Doing a Lot of Nothing Much

I've been doing a lot of nothing much lately.  (Don't get me wrong:  nothing much can be wonderful.  And it can also be called Reducing the Toxic Load.) For one thing, it's been too hot to do anything much.

Even if it weren't too hot, I don't go out much.  I'm no good at shopping.  I don't feel I need anything.  And then I don't much like looking for a place to park, going off in the hot sun to put money in the ticket machine, then going back to put the ticket on the dashboard.  I did manage to find some pretty earrings for a family member who recently had her ears pierced. Afterwards, I considered getting an ice cream cone across the street, but I didn't even do that.  I just went back to the car and drove home where I can look out the window at the sunlight filtering through the white pines. Or think about a recent painting I did in a watercolor class.  Or read my current book.

Sometimes when it's especially hot, I'll get in my car, turn on the A/C, and drive around.  But to get out of here, I have to choose.  Do I go the front way with all its traffic and trucks that will be shooting off onto the interstate? Or do I go the back way, a pretty dirt road where I can then go to a little farm stand and get homemade cookies, veggies, frozen meat?  (I often choose the latter.)

As I emailed a friend recently, I think we should all be required to spend at least a day in the country now and again.  It helps balance, cleanse, and enable one to get back to basics.  But choose a back road to get there.  No heavy traffic!

The Clucking of Hens

My brother and I didn't grow up with television.  (No, that isn't a picture of my brother.)  For one thing no one HAD television then.  It only came in when I was around ten.  For another, we couldn't afford it.  Besides, we were used to our routine, our life-style, and though we found TV to be a distraction, we didn't feel we needed to be distracted.  We preferred doing crafts on the kitchen table or reading some of the childhood classics like Robert Louis Stevenson or going out on bike rides around the neighborhood or helping our mother make cake or ice cream or visiting cousins and playing games.

So now when I turn on TV, I too often feel sorry for children who have to watch programs made for them. Who have no introduction to other things to do in life than sit glued (good word) to the TV since it CAN mesmerize one. But the noise it provides can be rather disruptive.  To my mind, children do not need the constant ups and downs of loud noise even from what are known as "the educational programs"-- what (to my ear) can come across as yelling. All supposedly in good fun, mind you.  They need time for gentle sounds.  The clucking of hens.  The telling of a good story.  The sound of spring rain.  The hum of the car's motor on the way to the beach.  If a child is being baby-sat by being placed in front of the TV, something less frenetic than the children's programs I happen on could be advisable.  Even turning off the volume.

Call me unrealistic.

Or, what about this:  find a CD of hens clucking and play that.  Wouldn't that be soothing!

Quietude

Ah, the best time of all is just after I get up which is 5 A.M.  Then I have a couple of hours when things are quiet around here.  No 18-wheelers changing gears out on the interstate.  Or bikers making the turn-off just a couple of streets away.  Or back-up beeps from trunks turning around on this dead-end street.  The frequently-visiting family (with dog) across the street is still asleep so no bouncing ball as they shoot hoops--with that methodical "thonk ... thonk" which reverberates throughout my house.  And their dog is asleep so no barking.  No chain saws taking out a tree, as last evening.  No lawn mowing.  (I actually don't mind lawn mowing--it never lasts long so you know it's going to stop pretty soon.)  No slamming car doors when loading, unloading, or packing the family and dog to go to town, the farmers market ... or maybe home again.  ... And then the resident dog-up-the-hill is still inside so she's not barking either.

We used to live in a lovely residential area in another town where we always acknowledged those first spring days after being indoors all winter.  We'd take chairs out to the garden and just savor the warmth, the peace. Until the fraternity two doors away savored them too by bringing out their boom box, turning up the music, and having their beer party.

So I value these early hours.  I have my tea.  I look out and watch the sunlight as it begins to fill my street. The stillness.  And I just sit and am.

Which reminds me of some lines out of Rumer Godden's book, Thus Far and No Further, about the time during World War II when her husband had gone off and she was about to take her two young daughters and live within view of the Himalayas on a tea plantation near Darjeeling, India.  (A beautiful book, by the way.)

"But what in the world will you do there?"
"Live there."
"But what will you do?"
"Live."

So it is for me at this blessed hour of the day.

Listening: Letting Each Morning Tell Me What It Wants to Say

A cup of tea and a quiet chair.  That's all it really takes.  No music, no radio, no TV, no computer.  Just a few first-thing-in-the-morning moments to sit and transition into the day.  Or, if one is fortunate enough to live near the water, a good early morning walk on the beach is splendid.  Or along a mountain trail.  I'm not talking about now and again, I'm talking regularly! 

I often think that it's totally necessary to spend some quiet time with myself ... to sit down and be silent. Or, to put it another way, to simply BE. If I'm to receive easy thoughts--or answers to any questions, for that matter--I need to be in a quiet environment.  Though, yes, they can arrive in the middle of washing the dishes.  Or taking a bath.  Or driving down our main street.

So, I live a quiet life partly to be receptive to whatever might come and partly because I simply prefer a life of peace.  No sounds except maybe a light configuring of traffic out on the main road.  The humming of the refrigerator.  Maybe a neighbor down the hill mowing his lawn.  I don't even put on Bach and Vivaldi as often as I used to.  Though I do enjoy tuning in to Krishna Das on Pandora sometimes when I'm making supper.

But if our minds are so obliterated with noise, with external music, with motors and beeps... how can we truly listen to the silence?  I particularly love going out on a sunny afternoon--usually, late afternoon--and just being in my garden.  With its woods, its grass, its rock walls and chipmunks, its tall white pines and herb garden.  Just to be there and take it in.  Then later ideas come to me.  Things I might write about or paint. (Or put into this blog.)   Places I want to go.  But it's the silence that captures me.  No one is around, no traffic (I'm on a dead-end street), no disturbances.

Of course, my uphill neighbor's dog does its share of barking which can drive me to distraction--sorry, but I have zero tolerance for a dog with an annoying bark--but it's what Zen might call "an awareness."  Zen would call the dog my teacher ... its barking something to set aside.  And the setting aside is something that I need to practice along with "don't know mind" as one teacher described it.  Staying neutral.  Not getting involved with others' dramas.  Taking deep breaths.

Loud music in restaurants is also problematic.  And "music" where I go fill up my gas tank.  Or at the dentist's, the butcher's, baker's, or candlestick maker's.  Just let us be, I want to say.  Just let us be.  We need only the sound of the wind in the grasses, the clouds covering the moon, the waves breaking on the beach, the words of a cheery hello.  And children, especially, need this.  Get rid of the television!  Let them be, let them understand the glories of quietude!

Sitting a Moment

I love outdoor chairs--summertime chairs, really.  They look so inviting, so convivial.  One can sit with a glass of iced tea and follow the wind, the sunlight ... listen to the birds, the silence. Or, with a friend, look out over the garden, the hills.  It all lends itself to an earlier era.  Any tasks can be put off awhile.  Any electronic devices.  It's just time to sit a moment, clear your mind, and say, "Ahhhh...."

One, two, three, four chairs.  Take your pick.

Outdoor Art on a Sunday Afternoon

Making an excursion to Manchester, Vermont, this past Sunday, to take in an exhibit at the art center there, I found that it was the outdoor art that I happened upon both there and on the way back that captured my attention.

"Palm Tree" by Neisga and Owen Crawford

First, there was this sculpture at the art center of a stainless steel palm tree with the splendid incongruity of tropicality amidst the region's cold-weather pines and maples.

Then, as my route home took me through the village of Bondville, there off to the side of the road were hundreds of rock sculptures in the river with people milling about--some wading in the water creating new cairns, others (motorists like me) standing around enjoying the scene.

Looking up-river

Thinking she might be a local, I asked a woman, "Who's doing this, do you know?"

"I don't know," she said.  "I'm from Maine."  But, later, looking on-line I found the story.  It all started a few weeks ago when, to assuage his grief after losing his dog, a man went out to the river over the course of several evenings and starting piling rocks on top of each other.  Soon, townspeople joined in including families with children ... turning it into something of a community art project.  But then one of the town's residents who thought the whole thing had gotten out of hand took a rake and in the course of just a couple of hours knocked everything down again.

But people got together and decided to rebuild.  So it was that rebuilding that I was lucky enough to witness both by townspeople and by tourists who stopped to join in.  (Surely some from the Pine Tree state since there were a number of parked motorcycles with Maine plates.)

Looking down-river

As I then made my way home, I thought about the simple, lovely act of piling one stone on top of another.  It seemed very Zen-like.   Very transitory.  Rather like building sand-castles that are all too soon washed away but that give both on-looker and builder a quiet satisfaction.  They're there.  And then they're gone.  Work well done that brightens the moment.

No more than a mile from home, I found this beside the road.

Wabi-Sabi As I Understand It

Old tree ... irregular

I have been interested in the concept of wabi-sabi since a friend introduced me to it some twenty years ago.  Basically, it is a Japanese aesthetic that embraces the modest, the imperfect, the irregular, the evolving/devolving.  I like it because it recognizes what I might call an un-Madison Avenue, un-Hollywood beauty.  Something with a more spiritual approach, recognizing a humanity, even, within the subject, whether that is an old gnarled tree or a misfired clay pot that no one pays all that much attention to.

One thing I've decided is that wabi-sabi is pretty much the opposite of what we in the West think of as beauty, ours being based on the Greek ideal of perfection.  The young beautiful girl, the perfect piece of hand-blown glass.  Not the woman d'un certain âge ... or something with a highly polished sheen from eons of use. 

In the advertising mode, we are faced with images that are meant to knock our socks off, to make one's jaw drop.  But how often can we keep that up?  So we disconnect.  We drop out.  We decide we want something calmer.  No drama queens, please.  Not even those who pretend not to be.  Here's the weather, they say.  Look at (and celebrate the anniversary of) the disasters that have hit these particular places.  Here's the news.  See what awful things are being done here and here and here.  Here's a program where a couple is looking for a house.  Watch how she wants something in the city and he something in the country.  Oh, conflict, conflict.  Who will give way?

And then our national aesthetic focuses on the bright, the glitzy, the honored, the one that calls out, "I am best" or even, "You are best."  So, to look at the very opposite (and something that does not speak of glorification) can seem downright subversive.  But what a treasure one can find in quietly invisible places, in places that are, that do not shout out to be recognized.

Wabi-sabi, then, is the beauty--even the spiritual path--found in that which is humble, incomplete, rustic, unsophisticated, overlooked, simple.  In a farmers market, it might well be the basket of "Seconds."  The tomatoes that didn't make the expensive cut.

Ferns ... devolving

What I'm wondering is:  as we (as a nation, as people) mature, as we are possibly faced with more austerity in our lives, will we find ourselves tapping more and more into something related to wabi-sabi?  We've so long learned that beauty is perfection that we automatically negate this whole different approach.  Where is the excitement in the modest? we ask  But we can turn that around to ask, what is there within the modest, the imperfect that we never noticed before?  I do believe we're ready for this more internal view, this totally different outlook than the one that's been drummed into us.

Apple orchard farm stand ... rustic

The best book I've found on the subject is Leonard Koren's Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Stone Bridge Press).  In it, he shows photos of a leaf decomposing on the ground, the intersection of two mud-straw walls in a typical Japanese room, a trail of rust made by a nail in a piece of wood.  According to him, one of wabi-sabi's metaphysical tenets is that all is evolving or devolving from or to nothingness.  "And nothingness itself--instead of being empty space, as in the West--is alive with possibility.  In metaphysical terms, wabi-sabi suggests that the universe is in constant motion toward or away from potential."  (p. 45) 

Shadows on a wall ... impermanent

Aging leaves on top of a stone wall ... modest, rough

Householder into the Woods

Alpenglow on the Himalayas

I have sometimes thought of leaving this country for good (or more or less for good) whether in protest over one thing or another or (more likely) in search of a gentler environment.  I know that one cannot "go back again," but some places do stick in my mind and Darjeeling, India, is one of them.  Kashmir is another, though since being there in 1980, the politics have totally shifted and aren't good for the likes of me.  At any rate, I fantasize sometimes about what it would be like to put aside most of my worldly goods and enter something similar to the fourth stage of a Hindu's life--the householder who says goodbye and goes off to meditate or cogitate.  (The four stages are student, householder, retired, ascetic/meditator.) 

In this return to a simpler life, I have envisioned a trim, wooden house, perhaps no more than one room overlooking some part of the Himalaya.  It is a fantasy, as I say, but, while immersed in this dreamy state some years ago--twelve to be exact--I sat down and made a quick list of things that came to mind, that I would include in a goodbye letter.  For what it's worth, here it is.


Dear Friends,

1. I shall write letters, but I shall not expect answers in return unless you are so moved.
2. I shall think of you fondly at times of celebration, birthdays, Christmas, but I shall no longer necessarily send cards or gifts.
3. I shall welcome all visitors and will locate accommodations for you when you visit.
4. I shall devote my hours to reading, painting, writing, walking, dancing, playing musical instruments, drinking cups of tea with friends, arranging flowers in a vase.
5. I shall get up with the sun, enjoy sunsets across the mountains, and go to bed when it is time to blow out the candle.
6. I shall strive to live as healthy a life as I can.
7. I shall hope to live where I can walk in one direction into fields and forests and in the other into town where I can buy stamps and bars of chocolate.
8. I shall hire people to help cook my food, clean my house, tend my garden, and drive me where I need to go, though I shall pursue those activities as well.
9. I shall return from time to time but not all that frequently.
10. I shall write down my thoughts as insights come to me.
11. I shall burn incense to the gods.
12. I shall wear long skirts and comfortable clothes and not concern myself with hair style and makeup not because I don't approve of them but because I've never been able to figure them out for myself.
13. I shall strive to equally enjoy things of the mind, body, and spirit.
14. I shall always think of you with great affection.

"A Chinese Whistle Tied to a Pigeon's Wing"

I am fortunate to live in a quiet neighborhood.  No loud music.  Not that many cars coming up the hill.  But, other than, say, hearing the Battle of Austerlitz some distance off, I'm wondering what people used to hear.  Harvesters singing in neighboring fields?  (Like that scene in the BBC's "Lark Rise to Candleford.")  Ox-carts rumbling down the road?  Someone chopping wood? 

Out walking along a trail beside a river recently, I could hear rock music penetrating the otherwise silent scene.  Later, back home, much like a cinematic version of Roman legions beating their shields in rhythm as they marched off to war--the metallic sound reverberating across the land--I heard the now-daily *thump*ing* *pound*ing* from the interstate bridge reconstruction only blocks away.  With May, we began The Power Mower Take-Over.  With June, we have Bikers Going to Their Annual Gathering.  Two- or three-hundred thousand meet in our neighboring state with a goodly number coming through our little town to connect to the interstate.  As I sit in my garden (or even inside my house), I can hear them accelerate when they make the turn.

I've read many of M.F.K. Fisher's books, reveling in her descriptions of life in France as well as California's wine region.  As she got older, she described the increasing need for silence.  In Last House, she said:  "I admit without perturbation the possibility that if I live long enough, my spiritual ear may reshape itself to such a point that it will tolerate only the sound of a flute, or a Chinese whistle tied to a pigeon's wing."

I'm finding myself almost approaching a similar frame of mind.  Sometimes, I'll put on Bach as a morning raga.  But I often prefer to fill my day with silence.  (I had to smile recently when following a car with that great bumper sticker, "Honk If You Love Silence.")

I spent part of this past winter in Honolulu.  Waikiki, to be exact, since that's where the condo rentals are.  Having been there the year before, I knew enough not to take something on Ala Wai Boulevard, Kuhio or Kalakaua Avenues since they are the main (and totally noisy) thoroughfares.

Traffic out the window of one place I stayed on Ala Wai Boulevard the year before, beating a fast retreat next morning

So this time I found a pleasant spot on a side street.  The building was quiet.  But to amuse myself one day, I noted all the sounds that came in from outside, often several at once.

Garbage trucks
Back-up beeps
Car alarms
Power mowers
Power blowers
Power trimmers
Police sirens
Fire engines
Ambulances
Buses
Cars
Car radios
Night-time shouting
Muffler-less motorcycles

Plus fireworks every Friday night.  A pleasant enough sound ... but I always jumped with the initial explosions because I wasn't expecting them.

Except for the fireworks, these have all now entered Our General Background Noise Scene. But, in addition (and no matter where I went), there was one sound that totally enchanted me--the soft cooings of the Zebra Doves.  Coo coo COO coo coo COO co COO co COO co COO.  They were gentle little things with long tails and zebra-striped markings.  I often sought them out and stood listening to their song.  Not unlike a Chinese flute on a pigeon's wing, you might say.