I went after Buddhism partly because of passages in Thoreau and Emerson, first read in 1963, I think; and they were the same passages that led me to seek out alone time:
I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? .... I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the northstar, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. -- Thoreau, Walden, "Solitude"
When alone, I have often felt as Thoreau or Emerson did -- that what was to be noticed
was that the dandelion or mullein is not separate but a localized
manifestation of the undifferentiated; the inspection of one's
surroundings yields not things but a unitary happening.
I had a sense the daffodils and fir cones in my surroundings were not burdened by the prescriptive religion I was being taught. Their amorality is not all "make love not war:" watching a preying mantis at work can give one a lot to reflect on. Yet the basic Transcendentalist exercise of "I am this and this is me" coincided with the one enduring maxim I derived from what I was being taught in churches: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I could generalize from my desire not to be punched, bitten, or stung. There's a disconnect here between the mantis' ethics and my own, but I'm working to solve that.
I, a presumably hardened skeptic, have admittedly skipped ahead to the golden rule from the moment of unity with all beings, taking the notion that they are somehow connected on ... faith. It comes from sitting still and studying that unity. Immersed in such study, I'm less likely to lash out, and the inner state that goes with not lashing out just feels right.
Buddhism struck me as a sound approach to not lashing out. It had both the unitary vision and simple, powerful ethics which were asserted to arise from that vision. I was, sometimes, put off by the verbosity, though, and approached the literature with some reductionism. I mean, how do you put lightning in a bottle? Even if the bottle is called Buddhism, which comes close to being the name for "the bottle for keeping lightning in that cannot be kept in a bottle."
I came to feel that the Four Noble Truths were but a wordy way to say "do no harm;" the Eightfold Path's recommendations were but a wordy way to say "do no harm;" the Six Paramitas were but a wordy way to say "do no harm;" and all the sutras, etc. were but an especially wordy way to say "do no harm."
I felt I could personally do least harm by setting myself quietly aside from the stream of humanity; and found ways to do that; living alone for years in Atlanta, or in a housetruck hidden in the Oregon woods whenever I could take a break from tree planting; or in a quad near my campus job when I, a householder, ran away from home and family to have my mid-life crisis -- but that last interlude was indeed harmful.
We do some harm when we go for a walk. Multitudes of invisible (to us) lives are crushed underfoot as we go, whether alone or with others. I might not be a preying mantis but in my clumsiness the end is much the same. So really the stricture might better be worded: do less harm. As if that were really possible; yet I think most of us feel this is a reasonable thing to at least try to do.
To go to a zendo and sit is to sit with others, but it is also emphatically to sit alone, "eyes level and nose vertical," as Dogen says, settling deeper and deeper into the solitude that gives each of us the chance to notice we are not separate from one another -- two or twelve or fifty breaths being inhaled, exhaled together in a space set aside for the purpose.
The instructions for this activity vary, but Dogen, cribbing his from a document now over a thousand years old, summarizes it so:
At the site of your regular sitting, spread out thick matting and place a cushion above it. Sit either in the full-lotus or half-lotus position. In the full-lotus position, you first place your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh. In the half-lotus, you simply press your left foot against your right thigh. You should have your robes and belt loosely bound and arranged in order. Then place your right hand on your left leg and your left palm (facing upwards) on your right palm, thumb-tips touching. Thus sit upright in correct bodily posture, neither inclining to the left nor to the right, neither leaning forward nor backward. Be sure your ears are on a plane with your shoulders and your nose in line with your navel. Place your tongue against the front roof of your mouth, with teeth and lips both shut. Your eyes should always remain open, and you should breathe gently through your nose. -- Fukanzazengi
Those of us with arthritis, perhaps, or Tourette's or paraplegia, will immediately see the problem here. Group zazen, held to this or even a somewhat relaxed version of this standard, is profoundly ableist.
I was never able to do all of it, and am rapidly approaching the point where I can do almost none of it. But in a hut I can do it in whatever way darn well works for me, which at present is to lean back in a zero gravity chair and sip "yard" tea as I watch the sparrows, returned from wherever, nervously flitting through blackberries in seach of twigs for their nests. The hut is its own full lotus.
Or a bedroom, or dining room, or seat on a train or bus. Or anywhere at all. Do not think that those currently hiding from bombs, or even those dropping those bombs do not, even then and there, have such moments.
This is common to all. That I think such moments should increase while bombings should cease may be my foolish attachment to illusory non-harm, but I'm, for whatever reason, all-in.
Let's hear it for tea and sparrows.
Along with thoughts of quarantine and masking as temporary hermitary, there's the permanent hermitary of difference.
Imagine a bright assigned-male only-child, culled at a very early age by peers due to a tendency toward effeminacy, by means of stoning.
Imagine the same child, due to or at least shortly after this traumatic incident, losing half of her hearing, and then missing reams of school time due to measles, rubella, mumps, chicken pox, flu and what can only be called depression, surrounded by mumbling and diffident or even abusive adults (she wasn't supposed to have been born).
And then, at 56, having tried all her life to be "normal," transitioned, just in time for the beginnings of a slide of civilization toward authoritarian christonationalism and massive indifference toward human rights, in the midst of a historically isolating pandemic. At the same time, an emergent condition marked by seizures ends her driving years, separating her from society even more.
She's a hermit already by default, as are so many.
Every population identifiable by difference from the norm, as defined and elevated to a principle by the herd, is culled by refused services, redlining, "unemployability" -- all the acts of which a majority (or would-be majority) are capable -- up to and including genocide.
Some of one's time might be spent resisting such a tide. This is activism.
Some of the rest of one's time may be spent in recuperation. It's then that one notices the virtues of the hermitary.
I watch birds. The jays trumpet from the tops of the trees, but never
stay in one spot long. They're autocratic in their actions toward the
songbirds, but watch their backs. On branches lower than those of the
jays, one finds the starlings. Prone to traveling in groups, locally
their flight paths are direct and short, with objectives, all business.
They defer to the jays but find and consume everything with gusto. Lower
still, one finds towhees. They wait for the jays and starlings to suss
out the safe and remunerative places, and investigate when the bigger
birds are satiated.
I watch trees. Most, near the hut, are cottonwoods, and they warn me of approaching storms by turning up fluttering silvered leaves. When there is wind, they bend. When there is stillness, they cleverly compete with one another for a glimpse of the sun, but also share food and information through their buried feet.
Cottonwoods love water, and they are clustered near the seasonal creek. I watch the creek, too, but not as often. I'm told it makes lovely music all day and night, but for me it is silent, unless I bring a hearing device, and hearing devices are tiring. When it runs dry I pick blackberries. When it jumps its banks I abandon the hut for a time, marveling at the power of even a modest amount of flooding.
Here, alone, I am all of me -- observant, prudent, fascinated by my surroundings and increasingly aware of my own thoughts and condition.
Hermiting and meditation have a lot in common, and of course hermits are often meditators. They make a kind of wisdom progress, though that's putting it badly. Wisdom does not build or progress, it's simply revealed by the studied and applied omission of distractions. One peels away the unnecessary, and that which was wise but poorly understood remains.
Buddhism teaches this explicitly.
The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness -- Hongzhi, tr. Leighton.
Those excluded from the mainstream by difference often evince discovered, uncovered, revealed wisdom, and thereby can be exemplars to the very society that has excluded them. What has happened to them is still a crime, but at least it can transmute them into gold.
One place solitude really shines is when there is a pandemic. By breaking the chain of transmission in the most complete way possible, the occupant of the hermitage performs a service.
Indeed one may think of recent lockdowns and the designation of quarantine sites such as hotel rooms as a bloom of something very like hermitages and hermitaries (cell attached to the monastery).
Isolation during a pandemic is not new; Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), for example, depicts a group of young women and men who retire to a country place to escape the plague. The one hundred stories they tell one another to pass the time is their streaming service.
Undoubtedly their motivation to isolate was fear or prudence; but retiring from the presence of others to prevent transmission from oneself to others has been for some time understood to be a public health measure.
Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, recounts lockdown procedures:
The Master of every House, as soon as any one in his House complaineth, either of Botch, or Purple, or Swelling in any part of his Body, or falleth otherwise dangerously Sick, without apparent Cause of some other Disease, shall give knowledge thereof to the Examiner of Health, within two Hours after the said Sign shall appear. ... So soon as any Man shall be found by this Examiner, Chirurgeon or Searcher to be sick of the Plague, he shall the same Night be sequestred, in the same House, and in case he be so sequestred, then, though he afterwards die not, the House wherein he sickned, should be shut up for a Month, after the use of the due Preservatives taken by the rest.
During the Great Depression, prefabicated huts, many of them much like my own, were distributed by the federal government to families needing to isolate a family member stricken by tuberculosis.
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| Source: New Deal of the Day |
In early March of 2020, our household chose to form a pod with our son, but we did not know if any of us had been exposed to the new virus. We determined to isolate from one another for a set number of days; Beloved made meals and slid them to Son past a plastic sheet that divided the house into two parts; I ransacked the pantry and moved into the hut. I already had water, books, musical instruments, electricity, phone, Internet, and a composting potty, so I felt pretty set.
But, as it turned out, I had likely been exposed just before we closed the gate. Within a week I came down with a serious illness: fever, chills,
shortness of breath, endless coughing, and a sense that my left lung was burning with a cold blue fire. I had never experienced anything like it.
Was it Covid? Local medical authorities had assured us it had not yet reached the area.
Testing was unavailable, and given the emergency that was just beginning to hit the local hospitals, I chose to ride it out. It would have been more responsible to do this if I'd had an oximeter with me, but one can't think of everything.
After a day or two, the fever broke, and I coughed on and on, and slept sitting up, for another seven days. Feeling pretty sure I was no longer contagious, I moved back into the house and rejoined the pod. The others showed no symptoms.
Daughter was our "essential worker" during this time (as during so many other times), bringing groceries and toilet paper from town and dispensing endless, if rather distant, cheer.
As she lived alone, and the County Health Department, where she worked, had at her insistence implemented work-from-home, her place, like the hut, became yet another among millions of "hermitages" across the world.
In her house and ours, missing one another, we lay down at night and rose in the morning keenly aware that we knew nothing of what the future might bring.
But we did feel we were doing rightly.
I think making huts widely available would have helped with this disaster; they are a relatively inexpensive solution, and choosing solitude (when able) on behalf of others is not burdensome if one takes a certain view of things.
Thinking of it this way, a respirator is a hermitage of sorts.
While no one lives forever, let us take care in not making one another ill. Things are tough enough as it is.
As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space
an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble
a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning:
view all created things like this.
-- Diamond Sutra, Red Pine tr.
I'm a summer baby; I love to fill my eyes with ripening crops. But the hut loves winter.
When snow comes, which doesn't happen every year hereabouts, it brings clarity through the starkness of bare trees and brush, and the invention, new each time, of the unstated promise of white space.
There's not much to think about with snow, which is why it draws the attention of meditators.
Being snowed in, in a warm, tiny space, is adventure, but the novelty wears off quickly and then one discovers one's concentration has deepened.
I tell myself: do not expect or look for such quietude, but do make use of the opportunity. Make tea, crack the books, reach for the highlighter.
After snowmelt begins, sounds return -- cars, ducks, chickens. The creek resumes its song. I remind myself not to regret the return of such "distractions" -- they're not distractions, but are themselves.
Flooding often ensues. The hut, its pier blocks undermined, shifts a little downstream. Oh, well, huh?
Do not expect daffodils, but do greet them. When they bow to spring breezes, maybe bow back.
Fourteenth century monk/poet Shiwu (Stonehouse) spent thirty penniless years living in a hut by a spring near a mountaintop in eastern China.
My circumstances are (so far) palatial compared to his, but in the hut I've made an effort to keep things minimalist, as a kind of exercise in privation preparedness.
The altar is the focal point of the hut but one's attention is often drawn toward mealtime. Quite a few of Shiwu's Mountain Poems are about food, concerning which he tells us he is not worried, but admits he is certainly preoccupied.
Lunch in my mountain kitchen
there’s a shimmering springwater sauce
a well-cooked stew of preserved bamboo
a fragrant pot of hard-grain rice
blue-cap mushrooms fried in oil
purple-bud ginger vinaigrette
none of them heavenly dishes
but why should I cater to gods
--Tr. Red Pine
I keep a Mason jar filled with rice handy, along with a jar of oatmeal, a jar of cracked mixed grains, and a jar of noodles. There's a salt shaker. And a jar of crushed (almost powdered) vegetable leaf flakes, made from surplus garden foliage which I dehydrate in a homemade solar dryer and then dry-blend. Mason jars are mouse-proof, a consideration in a quiet, isolated hut.
The "veggie powder" can be used in small quantities or large, depending on whether you're thinking of it at the moment as seasoning, trace nutrients, or a substantial part of the meal.
The routine is to put some water in the reservoir of the rice steamer, water and grain and veggie powder and salt in the bowl in the steamer basket, and set the timer. One then does morning service (sometimes this is in the afternoon) and a meal is ready by the time this is over.
I also either have water or tea. Our water comes from a well and I bring it, half a gallon at a time, from the house, as the water in the long garden hose to the hut tends to have algae and micro particles of neoprene in it and so is suspect.
Having read somewhere about using foraged wild or garden foliage for tea (tisane), I have formed the habit of hunting around for what's available on the acre, often gathering enough for the purpose as I go directly from the house to the hut. In season, I may find chicory, dandelions, nipplewort, narrow leaf plantain, crimson clover, deadnettle, cat’s ears, blackberry leaves, fir or spruce needles, money plant, Bigleaf maple flowers, and crop foliage such as kale, chard, beet greens, squash blossoms and leaves, pea and bean foliage, corn silk, and the like.
I layer these into the filter basket of a small four-cup coffee maker, add two cups or more of water, and there's the tea in the carafe in three or four minutes. If I need extra punch, I can add a teabag of black or green tea as needed.
If I've chosen foliage that makes good cooked greens, well, there they are in the filter basket, cooked, and I can add them directly to the rice, cracked grains or noodles. If I prefer soup, I can add the liquid from the carafe to the bowl.
I imagine this, frugal as it is, may be even a more nutritious and varied diet than Shiwu's, and he lived, relatively healthy and spry, into his eighties.
Makes one wonder what a supermarket is for.
Yunyan was boiling some tea. Daowu asked who he was making it for. Yunyan
answered, "nobody special."
-- Soto Zen Ancestors in China, Mitchell, 72
