Ryōkan's Poems that are not Poems

I just finished listening to Shohaku Okumura Roshi give two short talks at the Sanshin Zen community on the 'poems that are not poems' from Zen Master Taigu Ryōkan. - Ryōkan is the Han-Shan of Japan. He has an extremely inspiring story - though he came from a very wealthy family Ryokan spent the majority of his life begging as a practice (called takuhatsu).



Shohaku Okumura Roshi shared a few wonderful poems and I looked around for a few more. - Ryōkan was so clear-minded and open-hearted that peace and calm come through clearly in his simple words.



Down in the village

the din of

flute and drum,

here deep in the mountain

everywhere the sound of the pines.



One day he came back to his simple shack from a day of begging and a thief was there taking what little he had. The thief ran when he saw Ryōkan and left behind one cushion. Ryōkan grabbed the cushion and ran after the thief to give it to him. He then wrote this poem:



The thief left it behind:

the moon

at my window.



Most of all Ryōkan was a powerful teacher.



First days of Spring-the sky

is bright blue, the sun huge and warm.

Everything's turning green.

Carrying my monk's bowl, I walk to the village

to beg for my daily meal.

The children spot me at the temple gate

and happily crowd around,

dragging to my arms till I stop.

I put my bowl on a white rock,

hang my bag on a branch.

First we braid grasses and play tug-of-war,

then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball in the air:

I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.

Time is forgotten, the hours fly.

People passing by point at me and laugh:

'Why are you acting like such a fool?'

I nod my head and don't answer.

I could say something, but why?

Do you want to know what's in my heart?

From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

Testing Questions For ‘Genuine’ Progress & Improvement

Here is my own adaptation of a series of 'testing' questions and categories (stuff to think about before you go off and start to do something) that I found very eye opening and thought I would share.

Personal - Does it support:

• empowerment, awareness, creative visioning, values clarification, acquisition of essential literacies and competencies, responsibility, wellbeing and health maintenance, vitality and spontaneity (building & maintaining personal capital – personal sustainability)?
• caring, loving, responsible, mutualistic relationships with diverse people (valuing equity & social justice), other species, place and planet (home & ecosystem maintenance)?
  
• positive total life-cycle personal development and change?
  

Socio-Political - Does it support:

• accessible, collaborative, responsible, creative, celebrational, life- promoting community and political structures and functions (building & maintaining social capital & cultural [including economic] sustainability)?
• the valuing of 'functional' high cultural diversity and mutualistic relationships?
• positive cultural development and co-evolutionary change?

Environmental - Does it support:

• effective ecosystems functioning (building & maintaining natural capital & ecological sustainability)?
• 'functional' high biodiversity, and prioritized use and conservation of resources
• positive ecosystem development and co-evolutionary change?

General

• Does it support: proactive (vs. reactive), design/redesign (vs. efficiency & substitution) and small meaningful collaborative initiatives that you guarantee to carry through to completion (vs. heroic, Olympic-scale, exclusive, high risk ones) and their public celebration at each stage - to facilitate their spread - thereby making wellbeing and environmental caring 'contagious'?
• Does it focus on: key opportunities and windows for change (pre-existing change 'moments')?
• Does it explain: how it will effectively monitor and evaluate its progress (broad, long-term, as well as specific & short-term) by identifying and using indicators and being attentive to all feedback and outcomes (& redesigning future actions & initiatives accordingly)?

Adapted from the work of Professor Stuart B. Hill –-Foundation Chair of Social Ecology School of Education, University of Western Sydney

People Who Have Come Alive

Howard Thurman is a powerful example of human compassion and understanding.
He was a preacher who grew up in the segregated south and started 'Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples' the first non-segregated church in the US.
He was an incredibly hard working activist.

Gil Bailie was a motivated young person wanted to know how best to help in all the civil rights and spreading of compassion and teachings and asked Thurman 'what should I do'...

In a recent dharma talk at the Insight meditation center, Donald Rothberg suggested that Thurman probably had a million places where he knew that help was needed. - He might have sent Bailie to work in a community or to learn a special skill that was especially needed. But, instead, what he said was: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Made me think to write a little something in praise of the good people of the Insight Meditation Center and the San Francisco Zen Center who have been brave enough to challenge the 'voices around' and follow instead a deep spiritual practice. It made me think to write some words of praise, also to all the preachers out there who are still preaching the 'good news' that Jesus taught, though it has been used for 'spiritual materialism' and 'bought and sold and bought again' enough that it is hard to recognize as our spiritual tradition anymore.

To truly follow the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus, living a simple and quiet life in the midst of an increasingly materialist America is showing a real test of 'coming alive' and my hat is off to them. I am also deeply grateful for the podcasts so that I can glean the lessons of that struggle, while resting easy in simple quietude.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

The Best Of Intentions

"I'm sorry, you were saying something about best of intentions... 
Well, allow me to retort."

-Jules

I had the best of intentions when I put in the compost pile in the back garden. I made three of them actually. One a covered pile of green manures, mostly swept leaves from the brick patio that is the back garden, combined with the residues of the plots and the leftover bits of trees and land clearings from the neighbors. 

The Mystery 'Agent Orange' Caterpillar 

Another pile was of sticks, branches and other high carbon things that needed to decompose a bit in the rain and heat before being added to the pile. That one was uncovered. 

I also had kitchen waste compost in a 5 gallon pail that I peed on in the morning and whenever I was home throughout the day. It was, and is still, wonderful. - The rest I had to burn and go back to compost-in-a-bag. 

Defoliated Fig Tree in Mid Summer, Hanoi

What I did, in combination with creating some rich wonderful humus to add to the thriving papaya, banana and passion fruit was to create a breeding ground for cockroaches and a strange kind of fig-tree-specific caterpillar that I am calling the agent-orange-caterpillar. 

Within a week it ate all the leaves off of the four story tall healthy fig tree in the back garden. I was out of town when it took place and since returning I have seen that the 'agent orange' caterpillar does not stop there. Now it is eating the small branches and even the bark. 

I find myself outside, unable to sleep, climbing the tree in the in the early morning with a spray bottle full of garlic, ginger and alcohol. I think the caterpillars like it. 

With the best of intentions I have created a Permacultural nightmare. 

Anyone with information regarding the 'agent orange caterpillar please help. 

The Caterpillar in Question eating a fig branch

Fukuoka seedballs for guerrilla gardening in city shafts

Cory Whitney

Some of my mates have a new flat in downtown Manhattan near the South Street Seaport Museum. I love that place. The view of the city is great - looking out from the balcony - but the view of the city looking down is rather dismal.

Manhattan's city blocks have these thin air shafts running through - a depressed early version of the shaft running through the Empire's Deathstar. - Looking down from the balcony at the little spots of soil in the shaft below I daydreamed of a small cryptoforest there.

Photo 'Tenement Air Shaft Balcony' bv William Bode

A photo by New York photographer, John Albok

A photo of the bottom of an airshaft
by PJ The Sprite in St. Paul

I see a role for metropolitan guerilla gardening using seedballs. This could easily be done following the exemplary methodologies of the No Work Farming Master Masanobu Fukuoka as I have seen some farmers and activists doing in Iceland 1-2.

A photo of a seedball taken by Aravind Reddy
Bangalore Bombing on Green Mission near Bengaluru

More on how to make seedballs from the excellent book Freedom Gardens

More radical seedball ideas from Seedballs R Us

References

1. Whitney, Cory W. “Conservation Ethnobotany in the North Atlantic.” Non-Wood News; NWFP Digest, 2011.
2. Whitney, Cory William. “A Survey of Wild Collection and Cultivation of Indigenous Species in Iceland and the Faroe Islands.” University of Kassel, 2011.

Happy Lucky Idiot

"If you have time to chatter,
Read books.

If you have time to read,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.

If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance.

If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot."
― Nanao Sakaki

I am following Nanao Sakaki's suggestion and taking a sabbatical from blogging.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions and ideas.

Find me at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/corywhitney
and
http://uni-goettingen.academia.edu/CoryWhitney
on twitter
@corianderapples

More of my stuff:
http://www.drgreene.com/bio/cory-whitney
http://farmersforthefuture.ning.com/profile/CoryWhitney

as well as the Mendeley and Google Plus buttons on this page.
Mendeley
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/cory-w-whitney/
Google Plus
https://plus.google.com/100457993092024689630

Dangers of Urban Farming

Photo by Maggie Jones Urban Photographer

I just had an interesting question about the dangers of farming by roadsides.

Whereas, here in Asia, farming in the roadside spaces happens naturally and no-one really seems to wonder about the safety of it. The opposite is true in the West. 

It seems that the modern western movement toward 'guerilla gardening' and urban farming has met with a mix of caution and paranoia. 

Urban farming should be a practical and worry free system of agricultural production. 

It requires some forethought about buffer zones, and some proper soil tests before getting started. However, the dangers appear to be minimal and only in some amount of heavy metals in leafy greens. 

Kentucky Certification Sign

Cornel has published some research on growing veggies by the road.

Agrodocks has resources in research about urban farming.