Life Like Water

I recalled those words this morning as I walked my daughter to school. I was too young to vote and didn’t really know what they meant at the time. I was in high school and hope was limited to easy exams and cute girls.

It is a beautiful autumn morning. The sun lit up the trees that were already burning with autumn leaves. I know that history will be made and I understand the hope and promise wrapped up in those words: morning in America. I understand what drove that previous landslide political victory and know I’ll see a similar one in a few hours.

The flowers fall, for all our yearning;
The weeds grow, regardless of our dislike.
- Zen saying

I don’t believe that people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell

Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient being, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.
- Dogen

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
- La Rouchefoucauld

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
— Dwight David Eisenhower

I’ve tried to express this a number of times to people who have repeated the canard that “war is good for the economy”. Warfare is, in fact, a colossal waste of resources that could be spent building infrastructure and people. For example, Congress has just canceled the DDG 1000 destroyer program that had a cost per unit of about $5 billion dollars after two boats had been built.

Ten billion dollars for two battleships. For perspective, the money spent on this one program is almost twice the total funding for the National Science Foundation which provides grants and funding for a significant fraction of the scientific research in the US. It’s frustrating to listen to our President boast about his funding of scientific research when the entirety of NSF funding is dwarfed by a single military program.

As a people, we need to seriously reconsider our priorities.

“Pseudoconservativism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission … The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition … [He] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world … cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.”
- Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1965.

I can punch through boards.

Today was the big board breaking for charity event at my dojang. I never really got the breaking boards thing until today. Oh man it is fun. It’s one thing to kick a pad and do forms but when you really let loose and put your fist or foot through a chunk of wood you get a total high off it. I’m probably sweating 90% testosterone at this point.

I’ll have to see if any of the pictures turned out.

It seems that every time I think that I’ve the body trained enough to work (well at least to get by if not perform at the level I want) without getting too sore, we do something different and I find a whole new set of muscles that haven’t been doing a damned thing for the last decade.

Last night we did some sparring and I took a shot right in the shin splint which is a whole universe of pain but following that we did escrima. Since I’d never done it before I didn’t get to spar with them but I got to practice the basic heaven six drill. I’m not used to having both arm up and swinging like that but I did get going pretty well with the gentleman who was teaching me the drill. So of course this morning my shoulders are both sore as hell. Fun though. I probably enjoy swinging a weapon more than trying to limber up and train my stiff old frame to be one. Which means, of course, that I need to focus more on the latter.

On a totally different note, my wife got me the zen day calendar for Christmas. I’ve had one page that I saved sitting on my desk for the last two months so I thought I’d put it here as well just so it doesn’t get lost:

Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying, or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.

Dogen

When I first read this I got stuck on the respect/pity part but, after thinking about it for a while, that is probably a reaction to how we frequently conflate pity with superiority rather than simply recognizing pity as sympathy and sorrow for the pain of others. Similarly there shouldn’t be resentment in admitting that there are people with a clearer view and greater compassion than my own any more than I would resent admitting that there are people who are better at math.

So apart from a nasty case of the flu I’ve been going to TKD pretty regularly. I’m totally wiped out when I walk out of the dojang but at least I’m not crippled by sore muscles. Jyllian says I look like I’m losing weight which is one of reasons I love her: she lies.

No, having made my way through the tortures of sore muscles I had about a week before my body decided to again remind me that I was fast approaching middle age. It started out small, just two little sore spots on the fronts of my shins. Just enough to make me think “that’s odd, I didn’t know I had muscles there to make sore”. And over a week it blossomed into feeling like leprechauns with baseball bats were trying to knock their pots of gold out of my pant legs.

Skipped a few times and have just done push-ups, sit-ups and kicks at home and I’m about ready to go back on Wednesday. I’ll just have to take it easy with the jumping rope until whatever I tore up has a chance to rebuild.

My wife is wonderful