Mixed signs abound; after the storm, leaves shredded
by hail loll about on the street and
are investigated by crows. Where have the
birds been, all these baked-earth and baked-sky
days? And now they vanish again, as heat
resumes, as gardens wilt, as humans scurry
into delicious air inside sly merchants' shade.
I choose, as viruses have not, despite assurances,
abated, to limit myself, in straw Asian hat,
to observing this stuttering start to autumn
at first hand in the yard, at second hand
while putting away bought things the family's
acquired for me, before retiring once again
to the hermitary, converted tool shed
behind the house at the end of the drive
to zoom into the ether and sit
zazen with a few, who know
where to find me, some quiet, and themselves.
Many are hermits in just this way, though they
might not see it in these terms. A daily
routine within walls, or gardens, or
property lines: boundaries we create
of imagined air clean enough to inhale
without becoming a burden to our loves.
It's not much of a poem but shows what I've been thinking about. Autumn is trying hard to come in, with a strong system off the Pacific having filled our dried-up rain barrels, and awakened all the animals that seemed to be hiding somewhere after the heat waves, one of them topping 100°(f) for five days. We have another heat wave coming in September that looks to go over 90 for five days, with one more day pushing 100. But, yeah, plants have started putting on their fall plumage and the nights are cool.
I notice these things from the yard and while sitting in the "veranda" (basically a deck roof but no deck, just grass growing out of sand), or working in the garden. I have leukemia (slow, the CLL kind) and old age and what not, and a basic shyness with added cognitive decline, so I'm no longer a driver and now no longer a walker of the neighborhood sidewalks, unless someone is with me.
I'm also careful to breathe clean air. Weak lungs and all that, and I don't think much of the current official advice on viruses: Covid has surged hard this summer, and has been proven to have a long tail for many even when not initially presenting with symptoms. Even though my immune system is probably not very compromised, I see no reason to court disaster just because the CDC wants to avoid angering the nation's rentier class.
This adds a burden to the family; they mask up to go get groceries and feel a little self-conscious about it. But they agree that we, as a nuclear family with only one remaining driver, are exposed to too many potential unforeseen circumstances, so a few relatively easily achieved precautions are rational for us.
I spend time on federated social media and am seeing a lot of posts with this kind of thinking; it's like there is an emerging hermit class.
It's, for many, a privileged class, supported by the shipping phenomenon and an underclass (that's, alas, what it is) of front-line warehouse workers, store clerks and delivery people, many drawn from marginalized populations, who are getting sick repeatedly, and many of whom end up horizontal on couches, joining the ranks of those who must be maintained at cost to their tiny social safety nets or overworked social services.
This is like treading water after a ship sank. Many who thought themselves well-to-do are in the water with the people who brought them groceries or rotated their tires. I think there will be more of this and perhaps much more.
Against this slow-motion dystopian background, I think about what my role can or even "should" be. I have some intellect remaining, so I spend most of my days (and nights) doomscrolling for what I think might be the best policies and advice concerning climate, health, extreme weather resilience, and domestic and international relations, including resource wars, to share with whomever wishes to hear all this.
Buddhism came to me in the guise of how one might best behave on a sinking ship (or in the water afterwards); a kind of hospice manual:
"There are four kinds of wisdom that benefit living beings: giving, kind speech, beneficial deeds, and cooperation. These are the practices of the vow of the bodhisattva" -- Dogen.
Clearly the instructions are intended for face-to-face interaction, yet here I am hanging out mostly in my homemade hermitary, a repurposed tool shed. Right; well, my excuses, with the admission of privilege, are as stated above, and my practice (when not raising vegetables) is an online practice. It is twofold: curate links to sensible adaptive choices in a deteriorating system ("secular") and offer opportunities for zazen practice and discussion of anattā and its implications ("religious").
Of course, sometime soon I (we) might not have Internet access. What then? Well, much of the time, when I have my nose out of the computer, I sit in the veranda and watch. There's not much to watch: the clothesline, the power poles that run along our alley instead of our street, some fruit trees, and houses belonging mostly to absentee Airbnb owners. It's a restful spot.
Birds sit the wires in seasonal rotation. Swallows and purple finches have moved off, and currently starlings are passing through. Starlings were permanent residents at the farm in the last decade; before that, they migrated past us as they do here in spring and fall. And we're no longer under the flyway; I miss the honking of vees of geese while I worked the farm garden.
The distance between these two locations is fourteen miles. This variability of population is interesting; I can speculate about it for hours. What's not to entertain?
Or I just ... sit. Right there, every blade of grass continually establishes the temple of the whole universe. What's not to contemplate?
I think the phenomenon of "hermit" life goes vastly unremarked and underappreciated. In this neighborhood alone, many work among their flowers, vegetables and apple trees alone, contemplatively plying trowel and clippers. Kitchen work, too, is often undertaken alone yet not lonely, chopping, folding in, turning from counterspace to sink with a bowl, mind gathered to a single point.
My maternal grandmother had a huge extended family, but as they passed one by one, she accepted a small apartment near us and established a routine of bible study and housekeeping that lasted until she breathed her last. My paternal grandmother outlived all but one son and accepted a small single-wide trailer in his back yard, sitting out front and shelling beans as the geese passed over.
Who's to say they were not practiced eremitic meditators? They both, by the way, faced pancreatic cancer at the end and both dealt with it by no longer eating, with a silent yet not sad patience I admired.
There must be millions of these "hermits," widows, widowers, the divorced, or separated, or abandoned to end-of-life care facilities, or, among those younger, simply content to rise, go forth to stamp books behind a library desk, go home and sit by a window watching people with umbrellas scurry along rain-swept streets, or, or ...
... and not necessarily unhappy about it. Even many who strongly enjoy being social also enjoy solitude.
The worldwide assumption of a religious or even secular requirement that to do well one must do for others does not come with a meter. A quiet life has this to recommend it: those living contented with little typically do not generate much of this world's distress. As such they can serve as models for a life not dependent upon material culture for "happiness."
That in itself benefits living beings.
