Heron Morning

Every year, for 22 years, in the last week of September, I headed up to Algonquin Park in Canada to paddle. Most years I paddled alone. I want to tell you about a particularly profound morning.

The day before I had pushed myself. After several lakes and portages, I’d tried to paddle to a large lake on the other side of a ten-mile swamp, but as night started to fall I’d only gotten about three quarters of the way through. I found a campsite on a small point that jutted out into the marsh. I was so tired that I didn’t bother eating. The next morning I was up, stiff and sore, before the sun. I built a fire in the semi-darkness, made coffee and a big breakfast, and packed up the canoe. I set off just as the sun started to rise over a distant hill. The marsh was eerily quiet and foggy. As I paddled slowly, gently, so as not to disturb the silence, I heard a whoosh, whoosh from the wings of a big bird. A Great Blue Heron emerged through the soupy fog. It saw me at the same time I saw it, and quickly changed course. I just sat there and soaked the whole scene in. Sitting alone on the swamp that morning, in the eerie quiet, it felt like I was witnessing the birth of the world.

. . .

The passage above is from the upcoming “Journaling as a tool in the creation of a life”. It will be available as an insert in the Journal Meditations binder, as a softcover wire-o bound book and as a PDF. Both will be available for pre-order sometime in the next week with delivery anticipated late this month or early next month.

There is more on these sets on the Journal Meditations page on the Zen Mountain Journal website here.

Heron Stillness II

. . .

For the world is not painted or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

. . .

Inundated with so much negative news — war, politics, environmental destruction – I’ve been urged by long time readers and supporters of this work to offer messages of hope, of positivity, of the beauty and mystery of nature and of life. I’m calling this series of posts “Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence” after the name of a popular book I published in 2009. Each will be a brief reflection, quote or poem and painting. Today’s Emerson is an effort in that direction.

Further to those efforts, in the next few days, Zen Mountain Journal will offer for pre-order a binder and the first of a series of binder chapters that can be used as the basis of a journaling practice, or read on its own as a standalone creative work. Each is based on the best content from the Substacks and sixteen books Zen Mountain Press and its predecessor, Heron Dance Press, has published over the last thirty years. Each will be published in full color and include art.

More on the Journal Meditations binder and inserts here.

A journaling practice for those who seek to connect with inner worlds, with the silence and peace within.

Coyote Eyes

Cover from the Heron Dance Art Studio Issue 2001 exploring the mindset of rebel artists.

Some people find it exceedingly difficult to get along with me and I have to choose my jobs very carefully. I have no patience with phonies, dolts, or obnoxious incompetents and I take some pride in the fact that these people invariably dislike me. I admire perfec­tion or any effort toward it and I would not work with anyone who disagreed with me on this score.
- Hunter S. Thompson, in a job application as a young man.

That came after, I think, a short stint as a writer at a bowling magazine. That belief in himself eventually allowed him to put some fascinating if unorthodox work out into the world.

For more, see Hunter S. Thompson and the Origins of Gonzo Journalism

See also Norman Maclean Responds To Rejection and Maniacs Seeking the New Encounter.

I find a rock in my journals. Writing helps clarify my thoughts and thus my efforts. Journaling centers and stills my mind. Journaling is my way of mentoring myself. It has been a source of great comfort and guidance. At least quarterly I use my journals to review my goals and my progress toward those goals. I set goals for all areas of my life, not just business or finance. I set goals for my time with family and friends. I set goals for my health and physical fitness. Goals for continuous learning. Goals for community involvement.
- Nathan Collier, 2018 Commencement Address, University of Florida. Collier is the Founder and Chairman of the Collier Companies.

For more, see Why Journal?

Windswept Horizon

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have flown beyond the sky.
A last cloud wanders off, unhurried.
We sit, the mountain and me
Until only the mountain remains.
- Li Bai (Li Po, Li Bo, 701-762)

One if Li Bai’s quietest poems — a reflection on the permanence of time and the impermanence of life.

According to legend, while drifting on the Yangtze River one evening, Li Bai reached over the side of his boat to embrace the moon. Inebriated, he fell in and drowned.
- Journal Note

. . . . .

Silence thoughts, invite emptiness
Once submerged in emptiness,
The universe beckons.
- Journal Poem

. . .

For more, see The Tao Waits in Silence.

Storm Swallow

Within each of us exists profound inner silence, as vast as the universe itself. When we access that silence, we reconnect with our true nature. Paradoxically, we encounter considerable internal noise when first attempting to sit quietly.
- Gunilla Brodde Norris

. . .

For more, see The Tao Waits in Silence.

The longest journey is the journey inward.
- Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

. . .

Changes underway at Zen Mountain Journal:

1. Zen Mountain Journal will be published more frequently and will typically consist of just a painting and a short quote. These will remain free to Substack subscribers.

2. Each Substack will link to a page on the Zen Mountain Journal website that goes deeper into the subject. Those pages will shortly be available only to supporting members. For example, this page, open to everyone for now:

Carl Jung: “What is the myth you are living?”
I found I did not know.

You can become a supporting member here.

3. All Zen Mountain Journal original paintings are now either $500 or $1000. Prints, limited to an edition of five, are $300. You can see the selection here.

4. Zen Mountain Journal is in the process of creating a binder that will hold art, poetry and reflections on the human journey — creating a life based on inner peace, and on nurturing a friendship with yourself. It will also have room for your own journal notes and art. In fact, if you want, it can contain just your own journal notes and art. We plan to ship these binders and their inserts in about a month. As soon as we have a date certain we’ll offer them on pre-order for a discount.

Available inserts will include:

• Blank heavyweight premium writing paper (the same Mohawk Superfine 100lb text weight paper as is in the Tao Te Ching Journal), both lined and unlined.

• Watercolor paper.

• Journal notes, art and poetry. Examples of the inserts that will be available separately:

  • Journaling as a tool in creating a life.

  • Wild Waters and the Tao - an updated edition of our book first published in 2013 that quickly sold out. It explores the insights the Tao offers into life in wild nature, paddling wild rivers and water’s way of getting where it is going through surrender.

  • Creativity as a Way of Life — the inner work underlying creative work, an exploration of the journals of artists, novelists and poets: Steinbeck’s Working Days, Anne Truitt, Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit.

  • The Heron Dance Book of Love & Gratitude — First published in 2006, it went on to sell 20,000 copies, the most popular book we’ve published. It explores gratitude as a spiritual practice and philosophy of life.

  • Thoreau and the Art of Life — Thoreau’s journals totaled two million words and offer a fascinating insight into the early thinking behind Walden and his other books.

  • Emerson’s Laws of Nature, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: Reflections on nature by two of our greatest writers.

  • Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence. Reflections on the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

  • The Pausing for Beauty Poetry Diary. Poetry celebrating the beauty and mystery of nature and of life.

  • The Journals of Archibald Campbell, Wild Artist. The misadventures of artist Archibald Campbell who lives alone in the woods and paints nude models, and reflects on life, creativity and wild women. This was both the most popular and unpopular work Heron Dance ever published.

  • The Journey Itself is Home - art, poems and reflections on a life lived on the edges of our culture. From the book arts collection published in 2012.

  • The Man Who Planted Trees — Jean Giono’s shepherd, and my interviews with Frédéric Back, who received an Oscar for his animated film of Giono’s work. The book and film celebrate generosity as a philosophy of life.

  • Life is a Daring Adventure or Nothing. An adventurer’s journal.

Supporting members will receive access to downloadable PDFs of all of this work as part of their subscription. The PDFs will be designed in the standard 11×8.5 format and so each page can be printed out on a home printer and inserted in a standard binder that can be purchased inexpensively at any major retail outlet.

Or you can purchase the Zen Mountain Journal binder and inserts all printed on beautiful premium paper (Mohawk Superfine 100lb text) and three hole punched to fit these landscape binders.

There is a more complete description of the themes and inspiration behind this work on the Zen Mountain Journal website homepage here.

The following excerpt is from my book, Nurturing the Song Within. It explores the inner work underlying creative work and the creation of a life.

Scroll down for my follow-up interview of author Bill Porter (Red Pine) who has spent fifty years studying China’s Taoist and Zen hermits and their poetry.

. . .

It’s very important to think positive. More important probably is knowing that a negative thought will release poison into your system and will eventually kill you if you keep doing it.
- Willie Nelson

I’ve had a few experiences in my life – less than five – where I entered a deeply meditative state and encountered overwhelming feelings of positive energy. Once, during the darkest days of Heron Dance in 2011, I attended a shaman retreat put on by a former director of Heron Dance. I can’t remember how exactly I got into the trance that inspired the thoughts below, but it involved a lot of drumming and then a dream state during which I entered a hole in the ground and found myself in a different reality. I encountered a variety of animals, mostly fish and water mammals. I came upon a raging river —- in those days I was into whitewater kayaking —- and was forced along by an almost overwhelming current. Eventually I found myself standing in the center of a half circle of spirit entities from another realm. They waited for me to speak. I asked them questions.

I asked them whether or not I am too grouchy to be the creator of Heron Dance. This question was inspired, in part, by the struggles and resulting dark moods I was experiencing trying to keep Heron Dance going during a difficult time. And partly the question was inspired by my internal ferocity, a characteristic that has been both an ally in keeping Heron Dance going, and the biggest obstacle to it achieving its full potential.

Their response:

Don’t worry about things like that. Just be a conduit for our energy. Don’t try to be anything. Just be open to our energy.

It isn’t what you get, it is about what you give: love, compassion, beauty.

It is not about how you feel. It is not about what you don’t like. It is not about what makes you

upset: unfairness, etc.

It is about what you give.

You have been given a powerful, courageous spirit. The spirit guides have chosen you to be a conduit for their energy. You need to do something with that.

Just be open to our energy, be a conduit for our energy. We will take care of the rest.

They told me not to worry about money. Live simply and they would see that enough money gets sent my way. Discomfort was a part of my journey. Discomfort was my ally, my teacher, they said.

They offered guidance into a variety of different subjects – what to explore in Heron Dance for instance. In those days Heron Dance was publishing the fictional, semi-erotic, private journal of Archibald Campbell, wild artist. Drop that they said. Too intense.

They offered guidance on my role in the local community I was living in at the time – in particular guidance on the subject of good people who avoid me because I can be too provocative and intense. They offered guidance on my self-protectiveness and my somewhat related attraction to unpredictable chaotic situations and people. They emphasized the importance of meditation and deep internal peace, two necessary elements of the path they had chosen for me. I had recently had a couple of close calls and so I asked them whether or not I’d die whitewater kayaking. No, they said. But don’t worry about stuff like that. Whitewater kayaking is about balance and going with the flow, neither one of which you are ever going to be particularly good at.

Concentrate on spiritual journeys rather than physical journeys. I’m still not completely sure what they meant by that.

Overall their message was that there are positive forces of beauty, of cohesion and harmony and peace. And there are negative forces of chaos, destruction and hatred. Serve the positive forces and we will help you. We will be on your side.

. . .

I wish I could say that I took those messages to heart and reoriented my life around them. No I didn’t. I came up with a variety of excuses. I made halting efforts. I’m still on the journey, still sometimes failing, still sometimes succeeding. Still trying. I consider the fact that I am still trying a triumph of sorts. There is not a doubt in my mind that, had I followed the guidance they offered, the last twelve or thirteen years would have been more peaceful, more deeply satisfying. I would be more at peace with myself. On one level, it all gets down to surrender. Surrendering is the most difficult spiritual work I have done and need to do.

My point is that in deeply meditative states brought on by meditation and self-hypnosis we encounter important messages. Those messages often will not be what we expect or want to hear. Even though they involve living a simpler life, a more relaxed life, many of these messages are not easy to live. They challenge us on deep, uncomfortable levels.

Nevertheless, they offer a path through the chaos, both the chaos inside and the chaos in the greater world that surrounds.

You can read more about Nurturing the Song Within, and order a copy, here.

My follow-up interview of Bill Porter (aka Red Pine) in which I explore further his use of the term “the gods” in the context of help that shows up in his work, and his childhood and how it affected his future path.

You can view and read about the first interview of Bill here. It is my reflection on Bill’s interview from a Joseph Campbell mythic hero’s journey persective. I’ve summarized the interview (more Bill, less me) here.

You can read some of my favorite excerpts from Bill’s writing here.

. . .

You can learn more about the Zen Mountain Journal and Heron Dance here.

The Tao Te Ching Journal:
A Path to Inner Quiet

Zen Mountain Journal blends Taoist hermit poetry, contemplative art, and reflections drawn from a lifetime shaped by wilderness, solitude, and decades doing creative work on the outer boundaries of our culture. These journals are companions for seekers — guides in the reconnection with inner quiet, beauty, and the “soundless music” of a life lived with simplicity and meaning.

• Size: 9.25 × 8.5 inches — convenient size for desk or lap.

• Hardcover — the book can be written in without a table or desk.

• Double wire-o bound to lay flat.

• Printed on Mohawk Superfine, a premium uncoated paper for a beautiful writing surface.

• 160 pages.

More information here. Order here.

My follow-up interview of Bill in which he explores further his use of the term “the gods” in the context of help that shows up in his work, and his childhood and how it affected his future path.

If you don’t currently receive Zen Mountain Journal, and would like to, you can do that here.

For more on the Tao Te Ching Journal, visit here.

There are fun journeys, there are journeys of adventure and then there are magical journeys. You know you are on a magical journey when doors open when you need help most, or, when you come to a fork in the path, a guide shows up and points the way forward. It’s not that these magical journeys are easy. They transform us through trials and tribulations. We return a different person. Sometimes we start off on them for reasons we don’t fully understand. Perhaps we seek answers to questions from our childhood that have continued to trouble us.

Bill Porter is a legend to those of us who study the ancient poetry of Zen and Taoist mountain hermits. He’s lived in China for long periods of time, and can read, write and speak fluent Chinese. His book, Road to Heaven, about the present day Taoist hermits that live in China’s Zhongnan mountains has sold two million copies in China. There are hermits now living in those mountains that say they became hermits because of his book.

Bill is an unassuming, gentle man who has devoted fifty odd years of his life to studying Zen and Taoist mountain hermits and their ancient poetry. When, in our recent interview, while exploring where the motivation came from to embark upon this work, Bill talked about his decision to study anthropology after he left the army.

The reason I wanted to study anthropology when I got out of the Army was because, I thought by studying all the different ways people live their lives, I could choose one. I could put together something that made sense for me. I was trying to put my life together. My family was not something I wanted to be a part of. After my father got out of prison for bank robbery he started up a chain of hotels. He had 52 hotels when I was born, which I grew up around, and he was the head of the Democratic Party at one time in California, and then, at the end, in Idaho. I grew up around rich and famous, powerful people, and it was detestable, to live and be in the presence of people like that.

As a child, I had already chosen my path. Learning Chinese just opened up a new door to a new part of that path, and I’ve been following it ever since.

That word “detestable” kept turning over in my mind after our interview. It was the only time Bill displayed any emotion. I’ve often encountered, over the years of doing interviews, people whose life course seemed shaped by events from their childhood that were particularly profound or disturbing. Sometimes these paths were followed unconsciously, but Bill is aware of the connection. “As a child, I already chose my path.“ That path involved finding and writing about people living opposite lives to those of the family he grew up in – hermit monks focused on achieving inner peace through spiritual practice and living with almost nothing in remote mountains. When I asked Bill whether or not he thought extreme austerity was important to spiritual progress, he answered,

“It’s all about traveling light. It’s about lightening your load, getting rid of the garbage. You have a hard time surviving in the mountains. You don’t have time to be thinking about stuff. You hone in on what’s important in your practice, ‘cause you have to feed yourself. You have to grow vegetables. You have to gather wild plants. And of course, you have to either build or fix up somebody else’s hut.”

Bill didn’t start out with an interest in Taoist and Zen hermits or their poetry. A series of strange coincidences led him in that direction. Broke and attending Columbia to study anthropology on the GI Bill, he applied for several different grants for financial assistance. One, from the Defense Department, offered four years of support to students willing to learn a language not commonly spoken in the US. On a whim, without ever having had any interest in Chinese but also not having any interest in any other language, he wrote in Chinese and continued filling out other unrelated applications. A short while later he received a letter from the Defense Department accepting his application and giving him the financial support he needed to continue at Columbia.

After beginning the study of Chinese he happened to meet in New York City’s Chinatown a Zen monk who couldn’t speak English. Bill’s knowledge of Chinese was rudimentary at that point, but good enough that the monk was able to teach Bill meditation. A few months later Bill decided to go a monastery to practice meditation – and learn more about the spiritual practice of the monk that had become his friend. He wasn’t interested in becoming a monk himself – he’s always had a problem with authority he says – but he lived in two monasteries for a total of three and a half years. They wouldn’t accept money from him, which was good, he said, because he didn’t have any. The next fortuitous event in his journey happened as he was getting ready to depart the second monastery. The abbot gave him a book, written in Chinese characters, on the poetry of Cold Mountain, otherwise known as Han Shan.

Bill became enthralled by this poetry written by a hermit monk who lived around 800 AD. Rather than being written in academic, scholarly language, it was written in the simple vernacular of common people. For the next fourteen years, Bill lived in a farming village outside of Taipei and studied the poetry of Han Shan and then of another mountain hermit, Stonehouse. He’d get odd jobs to support himself and eventually ended up working at an English language radio station interviewing leading Taiwanese figures who could speak at least a little English. There, he had an interesting conversation with Winston Wong, who Bill describes as the head of the largest plastics company in the world, Formosa Plastics. It opened the next important door on Bill’s journey.

After having translated the poetry of both Han Shan and Stonehouse, Bill wanted to travel to China to see if he could find and connect with present-day mountain hermits. The official stance of the Chinese government was that they no longer existed. Bill, though, had heard rumors. He just had no idea where they were. He applied for a grant from the Guggenheim to go and try to find them.

As the interview was concluding, Bill asked Winston Wong if he had seen the movie The Graduate, and Winston responded that he had. From my interview of Bill:

“And I said, ‘So what would you tell a graduate? Would you tell him, ‘Plastics, son, plastics?’ He said, ‘No, no, I would tell him to follow the Tao.’ I was impressed with that answer so I told him that I’d applied to the Guggenheim Foundation to go to China to find hermits. And he said, ‘That’s a great idea. If they don’t give you the money, I will.’ A couple weeks later, I got a letter of rejection from the Guggenheim. I called him on the phone, and he said, ‘How much do you need?’ About four or five thousand dollars, he said, ‘Do you want that in cash or traveler’s checks?’

I went down to his office later that day, picked up traveler’s checks. That’s how I got started on the quest for hermits.”

Bill left for China, still having no idea where the hermits, if they existed, might live. A monk Bill encountered told him that there might be hermits in the Zhongnan mountains. Not having any other better ideas, Bill headed there and started to climb. That first trip was roughly 1987. Six years later Bill’s book, Road to Heaven, was published.

He continued to make trips there into his seventies. In videos on YouTube (my favorite can be found here), Bill, not in mountaineering shape, trudges up narrow mountain paths, sometimes with a sheer cliff falling off the trail to one side. He approaches the simple huts and knocks on their door. Sometimes they answer, sometimes they don’t. When they do, and agree to an interview, Bill approaches asks them questions slowly, with obvious respect. His desire to learn from them is evident. They share what they can, but, as he says, they struggle to communicate a spirituality that transcends words. From our interview:

“Words were not what they were looking for in the first place. They were all working on an inner spiritual reality, you might say. . . That’s why I really like poetry better than prose, for this kind of realm. Because poetry uses words to transcend words. These people like Cold Mountain and Stonehouse were really adept at delivering the spirit without letting words get in the way.”

Bill’s journey to find, understand and write about hermits has been one of both help showing up when he needed it, and knew he needed it, and inadvertent opportunities that led him in directions he didn’t know he wanted to go. He went about his quest with a remarkable lack of ambition or striving. If doors opened, he walked through them. His gentle approach reminds me of the Taoist principle of wu-wei – effortless action -- acting without unnecessary force, strain, or ego-driven struggle. As he says, “one thing leads to another, and I’ve kept down this path of where I’m not doing something to become rich and famous, but because it is something I want to do.”

When I suggested to him that this life he’s chosen required a price, he said no, not really. He just got on a path that seemed interesting to him and followed it. That’s a little ironic in the context of something else he said later in the interview – for eighteen years after returning to the US he and his family lived on food stamps. Eventually royalties from his books enabled him to move “out of the world of food stamps and into the realm of the tax-paying lower-middle class.” Sacrifice or no, out of all of this has come a formidable body of work, and one I frequently turn to in my own study of the ancient poems of the Zen and Taoist mountain hermits.

. . .

Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from Bill’s book, Road to Heaven, Encounters with Chinese Hermits in which Bill interviews Master Hsieh, a Taoist monk, living on China’s Huashan Mountain.

Hsieh: Lao-tzu said to cultivate tranquility and detachment. To be natural. To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need. But to know what’s natural, you have to cultivate tranquility. Huashan has long been famous as a center of Taoism because it’s quiet. There used to be a lot of hermits here. But now the mountain has been developed for tourism. The tranquility is gone, and so are the hermits.

Porter: Aren’t they interested in teaching others?

Hsieh: Yes. But before you can teach others, you have to cultivate yourself. You have to know something before you can teach something. You can’t explain inner cultivation just because you know words in books. You have to discover what they mean first.

Porter: If people can’t learn Taoism from hermits, can they learn from monks in temples?

Hsieh: You can’t learn just by visiting a temple. You have to live there for at least three years and help with the daily work. If you can stand the hardship and privation, after three years you can ask one of the monks to be your teacher. It’s not easy. You have to have a clear head and a quiet mind. As I said before, it takes at least three years of physical training before your mind is quiet enough to understand the Tao.

You can read more of my favorite excerpts from Bill’s writing here.

. . .

You can another, earlier version, of this post on the Zen Mountain Journal website here. It offers my takes on the interview from a slightly different perspective — the Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero’s journey.

You can learn more about the Zen Mountain Journal and Heron Dance here.

The Tao Te Ching Journal:
A Path to Inner Quiet

Zen Mountain Journal blends Taoist hermit poetry, contemplative art, and reflections drawn from a lifetime shaped by wilderness, solitude, and decades doing creative work on the outer boundaries of our culture. These journals are companions for seekers — guides in the reconnection with inner quiet, beauty, and the “soundless music” of a life lived with simplicity and meaning.

• Size: 9.25 × 8.5 inches — convenient size for desk or lap.

• Hardcover — the book can be written in without a table or desk.

• Double wire-o bound to lay flat.

• Printed on Mohawk Superfine, a premium uncoated paper for a beautiful writing surface.

• 160 pages.

More information here. Order here.

This post may be truncated by your email client. You can view the entire post here.

. . .

I first met Doug Peacock to interview him for a book. I was thirty-six years old. I arrived on his doorstep lost, discouraged and bewildered, working on a book no one believed in but me, married to a woman who expressed her ever-increasing dislike of me, with two young sons and a bank account that was shrinking with an alarming alacrity. And I was two hours late for the interview. It turned out to be one of the best nights of my life.

The afternoon before I had called my wife in upstate New York from an all-night truck stop in Arizona. No answer. I phoned several times over the next few hours. Still no answer. Concerned, at 10pm at night, I called a neighbor. She’s there, they told me. She’s got a friend with her. The friend shows up whenever you leave town. I asked if they would go over and ask her to answer the phone. They did. We had an unhappy phone conversation. His name was Wayne. I had left a career on Wall Street to write a book about people who lived life by their own rules, who marched to a different drummer, who dreamt a life, and then made it real. The literary agent I was working with told me that she had found a publisher if I would change the entire theme and central message of the book. I didn’t get to sleep until 4am and then slept till noon. Then I went for a run in a field of some kind of agribiz monoculture that stretched as far as the eye could see.

When I returned home a couple of weeks later, Wayne’s World hats were scattered around our home. Two months later I was diagnosed with an incurable cancer – non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Stage IV. It was in my bone marrow. Our marriage broke up the day I was diagnosed. Eighteen months later, having not died and having not found a publisher, I started Heron Dance based on the interviews I had done for Free Spirits. In honor of the night he gave me courage, and maybe changed my life, four years later, in 1999, I devoted issue 22 of Heron Dance to Doug. That’s the only issue I’ve ever devoted to one person.

Heron Dance (now Zen Mountain Journal) was a magical journey. Not only did financial help show up when I needed it most, not only did encouragement show up when I needed it most, but also, through a strange series of circumstances, an experimental medicine (WF-10 or TCDO) developed in Germany showed up when I needed it most. It kept me alive until Rituxan was developed. But that’s another story. I offer this background to put in context why I showed up for my interview with Doug two hours late.

I found Doug chopping mesquite in his backyard on the edge of the desert outside Tucson. He was a little grouchy at first, but when I pulled out a six pack of dark German beer, his mood improved dramatically. It was a sunny January afternoon. We sat back there surrounded by clucking quail, who wanted us to move on so they could come in to feed. As afternoon became night, we sat in the dark and drank wine and then scotch. Coyotes howled in the hills around us and a pack of javelinas -- which look like small pigs with big incisors -- wandered into his back yard, snorting around the table. When we reached for a drink, or raised our voices, they would scramble off into the desert. A few minutes later they would be back, rooting around, a couple of feet from where we sat. As I said, it was a magical night.

I have met a half a dozen people in my life with a real passion for life. When you leave their company, you are on a high. They somehow give you a boost. Doug is one of them. I would like to share with you some of what he said to me that first day and evening that we met. I hope it doesn’t come across as hero worship. Doug’s life isn’t all wonderful. There is anger, paranoia, fear; ever-present loaded handguns occasionally used indiscreetly, the drunken rambles through Tucson and Katmandu, the fist fights, the car wrecks, the friendships abandoned over some slight (real or imagined.) The bullshit and bad manners. There are some funny stories mixed up in all that, but they kind of miss the point. This man is alive. He offers a perspective on the importance of wilderness to a society that has removed itself from the natural world. He has truly lived. He knows profound sadness and joy. He lives with an open heart -- open to the beauty of nature, open to the beauty in the spirits of others. As we became friends over the ensuing years, I spent some of the best times of my life with him and some of the worst. He probably has more intuition about others and about bears than anyone I’ve ever met, and more wisdom – about everyone else but himself. About his own life he’s strangely unaware. But he came into my life when I desperately needed encouragement, and he gave it to me. His courageous approach to life, and his belief in me, gave me courage.

When we first met, I had no idea who Doug was. Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, had suggested a dozen people I might interview. Doug was one. As we sat in his backyard, I came to know his story. Doug is an ex-Green Beret medic who, after one and a half tours in Vietnam, had returned to America and spent time in Wyoming wilderness getting himself together, during which he developed an affinity for grizzly bears. His friend Ed Abbey got him interested in monkeywrenching -- eco-sabotage. Given his expertise in C-4 plastic explosive, he was a natural. (Just kidding). Edward Abbey wrote twenty books, mostly centered around uninhabited landscape. Perhaps his best known book is The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a group of environmental saboteurs who tried to slow the destruction of wilderness by rendering oil, mining and logging machinery permanently inoperable. A favored technique was dropping monkey wrenches down recently drilled oil wells, hence the title. A principal character in that book was ex-Green Beret Sergeant George Washington Hayduke, a character based on Doug. The last book Abbey wrote before he died was Hayduke Lives! In my gallery in Asheville there is a sign above the door: Hayduke Lives! And yes, yet he does.

Earth First! was inspired in part by The Monkey Wrench Gang. Doug did not ever actually join Earth First!, but the founders were friends of his, and many ex-Earth Firsters describe Doug as someone who inspired them in their work, both farious and nefarious. The FBI infiltrated Earth First! and arrested a number of key participants. The group split up. Many found less risky ways to work for wilderness.

Doug grew up in the woods around Saginaw, Michigan. His father left a job as a chief chemist in a sugar beet factory to become a Boy Scout leader. For seven years, while Doug was growing up, and his mother taught school, Doug was out in the woods with his dad. He was too young to be a Boy Scout, so he spent his time roaming around by himself -- bass fishing, canoeing, catching turtles.

He found a lot of Indian artifacts, including, at the age of fourteen, a major archeological site. His picture was on the front page of the local newspaper. “But just as I was riding the crest of my first wave, I fell from grace. I got drunk with three buddies, and shot fourteen pigs. We had to pay for every one of them. After the pigs I never quite made the Boy Scouts myself.”

(Years later, sometime around 2000, I was hanging out at Doug’s place in Paradise Valley near Livingston – on Jeff Bridges’ ranch – and there was a guy there who had known Doug since they were both kids. He may have been one of the fellow pig shooters. I asked him how much of who Doug is was due to Vietnam. He told me that Doug was just as crazy as a kid as he was after Vietnam.)

After high school, Doug went to college for a while -- in order to avoid the draft -- but he hated school. After a few months each year, he would get in his jeep and head west to work in the copper mines or as a carpenter. Then he would have to hurry back to school to avoid the draft. Eventually they caught up with him and sent him off to MP school. “MP school was schizoid city. I had been an outlaw all my life. I would be watching the training films on stockade duty and dreaming of escaping over the wall myself. The only way to get out of something like that in the army is to volunteer for more and more serious, dangerous shit. So I volunteered for Airborne. Then I got interested Special Forces medical training. I have a need to be self-sufficient and I wanted that training. In one year, they teach you everything a doctor is taught with none of the bullshit. I was against the Vietnam War, but I had to see it for myself. What could be more perverted than going to experience the Vietnam War just to see what was going on?

“Anyway, I lived for a whole year looking at a road map of Wyoming, staring at the little blank spaces. This was before I went to Vietnam and had bullets to dodge and real things to worry about. I used to just stare at the map and take off like a bird. Soar like a bird above the peaks and the ranges and the glaciers and the basins.”

He describes it as good training. Tough training. “Green Beret medicine is a counter-insurgent weapon. You go out there and patch up tribesmen, and fix up their kids, in the hopes of recruiting more and more guerrillas to fight your dirty little war. It’s horrible.” He spent a lot of time with Montagnards in mountainous jungle. He would be the only American, or one of two Americans in patrols of six to two dozen men. “They would helicopter us into a place surrounded by Viet Cong and NVA. We would sneak around in the woods, get in trouble and run for our lives… I have been shot at I do not know how many thousands of times. Not 20,000 but certainly more than 2,000. I had bullets go through canteens on my hips twice. I was only hit once… A lot of the bullets we dodged were from U.S. helicopter gunships. But being a Green Beret medic is an anarchist’s military dream. You are totally on your own.

“I can remember being in really horrible places like the village next to My Lai about a month before it happened. At the time it was off-limits to Americans, but I smuggled myself in with my Vietnamese medic. We had become close friends, and we were walking around in this town together. You could just feel the animosity and hatred. There were a lot of Americans stationed at Duc Pho, which is very close by, but they were not allowed in.

“We were speaking Vietnamese and walking the streets. I really didn’t want to be an American then at all. I was swimming in another stream. I was good enough by then that I could have a real conversation. After a couple of hours, I could feel the whole mood of the village change. I was not an American anymore. It was such a sensual pleasure -- speaking Vietnamese, walking into the stores -- just a very sensual pleasure. You could just feel the hatred evaporate.

“The last day I was in the field in Vietnam was March 16, 1968 -- the day of the My Lai massacre. I was forty miles away, back in the interior, behind a couple of mountain ranges… The war really had an impact on me. I was not immune to some of the horrific effects, but on the other hand it solidified all the doubt about where our culture and society is going. What I don’t like about it. It turned out that most of my suspicions were right.”

He got out of the army at the age of twenty five -- “a very old twenty-five.” When he got back to the states he bought a jeep, went back to Michigan to see his parents for a few days. “I didn’t have anything to say to anybody. I was aware of the impact I was making, but I couldn’t help myself. I just wasn’t there. These were the people I loved most in the world, and I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t have anything to say to anybody. It was years before I could have a serious conversation with anybody.” So he headed west. The mountains were in deep snow. He went to the Arizona desert and camped out in the canyons until June. Then he headed for the east side of the Wind River Range in Wyoming. “After a month, I got so sick of the rain, and eating trout and my own company that I decided to go up to Yellowstone where it was relatively flat and warm and dry. After I got there, I had a malaria attack, and ended up laying in a sleeping bag for three days. Soaked the sleeping bag all the way through. Temperature got up close to 106 degrees. Unloaded my pistol so I wouldn’t do anything crazy.”

He packed into a thermal area where there were hot springs to regain his health. He had a sow and her cubs saunter up to him. He scrambled up a tree. “It was stupid, but I didn’t know any better in those days. Bleeding, naked in forty degree winds. She didn’t pay any attention to me.” That was when the park was trying to wean the bears from the garbage. He had accidentally camped right beside a dump. The bears would walk past -- fourteen grizzlies in a line. “Those were the days before more and more pigdom in Yellowstone. Before the crowds of people. There was almost no one there that time of year.”

He had seen grizzlies before he went to Vietnam, but this time they made a real impact on him. He spent many summers filming them. He would camp out in Arizona in the winters, and then head back up to Yellowstone in the spring. “I have lived most of my life on the fringes of our culture. The most I have ever worked is four or five months -- as a hippy mailman. My whole life I have been totally unemployable. Whenever I make money, it is by accident. A total accident.” His friend, Ed Abbey, suggested he consider a seasonal job with the forest service because: “It’s got a quitting date that you can look forward to.”

“So I would take these seasonal jobs. I worked in North Cascades as a backcountry ranger for three years. Objectively, from anyone’s point of view, I was the worst park employee in their history. Horrible. Anarchists make lousy law-enforcement agents. The only thing I ever busted was an illegally parked Winnebago. I got in a fight with the deputy sheriff of Whatcom county and totaled a Ranger pick-up truck under highly dubious circumstances. I still hold the park record for property damage. So, with the support and encouragement of the Park Service, I left to find more suitable employment. That was twenty or so years ago. I am still looking, I guess. But apparently not too hard.

“I discovered that bears were having trouble, and I started sneaking into Yellowstone in April. I did that every spring. I would hide my tracks. Then I’d go from Yellowstone to Glacier in the fall. There are a lot more bears in Glacier. That became a seasonal pattern.” Eventually he was working two and a half months a year and getting a little unemployment. Just enough to live off. That pattern went on for fifteen or twenty years. “I had a dog. I had girlfriends from time to time. They would come and go. Well, the dog wouldn’t come and go -- but the girlfriends would. The dog socialized me, really.”

He met Lisa, his then wife, in the back country hiking. They had two kids. By then he was in his forties, and had some need for a little income. He decided he should become a writer. “One thing you can do if you are unemployable is write. It doesn’t involve collaboration and you don’t have to raise funds or buy equipment. I thought about crime but, you know, you have to knock over a lot of Safeways these days to pay the rent. If there were honorable trains or banks, I’d take them. But there aren’t.”

For many years he lived a migratory lifestyle -- Yellowstone to Glacier National Park and then, around Christmas every year, he would go on a solo trek in the desert of southwest Arizona -- the Cabeza Prieta. When I interviewed him, he told me, “I have been going on the walk for seven winters -- roughly from Yuma to Ajo. A different route each time. It takes me a week or ten days to walk about 160 to 200 miles. I have a little cairn out there in the desert. A place where I mourn my dead. I spend a day there and fast.” He has other memorials back in the woods in Yellowstone and Glacier. For twenty years he has been gathering buffalo skulls in Yellowstone -- animals from the same herd. He places them in a giant circle. He considers himself sort of a caretaker of their spirits. “I take my kids there now too. We make little offerings and things.

“I’m not out of the woods yet. I am the kind of person who does everything for therapy. I write for therapy, I walk for therapy. I cook for therapy. I pound nails for therapy. And every year I have to spend a lot of time out, by myself. I need great expanses of desert, tundra and wilderness. I travel constantly. My time is my own. I love new country. I love wild country most of all. I spend a lot of time in Mexico, a lot of time on the coast. A lot of time in Seri Indian country.

“A lot of my strength is really knowing what is unacceptable. And there is a whole lot that is really unacceptable. Most ways that people think they have to live -- I just could not do that. That’s not an acceptable way. It’s not acceptable to stand by and see something go on that is unjust. You would think you could let things slide after a time, but I just can’t do that. It gets you in a little bit of trouble, but at the same time, you really know where you stand at all times. I don’t preach to them, but I hope my kids see that.”

The underlying theme of Doug’s life is a passion for life, a reverence for life. Life of all forms. Wildlife, the way he spends his own life. The other is an uncompromising pursuit of what he believes to be right, regardless of the cost. Most of what he believes to be right is connected in some way to preserving wild areas as sanctuaries for wild things, and, secondarily, as places where people can go to get in touch with our original habitat.

“My habits are bad, like a hobbit. Drugs and booze are breaks for the soul. To be driven. Obsessive love, obsessive drinking -- it doesn’t matter -- they are notions close to my heart. I pay attention to them. It gets me in a lot of trouble. I’m old now. Fifty. And not in great shape. Last year I broke eight ribs in fights. I don’t look for trouble. These things just happen, but I can’t walk away.”

Here are some more excerpts from my interview of Doug:

I’m against TVs, but there is one in the house. Some days you get lazy. I take care of the kids for weeks at a time. When I have to get some writing done, I find myself just putting a tape in there and walking away. You probably shouldn’t do that. But on the other hand, what is really exciting about children is not what you teach them, but what you share with them. More than anything else, I just share my life and my love for things in the out of doors. The way children see the world is the way you should see the world. It’s like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence. The smell of discovery around every bend, every meander of the creek, and all of your troubles disappearing, like bubbles down a sunny river. You can learn about that from kids and it’s really wonderful. But you share it. You don’t teach it. You don’t dispatch it. You don’t even borrow it.

I take my kids up in the canyon lands, exploring ruins that are virtually untouched. Or we go to the ocean and camp on the beach. We gather clams and oysters at low tide. We take a thirty-year-old drift boat and bottom fish and catch crabs and salmon. We make huge chowders. You learn about the world that way, and it’s a good way to learn. You don’t force anything. You get hungry and you go out and satisfy your hunger. Every day we go and get something to eat. I take sampa, a bag of lemons, some condiments, but unless we score some fish or something we won’t eat much. That is a real incentive. Diving for moonsnails. Catching trigger fish off the reef. Then returning to share the catch. I make a sauce with garlic and olive oil and some lemons. It’s incredible. A feast night after night. And you learn things.

There hasn’t been anyone some of these places for hundreds of years -- since the Indians disappeared. A lot of wisdom resides in that land, in the ruins and middens. What were the lives of those people like? Not bad, by all indications. They stored up food for lean times. And had lots of leisure -- lots of time to just enjoy life. Every day, all the clams you could eat, giant leatherback sea turtles. Desert cactus for vitamins. It’s possible to go back and touch those roots -- our roots as human beings.You can still find the middens of the pre-historic Seri -- middens with thousands of broken moonsnail shells. We know they’re good to eat because the Indians ate tons of them. That is such a great way for anyone to learn -- a kid, an adult, anybody. . .

“You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. I love new country. Wild country most of all. I consider my time to be my own so I have travelled constantly. It’s so important to get out of yourself and out of your culture because a lot about our culture isn’t great. And you get outside yourself most easily in the wild. The places that are strange and different. It has to be different than your own life, your own culture. A place that is strange and new -- where what you know doesn’t necessarily apply. You need to get out in order to see back in.

That’s what I need to do when I am in a slump with my writing. I’ll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Or go for a walk through one of the few places on earth where the people still live as hunter/ gatherers....

“The notion of following your passion is a cheap instinct and a good instinct and it’s worth indulging. Your passion is your source of power. In order to have power, you have to live a life of passion. You have to live a really full life. You need to follow those paths, no matter where they lead...in defiance of all things conventional, perhaps. And of course it is at a price. It’s going to cost. You have to know that going in. But the price you pay, in my opinion, is not worth the time of day to think about. It is so important not to knee-pad around the world. You should never bow down to anything but those you love and respect. Ever. For anything.”

In 1999, I decided to take Heron Dance on an exploration of the subject of creativity. Doug’s friends include a number of authors, poets and musicians. He gave me their names and numbers or addresses. During the trip, I interviewed some of them. They talked about their work, but what they really wanted to talk about was the impact Doug had had on their life. And so I decided to devote an entire issue of Heron Dance, the predecessor of Zen Mountain Journal, to Doug.

Here are some excerpts:

Doug comes down to visit driving some old Honda or Subaru. It leaks toxic fluid that ends up all over my driveway. He’ll have to add a quart of oil when he gets here, but he’ll miss the oil tank, so that will end up on the driveway too. As he is bumming a quart of oil from me, he’ll tell me that I ought to get my Ford serviced. Meanwhile he is driving this piece of shit.

Then he will bring his black hole bag in and all of the sudden, every room of my house will be completely full of his stuff. He will decide he has to cook dinner. He can’t cook dinner just for my wife and me. We need guests. So he’ll get on the phone and all we’ll have a dinner party for twelve. We’ll go to the grocery store. I will buy a lot of groceries. We will go to the liquor store. I will buy all the liquor. And he will go buy a couple bottles of good wine. We’ll go back and he’ll cook. And he always somehow manages to get garlic on the bottom of his shoes and walk all over the house. There will be garlic all over my tile floors. Totally destroy the kitchen. People arrive. It will be the most extraordinary meal. The conversation will be incredible. You will wonder why all dinners can’t be like that. You usually pick up the tab at dinner. And you feel wonderful about it.
- Dennis Sizemore

I have my own twisted view of karma. I believe it does come back. The intent of what you do is very, very important.

I refuse to call it God, but I believe it is larger than yourself. That’s all I know. If it exists it resides in between. And indeed it seems to. In Vietnam I came to believe in arrowheads and invincibility and talismans. You believe in a lot of nonsense. But somehow, something works. I don’t have any theories. I just believe in the Earth. I believe the wisdom resides on the Earth, in the Earth. If your intent is to serve the larger good, the Earth itself -- if you serve the Earth -- you serve yourself. Basically, you don’t have to do this on a large level. You can just collect a lot of garbage from the side of the road. The sides of the roads of life, perhaps. That’s power. That’s karma. That’s the best you can do.

And even if it’s actuarial. Even if, perhaps, every good person doesn’t get rewarded. Maybe some get hit by garbage trucks. Maybe some get hit by a hearse on the way to a funeral home on a motor cycle. Those are exceptions. I think, on the average, you can count on karma.

Except watch out for garbage trucks.
- Doug Peacock

In 1990, on my way to collect mesquite cooking wood in a sadly overgrazed valley east of the Picacho Mountains, I stumbled across a coyote caught in a number-3 trap con­nected to a chain leading to a re-bar grappling hook attached to a mesquite tree. I slowly approached and the coyote, naturally figuring I was his tormentor coming to kill him, charged violently and desperately, then dislocated his paw tugging back away from me. At ten feet I stopped and spoke in a low, calm voice to show I meant him no harm. After a few minutes -- with me not moving -- the young coyote ceased his futile lunges.

I moved in slowly, a half step at a time, talking to the coyote constantly, much like I talk to grizzly bears. It took me at least ten minutes to reach the trap. I knelt and reached out towards the trap with my bowie knife, trying to pry apart the steel jaws. The spring was too strong; I couldn’t open the trap. The pathetic animal leaned away from me. I dropped the knife and moved forward. I took the trap in my hands. The coyote took a step towards me and sat down, one paw raised (caught in the trap that I now held) like my old collie dog used to do. I worked my fingers into the steel jaws and touched his mangled paw. I pulled against the spring and opened the trap. The wounded coyote -- sitting on his haunches, paw in the air, his nose only four inches from my own -- didn’t move a muscle. I leaned slowly into his face and whispered “go.” My little brother -— God’s dog -— vanished into the creosote.
- Doug Peacock, The Patagonia Catalog.

Life goes by so fast. And it is so lovely. And it hurts so much. And in the end you get a chance to open your arms to death. An endless marriage of loving life. And wrapping your arms around death. Especially as you get older. Everything is so quick. I am devastated by loss. I have had loss all my life. I never catch up with it. You blink your eyes...you outlive a friend...you wonder what happened. You didn’t live fully enough. You have to keep that in mind all the time. It is really easy to blow life. Blow life by not spending the kind of time you need to with your children, or with the other people you love. Being inattentive. Lazy. To live fully in each day is an onerous responsibility.

Life is so difficult and so easy at the same time.
- Doug Peacock

I am not a scotch drinker in general -- but last night I had a distinct nagging taste in the back of my head. It finally came to my tongue. And it was scotch.

The last time I had scotch I was with wild Indians in Siberia. They are Mongol natives -- hunters and trappers. I was traveling with Yvon Chouinard, Rick Ridgeway, Doug Tompkins, Jib Ellison and Tom Brokaw. We bribed an Aeroflot helicopter to drop us and our gear and kayaks at the head of a big river in Southeast Siberia. We land and are breaking out our tents and putting together our kayaks. At dusk these Udehe Mongols come over with a huge stew pot full of fresh moose meat -- liver and sirloin. It is just incredible. I love moose. Brokaw goes into his pack and brings out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and pours shots for all of these Indians. So we shared dinner and scotch and watched the sun go down.
- Doug Peacock

I would not spend one minute on a cushion, inside a house, meditating, when I could look out, ponder a great valley of cottonwood and aspens and mountains beyond. I party, I drink, I swear, I fight. I am a poor candidate for a Zen life. And yet, there is nothing quite so total as being completely tuned into the present. To the moment. How you get it really doesn’t matter.

Human beings are complicated. You can live in the past, you can dream all the time of the future, but every now and again you need to be right there. But it’s hard because most of the modern world isn’t worth paying attention to. Who wants to pay attention to the traffic jam on I-10? The more you live in the suburbs or urban areas, the more you want to shut everything down -- see little, hear little, smell nothing. Who wants it? Who needs it? The total sensory experience of living in a shithouse.

When you walked by a period of life when you could have been really happy, you should have seized it. You should have leaped upon it. I just try to let myself go. It’s not necessary to live in the moment every day, in the traffic jam with smog creeping in your window, listening to bad rap music on the radio. But when it’s there you have really got to live it. The best reason for living it is knowing you are going to die. It’s no big deal. I have had some sense of my own mortality for a long time. It’s not a negative thought. It’s just the way things are. If you want more life, that’s fine. But you should get as much out of the life that you have got left as you can. I wish I had a clue as to how to find happiness, but I know it slaps you in the face all of the time. You just have to stop long enough to pay attention.
- Doug Peacock

When we are on a long journey, one prone to setbacks and disappointment, we need kindred spirits to tell us we’re making a worthwhile contribution to their lives, to their well-being. As I mentioned when I first met Doug I was starting to wonder exactly how crazy I was to be chasing a dream of becoming an author. Doug’s message wasn’t Ra! Ra! It wasn’t “This book of yours is going to be great! It is going to be a great success!” It was if you tell your story with integrity and courage, it will find a market. Not a big market, but a market. You will make a living. Don’t worry about what anyone else says. What we need most as a culture is courage and integrity. If you don’t have that, go back to Wall Street. We don’t need you.

“You have to buy the groceries, but waiting for the confirmation that your work is worthwhile is utterly unimportant. You create this thing and you lay it out there. It’s not yours anymore. Other people like it or hate it, but you can’t worry about it. The only thing a writer should care about from a publisher is keeping his books in print. People can buy ‘em or not buy ‘em, read ‘em or not read ‘em. You have to do what you have to do. You can’t let it affect your life in any way. You have to have a sense that it is the right thing to do, and if it is real important, believe me it will show.

“Anxiety – fuck it. You can’t let money get to you. It’s like people blackmailing you, or people that could black mail you. The more you worry about what people could do to you, the more they get to you. You should just not let it get you. The world is basically fucked. The people in People magazine – the people who write the garbage – make all of the money. But there is enough of a market out there that if you have something serious to say, you can buy your groceries. If you have something to say in a half-way intelligible way, not a slick way but an understandable way, you will buy your groceries, and you should not worry about any of that other garbage. Shouldn’t give it a thought. If you need to waste some time on it, spend a whole afternoon on it all at once, and never think about it again.

“Just get your stuff out there. It doesn’t matter who does it. Or how much money you get for now. If somebody wants to buy it, you will get the money back sooner or later.

“But you will never get rich doing this either. If you want to make money, you need to write a really sexy novel. A really glitzy story that will be sold for the movies.”

It was my plan, with the Free Spirits book, to keep myself out of it as much as possible. That was mostly because I thought what others had to say on what it means to live a big life, a meaningful life, was more interesting than my own thoughts. Doug disagreed. That was thirty-four years ago. I’m just now rethinking my writing around what he had to say – tell my story as I tell the stories of those I met that had an impact on me.

“You have to stick yourself in the middle of it all the time. You don’t just start out with an introduction, and end with a conclusion. You are -- the way you interact with these people you are interviewing -- is as much of the story as any of their stuff is. It’s the thread that carries it through. The way you see it all is the way the reader is going to see it all. We need to know all of the way through what you think.

“You can’t render it through the tape recorder. You are going to offend some people. That doesn’t matter. You are going to take a chance of being wrong. But that doesn’t matter. You have to stick yourself in the middle of it. You have to arbitrate it. You are doing a really cosmic mix here. These people would not get along in a bar, or in a helicopter.

Years later I wrote in my journal:

Doug Peacock Helped Me Keep The Faith

Doug Peacock -- man with a soul
Man with a lot of friends
A good friend to have.

Doug Peacock -- ex-Green Beret
Man who knows death
Man with a hurt.

Doug Peacock -- desert rambler
Grizzly bear man
Revering the spirit -- the wild, past and present.

Doug Peacock -- man of passion
Following his passion
With conviction.
Hayduke.

He helped me keep the faith.
When I needed it most
A man without
the courage of his convictions
the courage of his values
is just another man
of which there are too many already.

What do I do
when doing right is uncomfortable?
How much security
do I get from my values?
From who I am?
Do I believe in who I am?
Do I believe when it is tough to believe?

Those are the measures of a human.

People pass through our lives. They sometimes give us an immense gift and then disappear over the horizon. That was what it was like with Doug and me. He gave me a huge boost when I needed it most. But there were lots of dark times too. The worst was a sea kayak trip with his son Colin in Baja Mexico. Doug and his wife broke up when Colin was about ten I think. Colin was probably fourteen on our trip to Mexico and really struggling. Doug had a lot of guilt about that and he took it out on me on the trip. Angry outbursts. Actions too hurtful to repeat here. We hugged as we said goodbye at the airport, but for twenty years after that trip Doug and I didn’t talk.

Then a couple of years ago I went to Montana to show a friend Glacier National Park and look for grizzly bears. Doug lives outside of Livingston Montana so I contacted him, and took him and his wife out for dinner. Below, a photograph of him and me walking down the street afterwards. The three books I was carrying are his latest three.

I told him that when we first met he told me that he had one foot in the grave. He responded, “Yes, but now it is actually true.” I said to him that we’d probably never meet again but I wanted him to know what a profoundly positive impact he had had on my life.

Doug has written several published books: The Grizzly Years, Baja!, Was It Worth It?, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth, Walking it Off, In the Presence of Grizzlies, and The Essential Grizzly as well as a number of articles for Men’s Journal, Outside, Amicus Journal, Audubon and others. All of his books are available on Amazon.

Here are three Doug Peacock pages on the Zen Mountain Journal website.

• Doug’s foreword to the Heron Dance Back Issue Anthology.

• Issue 22, Hayduke Lives! Published in 1999.

• Doug Peacock, author and eco-warrior — much of the same material, and some new stories.

. . .

You can view this post on the Zen Mountain Journal website here.

You can learn more about the Zen Mountain Journal and Heron Dance here.

Hawk Blue and White

Young, I was never made for the common world —
my nature was to love the hills and mountains.
By mistake I fell into the dusty net
and was gone, all at once, thirty years.
The caged bird longs for its old forest;
the pond fish remembers deep water.
Now I’ve cleared land at the edge of the southern wild,
keeping things simple, come home to garden and field.
Too long shut inside a cage —
now I return to what I am.
- Tao Yuanming (365–427, Taoist recluse-poet) — from “Returning to the Farm to Dwell”

When I get together with friends around a campfire or to share a meal, and an interesting subject comes up, I don’t launch into a Taoist/Zen interpretation of the topic. I tell a story. Over the years, mostly because I find other people’s words more interesting than I do my own, I’ve rarely told stories in Zen Mountain Journal or its predecessor, Heron Dance. A week ago a literary agent approached me expressing an interest in publishing my memoir. This has happened five or six times over the last thirty years. I’ve always declined, including last week, because I don’t like looking backwards. But since that conversation last week I’ve been thinking about the number of times friends have told me that they find my stories to be unusual and interesting. It is important I think, that we who do this kind of work listen to what others tell us about where the work is adding something unique and worthwhile to others, regardless of our own inclinations. Sometimes those inclinations – like for instance other people’s lives are more interesting than my own – may not be valid.

I left home for the first time when I was fifteen. I hitchhiked across the country looking for a group of Indians led by Chief Smallboy who had left the Hobbema Reserve south of Edmonton to live traditionally on Crown Land in Alberta, Canada. (Crown Land in Canada is roughly the same as BLM land in the US). I had become fascinated by the lives of indigenous peoples from wilderness canoe trips with the YMCA in northern Quebec. We came across old abandoned log cabins, some that had been occupied by white trappers in the 1930s, and some that were Indian cabins. There were usually several Indian cabins in a row huddled together in sheltered coves and we’d go into them and get a glimpse of their traditional lives. The cabins fascinated me. When I returned home I read every book on the traditional ways of native peoples in the high school and city libraries. I also, through a serendipitous chain of events, had gotten to know a family of Mi’kmaq Indians who made jackets out of smoked moosehide. I spent many evenings and weekends with them learning how they did it and about their lives and philosophy.

So I set off at the age of 15 from Ottawa in search of Chief Smallboy, about 2300 miles away. I came close. A couple of Indians in a pickup truck stopped outside of small town that was, as close as I could figure, about 20 miles from Smallboy’s camp. I explained who I was looking for. They told me to jump in the back. About twenty miles later at a crossroads way back in the woods, they stopped the truck, told me that Smallboy’s camp was somewhere around here, and it was time for me to get out. I grabbed my pack, got out and started walking. I didn’t know what else to do. No more vehicles passed by that evening. I walked for a few miles and camped. The next morning another pickup with Indians stopped. They had never heard of Smallboy they said. I knew enough about Indians to know that what they were really saying is that they didn’t want a teenager with long red hair living with them. I was who they were trying to get away from. They drove me back to the small town where I had started from the previous day. Having no where else to go and since it was still early summer I decided to hitchhike to Vancouver – the Haight-Ashbury of Canada. Along the way a beautiful eighteen year old woman picked me up. She lived in Field BC in a beautiful pass – Kicking Horse Pass in Yoho National Park right on the Alberta border. I spent the summer with her and her American deserter and draft dodger friends – this was during the Vietnam War. We had a fun time.

The next summer my dream became a reality through a circuitous chain of events and I did end up living with Indians in the bush. I hitchhiked up to Great Slave Lake in Canada’s subarctic. There were hundreds of fires burning in the scrub and stunted boreal forest surrounding Yellowknife. The Forest Service was desperate for firefighters. I was broke. I told them I was eighteen. No one checked my ID. Being 18 was the sole qualification needed to get the job. The Northwest Lands & Forest Service flew me out to a fire in a helicopter. The crews were all Dogrib (Dene). Most couldn’t speak English. They were familiar with Edmonton – that’s where the prison and hospital was – but they had almost no concept of Canada and had never heard of the then prime minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. I learned a lot about their lives. A few weeks later the nearby tower lookout quit. I was the only person nearby English-speaking and available. They sent the helicopter back to get me. I spent the rest of the summer living alone in a tent on top of a big rock and reporting on fires from an old tower that would sway back and forth in the constantly howling wind.

I’ve spent most of my adult life on some edge or other. I haven’t worked on an hourly or salaried basis since I was seventeen. It has always been my own endeavors, some of them creative some of them business. In that time I’ve met and interviewed about a hundred and fifty fellow travelers on the periphery of the culture – Outward Bound Instructors who went on radical adventures in their time off, people who volunteered in refugee camps, in prison, in homeless shelters. People who climbed the world’s highest mountains, who sailed alone around the world, who sailed with Thor Heyerdahl, who worked to protect wilderness. And I volunteered in a medium security prison with the Quaker Alternatives to Violence program in order to interview inmates serving long sentences and who were working with young inmates to help them find a better path.

When I published those interviews back in the earlier days of Heron Dance I didn’t offer much in the way of commentary or reflection. The earliest of these interviews and road trips occurred thirty five years ago so I’ve now had time to reflect on them and on the friendships I’ve built with those I’ve gotten to know. Now I’m ready to share what I’ve learned, including the hard lessons of failure and sacrifice that living in your own way on your own terms doing your own thing entails. On the whole it has been a big, exciting, full and interesting way to live life.

Thinking over this idea – making storytelling a big part of Zen Mountain Journal going forward -- I approached a long time reader and supporter of this work whose opinion I deeply respect. He said to me, “The most sacred thing we have to share is our story. The most sacred thing we can receive is another person’s story.” (Jim Newsom, backwoods forest dweller and possible future interview subject.)

And I’ve begun approaching people for new interviews. Some are people I interviewed years or decades ago. Some, like Red Pine/Bill Porter, would be new interviews.

For more thoughts on stories from the outer periphery of our culture, and the questions they leave behind, see the new home page on the Zen Mountain Journal website here.

To view his post on the Zen Mountain Journal website, visit here.

The Empty Canoe

One of the things he liked most about the hermitage was the silence. “Silence is my music now.” He could pick up the small sounds of insects and animals. Sometimes when the wind was strong, it blew the sound of the traffic to him. He liked to think of all the people going on with their lives and to think of himself as in a sense staying where he was for their sakes, “like a lighthouse keeper.”
- Phyllis Rose, “The Music of Silence”, Atlantic Monthly, writing about Thomas Merton

Forests and fields, sun and wind and sky, earth and water, all speak the same language: peace, solitude, silence. Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
- Thomas Merton

I’ve long been an avid reader of the works of Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, who lived for many years in a hermitage on the property of Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He wrote sixty books including the posthumously published “My Argument with the Gestapo,” from which I’ve frequently quoted over the years.

“If you want to identify me,” he says to the British officers who are questioning him, “ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person.

Merton is also the author of one of my favorite all time essays, Rain and the Rhinoceros, which I’ve posted on the Zen Mountain Journal website here. One of Merton’s books, and the subject of this post, is The Way of Chuang Tzu. In Merton’s words, from the introduction:

The classic period of Chinese philosophy covers about three hundred years, from 550 to 250 B.C. Chuang Tzu, the greatest of the Taoist writers whose historical existence can be verified (we cannot be sure of Lao Tzu), flourished toward the end of this period . . .
- Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu.

Merton worked on the book for five years and and said that he “enjoyed writing this book more than any other I can remember.” The Dalai Lama wrote in the foreword,

I have been moved a great deal today at this memorial or recollection of the life of Thomas Merton, and I am very happy that we have done this. From the point of view of a religious practitioner, and in particular as a monastic, Thomas Merton really is someone that we can look up to. From one point of view, he had the complete qualities of hearing—which means study, contemplating, thinking on the teachings—and of meditation. He also had the qualities of being learned, disciplined and having a good heart. He not only was able to practice himself, but his perspective was very, very broad. . . for the rest of my life, the impact of meeting him will remain until my last breath. I really want to state that I make this commitment, and this will remain until my last breath.

Several of the poems Merton interpreted for the book deal with the subject of inner peace. One has in particular captured my imagination. I offer my interpretation below.

The Empty Boat

If, when crossing a river
A paddler encounters another canoe
And that canoe collides with his
What follows depends on whether or not
There is someone in the offending boat.

Empty, the paddler shrugs and continues
Perhaps puzzled but not angry.
But, if the offending boat contains another paddler
And especially if prior to colliding that paddler
Was warned off, anger, unkind words
Often ensue.

Chuang Tzu, Taoist poet
Suggests we empty ourselves
And in doing so, we abandon
Emotion, anger.
Empty of self-righteousness
We cross the river of the world
Unopposed. Unimpeded.
Almost invisible.

Be lost in the masses of men
No name, no fame, no distinction
Unseen, you will flow like the Tao
Judge no one, and no one will judge you.
The boat of the perfect man
Is empty.
- Zen Mountain Journal interpretation.

In offering my interpretation, after study and meditation, I try to boil the poem down to its Zen-like essence as shaped by my own experience. To read Merton’s interpretation, visit here.

For my favorite Thomas Merton quotes, visit here.

For my favorite Thomas Merton essay, “The Rain and the Rhinoceroses”, visit here.

Island Abstract II - One of a series of abstract watercolors painted after a summer spent paddling the north shore of Lake Superior solo.

Journaling, in combination with meditation, has been a big part of my life.

I first became aware of this approach to journaling from an article in a now defunct magazine, The Tarrytown Letters, given to me by a friend. He had attended a workshop offered by Dialogue House on the journaling techniques developed by Ira Progoff. One of those techniques included the use of imaginary guides — a figure who you perceive as being a person of wisdom. You then imagine meeting with that person and seeking advice from them.

I created in my mind a guide that was partly who I imagined myself to be in the closing years of my life, and partly an Indian I had met paddling by a cabin on a remote lake in northern Quebec when I was fifteen. He was quiet, thoughtful. One evening at dusk, he and I went out paddling looking for beavers and he showed me how to paddle silently. He didn’t talk much but nevertheless was friendly and seemed to understand me in a sensory sort of way.

Over the ensuing 55 years I’ve frequently turned to this figure for advice. Earlier this week I spent most of a day in meditation and then turned to this imaginary figure, and my journal, for clarity on where I next take my art and writing for this Substack and for my next book.

The advice I get from this imaginary guide often surprises me. Sometimes it offers advice that is completely contrary to what I want to do. The directions and decisions it proposes have often, in my younger years, seemed no fun. Boring even. For a while I called him Mr. Kill Joy. In retrospect though, over the years, I’ve learned that his advice could have saved me much wasted time and heartache.

The first time I asked him for advice we were sitting in his living room in front of a large window that overlooked a backcountry lake. I can’t remember the question, but I clearly remember that he got up and without a word left the room, went down to the shore, got in a canoe and paddled away. I think he was trying to tell me that the thing I was concerned about at the time was of no consequence and to ignore it.

Earlier this week I asked him where he thought I should go with my work now that the Tao Te Ching Journal is published and successful. I had been considering a number of ideas, and was more or less settled on a combination of the journaling meditation techniques described above and a revised edition of the book I published thirteen years ago, Wild Waters and the Tao. It had quickly sold out and I’ve long planned a reprint, but something about that idea gave me a vague feeling of discomfort and I was trying to figure out why.

When I asked my imaginary guide for his thoughts, his answer was unequivocal — write about different perspectives on the search for inner peace. Combine that with your reflections on the passages you offer readers. I’ve often written about the search for inner peace over the years but it never occurred to me to write about it exclusively.

I see my life as having developed along two contradictory paths. One definitely has been the search for inner peace. There have been periods of my life when I’ve submerged into inner peace, mostly on long solo canoe trips. I’ve also experienced it on long solo road trips — trips I did many times in the early years of the Heron Dance Art Journal (Zen Mountain Journal’s predecessor) when I was conducting interviews. I’d drive across the country in an old Toyota Previa van, and sleep in the back.

The other path has been one of striving and competition — working on Wall Street, amateur boxing and judo, whitewater kayaking, running a business, growing a business. Those two paths, as you can imagine, are contradictory. In Song of Myself (Leaves of Grass) Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I too contain multitudes, so much so that sometimes I wonder who I am. As Bob Dylan once said to an interviewer:

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

As I probed my guide for his reasoning, he responded that the thing I most want to achieve in my life, one month short of seventy years old, is inner peace. Inner peace as a daily state of mind rather than an on again off again experience. And, he said, I have done hundreds of interviews and accumulated thousands of quotes from books, many of which explore different perspectives on the search for inner peace. So I have a lot to draw on. In particular, I’ve been engaged in a multi-year study of the poetry of ancient Zen and Taoist hermit monks. In their search for inner peace they sacrificed almost everything in the way of comfort and family life to live solitary lives in nature, focused on their inner life, in the remote Zhongnan mountains of China.

Thinking this over, I shared the idea with a writer friend I turn to when something I’ve written concerns me, often because it is personal and revealing. He suggested building the new home page of the Zen Mountain Journal website around an interview I did more than thirty years ago, in the years before Heron Dance and way before Zen Mountain Journal. His suggestion sent me back to the transcript.

In Colorado, I interviewed Jeff Casebolt, then a Colorado Outward Bound instructor, who had traveled the entire west coast of North and South America — kayaking from Alaska to just north of Vancouver and then, from there, cycling to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Jeff opened the interview by probing my motivations: was this book about thrill-seeking adventure, or about the deeper questions surrounding what it means to live a spiritual life, a life on your own terms? Apparently satisfied, he told me to go ahead with my questions. I wrote afterwards:

The intensity of his gaze startled me. The first thing I asked him was why he did the trip.

“It was both a physical and a spiritual journey. The word ‘spiritual’ has a lot of negative trappings associated with it, but I think all of us are on an inward journey. On the trip, people kept asking me why I was doing it, and the answer always changed. The picture changes. I am realizing, more and more, that it really was something that I was looking for internally. The external was certainly an incredible adventure, but it is more and more clear to me that we are all looking for inner peace.

That two and a half years is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. It’s like a metaphor. Life is a journey. It’s an external journey and an internal journey. My desire now for a spiritual depth and awareness of a presence in my life is a result of the trip. Having encountered some really amazing people — encountered highs and lows — that I could never have accessed within myself. The trip was a glacier that gouged internally. Gouged my soul. The marks are indelibly inscribed in my soul. Meeting people who had nothing, who would take the shirt off their back to help me — taught me just how greedy we are. How people who have lots of money and lots of resources don’t know how to be generous. People who have nothing but who have a real connection with themselves and with their family and with community realize that life is really about people and love. The kind of connection and love that we can create and give each other.”

I asked him to explore that further. It has been my impression that very few are actually searching for inner peace, and in fact, if more people were on that search, the world would be a much different place. He answered:

“I think a lot of people are not conscious of what they are looking for, they couldn’t articulate it, or even think about it. But yes, I think everybody is searching for an inner kind of place that is more peaceful.”

Thirty years later, I still think about Jeff’s answer.

So that is where this Substack is going: different perspectives on the search for inner peace — the ancient hermit poets, Thoreau and Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön and the people — the Free Spirits — I’ve interviewed over the years — combined with my reflections and paintings.

The mountain hermits talk about wu wei — the art of effortless flow. The quest for inner peace carries within itself an inherent contradiction. What you reach for cannot be captured. It is perpetually just beyond your grasp. It is shy, timid. So instead of reaching, you sit down and wait. Inner peace comes to you at its own pace, on its own terms. In silence. You rest your mind. You remain receptive: watching, listening, accepting. You exist inside a quiet awareness.

I’ll close with a quote by U Thant, the third Secretary General of the United Nations. He was from Burma (now Myanmar) and was a Buddhist.

Through meditation I seek inner peace. I heartily agree with Father Dominique Georges Pire, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, when he says: “I still think that to be a peacemaker, that is to say a man of peace, one must first be at peace with oneself. One must first achieve inner peace. This involves getting to know oneself and learning to control one’s impulses. Only then can a peaceful being approach the immense task of creating harmony between groups and between individuals.”
- View From The U.N., The Memoirs of U Thant

There will be more from U Thant in the days ahead.

. . .

To view on the Zen Mountain Journal website, visit here.

Another Horizon

The pottery and brush paintings of old Japan and Korea embody a rough, aesthetic beauty. That rough beauty is influenced by Zen Buddhism simplicity, which in turn has roots in the Tao mountain hermits of China two thousand years ago. Perhaps the most fascinating exploration of this beauty is the book The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi and potter Bernard Leach. Here are a couple of short quotes to give you an idea.

Beauty dislikes being captive to perfection. That which is profound never lends itself to logical explanation: it involves endless mystery.

Why should one reject the perfect in favor of the imperfect? The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard. We in our own human imperfections are repelled by the perfect, since everything is apparent from the start and there is no suggestion of the infinite. Beauty must have room, must be associated with freedom. Freedom, indeed, is beauty. The love of the irregular is a sign of the basic quest for freedom.

Every artist knows that he is engaged in an encounter with infinity, and that work done with heart and hand is ultimately worship of Life Itself . . . a degree of enlightenment wherein infinity, however briefly, obliterates the minor self.

My respect for Yanagi’s work has led me to devote a couple of pages on the Zen Mountain Journal website to favorite excerpts from The Unknown Craftsman. You can view these here, and The Beauty in Imperfection here. A key concept in this work is that our lives, as well as our work in the world, are manifestations of our inner beauty, our friendship with ourselves, but also the result of grit, discipline and persistence. The creative life, the creation of a unique and beautiful life, is like the tip of an iceberg – what is manifested outwardly derives from the larger inner work under the surface.

Belief in these concepts is not confined to Zen Buddhism and Taoism. As Jesus reportedly said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:16), “By their fruits ye shall know them”. I have been fortunate to come to know, through interviews I did in the early days of Heron Dance, the predecessor to Zen Mountain Journal, a number of individuals whose outward work was a manifestation of inner beauty. Frédéric Back, creator of the Oscar-award winning film, The Man Who Planted Trees was one such individual. Balbir Mathur, co-founder, with his wife Treva, of Trees for Life, which has provided tens of millions of fruit tree saplings to impoverished villages in rural India and other third world countries another. Len Soucy and his wife Diane who founded The Raptor Trust another. I could mention many more.

And there have been others that I’ve not met, but read about, including furniture maker Sam Maloof.

I have always believed in living a good life, aiming myself -- oh, how shall I put it? -- aiming myself true. . . I try to live right. I always try to adhere to what I think is right, and that, to me, is the most important part of creative work. Fashion comes and goes, but my pieces have to have the integrity of my vision.

Maloof derives his strength from resorting to something outside himself, from an appeal to an honorable code of conduct, an elevated sense of order, to a deep, abiding faith. He lives an ethical, right-minded life and cites integrity as the most important part of his work and of his creativity.

Sam believes in the unseen influences that guide him. That is the source of his risk taking, of his courage to create. He gives a quiet thanks, he shows respect, he behaves in the most correct way he knows how, and then he sits down to make a piece of furniture.
- Furniture-maker Sam Maloof, as quoted in the book Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian.

I recently came across the work of Japanese potter Shiro Tsujimura and his work, and the life he’s led, captured my imagination. He was born in 1947 to a farming family near Nara, which in turn is near Kyoto, a beautiful ancient city of Buddhist temples, gardens, imperial palaces, Shinto shrines and traditional wooden houses. After high school, he entered a Zen monastery.

I shaved my head, donned a robe, and began a life of Zen-centered asceticism. I arose at 4:30 a.m., meditated, read sutras, and did all kinds of chores. When this was no longer enough, I was sent on a pilgrimage. I took enough money with me to cover my funeral expenses.

Sometimes I slept in a temple, sometimes in the open air; sometimes I headed for the mountains, taking along a little food, and did zazen [Zen meditation] for a few days. All the same, after less than two years had passed, I decided to conclude my life as an ascetic monk. I felt that these Zen practices were only a way to escape from myself and from my painting. At the same time, pursuing something that emanates from my inner being, and something that emerges from making things-these two things are the basis of my life.

I chose ceramics, calligraphy, and painting because they are spontaneous art forms. In the spiritual sense, they are all the same -- art is an expression from the body.
- From the beautiful book of his art, Shiro Tsujimura, An Art of Living, as are the quotes below.

In 1969, at the age of 22, Shiro purchased three quarters of an acre near Nara, upon which he built a small shack out of found, abandoned and donated building materials.

Building this hut, painting, ceramics, selling my wares -- these are all one and the same thing for me. I wish to continue searching for that “something” that comes from my inner Zen and from making things.

In 1970, I visited the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, where much of the folk art collected by Soetsu Yanagi and his folk art movement are exhibited. There I discovered a large oido teabowl among the many works on display. “This is it!“ The generosity that emanated from this bowl -- the way it embraced everything, good and bad, and yet was not overbearing -- moved me deeply. I reveled in gazing at it for a long time. . . (but) when asked what it was about the shape and color of the oido bowl that attracted me, can’t remember a single thing about either. The bowl was not identified; it was simply marked oido and was kept in a glass case along with other objects in a room on the second floor. There were also a lot of old textiles, furniture, and pottery downstairs, but once I found the oido bowl, I forgot about the rest of the exhibits and didn’t move. Thinking back, all that I remember is what a comforting feeling it gave me.

I can only say that I felt as if I was facing a person rather than a bowl, and that I seemed to be in the presence of the [Buddhist] Divine Mother and the Great Compassion. The bowl was far more than its form, far more than its color. . . In my handiwork made with clay, I wish to express the state of divine motherly compassion, the quietude embracing all good and evil, which the oido teabowl had expressed. In other words, I want to create nothing other than this state of mind. Imitating the shape of the oido bowl is not the point; I have no desire to imitate an oido bowl, no matter how wonderful it is. All that I can hope to do is to clarify how I felt when I saw the bowl, what had been hidden inside me, and what had attracted me to it so intensely.

Have I been able to explain to some extent why I create ceramics? It seems to me that there is a limit to what can be expressed in words. I wish to live my life without being overwhelmed, wondering all the while how far my working with soil, starting from scratch, can advance and expand within me.

Within a year after seeing that oido bowl he built his first pottery kiln. One of the more fascinating aspects of his work is his preference for the clay found around his home over that which is commercially available. In the book, he often refers to it as “soil”.

As if caressing the soil, help it along with your fingers. This is a way to create: lend a hand to the soil just a little. If you try to force it, you’ll destroy the soil. Don’t try to control it, try to follow it.

As I have already said, clay has a strong personality. If I emphasize myself in the process, the personality of the clay will vanish. In practice, however, I try to make the clay my own, even if it is difficult to find the right balance between myself and the clay.

From fields and mountains, I gather soil that suits me. Then I pound it with a mallet, sift it, and mix it with water to make potter’s clay. If you use clay that has been mass-produced in a factory, the process is simple. Factory-made clay is easy to use and has no imperfections. On the other hand, it is also a clay without character. The clay I collect in nature is exceptionally rough and does not stretch. It’s viscous and easily degraded. It’s too easily damaged by fire yet too resistant to it. In a word, a clay with such “drawbacks” is also a clay with character. Accordingly, unique pottery can be made from unique clay, even if many “mistakes” can occur in the process.

For decades, Shiro sold his tea bowls and other creations on straw mats in front of the Nanzenji temple, the Kyoto National Museum, along the rice paddies in Ohara, and in front of the Sanjūsangen-dō temple in Kyoto. In the book, a collector of his work, Hiroshi Sugimoto, described his first meeting with Shiro.

I met Tsujimura forty years ago when I was just starting to dabble in antiques. He took me to a dilapidated shack on the very edge of the forested hills, far from the inhabited parts of Nara. I recall him telling me, with no hint of boastfulness, that he had built the place himself. He had either scavenged or been given all of the building materials. He struck me as a man with no interest in the business world. There were two small children cavorting about, stark naked and barefoot. They reminded me of free-range chickens.

. . .When I asked him where he sold his teabowls, he explained that until recently he and his wife had been selling them off a straw mat on the ground in front of the Sanjūsangen-dō temple in Kyoto.

There was an earthenware jar to one side of the door of the shack. Peering in, I caught a glimpse of some coins and banknotes. When people who dropped by bought his ceramics, they would throw cash into the jar, which he would help himself to whenever he went shopping. I felt as though the money economy had suddenly intruded into the life of a man from the Jōmon period (c. 14,000-300 BCE).

Now his pottery is world-renowned and sells for thousands of dollars per piece.

. . .

Journal Notes: A conversation with your creative work

Standing before the oido bowl, Tsujimura felt he was “facing a person rather than a bowl.” He gazed at it so long he forgot the rest of the museum. He has spent the next sixty years creating pottery, and he’s not done yet. A work of art — including the ones we make, finished or not — has an inner life of its own. Imagine it as a person, a person of wisdom and beauty. Converse with it

First, choose the work. It may be the one that is the focus of your creative life now, or one abandoned years ago. If an abandoned one, look for the unfinished works that still carry emotion or awaken a feeling when you think of them — that twinge may be a sign that they are still alive. Now, with the changing circumstances of our life, with our deeper and more complete life experience, that work may offer possibilities not recognized or available in times past.

Write a few lines about the history of your current work, or your previous endeavor. When did it begin? What led to the idea? What difficulties did you, or are you now, encountering? Record brief entries — facts and memories, not explanations or apologies.

In your quiet place, close your eyes. Let your breathing slow. Feel the presence of the work — its beginnings, its possibilities, its setbacks — and let it take the form of a person sitting across from you. Greet it. Ask it if it has anything it would like to say. Then write the conversation as it comes without contriving or editing. Long pauses are fine. Wait for it to finish speaking.

Then ask it how it thinks you are treating it, or did treat it. Ask it what it needs to flourish. Ask it if it has anything else to say.

Don’t judge what emerges. A neglected work may be angry; an old one may surprise you with its patience. Whatever it says is a reading of where you actually stand together.

Put the pages away. Wait a week before reading them. Then, if the conversation wants to continue, let it.

. . .

To view on the Heron Dance website, visit here.

Lucid Journey

Bashō (1644-1694) is the haiku patron saint of travelers and wayward wanderers. Years ago I put together a book arts collection of my poems and art and named it, “The Journey Itself Is Home”, a title taken from the opening lines of Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi (”The Narrow Road to the Deep North”), Basho’s travel journal from his 1689 journey through northern Japan.

The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
- Basho

Sampu, a wealthy merchant and admirer of Bashō’s haiku, built him a small house in Edo. It burned down a couple of years later in a fire that swept through town. He lived for a while with someone he had studied Zen with at the Chōkeiji Temple in Edo, Rokuso Gohei. He found himself constantly dreaming of the open road, and decided to, as he put it, cast himself away, restore his true identity (which he described as the ‘everlasting self which is poetry’) and hit the road. Bashō wrote, “I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyokyo among the wails of the autumn wind.”

Bashō was inspired in his travels by the example of a priest from bygone days, probably Saigyō (1118–1190) who is said to have travelled thousands of miles “caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon.” Basho wrote, “I leaned on the staff of an ancient who, it is said, entered into nothingness under the midnight moon.”

In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Bashō wrote:

Days and months are the travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by . . . I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind –- filled with a strong desire to wander . . . I walked through mists and clouds, breathing the thin air of high altitudes and stepping on slippery ice and snow, till at last through a gateway of clouds, as it seemed, to the very paths of the sun and moon. I reached the summit, completely out of breath and nearly frozen to death. Presently the sun went down and the moon rose glistening in the sky.
-Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

. . .

Where am I on Basho’s narrow road?

Bashō left his broken house and walked into the autumn wind to recover what he called his everlasting self. Most of us won’t cast ourselves away onto the open road. But the road is there regardless — we are on it whether we notice or not. The seasons of a life arrive the way weather arrives on a long walk: gradually, unannounced, and we may travel a long while inside a new one before we recognize it.

So, a question to carry into stillness: Where am I now in my life?

Find a quiet place. Close your eyes. Let your breathing slow. Don’t think about your life — thinking only retrieves the story you already tell, worn smooth by repetition. Let the question settle beneath thought, and let something answer for you: an image, a metaphor, a single unexpected word. This stretch of the road has been like... mist on a mountain path. A gateway of clouds. A long walk without trees. It doesn’t need to make sense.

Whatever comes, write it down without judgment. Don’t welcome the hopeful image or turn from the dark one. The image is not a verdict — it’s a reading of where you actually stand, and where you stand is the only place a journey can continue from.

Then ask: when did this chapter of your life begin? Was there a moment — an event, a departure, a loss, a fire? Jot down what you remember. Brief entries, facts and memories, not explanations.

Finally, at least for now, right down what first comes to mind about the possible significance of that first image or thought that came to mind when you asked for something, however vague, that summarized this time of your life.

. . .

To view on the Heron Dance website, visit here.

The journaling explorations in this series are inspired by Ira Progoff’s At a Journal Workshop, the book I’d point you to first if you want to go deeper.

Painting: Horizon II
Original and Prints available.

Reflection

Silence thoughts, invite emptiness
And the universe beckons.

Spend time alone in nature and after a while a strange sense of internal quiet takes over. It is very mysterious. The silence inside starts to dominate. A lot of it has to do with the absence of talk. That part of the mind that determines speech relaxes into disuse and is taken over by a kind of emptiness that is deeply peaceful. You don’t notice it at first because you are so deep inside it, but then, all of the sudden, comes the realization that the pre-verbal soup you’ve relaxed into brings a very wonderful and deep sense of internal calm.

If you decide to go on such a journey though, and haven’t done it before, be prepared for a rough two or three days. The mind, formerly engaged in a constant search for things to worry about, for threats, now has nothing to focus on and the result can be a kind of internal anger. A friend of mine who facilitates silent retreats describes it as your internal world settling unfinished business.

Journaling question to consider

• When was the last time you gave talking a few days off to to relax, rest, and recover?

. . .

To view enlarged on the Heron Dance website, visit here.

With this behind us, and with a number of other major projects now done, it is my objective to resume publishing this Substack 2-3 times a week, alone with work on the next journal.

In order to focus on the creation of these new journals, going forward the gallery in Asheville will be open just on Saturdays (11-5) or by appointment. If you plan to be in Asheville but Saturday is not convenient, you are very welcome but please either call or text first. 802-234-3120.

The items below will all be removed from the website at noon tomorrow.

Liquidation Sale

All nature art originals are now $100. Visit here to view the selection.

• Framed nature art prints are now $65-$100. Visit here to view the selection.

• The liquidation nature art prints at 75% off. View the selection here.

• The hardcover first edition book, Nurturing the Song Within. This book was originally published at $95. Now $40. Description here. Order here.

• Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. Only two copies left. $43.95. Description here. Order here.

• The Pausing for Beauty Poetry Diary. $20. Was $39.95. Description here. Order here.

The following items are print-on-demand and not discounted. They appear here because they will be removed from the website in one week.

• Zen Mountain Art Canvas Prints. You can view the selection here.

• Nature Art Canvas Prints. You can view the selection here.

• Nature Art Canvas Prints. You can view the selection here.

• All nature art posters. You can view the selection here.

. . .

To view this on the Zen Mountain Journal website, visit here.

Painting: Chuang Tzu Horizon
Original and Prints available.

The text from the journal painting above:

The ancient hermit poets sought wisdom
By remote mountain streams.
Status, power over others, held no interest.
— Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE). This interpretation was inspired by Thomas Merton’s fascinating book, The Way of Chuang Tzu.

I keep notes on a wide variety of subjects of particular interest. Here are my notes on wisdom, collected over the last several years.

• The basis of wisdom is the seeking of a positive future.

• Wisdom makes the lives of others better.

• Wisdom looks for, tunes into, the beauty of others.

• Wisdom is thoughtful, quiet, contemplative.

• Wisdom looks with skepticism at the flow of the mainstream culture that surrounds us, which is based on desire and fear.

• Wisdom avoids rushing, avoids frantic, desperate behavior.

• Wisdom avoids waste.

• Wisdom boils things down to their essence.

• Humans are complicated.

• Wisdom lives within its own center, and doesn’t depend on others or hook into others in an effort to achieve equanimity or peace.

• Wisdom is careful what it engages in, especially what it gets emotionally wrapped up in.

• Wisdom seeks harmony, the point of agreement.

• Wisdom believes in focusing on points of leverage where small action achieves a big result.

• Wisdom seeks transcendent beauty in nature, people and art.

• Wisdom knows how to relax mind and body.

• Wisdom is resourceful.

• Wisdom believes in the simplest, easiest way to accomplish an objective with the fewest moving parts.

• Wisdom knows it doesn’t have all of the answers.

. . .

Journal Question to Consider:

• How would you describe the role of wisdom in your life — wisdom as you define it?

. . .

To view enlarged on the Heron Dance website, visit here.

Changes at Heron Dance

I’ve narrowed the focus of my work to the creation of journals that explore questions at the core of a quality life. As part of that change, most of the art and books on the Zen Mountain Journal website are being liquidated or discontinued.

Details, including the liquidation sale, are here.

Changes at Zen Mountain Journal: Narrower focus, liquidation sale.

Narrower Focus:
Journals That Explore Questions at the Core of a Quality Life

The reaction to the Tao Te Ching Journal has been so positive that I’ve decided to focus on the creation of more journals, all with the common theme of exploring questions at the core of living a quality life. The quality of the questions we are willing to explore has a profound effect on the quality of our lives. Quality is of course subjective — the role of these journals is not to define quality, but to act as a companion in thinking through that definition. And manifesting it.

For the foreseeable future these journals will relate in some way to ancient Zen and Taoist poetry and writing (Questions from Cold Mountain, Wu-wei, wabi-sabi, the Book of Tea, etc). Ultimately the subjects of these journals will expand to a Thoreau journal, a journal based around my book from years ago, Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence, etc.

As a result, I’ve decided to liquidate or discontinue 75% of the art and related products on the Heron Dance website – the art not related to the Tao Te Ching Journal or upcoming planned journals. We’ll also liquidate or discontinue the books that fall outside this narrower subject area. The PDFs of all of these books, and some from the distant past, will remain available free to supporting members. And going forward, in place of canvas prints, I’ll offer limited editions of five — each printed on archival fine art paper, signed and numbered — in addition to the original paintings. These limited-edition prints will be priced at $300 each.

We’ll run this liquidation for one week (until Monday, July 13th), after which all liquidation and discontinued items will be removed from the website.

Also, in order to focus on the creation of these new journals, going forward the gallery in Asheville will be open just on Saturdays (11-5) or by appointment. If you plan to be in Asheville but Saturday is not convenient, you are very welcome but please either call or text first. 802-234-3120.

Liquidation Sale

All nature art originals are now $100. Visit here to view the selection.

• Framed nature art prints are now $65-$100. Visit here to view the selection.

• The liquidation nature art prints at 75% off. View the selection here.

• The hardcover first edition book, Nurturing the Song Within. This book was originally published at $95. Now $40. Description here. Order here.

• Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. Only two copies left. $43.95. Description here. Order here.

• The Pausing for Beauty Poetry Diary. $20. Was $39.95. Description here. Order here.

The following items are print-on-demand and not discounted. They appear here because they will be removed from the website in one week.

• Zen Mountain Art Canvas Prints. You can view the selection here.

• Nature Art Canvas Prints. You can view the selection here.

• Nature Art Canvas Prints. You can view the selection here.

• All nature art posters. You can view the selection here.

. . .

To view this on the Zen Mountain Journal website, visit here.