, then life would be so easy. How childish this sounds. I know that committed practice is my only way out of this cycle of negative thoughts and I keep saying to myself that tomorrow I’ll really start practicing, that I’ll set aside time each day for zazen. But I can’t wake up at 5 am, splash cold water on my face, and sit. It’s just not in my constitution. At night, after the kids are in bed, all I want to do is sit on the couch with a beer and watch baseball. So here’s another excuse…I’ll really start practicing when baseball season is over. Yeah, right…see you in October. Just one more excuse, one more delay. But when will I finally wake up? I ask myself. Always tomorrow, comes the answer. Right now I’m concentrating on the teachings of Bodhidharma. I wonder how I would act if this towering figure were standing right before me, with his bulging eyes, bushy beard, and countenance that demands I stop wasting time and wake up now! I realize that every day we must renew our vow to wake up, to become buddhas, to save all beings. Not even every day, but every minute, every second we must make this vow, endlessly for thousand of kalpas, until we achieve liberation. This sounds really hard, when I think about it. Like Bodhidharma’s disciple Hui-k’o, sometimes I feel like I’d cut off my arm to have my mind pacified. Where is Bodhidharma when I need him? All I really want is to be completely present in this wonderful moment, without obsessing about the past, or projecting into the future. I have to keep making this vow.

swamps of jersey

Henry is heading out on the open road today, bound for that paradise by the ocean, Atlantic City, NJ. This is business, not pleasure, but wherever Henry goes, he hopes to find new discoveries and adventure. The meadowlands are coming back they say. It’s been about twenty years since I was in AC, and it’s come a long way since then. With Jersey on my mind, I listened to Nebraska again last night, and those lines of Springsteen’s are echoing in my head as I prepare to set off: “Everything dies baby that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” I’m looking forward to strolling the boardwalk and seeing the ocean. I imagine it will be about ten degrees warmer there. I’ll miss my family while I’m away, but I’ll bring them back a handful of sand, or maybe a poker chip.

snakes

This happened before dinner tonight. The sun was just beginning to set. The bottoms of the bare trees were in shadow, but the tops were bathed in the otherworldly pink light that you only see for a few minutes each day. The air was cold. But a cold that was, combined with what was left of the sun’s heat, invigorating and life-giving, not the numbing cold we’ve been experiencing during the last four months here in Maine. This was a cold that made me feel like I could walk ten miles or more without tiring. We had about a half-hour of good daylight left and my six-year old daughter was asking to be taken to the church playground, across the street from our house. The playground isn’t much more than a Cedarworks playset nestled in the trees behind the church, but its proximity and relative seclusion makes us feel like it’s our own private realm. There is also a hill to climb that in the winter allows us a view of the Kennebec River, and woods to explore. I never miss an opportunity to make my children aware of the wild nature that is all around them, and the fact that beauty can be found even in the simplest things. Never miss the chance to do this if you are a parent. If children (and adults) are never taught to appreciate and find joy in the simplest things in life, they will never be able to get enjoyment out of the complexities, and when times turn bad as they sometimes do, they won’t have the inner strength to make it through life’s austerities. To be able to feel at home wherever you are, rich or poor, with not much more than a toothbrush and the clothes on your back is a good thing, I think, and Henry would agree. But I digress. So we walked over to the playground and as I was swinging next to my daughter, she asked, “Where do snakes come from?” I said that this was a very good question. Why was she asking? “Well, in school, the teacher was reading a story about snakes and one of the kids asked where the first snake came from and I know it didn’t just fall out of the sky.” “Well, I said, some people believe that god snapped his fingers and made everything appear all at once. But other people believe that all life started from very simple organisms that changed over a very long time and turned into all the animals and people we see today. This process took millions of years. It’s called evolution.” My daughter seemed to accept this as the more reasonable answer. Then the sun started to disappear and my ears got cold, so we went home for dinner. You just never know when you might get asked about snakes falling from the sky a half-hour before dinner on a Sunday afternoon. Today I was poor, but I had this moment with my daughter, and the pink sunset.

the wicked bean

I remember a line spoken by a character in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections that says, roughly, “I can’t wait to go to bed at night so I can wake up in the morning and have coffee.” I may not have the words exactly right, but I agree with the sentiment. In contrast, Henry Thoreau said that water is the only drink for the wise man. I have been at war with these two sentiments my whole life. (And if you throw beer into the mix, you have a three-way smackdown) I have tried at various times in my life to give up coffee, using tea instead as my morning fix. I love good tea, but nothing beats the thrill of coffee. Judith Warner, a columnist for The New York Times and a much more eloquent writer than me, wrote a great blog post on the joys of coffee. I wonder what humans did before coffee. How awake could I become without coffee? But these are idle thoughts. With two small children and a demanding job, I’d decompose into a puddle of goo without my coffee. Someday I might be free of the brown, bitter beast, but for the time being, I’ll look upon my morning coffee as a joy rather than a shackle.

stepping outside

I wasn’t familiar with the story of Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz until I watched a preview (on that Mount Olympus of all internet time-wasters, Apple Movie Trailers) of a forthcoming film called Surfwise. This is the story of a man who left his successful medical practice to travel around North and South America with his wife and their nine kids in a 24-foot camper so that they could surf full-time. This idea of becoming a “businessless person,” as Zen Master Linji says, is a seductive one. Wild nature is shrinking and as a society we (and our children, if we have them) don’t spend enough time romping in the woods or combing the beaches anymore. I was watching HBO a few nights ago and George Carlin was on, doing his usual routine, when he started talking about how our kids are so overscheduled right now, and how something that used to be spontaneous – play – has now been transformed into “playdates.” What happened, Carlin wondered, to a kid sitting in the backyard in the grass, just sitting there, digging a hole in the ground with a stick? “Do they even make sticks anymore?” he asked. I laughed because it sounded funny at the time. But I wonder. If you look at Doc Paskowitz’s story, you might conclude that he was crazy. His children certainly criticized him for handicapping them in life by not sending them to regular school, etc. When Thoreau moved out to his cabin at Walden Pond, he was stepping outside of what society at that time thought was normal behavior. And yet, his example, his rebelliousness, serves as an example for us today. I wonder sometimes how far I would be willing to step outside of cultural norms to pursue a life of true independence. Would I ever have the courage to sell everything I own, take my wife and kids to the Caribbean, and live in a grass hut, digging in the sand with a stick, eating fruit we picked from the trees that morning? Is that really crazier than working in a basement cubicle for the next twenty years? Which scenario is more normal, more human? I don’t think humans were meant to live in boxes. Sometimes I’d rather get myself to a tropical beach, find a stick, and start digging.

henry in summer, or, wishful thinking

“The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food is generally more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary…Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” – Walden

back from the woods

Sorry to go all all Tanzan on you like that, but sometimes a guy just needs to get away. Where did I go, you may ask? The easy, but untruthful answer would be to say something like “I was swimming in Walden Pond,” or “I was busy becoming a Buddhist, Rastafarian, Gospel-of-Thomas Christian.” (This might actually be true, since that’s about what I am) But the real answer is that for the longest time I just didn’t have anything to say. Frankly, I don’t know how these professional bloggers do it. Something new every day? My mind doesn’t work that way, I guess. But for the longest time, there was something missing in my life, and I realized it was creative expression. So I’m going to try a new tact, and perhaps be a little more experimental with this blog. Maybe I’ll throw in some poetry or a few more photographs. We shall see. I’m working on a few things right now that I’ll hopefully be able to share with you shortly. As I look out my window right now, I see snowflakes swirling down from the sky. It’s mid-March, and somehow these snowflakes seem unfair. This has been a cruel winter. I can’t afford to heat my tiny house, the front end of my ancient Accord is making scary noises, and my feet are always cold no matter how many pairs of Smartwools I put on. But I have my health, my family, my Buddha nature, and now, once again, I have my blog. Henry’s back from the woods.

recommended reading

I like to keep a list of the books I’ve read. I’m strange that way. I have a little black Moleskine notebook where, if I can remember to, I record books I’ve either finished reading, or would like to read sometime in the future. I don’t really know why I keep this list. I’m not trying to make myself look smart. I’m not going to pull it out at a party and show people. Maybe I hope to pass it on to my children someday, wishfully thinking that they might like to read some of the books their dad read. Who knows. So this a roundabout way of saying that I have a long list of books I could recommend to you, but for today, I’ll just mention a few. The first is a series of three children’s books written by DB Johnson. They are: Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, Henry Builds a Cabin, and Henry Climbs a Mountain. The main character in all three is a bear named Henry, modeled after you-know-who; Henry David Thoreau. Each book, through its wonderful illustrations and simple story, illuminates an aspect of Thoreau’s life and writing. I won’t say too much more. Seek them out and discover them for yourself. I’ve read them to my own children many times, and they never fail to entertain and inspire me. The other set of books I’d like to recommend is something completely different. If you’ve read even some of this blog, you can probably tell that I have a deep interest in Buddhism. I may even call myself a Buddhist, whatever that might mean, but I don’t sport a shaved head or wear robes. I live an ordinary life, doing what’s required, trying to live mindfully. So I’ve read quite a few books on Buddhism, but I came across something I thought I’d never see. It is an eight-volume manga-biography of the Buddha by an artist named Osamu Tezuka. Manga is a Japanese form of comic book. So it’s actually a comic book version of the life of the Buddha. The books show an amazing humanism, slapstick humor, bawdiness, and violence. But this only serves to bring the story to life. If you approach them with an open mind, you won’t be disappointed. You may even be moved.

real simple

I’ve always been puzzled by the phrase voluntary simplicity. I know I said when I started this blog that it would be categorized by, among other things, a lack of cynicism. I think we are a much too cynical society as a whole, and many of the blogs that I read are rants against something. That’s OK. If the world was perfect, we wouldn’t have much to write about. So I guess I should apologize for the intrusion of cynicism into this post. Voluntary simplicity implies that you have enough resources to live comfortably, but all that disposable income is making you feel guilty, so you basically cut down on buying things. You can even buy a beautiful glossy magazine called Real Simple that gives you hundreds of suggestions each month on how to voluntarily simplify. I would think that one of the first ways to simplify is not to buy magazines, but that’s just me. Sarcasm aside, I wonder what it really means to truly simplify in this day and age. There are millions, if not billions of people in the world who are victims of involuntary simplicity. Could we give up our cell phones, our iPods, our second cars, our second homes? I remember seeing a photograph of all of Gandhi’s worldly possessions; sandals, eyeglasses, eating utensils, and a prayer book. Thoreau brought some books to his cabin at Walden, a few tools, pencil and paper, and not much else. I subtitled this blog a “virtual cabin.” Thich Nhat Hanh talks about withdrawing to his “retreat” when times get tough. Do we have our own retreats, virtual or otherwise, when things get too tough and we need to regroup? Do all the things we have hamper us from finding that place? What do we need to get rid of to be truly fulfilled?