A Moment of Zen and Science

On a table, at the entrance to my classroom, is a large, green bottle of hand-sanitizer. Each day, roughly one-hundred kids pass it and many of them use it.

Each day, numerous times, it occurs to me that their germ-covered hands must deposit a veritable complex society (little germ schools; train systems and resort communities, for instance) of numerous types of invisibly crusty-brown germs on the bottle, and this notion niggles me.

But, each day, these recurring niggling thoughts are recurringly replaced with the exquisite satisfaction that, as soon as each student rubs the sanitizing gel into his or her hands, the germs are eradicated in small, completely ethical germ-genocides.

In the silence of preparation periods and lunch, I look at the teeming bottle and relish the next slaughter.

Thanksgiving

We deep-fried our turkeys yesterday.

No, I am not going turn this into a cooking blog (but you simply must try it).

Anyway, we bought this fryer that needed to be assembled, so I did that in the morning. (Only one piece was left over, which is good, for me.)

Ansel Adams: Old Faithful

The best part about this is that you can prepare your turkey for consumption in less than an hour. I cooked two birds. The thing is, though -- you have to stay with it. I know from working in restaurants, during my school years, that you can't trust hot grease. In short, I had to sit outside, in the cold, for two hours, watching turkeys do their danse macabre in the in the roiling liquid.

Once I dropped the first one in (after the initial violent bubbling and the spew of liquid death) I thought about calling one of my sons to get the book I'm reading. Instead, I sat close enough to the fryer for warmth but far enough to avoid blindness, and I watched: pot, sky, trees, clouds and all of sunshine's creation .

"Nuke" LaLoosh and Me: The Myth of the Creative Process

Crash and Nuke

I love baseball. I also love baseball movies -- the greatest of all time being, of course, Field of Dreams. But one of my other favorites is the comedy Bull Durham. In he film, there is a young pitcher, "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who is talented but...unfocused. (Okay -- he's an idiot.) Kevin Costner's "Crash" Davis and Susan Sarandon's Annie Savoy have the task of grooming Nuke for the majors. Crash takes the baseball experience approach, but Annie goes a more philosophical route.

When Nuke loses his control on the mound, Annie has him wear women's underwear ("Rose goes in the front, big guy.") and she tells him to breathe through his eyelids. In essence, what she gets him to do is to stop thinking about pitching and just "let it happen." This works for Nuke.

Kurt, the bassist in my band, used to look back at me when he made a mistake on stage and he would point to his head, implying that mistake came when he started thinking.

The Shock of Transcendence

The Taoist weirdo.

What they never tell you, these philosophers and spouters of wisdom, is that, if you reach the desirable states that they recommend, you will have officially become a weirdo. You may even question whether your mind is working as it should. Transcendence, for instance, is quite alarming -- not when you manage it once, but when you finally make it part of your life on a daily basis.

Right now I am going through very difficult times outside of my home. I'll leave it sans detail, but it has been heart-breakingly rough over certain intervals.

That said, I'm not suffering much for it. I do wish things were better in this outside-of-the-home situation, but I find myself happy, otherwise. Sure, I would still love to fix what it broken, but I am not, in any way, feeling dragged down by it, in terms of my life. I'd rather these difficult things weren't so, but I do believe I have learned to take the advice of the wise to heart: to keep things in perspective and to give credence to those things that are truly important.

Zen and Front Lawn Catches

My son loves to have catches. I love of have catches. Still, I find myself not wanting to have catches with him a lot of the time, even though I usually do acquiesce when he asks. The reason is as simple as the difference between two minds in two different stages of development.

If you wanted to, I would stand in my front yard or in my back yard and toss a baseball back and forth for hours on end. Nothing beats an orange evening sky, a cool/hot summer breeze, the sound of lawnmowers in the neighborhood distances and the warm crack of a baseball metronomically hitting glove leather. Nothing is more zen-like than the casual rhythm and the automatic reaction of catching the ball -- in front of the body; down at the side; scooped with a staccato da-blap from one hop on the ground.

Throwing and catching a baseball is one of my favorite meditations. But not with my son.

See, he is still gearing up to slay the dragons of the world. I'd rather sit on their backs and fly above the landscape.

He still wants to be the star on the stage. I'd rather watch, smiling, as someone else takes the accolades I helped him to achieve.

He still wants to land crippled airplanes; wander mysterious lands through forests lit up with the glowing eyes of night-creatures, and win the love of a beautiful princess. I'm comfortable in my little castle, with my queen and my two little knights-at-arms, sitting and soaking up the sweet sounds of laughter and the soft blips of a video game in the next room as I read.

In Defense of Having Stuff



Tolkien's Smaug

  Let me start by saying that I am a fan of the concept of living more simply and with "less" -- of placing peace of the mind above desires for material things that we perceive as "better" than what we already have or for life as we wish we could have it. But, I think we need to carefully keep perspective: possessions are not all bad.

Wanting things just to have them leads to both literal and philosophical clutter but material things can bring us happiness. We shouldn't let the very important and wise idea of not allowing possessions become an albatross around our necks turn into a fear of wanting and taking pleasure in the material things we love.