Hey, y’all, I’m back. [cricket, cricket … ]

Um ... wait ... 

I deactivated my Facebook profile back in August in order to take a personal retreat into my analog life. I wanted to reset the way I was consuming social media and get back to prioritizing those things in my life that align with my intentions and aspirations. I wanted to reinvigorate my meditation practice and I needed to spend more time writing.

Facebook can be an excellent distraction. I drive a truck for a living and can only accomplish other things once I've stopped somewhere. I’m often only stopped for a few minutes, and it was so easy to decide that all I had time for was a quick check on FB. Soon, it was just a bad habit; almost an addiction. I was always hip deep in my news feed, strenuously arguing politics and keeping up with all kinds things that don’t matter me. There was always something else interesting to read. And while it wasn’t endlessly interesting, it was an endless supply of things that seemed

interesting. I have always been a voracious reader but I wasn’t reading things I wanted to read; I was reading the next shiny, interesting thing that came by. After a while I could tell it was only a felt sense of interesting; something artificial. One friend once told another, “you can find Todd on Facebook, he’s always there.” While I am back and a bit ambivalent about being back, I won’t be back in the same way that I was before.

I am working the road hard lately, with the goal of being able to quit by late summer to work full time on my boat. Most truckers don’t have a regular schedule; I am one of those for sure. This has made it tough to maintain a regular meditation practice. Moreover, it’s pretty easy to blame the irregular schedule and get lazy. My meditation became catch-as-catch-can for the last couple years. Even though I actually take Buddhism quite seriously, I had become the proverbial night-stand-Buddhist; I was mostly Buddhist in what I read at bedtime. With a little extra effort during these analog days, I have managed to return to a regular practice. In fact, I may be sitting more now than I have since the time of the precept ceremony I participated in. I didn’t realize how much I had missed it until it began soaking back into all the corners of my life.

Habits have to be cultivated. Life is good, and quite settled right now, because I’ve taken back control of my habits. When I’m not paying attention to my intentions and the good habits I’ve developed around them, they are easily replaced by habits not of my own choosing. Someone or something else is deciding what direction I should head. I cannot achieve my goals without maintaining habits that contribute to that achievement.

This is the time of year when people talk about resolutions. New Year’s Resolutions are really about developing and maintaining good habits. However, I believe that habits can only be cultivated with daily discipline -- not an annual review. Wresting control from external forces and taking responsibility again for my own navigation was not easy, but it is my only chance to keep making good decisions and get Emma in the water to go vagabonding.

The same effort to live more inline with my aspirations has got me writing regularly again too. There are new posts here at the Zennish Boy blog as well as on the Bubba the Pirate blog. I have also started work on a sailing memoir that will stretch from my very first sail at a boy scout camp in northern Michigan to the present day on the cusp of escaping to sea from the Atlantic Coast of Florida. I'll let you know when it comes out as an ebook. There are also bits of other writing soon to appear over at the Secret Other Blog.

I miss my Grand Rapids Sangha Family.

The Log

I've been meaning to write a post describing working on the highway as a crucible of reactivity. Out here on the mean streets, there are clueless drivers, texters and just plain bad drivers. I was going to suggest that some of these drivers, fourwheelers and other truckers, were endangering the rest of us. It was going to be obvious that some righteous indignation was appropriate. Actually, I was trying to justify my own righteous indignation; my overreaction.

As a truck driver, I'd had a couple close calls driving aggressively and long ago decided I better lay off. I first fixed that by aggressively preventing other drivers from being aggressive. Sounds logical, right? Eventually, I just went through a phase of really resenting the drivers who were aggressive, or ignorant of the finer points of traffic law, or just plain stupid. Really, it was about how I was a better driver than them. It was probably always something like that. Finally, I've reached the point where I am just bewildered by how some people drive. I'm not perfect, of course, but I've improved my intention.

The “crucible of reactivity” was going to be the perfect excuse for me occasionally losing my shit behind the steering wheel. Every once in a while it still creeps up on me.  

And then I heard an old Zen story. Old Zen stories will always get you. The good ones are so stripped down, so human, that you can immediately recognize yourself in one of the characters. This Zen story is in two parts. In the first, you are out fishing in your canoe when you start to feel a little sleepy. You drop an anchor and lie down to take a quick nap. Just as you're about to drift off to sleep, you feel a great clunk and jump up to see that another fisherman has carelessly run his canoe into yours. “What the hell are you doing? Are you stupid? You're a danger to all of us out here!" [sound familiar?]

The second part is nearly the same, you are out fishing in your canoe when you discover that you're a little sleepy. You drop an anchor and lie down to take a quick nap. Just as you're about to drift off to sleep, you feel a great clunk and jump up! “What the … oh.”  Its a log that has drifted down the river and bumped into your boat. You lie back down and take a peaceful nap.

What is the difference between the other fisherman and the log? Absolutely nothing. We have no more control over the behavior of the other fisherman than we have of the log. We can try to argue, like I was going to about other drivers, that the other fisherman should be polite, be responsible, follow the rules, etc.  Can we ever make someone else follow the rules? Or especially, can we make them follow the rules in the way that we would want them to?

We can't. We also don't have any idea what is on the other fisherman's mind or what's going on in his the life. There are a thousand things that could be on his mind; stressing him to distraction. Can we blame him? Can we expect him to do what we want?

Then why are we willing to give the log a pass and not the other fisherman?

Huh, that never happened before ...

There are times when even I am surprised how clueless I can be. Worse yet, I've learned this week that I have to work on my equanimity.

I was driving south on I-95 through Georgia, minding my own business, listening to podcasts from the Secular Buddhist Association. It just happened to be the very last exit in Georgia, when two vehicles were coming down the entrance ramp; a full size pickup followed by a well kept, old style Jeep Cherokee. Now, with well over a million miles on the road, I don't move over for anyone anymore. It is their job to blend into the highway traffic from the ramp. Truck speed limits are lower than those for cars, so I am going slower anyway. Further, it seems to me that it is safer to maintain a constant speed and stay in one place.

The pickup truck accelerated and entered the highway well in front of me. The Jeep, however, waited until he was almost out of room and had to brake hard in order to get behind me. The fool must have been texting, I thought to myself. To make matters worse, just as we cleared a rise in the highway, a construction sign told me the right lane was closed ahead. I signaled, merged left and then saw the Jeep coming around me. He's not happy, I thought to myself. After the lane never closed, I merged back to the right for the Florida Agricultural Inspection Station; the first “exit” in Florida.

Just ahead of me, a four wheel vehicle entered the inspection station. That's weird, I thought to myself. As I entered the station, the four-wheeler stopped at the guard shack, talked to the officer and pulled ahead to park. Oh, he must work here, I thought to myself. It never occurred to me that vehicle was the same damned Cherokee from Georgia.

I stopped at the Ag station window to report that I was just carrying freight for Walmart; nothing agricultural. He nodded and with a grimace, asked me to pull over up ahead to the left. This had never happened before, I thought to myself. I slowly pulled up to the wide spot in the drive and the guy from the Cherokee was standing there, in uniform, fuming. Huh … to myself.

As I rolled to a stop, the officer guy walked around behind my trailer and vigorously motioned for me to get out. I could almost see tiny wisps of smoke twisting in the air above each of his ears.

“What was going on back there? You should be glad that happened in Georgia, because I really feel like writing some tickets right now. In fact, I should call them, up there in Georgia, and have somebody come down and write you up? I could have hit the passenger side of your truck, you know. It's a good thing that I am a quick driver and I could get into the emergency lane,” he spewed all in one breath.

I may be a little slow, but I knew right then and there, I had to play this cool. Not just cool, like smooth, but I had to feign to grovel for this creep because he was a pissed off wannabe cop. If he had actually hit my truck, it was not going to somehow end up my fault. If he was such a talented driver, it would seem that he would have judged the situation more clearly and either sped up or slowed down while he still had room on the entrance ramp. I still think he had been texting.







I apologized. I explained that I never intended to do anything to him personally. I told him sincerely that when traffic is blending, it is safer for me to stay where I am and maintain my speed. In my humble opinion, I said. The cruise control was engaged, I added. And I apologized again.

When I put my hands in my pockets in my best humble-George-Costanza-look, all I got was “KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE 'EM!” I stayed calm, apologetic, and moved rather slowly.

He must have got the hidden message within my groveling. For each time I mentioned “blending traffic”, his lizard brain lurched in recognition. He would never confess, especially to me, but I think he began to realize he was way out on a limb. If he was going to push the issue and I didn't roll over but decided to push back, somewhere along the line he was going to have to explain how he got all the way down to the end of an entrance ramp so close to a semi trailer that he had to brake hard to prevent an accident.

I took a small slice of comfort in that I stayed out of the fracas he seemed to want. I kept my own lizard brain sitting on its hands. Presumably, the officer would have loved to have provoked a reaction from me so that he could indeed start writing some tickets. Or better yet, get out those handcuffs he probably dreams about using.

However, four days later, I am still spinning my story to make him sound like a thug. The truth of the story is likely somewhere a little closer to the middle, but I am continue to struggle with my own reaction. I will admit I am somewhat hypersensitive to an authority figure with a shitty attitude; especially a cop. Nevertheless, I truly think that he was simply angry, overreacting and abusing his position of authority for a purely personal reason. That does not change the fact, but actually highlights very well that I have a lot of work to do. Maybe I shouldn't be telling the story at all, but I definitely should not have had to carry it with me; rethinking it for days. I cannot change his reaction to the situation but I should be able to control my own.

Lifestyle or Religion?

Today I was asked if I considered my Buddhist practice a religion or a lifestyle. After some thought, I believe that the frame of the question is incorrect. The question does not make sense to me in a meaningful way. 

It is my opinion that a great many of the maladies that we suffer in our modern culture are caused by the fact that religious people often have lifestyles that completely contradict their professed beliefs. If a person is a true believer of a religion, their lifestyle should be directly affected by, and converge with, their belief system.

Consider right wing politics in the United States of America. The words Conservative and Christian are uttered so often together that "conservative" sounds slightly hollow without its proverbial suffix "christian." I felt a twinge making that previous sentence work in both directions. I know non-conservative Christians, I was raised as one. However, in politics "christian" is rarely heard without its prefix "conservative."

At first this might seem to contradict my thesis. These words are so attached in our lexicon that they must be an example of lifestyle and religion in parallel. However, look at some of the core teachings of Jesus Christ: love your neighbor as your self, love your enemies, refrain from hatred and lust, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth, money changers thrown out of the temple and even the story of loaves and fishes. Now try to square even one of these teachings with capitalist economics as currently practiced in the our country and, thanks to our evangelizing, all around the globalized world. Capitalist economics is the economics of choice of so-called conservative christians. I know, I don't get it either. 

I don't want to pick on one religion. There are examples in all religions where lifestyle and religion diverge, especially in a toxic mix that includes politics. Look at ethnic violence perpetrated by Buddhists against a Muslim minority in Burma. If we look at the hellish violence that the United States has perpetuated against whole countries in the Middle East, its easy to understand that "Muslim Terrorist" is an inaccurate, politically naive construct. Yet, there were many places in the world where, pre-globalized politics, Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together as peaceful neighbors for hundreds of years. Moreover in every branch of every religion somewhere there can be found a charlatan leading some number of people astray while profiting from their ignorance. Another very old cliche highlights the difference in behaviors between Sundays and Mondays.

My lifestyle was profoundly affected by my return to Buddhism. I have always enjoyed mixing it up with people and arguing politics, philosophy and religion; as if any of those are truly separate. Old habits die hard, but I am getting better. My religion and lifestyle began to converge when I came to understand that showing by example is more effective than telling with words. I can do more to improve the world by just living my life my way than I could ever do by arguing. Arguing seals another person's mind against what I am saying. There is very little hope in changing the world by words. The world can only change by the application of compassion and loving kindness.

When I was a hard core Atheist, people who believed in a god pissed me off. I could not understand how they could "believe" AND I wanted to convince them of the error of their ways. My success rate in converting others, by the way, was zero. When I began to realize that neither science nor religion possess a monopoly on understanding the world we live in together, I began to soften and eventually returned to the Buddhism I tried to study in college.

Further, my lifestyle was greatly affected by understanding, through my religion, that there is no separation between us, nor between us and the universe. Not only are we *all* made up of the same stuff, we all are the *same* stuff. It helped me to see that I was no different than the Christians who frustrated me. A step backward helped me understand that we are all asking the same questions just with different words. This realization allowed a crusty shell that I had worn for many years to crack open and crumble around my feet. It doesn't matter to me what anyone else thinks or believes because all their questions are my questions too. The dissatisfaction of an unexamined life is something all of us feel to some extent. With that my heart burst open and I could let everyone in because I knew they were all in there already. 

My religion and my lifestyle are so intertwined, I don't know where one ends and the other begins. That being said, I am neither that good a Buddhist or a very good human. Yet, I know that if I have the whole universe in my heart it matters not if I am a good Buddhist or a good human or a good Muslim or a good anything. The illusion of separation is rooted in judgement. Being open and dropping the separation of me from the universe is not only more important than being good or right, it supersedes good and right.

===

This sounded to me like a good enough exuse to break out Jane Merchant's "The Stars and I" again. When she writes:

    "Till all the stars were shining into me
    And I was all the stars that I could see"

                 ...  my heart swells up and my own boundaries dissapate.

==

The Stars and I by Jane Merchant

         I want a hill to live on, lone and high,
         Because, when I was small, I used to lie
         Out on a hill at evening, watching stars.
         I didn't care a bit which one was Mars.
         I couldn't find the Dipper or the Bear
         Or anything my elders said was there,
         And why I should I couldn't understand.
         It was enough to lie there and expand
         Till all the stars were shining into me
         And I was all the stars that I could see
         In all the endless acres of the night.
         That was the best of living. That was right.

         The worst was going in to sticky gloom
         And having to shrink myself to fit a room.

Maybe some people aren't assholes . . .

My Buddhist life is starting to come together again. I had let the practice slide, then began to feel I missed it, but struggled to get it back. Out on the road, its hard to maintain anything, but recently, thankfully, I've been able to quietly sustain. It feels like I'm in tune with the world again.

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self,
To study the self is to forget the self,
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas”

- Master Dogen Zenji

Our teacher at the Grand Rapids Zen Center and BuddhistTemple reminded us in a recent dharma talk, that many people forget Dogen's first “study the self” part and try to jump right to the “forget the self” part without doing the necessary work. With my meditation practice back on track, I'm learning things about myself again. So much nonsense gets cooked up inside the human head; mine especially.

There are very few people in my life that get under my skin. I've always taken some thin comfort in that there were so few people who bothered me. I must be an alright guy; I get along with almost everybody. The first stage of my learning came a couple years ago when somehow I realized that 50% of my issues with these people were my reaction to the situation. A time came that I was going to be stuck spending a weekend with one of those people. Luckily there were to be plenty of other people around. I decided to just let them be and not react, even if I thought they were being an ass. It actually worked and the weekend went more smoothly than expected. I was kind of proud of myself. However, I never did the hard work to think about my half of the issues.

Now it may be that some people really are assholes. I might even be right that you can change your own reaction to that kind of person, but I needed to dig a little deeper. These bothersome people are a small group, but they have occupied an inordinate amount of my time – my brain time. These people are so bad [uh huh …] that I would dream up scenarios about future confrontation. Because I knew what they were going to say [ridiculous] and I wanted to be prepared with my rebuttal [sad, and ridiculous]. I was preparing for battle. Given the right prep work, I would smash them into submission with my powerful words [sad, really damn sad].

Sitting on my cushion and peaking into my life, I've been amazed to find anger. Hey wait, I'm a happy guy, right? A joker. What's up with this? The anger usually showed up around these particular people, but it was coming from somewhere else. It was coming from inside me. I stayed with that, teasing at it like a kid poking at a campfire with a stick – watching it burn down.

My perception of this stuff finally settled to the bottom, like that last big log settling into the embers. The situation presented itself that I was going to see one of those people again. My mind started to build the scenarios and the rebuttals … and then, with a clunk, it was right in front of me. My mind was creating these ridiculous “issues” that would surely lead to difficult situations where I could swing my hammer! [such crap] These situations never actually came up, by the way. I was never right. 

Deep in the cob webs, there was another, totally different issue. This other issue had come up before around this person, likely without malice, but it was something that I didn't want to talk about. It was something that was embarrassing or difficult for me to square. Turns out the issue was mine and mine alone. My pea brain was making lots of smoke to cover this other thing; to keep it hid. I've discovered that nearly all my reactions to similar people in my life have involved something else; something deeper.

It is so good to learn. My brain knows now too, so it doesn't race so easily. I still have work to do, but even if not all the assholes are covered by this new loophole, its really just my work on my issues. Now I don't have to worry about how to react to the other person -- it was me all along.

Plaza Rage

It had been a hell of a week; bitter cold, snow and ice, and a highway job. Add to that I had wrangle an empty trailer to be able to pick up the load that would get me back home. Along the way I had to cut across mountainous Pennsylvania backroads to get there, when all I wanted to do was pull off the road somewhere and have a stiff drink … beside a roaring fire.

After the pick up, I battled my way across Pennsylvania and Ohio and got to Detroit on time to deliver. Detroit was my first city after college and I have a soft spot in my heart for her. My load was recycled metal. Recycling industry facilities are not located in swanky business parks. Scrap dealers and reprocessors are where the rent is cheap and the neighbors scarce. Driving up Van Dyke Avenue – a street that I had once lived on in another Detroit neighborhood – was excruciating. The burned out and abandoned buildings crowd out almost any other potential. I wept for my city and got unloaded in a yard surrounded by 12 foot chain link fence topped with razor wire. 

The next challenge was to drive from Detroit to Zeeland in a stiff crosswind with an empty trailer. I made it across owing to my unique combination of stubborn and stupid. I dropped my trailer as the snow plow guy in the lot tried to find new places to put more snow. After bobtailing to the terminal, sorting and turning in my paperwork, unpacking the big truck and stuffing it into my little truck, I was ready to go home, but I needed to stop at the grocery store on the way.

I approached the intersection of organically shaped plaza streets gingerly as the cab of my Ranger was precariously stuffed. A father and son in a big SUV approached from the opposite direction. Without so much as slowing down, the dad cranked his wheel and turned left right in front of me! I outstretched my arms in the International New Jersey Sign for “WTF!!??!!” The dad just looked at me like he didn't understand. This only stoked my anger. As they made a big curve right across my path, the son looked at me dumbfounded. Through their salt crusted windows I imagined that I could see the spittle about to drool from the kid's ridiculous looking lazy mouth. I had the urge to just ram them. Alone in my truck, I disparaged their family, their politics, their religion, their sisters and mothers. They didn't seem to have any idea how they were making my stupid week worse! In my final triumph, I flipped them the bird just before they disappeared around the corner.

I gave my Ranger some gas. The backend dipped slightly to the right; more a saunter than a spin out. Patiently, and feeling oh-so-superior, I waited for the tires to gain some traction. The plow polished snow gradually gave way and as I moved through the intersection, it hit me – brighter than the blinding afternoon sun blasting off the white on white ice and snow – in order to facilitate traffic exiting the plaza, there.is.no.stop.sign.in.the.opposite.direction. Father and son were flabbergasted simply because they were right and I was wrong. I had lost my way – in many more ways than one. How could I have felt so self righteously violated over 4 more seconds at a stop sign? Who have I become?

I've struggled recently to make time, or take the time to continue my meditation practice out here on the road. After sitting all day, driving a semi and concentrating strongly on my driving, it is hard to convince myself to sit, on purpose, to concentrate some more. Other times, I'm running so hard if feels like I don't have the time. The result is I haven't been sitting.

Rolling slowly through the plaza, I realized – re-learned – that meditation is not just sitting and concentrating. It's not doing time. Meditation is about reflecting on and absorbing the wisdom I have been offered. It is not an escape from life, meditation is practicing how to live. To just do the time is to miss the point. To feel self righteous while driving through a plaza is to miss the point. Rather than worry about how much time I meditate, I just need to sneak a few minutes here and there to reflect on who I want to be. Making a complete ass of myself helped me find my way again.

Steering Toward the Curves

I struggled against the wind and rain, in the dark, driving across the cattle plains of South Texas. Squall lines roared in off the Gulf of Mexico. The inky, black emptiness of the prairie made the refinery lights look like cities across a big lake. Biblical torrents of rain filled ditches and slathered the road. Air cushion shocks make my ride nice and smooth, but with every gust of wind, the cab lurched on its squishy platform. Right after, the trailer leaned over like a schooner digging her leeward rail. Each squall line brought its own series of sickening double lunges.

Then two lanes funneled down to one and shifted off center in a construction zone. I hurtled through a swerving, narrow pass only a roller coaster masochist could dream up. There was mud and gravel to my left and a continuous line of Jersey barriers to the right. The rain gave everything a sinister reptilian slickness. In the skittering gleam of my headlights, it all rose and fell like the ribs of a cement and asphalt striped lizard.

Flying through, my forward motion animated the ruts and ravines of construction mud. A flash and crack of lightning woke the beast and tentacles of mud began to writhe. Every ditch was a mudbound kraken waiting to pull me into a slimy abyss.

On the right, the ghosts of a thousand traffic fatalities howled against the barrier surfaces; like hamsters clawing at aquarium glass. In their deafening silent screams, I heard the story of each hellish demise. Their agony could only be mitigated if my trailer clipped the barrier with a staccato ricochet and I joined their plaintive chorus after my own diesel fueled apocalypse.

In real life late night driving, if the tires on just one side of my truck got into that mud, I might as well be drug down by giant muddy tentacles. Likewise, in the pinch points of the curves, too tight a turn could cause the trailer to catch on a barrier. The impending disaster would be dramatic and just as likely acrobatic. I was hauling a light load down to McAllen, but still must have had 40,000 or 50,000 pounds of momentum twisting, turning and lunging.

When a driver concentrates too much too close, the tension builds with every yard of asphalt. Pretty soon, the steering wheel is jittering back and forth in a thousand desperate micro-corrections, while the foot unconsciously lifts off the accelerator. Every driver panics the first time through or they're lying about it.

You have to start with faith in the system. The construction workers are going to set it all up so that trucks can make it through. How could they not? Besides, a hundred trucks have already gone through ahead of you. If there is no wreckage blocking your way, they've made it.

After that leap of faith, the key is to take a deep breath, slow down a little if you must, and look a little further down the road. If you steer to the curves as they come toward you, rather than worry about what's up close, you will make it easily. Success comes with smoothly anticipating your way rather than reacting in a panic.

Life is a lot like getting through a construction zone at night – in the rain. Take a deep breath, trust you can get through and then steer toward the curves that are a little further down the road.

–

Image used without permission. Lifted from http://ozplasmic.deviantart.com

A Wreck on the Highway

A small disc of fabric cartwheeled across the highway as I was catching the wrecker. We were just getting through Chattanooga, TN and the traffic was finally thinning out. My truck didn't quite have the oomph to pass in the mountains, so I backed off the cruise control and stayed in the granny lane.

The throttle governor that limits the speed of the truck can be frustrating. I'm not opposed to governors per se, but none are set at exactly the same speed. If you're behind a truck whose governor is just a half mile an hour slower than your own, you will catch up to it and feel like you need to pass. Trouble is if you're only going a half mile an hour faster, it will take you 10 minutes to get by the slower truck - on the flat. In the mountains of Tennessee, hauling a heavy load, passing was just not practical. After swallowing my pride and settling in behind the wrecker, I began to notice the debris. The wrecker wasn't towing anything but appeared to be following the truck ahead of him.

Little things catch my eye out on the highway. The wrecker hit a patch of road debris that scattered spectacularly. The clumps of fibers, some kind of stuffing, burst like a hive of snow snakes. Bouncing on an expansion joint, the truck in front of the wrecker scattered little clods of dirty that trailed dust toward the shoulder like they were smoking.

As we dropped into one of those beautiful Appalachian valleys, three or four more little pieces of fabric danced across the highway in a cascade of delicate sadness. It was then I squinted into the twilight, suddenly curious of the truck in front of the wrecker. I felt a pinch in my chest as his cargo came into focus. I could see it fine, even in the dwindling evening light, but my brain struggled to make sense of it. Unusual finger shapes, like an open hand slightly askew, trembled as they bounced down the highway. The truck, a flat bed, was carrying the nearly unrecognizable remains of a completely burned out semi tractor. Two corner edges of the sleeper were the anguished skyward fingers. In the hints of a cab, I finally realized the grim tale before me.

Did the driver survive? Was he inside when the fire started? Was it an accident? Were there others involved? I hadn't yet wired my CB radio, so I couldn't inquire. Either driver in the somber convoy would have had no obligation to respond anyway. I could only sit and wonder. The upholstery was burst open like popcorn, shedding swatches of fabric. The mattress, still in there somewhere, couldn't keep its own stuffing from jumping out in the wind. The smoking clods must have been ashes or the residue from fire extinguishers.

Passing a truck accident can give me pause, but following a wreck for over a hundred miles, I was quiet as a pallbearer for two hours. Unanswered questions rolled around in my head. All I could do was consider the possible explanations and openly offer my compassion and empathy as the silent forests buzzed by.

Naturally, I thought that could have been my truck. Three years ago, I had already driven a half a million miles. Now that I've started  driving again, I am back in this statistical pool. But this is not a preachy, stilted riff on being safer and more vigilant on the road. As I drove up I-75, following the nightmare possibility of the burnt cab, I was struck by the beauty of impermanence. The driving might be just a job, but the drive through the lush valleys and vivid green forests of Eastern Tennessee was beautiful. Besides the traffic and the hum drum of whatever it is each day, this job is a tour of wonder. Instead of sitting at a desk in front of the same patch of wall, or feeding lumber into the same machine all day, I get to sit here and watch beautiful sunrises, wonderful mountain vistas and stars reflecting on rivers. 

I also see pollution billowing from smokestacks, trash along highway shoulders, and completely wrecked semi tractors. There is beauty and there are troubling sights, but all are impermanent. The Buddhist concept of impermanence is often misunderstood. Some think it must be a certain emotionless, Spock-like aloofness. In my opinion, to deeply accept impermanence is to cherish the beauty in each moment we have, in the people we're with, in whatever stuff we have – just then. Everything, and everyone, is impermanent and therefore all are beautiful. Just like cherry blossoms or fall colors, the allure is the beautiful sight that you were privileged to see at that moment. Whether you're driving a truck, working at a desk or feeding a machine, consider it a privilege. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi used to say “Just to be alive is enough.” Once each moment is seen as a privilege, one can relax and just enjoy life.

Dharma of the Floating Floor

Traditionally, the word 'Sangha' referred to the community of Buddhist monks and nuns. Today, especially in the West, the term denotes the entire community of Buddhist practitioners, lay and ordained. In Western Protestant terms, Sangha is the church community of a Buddhist temple. We have our regulars, people who attend when they can, and we're often blessed with new faces as well.

In less than two years, the Sangha had outgrown the little storefront temple space in which we had started. The search for bigger accommodations was arduous, and we feared that we would have to leave the downtown Grand Rapids area. In the end, however, we found a wonderful location in the 400 block of South Division, just up the hill from the new downtown farmers market. The bigger space needed new paint, new flooring and lots of clean up.

Our expanded version of the Three Refuges Chant refers to the Sangha as the “shining light that supports me.” In fixing up our new temple space, we got to experience that support in more tangible ways. Working together strengthened the fiber of our community. There was plenty of work to go around, and we all chipped in on the various projects. Thoughtful Sangha members brought food in to replenish the energy spent on all the good work.

One of the last projects was installing a laminate floor, sometimes called a floating floor, in the Dharma Hall. Four of us began the work early on a Saturday morning. Alisha had already started working with the planks and had developed a system. She taught us to lock a short end into the last plank, bend the long edge just so, hook it into the previous row, and then tap the plank into place with a block and hammer. Some of us were instructed it was a finesse job, others needed to whack at it – based on our potential for damage. It took a couple tries to get the hang of it, but soon we were all tapping away. A floating floor grows diagonally across a room as you lay it down similar to putting up a brick wall, but horizontally.

During the day, the crew had time to chat and share stories, and along the way we chuckled at the small gems of wisdom we were stumbling upon. Sage-like, Alisha instructed us to “Be patient, it doesn't look like anything is happening, but it is.” As the shiny new laminate overtook the rough subflooring, someone said “look, there is more floor than not floor.” Another reminded that it was “all floor anyway.” Good people and a common cause can make hard work go more easily. It was a long day, but in the end the hall looked wonderful – even without the base moulding installed.

As I drove home and pondered a job well done by a bunch of volunteers, I felt the warm support of my community. We had come together, grown together and did some good work too. That night the temple was still not quite finished but every day it was a more special place than the day before. It occurred to me that the more tightly knit Sangha was even more supportive, more conducive to the deepening of each other's experience. This intangible community support was given a physical expression in the tapping of laminate floor planks. As each of us crawled around on the floor, working on our own row of planks, we could actually feel the help of the others as their tapping reverberated through the floor. It seemed to me like the heartbeat of the Sangha.