Cold cliffs, more beautiful the deeper you enter-
Yet no one travels this road.
White clouds idle about the tall crags;
On the green peak a single monkey wails.
What other companions do I need?
I grow old doing as I please.
Though face and form alter with years,
I hold fast to the pearl of the mind.
Han-Shan
I had an opportunity to contemplate hate this past fall, as the nationally known hate group, the Westboro Baptist Church, came to town. They picketed at Montana State University and at Bozeman High School. They were at the high school right when school was letting out, and the elementary and middle school kids who transfer at the school were showing up.
The presence of this group in Bozeman incensed me for a number of reasons. First of all, I hate hate groups! (More on that irony below). I think hate groups are more powerful than a lot of folks realize, and we need to do more to counter them. Second, I have absolutely never understood the supposedly Christian stance against homosexuality; I somehow never got the memo on that one. Glad to hear even the pontiff has said, “Who am I to judge?” And Third, I have kids in the Bozeman School district, including at Bozeman High School, and a hate group showing up there absolutely brought out the momma bear in me! These are my kids’ friends, family friends, kids we’ve known since they were in kindergarten. I wasn’t going to let a hateful group trying to intimidate LGBT youth at my kids’ schools go down without a fight.
Alas, there is that issue that hating the haters doesn’t really work. Fortunately, a lot of people wiser than me, including local groups such as the Gallatin Valley Interfaith Association, the ACLU, and the Montana Human Rights Network organized a great counter protest. Apparently part of the story with Westboro Church is that they sue cities who don’t let them protest, and they will even sue counter protesters who yell back at them and inadvertently violate some rules of slander or libel. They’ve had years to perfect these tactics. Also, Westboro Church doesn’t always show up when they say they will, so if all you’ve got is people on the other side of the sidewalk and there’s no one to shout at, the protest kind of fizzles.
Organized in Bozeman was a rally at a separate space at MSU, with a music DJ, talks (including one by a real live Baptist minister), a march to a nearby park, and then an I Scream for Equality Ice Cream Social. I couldn’t make the earlier music event, but showed up for the speeches, including the Baptist minister who stated emphatically ‘God does not hate fags’ to a rousing cheer from the audience.
The ice scream social had 1,500 scoops of ice cream on what turned at the last minute into a lovely warm fall afternoon. The crowd was brightly dressed, festive, and in a good mood. It really heartened me to see my community turn out to this event.
Sometimes, the bodhisattvas live among us, in our own time. I am fortunate to remember the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s actions, and deeply saddened to have a vivid memory of day he was shot. Here’s a link to an article that expresses what he accomplished much better than I could express it, and a few of my favorite quotes:
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
A while ago I heard about Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in Thailand which is built entirely of beer bottles. They used 1.5 million green and brown bottles, and are still collecting bottles to build new structures at their temple. You can find a lot of great pictures of this temple on the internet. I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool, I wonder why we don’t do that sort of building here in the U.S.” Of course, you can think of a number of reasons why we haven’t built such a temple in the U.S. (zoning laws, amount of effort it would take, etc., etc.). But lately, I’ve come back to this idea. No really, why don’t we build that sort of temple here?
Several things got me thinking again on this issue, including this cool article about houses built in Nigeria from recycled plastic bottles. These bottles are filled with sand becoming ‘bottle bricks’ that are 20 times stronger than brick, and produce a house that costs 1/3 what a brick house would, stays cool in an equatorial hot climate, and is bullet proof. In war-torn areas such as northern Nigeria, bullet-proof seems like more than just a ‘real estate amenity’.
Also, out in the blogosphere I’ve seen good commentary on a topic that increasing bugs me; the middle class/upper middle class assumptions of some Buddhist teachers and practitioners in the U.S. convert community. So really, why don’t we use inexpensive/recycled building materials in building our Zen centers in the U.S.?
And finally, there’s an article in the current addition of the Economist magazine about the global market in junk and recycling. It’s a $500 billion market that employs large numbers of people. Mostly the junk flows from the U.S. to Asia, especially China, where it is re-used. In the global scrap market the U.S. is referred to as the ‘Saudi Arabia of scrap’. We’re a wealthy country, but we don’t see the use in much of the material flotsam and jetsam around us.
There’s a great article about a scientist who took the UN’s hefty 2,200 report on climate change, and distilled it down to one haiku for each main point of the report! He also made delightful water colors, at least one of which evokes Chinese scroll paintings. This oceanographer knew what he was doing as he was an author of one of the chapters in the full report. He took on the haiku project when he was home with a cold! His booklet of haiku and water colors is so good it’s going to be used as a teaching tool in some schools.
Traditional haiku evokes nature and seasons. I think haiku describing how the entire climate is changing qualifies as being related to the seasons.
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
-Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
Steve Stucky
March 6, 1946 – December 31, 2013
Sadly, the passing of one of the good ones. I only met Abbot Steve once. I was visiting the San Francisco Zen Center, sat down for dinner in the dining hall, and he ended up sitting next to me. We had a great conversation, the details of which I don’t remember, but I remember he was down to earth and friendly. Seemed like the kind of guy who’d spent his life with calluses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails. I wasn’t surprised to find out later that he worked a landscaping business when he left SFZC, and that he grew up on a Mennonite farm. He was one of the few ‘Zen masters’ I’ve met who seemed like you could drop him into the middle of a ranch in Montana and he’d be completely at home. I was also impressed that he was one of the few senior teachers in this country to issue a clear, public statement regarding sexual abuse in the greater Zen community.
We will hold service for him this coming Monday evening at the regular practice meeting of the Bozeman Zen Group.
Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela
Today, the 8th of December, is Rohatsu, a traditional day to celebrate Buddha’s awakening.
It has also been declared a day of prayer and reflection in South Africa following Nelson Mandela’s death. How appropriate.
“Children are not born hating another person…..People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart.”
-Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013
I’m at a Zen retreat this weekend, and one of the other retreatants has the coolest bumper sticker I’ve seen in a long time!
Marty Schmidt
I read that a father and son had died climbing K2 and I thought, “What father-son duo would ever climb K2?” As soon as the thought formed in my head I realized I knew the answer – Marty Schmidt and his son. What a loss!
I climbed Aconcagua in the late 1980s with Marty, when we were both young assistant climbing guides. I loved Marty’s company; he was fun, upbeat, thoughtful and kind. I was not only the most junior staff in terms of climbing guide experience, but also the only woman on a trip with 16 men. There were a lot of tough things about that trip, but Marty was one of the bright spots.
Like many people who devote themselves full-time to a life of mountaineering, he was quirky guy. Not large in stature, built more like a rock climber with a gymnast’s compact physique. He carried a small container of special cream all the way up and down Aconcagua, rubbing it on the nascent laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. This behavior was unusual for a male climber in the 80s, but he told me he planned to always be a climbing guide and to live a long time, and didn’t want his skin to age too much. Looking at a recent photo of him I have to say he wasn’t successful at fighting the laugh lines. Then again, he laughed a lot.
He valued the spiritual life one found in the mountains, and had a few unusual views. I once found a statement from him on-line that he planned to live 120 years. I wished him luck but feared that wasn’t exactly how things would go down.
After Aconcagua he was excited to head off to a commune in Australia for the birth of his first child. My memory is he planned for his girlfriend to give birth in a salt water pool while dolphins swam in the water at the time of childbirth.
As his son Denali Schmidt grew up I think it would have been impossible for Marty not to share his love of climbing with him. In recent years they knocked off impressive feats, including putting up a super hard route named ‘Dad and Son’ on the peak Denali was named for. Marty expressed that spending several months a year with his grown son pursuing something they both loved was a joy few fathers have. (Here’s a link to a movie Denali made about climbing in Alaska with his dad.)
Apparently on K2 during this July climbing season the avalanche conditions were bad, and finally the other six parties on the mountain retreated to base camp, while Marty and Denali went up to Camp 3. In the evening Marty reported by phone they were successfully at Camp 3, and wanted to scout the rest of the route to see if it was passable in deep snow. It appears that a huge avalanche came through later that night and swept them both away. I hope they went quickly. For lots of reasons their bodies have not been found and there is no effort to retrieve them.
Avalanches are one of the dark handmaidens of death in the mountains. Assessing the risk from potential avalanches is tough, especially on big committing mountains (and if K2 isn’t a big committing mountain, I don’t know what is).
My understanding is that the Buddha did not address what happens to us after death. My own opinion is that anyone who says they know what happens to us after we pass away is undoubtedly completely wrong. Others, including Zen teacher Brad Warner, express a view that we are part of the universe and some part/energy remains after our physical death.
I have also heard dying referred to in Buddhist communities as “The Great Leap”. That phrase would have pleased Marty who loved leaping into the unknown, traveling to mysterious and formidable places. Dear friend, rest in peace on K2, the mountain you said you loved above all other mountains.
Big Sky Zen Practice 