not THE way, but A way
Lots happening, and had some problems with service providers and such. Finally found the time to find the correct backups and see what I could salvage of the blog. Looks like we got most of this one back. For those of you still paying attention, I wish you all a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving.
A close relative of mine has spent a lot of time on the water. He taught me a lot about the water and boats. Looking back I find it interesting, that time spent with someone who had spent so much time around boats and the water, well as much time as my cousin had. When I have gotten a chance, those who have had this time seem to be so critical of that lifestyle, maybe “cynical” is a more accurate term. Well, kind of.
It was my cousin who told me, “the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life is the day he buys the boat, and the day he sells the boat.” His cynical nautical repertoire was long, and it spoke more to me of the number of boats he had owned over his lifetime, and possibly those times boating with those close to him then it did any hatred for his time adrift. Although not crusty himself, his stories for the water and for boats specifically were made of this crusty wisdom, kind of like the salt of the sea had gotten it’s own say in his stories. The thing was, if you really listened, it was more like a story being told by an silver-haired deep-wrinkled man speaking raspy of a long shared life with a wife, the story crusty, but the look of his eye wet; all the evidence that he would repeat that life over in an instant.
When my cousin didn’t have a boat, he talked crusty of them and often.
I had not really considered myself a “boater” although looking back I had spent much of my time on that same water with my cousin. The Atlantic is a beautiful thing. My grandfather was a fisherman, I got to ride in his wooden boat on the Mediterranean with him years ago to fish. The Mediterranean is a beautiful thing. As a little girl I guess I knew what I was doing was fishing. I actually loved catching crabs with nothing but a line, a chicken leg, and a bucket. On good weeks on the dock, I could fill that bucket high enough to feed the whole family. The dock was a beautiful thing.
Is it a natural thing, to love a smell that no one should love? Fuel, rust, wood, water, rot, and fish; is it the newness of youth that allows us to hear the song of the waves slapping, to experience the spray, mixing those seemingly intense textures into a feeling, maybe we can call it a world, and depositing it deep into our minds? Is there some kind of light that shines special from the water, those clouds, the mistiest of days, that chisels an image of the comfort for such a seemingly inhospitable place?
You know it when you have it. You know it when someone else does. It was not soon after my teens when I remember knowing that I never wanted to live more than an hour from the water.
I love a port town.
These days I am a long ways away from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. I find myself happily about an hour close to the Pacific. I own a boat now, and here is my first venture into crusty wisdom sayings. I’ll start by telling you what you may already know: the Pacific ain’t real “pacific”. (There, that wasn’t too painful.) When we decided to take up sailing it wasn’t a dock on the Pacific that we found our sailboat moored, it was on the banks of the “mighty” Columbia River. When I think of it, I find it hard to think of a better place where I would want to learning how to raise sail.
I have to give credit to my seafaring cousin, contrary to the rest of my family who seem to live life at the pace of a motorboat, he was the first and only to one buy and actually sail a sailboat. For those who run the pace of motorboats, sailing seems a bit unfathomable. “Why would anyone want to get from point “a” to point “b” slowly?” “Why oh why would you want to “think” about or putting so much effort into getting from point “a” to point “b”?” When I think of it and those who love enjoying the water in this way, it completely makes sense. My cousin found something other than speeding and fishing to enjoy on the water. Maybe the ocean salt had found its way into him where he had gone beyond feeling separate from the environment. I got this feeling from him when he talked about sailing and why he liked it when he took me out. He was the first of a few to mention how sailing brought him closer to experiencing the environment, the water, the wind, the waves, and respect for that environment more than any other forms of boating he had tried. Now that I have started to sail a bit, it is easy to believe him.
Of the many things my cousin taught me, but one that I didn’t really appreciate till now was the actual ”language” of the water. Not a secret language of course, but one that has been used by those who had traveled on the seas for centuries. Had I thought of it like that then I may have kept more of it in my memory and maybe the sooner I would have brought myself to learn sailing. It is of no consequence though, because I am learning it now.
So that is what I have been doing lately, spending my off water “rainy” hours learning the different parts of a sailboat, along with the different nouns and verbs of sailing. It is with terrific excitement to learn such a rich and historical vocabulary tied so close to the culture of the water. Although not used on a salty sea, but on the Columbia, the vocabulary will surely “bend” well with my existing feelings, smells, and the memories of my youth and of the larger water.
Here is a cool site that has a great list of sailing terms : http://www.schoonerman.com/sailingterms/
My cousin was the first person I sent a picture of the little sailboat after we bought it. What surprised me was that he wasn’t surprised. “I figured you for sailing” he said on the phone as I imagined his smile, ”Just keep throwing money in her hull, and she will serve you well.”
in reply to majidrazvi # # # Another cloudy day has brought me here to repent. I thought perhaps writing this article in this place, would be appropriate, especially since it is here that I have typed long and hard about the good things I think about. I am kind of proud that in close to 400 posts I have really had only one or three that I can say were motivated by any kind of irritation. I consider that an achievement.
If you have been reading this blog a while, you might have gotten hints, here and there, of my Facebook account. I have written some about Facebook, mostly about privacy and about how to politely say “no”. I actually politely said “no” to a person who then retaliated a bit, but that is a different story. Well, maybe it really isn’t. This article in a way, is how again I found myself saying no. Perhaps the issue is that some things never feel quite right in the the doing.
If you have been on Facebook for a time, you might realize how people can get knee deep in a quagmire of negativity. There are, I would bet, dozens of article about the “types” of Facebook users out there; the lists of generalizations that really can be applied to users there. These generalizations are like, “the drama queen”, “the political junkie”, “the passive-aggressive”, “the flirt”, “the WAY too much information person”, the “I’m so clever and cynical about everything person”, “the gush about god person”… (you get the idea). Really, these are just people that we would find in any situation (remind you of high school?). We also probably find these traits within our own behavior from time to time, I know I do. These are just generalizations of course, we know deep inside that no one is any of these things 100% of time. But one thing that I find in common with all of these generalizations is they describe how people respect personal boundaries.
Can we state in advance that consistent tromping of other people’s personal boundaries is a pretty un-mindful act? Where every post of “like” is how certain people should not or should be allowed to be wed, or that people from a certain political party are “add nasty name” here, it starts to wear me thin. When every darn post has an expletive that isn’t funny (it must be funny), or really just has anger or negativity attached to it, and with no redeeming value, it starts to make me wonder.
And wonder I did.
I wondered so much, I did what I think I should not have done. I jumped into the fray. I did not fumble either, when I did I valiantly hit every sacred cow of the people on my friends list like a ballerina playing wack-a-mole. I was polite about it, actually I kind of explained my behavior in a short series of Facebook posts that ended up being in the form of a strange sci-fi story about tuba players saving the economy.
I won’t add the story here. I don’t think negativity out of its own context does much good anyway. Here is a set of comments from part of the story that I believe were the most poignant part, even if only accidentally so:
Friend: I still say, “huh?” You gotta watch out for that weed killer. Strong fumes.
Dharma: You missed the earlier messages of mine… no matter… you wouldn’t gain much from them
Dharma: And that was a compliment…
Friend: You sure it isn’t fumes? It’d be cool if everyone playing Tubas could fix the economy, stopped idiotic confrontations, etc. But I don’t think kazoos can do it.
Dharma: Hahahhaha… If my “tuba beliefs” make you think I’m on fumes (and I’m joking) you don’t want to know what I’m thinking…
There have been quite a few more posts by me, and in my own creative style each hit a different boundary. I even compared the pope to Roman Polanski in one heart warming and moving post about our responsibility to children. I’ll say it again, I was as delicate as I could be with the material but some reality people just don’t want to see. Did the behavior stop? Yes, even my more virulent “friends” gave a big pause.
Lots of people would say, “hey, you don’t take anything sacred do you?” Actually one of my best friends joked with me in this way. My answer is.. my boundaries are sacred to me. Over the years I believe people have been tromping my boundaries beyond recognition, taking my politeness quiet as permission to keep on performing their bad behavior around me. I am proud of my Facebook friends for stopping. I don’t know how long they will, but it shows a lot of character to catch yourself in such things.
With all compassion it is my opinion that many of the people on my friend’s list are fairly new to social networking. The group, many whom knew each other began to resemble a gang, but only because they gave each other pats on the back for bad behavior, which made the behavior grow. Fun and games right? What I had done was to hold a mirror up. I did it very politely. Some people loved it and appreciated it.
Being peaceful and non-violent does not mean you roll over when someone disturbs your peace. I believe that there are ways that you can peacefully and non-violently defend yourself.
I can try defend my actions, and I have in my mind, saying “I have younger family members on my list who need to hear these things.” Some of what was being put up on our mutual walls was pretty “outdated” thinking, kind of like pre-civil rights, get out the hood, kind of thinking.
I actually talk about my growing frustrations and plans to deal with it in the post “Two Minutes of Hate – Give the Proud What They Want”. Here I was fumbling with the idea of just letting it go.
“Letting it go”, is certainly the direction I was going myself in my Zen practice. I had made a “word-image” in my mind of my idea -the concept I was thinking was “no wave”. I don’t know if it is original or not, but my idea was that we really don’t know the outcome of our actions, good or bad, especially as time flows into the future. We really don’t know that if someone creates an considerable amount of suffering whether its long term outcome will be even greater happiness or visa versa. I think this has come out of my Zen studies and I believe it. Our lifespans may be too short to be able to judge good and evil if we ever could (or can). Time will always prove us wrong (and right). Compassion tells us there is no real good and no real evil, but there can be real understanding. So the concept I was working on was “no wave”. Instead of trying to forge ahead and be a do-gooder, and instead of getting angry and being mean, I would try and leave no trace. No “karmic” wave in a sense. In my practice, I thought this might be the best thing I could do, the most respectful way to be, especially to others.
Well, I would tell you my conclusions about my practice, but apparently my concentration on “no wave” has been derailed. What made me change my attitude?
Negativity.
Pride.
Hate.
Fear.
Suffering.
All, from family and friends. In a word, ignorance.
I had a hard time keeping my self from reacting when I thought that my younger family was learning such an example of ignorance as something “positive” to emulate. It actually kept me awake a couple nights. Then the thought became: right now, in order to be the best example, I would have to have to act.
I know time may prove me wrong, actually let’s just assume it will, but I felt that if those kids knew a different view growing up, that a different view was even available, (and they didn’t have to agree with it either), it might make their lives easier in the future.
Very selfish of me, I know.
No. I still politely hit issues that may be uncomfortable; the head waters of my opinion have been broken, but the really nice thing is, it has become a conversation. It is wonderful to have that conversation with little or no anger associated, there is still a little fear. What is even more fun then having deep and meaningful conversations with friends and family.
I still think the “no wave” practice is a valuable one. I plan to return to it soon.
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