Japan Is Only a Foot and a Half Away!

For a little more than a year now, I have been making daily visits to ancient Japan. My means of transport has been the shakuhachi, which is sometimes called the Japanese Zen flute. It is made of the root end of a bamboo stalk. It is blown on one end, where there is a sharp edge. In looking through it (as if it were a telescope or a spyglass) you will see that its bore is painted an inky, shiny black. This black is like the beautiful darkness of the soul that the sound of the shakuhachi connects us with. The darkness that heals us. That gives us rest and renews us, the way that the night renews us with sleep. We are addicted to light. We see far too little of the dark.

The standard length of the flute is one shaku plus a hachi: which is to say approximately one foot and one half. Hence its name, and also why I say Japan is only a foot and a half away. Do I feel the yearning to be there, in that beautiful ancient country where the sea and the mountains, cherry blossoms and rice paddies, clouds and sun come together in one island place, which is always just a little too complete to really need the rest of the world? Well, all I need to do to find it is to pick up the flute, put it to my lips, and blow. 

The instrument is not easy. After I first received my flute from the maker in LA, it took a good two weeks of patient daily blowing (sometimes to the point of faintness) to learn to make a consistent sound. Twelve months of faithful daily practice have followed, and still I am not really stringing notes together in what most people would call melodies or tunes. Miles Davis said that the best musicians are known by their sound, and although he was a trumpeter, not a flute player, I am taking his implied advice, and taking my time at it. Savoring the sounds of each note and each register. Learning to bend the pitch by drawing in the jaw or nodding the head. Finding the center of each pitch, by means of a modern electronic pitch meter. Blowing the fundamental note Ro time after time after time, in the understanding and faith that Ro contains every other note above it, and that in mastering Ro I will master the matrix out of which every melody will eventually proceed. 

The shakuhachi has five fingering holes, for five basic notes. The rest is amiable cheating and adjustment. Which in itself seems like a sort of parable about life. So much can be built with so little. As long as you're willing to give and take. Mix and re-mix. Negotiate and reflect.

The shakuhachi literature goes back centuries. And the art of playing the shakuhachi has developed in different ways in different parts of the country of Japan. I think of this process of individuation as similar to the way that butterflies evolve differently in different locations. They are spotted one way here. Striped another way there. They float just so here, and glide with sweet meaningful undulations there. Just so with the schools of shakuhachi. Every good player knows a certain school. And cultivates affection for it, as if it were his or her own dear family of notes. This is where we belong, the patterns of flight we know. The angle of the sun is so specific here. We love it that way.

I am far from joking, when I say that I consider the shakuhachi an instrument of travel. It's not of course a jet plane or a boat. It's definitely not an automobile, which means literally something that goes by itself. But the flute does get me there, to Japan, or, all right, to an inward spiritual sum that I picture as a Japan of the mind and soul, a place filled with mystery and with beauty that can only be accessed by means of discipline, mindfulness, patience, and self control. By thoughtful formation of the lips, and intelligent breathing. By means of a posture of the spine that joins heaven and earth in one strong up-and-down bodily brush stroke. The flute simply cannot be played properly without a beautiful muscular posture. And you must smile subtly as you blow, with a smile reminiscent of the Buddha's. And you must believe as you blow, along with all the Zen masters, that the human breath, in the here and the now, is plenty enough to think about. Almost too much. 

So, is it practice time? Well, pick up the flute and let go of the ego, yes at least once today let go of that most masterful and misleading of illusions that is the ambitious calculating self. Drown it in sheer beauty of sound and in the science of the production of that sound. Breathe in, then return that breath to the universe through the medium of the flute. The flute will do the rest.  It will Ro you all the way to Japan.

HB

Many Verbs Make the Hummus Light

Hummus, the creamy pasty stuff that's good for dipping with vegetable sticks and falafel, is made with chickpeas. Lots of chickpeas. And chickpeas come with skins, little saggy sleeves of vegetable matter that the peas can't shrug off by themselves, even with a good and proper boiling. Now say (just say!) you're making your own hummus. And you dream of it light and creamy. Well, for the creation of that light and creamy hummus, the skins need to come off of the peas. And yet taking the skin off of each cooked chickpea is a bore. Each one has to be picked individually up and slipped out of the skin. This takes time, patience, and over the course of many minutes of labor, even a little finger strength.  

Now I know that all sorts of methods have been proposed to make the job easier. It may be that some of these methods even work. But I'm not here today to recommend a chickpea-skinning efficiency hack. I'm here to recommend the opposite. 

I'm bringing up the skinning of chickpeas as an illustration of a whole class of labor that we pretty much wholly reject these days. Arduous, we call it. Boring. Mind-numbing. Manual. These adjectives are like the bright dashed lines that utility workers paint onto the lawn-grass. They indicate there's something deeper underground: in this case a copious pipeline of disdain. Need to weed the lawn of dandelions? Don't root them out with a dandelion digging tool; just spray and kill with herbicide! Dishes need washing? Put them in the dishwasher with some soap powder, flick a switch. Want to copy a poem? Call it up on a website and print the darned thing out. Then, with the time you've just saved, go do something more meaningful.

But what if this is just flat out wrong? Or mostly wrong? Or even just partly wrong? What if food is better, precisely because our own hands were involved in its making? What if poems are more enjoyable precisely because we copy them out by hand with a pen or with the percussive strike of typewriter keys? What if the reason we equate physical labor with meaninglessness is that we keep stubbornly neglecting to add something essential to the labor itself? Such as singing? Such as children playing in background? Such as the swapping of stories? Such as listening to the birds? Such as the simple striving to feel a Zen affection for the present moment? 

Especially conversation makes work go sweetly by. There is no human gift so beautiful and everyday as the gift of conversation. And yet we discount it. Avoid it. Replace it with machines. I think we should do more conversing. And I think that, to encourage us to do more of it, we ought to do boring chores, more of them, just in general more.

As you may have guessed, not long ago Sunnyside was witness to the skinning of a certain population of chickpeas. I do not remember all the particulars of that episode of labor: exactly how long it took, or even what time of day it was when I myself took part in the work of de-skinning. I think it was late morning. But I do remember this. I was with my wife. And we sat across the dining room table from one another, and, as we did the work with our hands, that is, as we picked up peas from one metal bowl, skinned them, and deposited them nude and glistening into a different bowl, bing, we talked. And now the jar of tasty hummus that sits in our refrigerator, is also a sign of meaning exchanged, stories transferred. It is part of the cement of relationship, a gift to ourselves that she and I made together. 

I really am saying we ought to do more chores, if we possibly can, and especially if we can do them together, and especially if the chores in question give us space to talk with one another: maybe in silence, because even certain kinds of silence can be forms of conversation, but probably more often with actual nouns and verbs strung together aloud to communicate love and to create a common story.

As Eve says to Adam in Paradise Lost:

With thee conversing I forget all time,/All seasons and their change, all please alike...

Time to talk. Time to weed the garden. Skin the peas. Try it. Really. Maybe instead of boredom you'll feel something more like the return of time itself, which is to say, the return of light and creamy nutritious life.

HB

How to Deal With the Pain

So. True harm has been done to you. Real injury. Particular injustice. How to respond? 

No need to multiply the sum of anger and sorrow in this life. No need.
No need to extend the hurt beyond the circle of what's done. No need.
No need to daily anatomize the wrongs done to you. No need.
No need to endlessly rehearse the anger. No need.
No need to tell and retell the outrage. No need.

Always keep the task of healing in view. 

Bring friends into your service as forces of prayer and pondering.

Consider your own past as a tool for the understanding of truth. Precedent often has something to say. 

Consider relevant scripture. 

Seek reconciliation in person. Legal tools are blunt and brutal.

Do not fear failure, even if you know you cannot possibly win.

Believe that there is not a human being on this earth who is not made in the image of God. Whom you must honor in person. Every person. Including yourself.


HB 

The Boy, the Dog, and the Money

Once I was mugged at dog-point. I was twelve years old, biking through a park after school, when the huge animal was suddenly right alongside me, snapping at my ankles. I got off and put the bike between me and him, a barricade of Schwinn, while he barked and bristled and in general made me understand he did not much like my living looks, and would do his best to turn me inside out. I was at that time maybe five feet tall. The dog may have been as heavy as me. Of course when you're talking about a dog that size, he might as well have been an archangel. I shook. Every inch of me.

Then, at a command, the dog retreated. Two men came near. One of them demanded money.

I turned the pockets of my pants inside out and there was precisely nothing in my pockets except a few pieces of lint, so he told me to get going you little shit. I got back on the bike and pretended to be off. 

Though actually I did my best to track the three. I doubled back and followed at a distance. In a parking lot bordered by trees, the three of them got into their two door sedan. The dog jumped in first. It still kind of breaks my heart to think of that moment: the creature jumping into the back seat, in that eager scrabbling way that dogs often have of getting into cars. Enthusiastic. Full of the desire to please. He was just like any dog that knew his way around his life, and his owner's life. He might as well have just come from an innocent hour at the beach, catching Frisbee tosses. Though in fact he had just been used to mug a twelve year old boy. 

Nothing came of my trying to get close enough to read the license plate. When I got home, I told my mother what had happened. She called the police, and an officer arrived. He asked a lot of good questions, the ones you'd expect, among them:

"Did they take anything?”

“Five dollars,” I said. Which yes, was embellishment. Why did I lie like this? Why did I say that the men and the dog had taken money? There's only one reason, I think: I wanted to be taken seriously. And the only guarantee of that, I thought, lay in saying that money had been subtracted from my pockets.  Otherwise no one would really care. So I thought. 

Later that afternoon, I went to catechism class—getting there a little late on account of everything that had happened. All my classmates had been apprised of events by the pastor, who, when I came in through a door in the back of the room, was sitting in front, at a lectern, on a tall metal stool. His eyes, filled with kindness and concern, found mine across the distance of the room.

“How are you?” he asked. Fine, I answered quietly, fine, though of course this was not precisely true. I took a seat, not far from a girl I liked, but not too close to her either, because there's a certain distance from what you love that helps you believe in its continual perfection. Class proceeded. Maybe we were talking about the creed: "We all believe in one true God."

(Who is not the god of Money.)


HB