HAN SHAN AND BACKWARDS BALLCAPS

brice marden

han shan series

 

Things are changing so fast within, it makes me wonder what is going on. I have my friends I like to see, and do see them, and find the circle shrinking. Not because of people dying out, rather that I am drawing inward at a noticeable rate. Like when I'm used to driving fifty and then am going eighty. It takes more focus. The purpose behind the change from urban living to country road was to move inward, solitude however I define it. I saw my house a monastic retreat, a monastery of one following no religion, the still point of my interior journey to the heart of things invisible. I could not lock myself down in a belief system evolved over centuries and millennia of filtering through the male ego. I mythologized self an American Han Shan living outside the world on Cold Mountain. The likeness was thin, though the spirit close. Han Shan's Cold Mountain has accompanied my time in the mountains like he and I lived parallel lives in different times, different parts of the world, he in the mountains of southern China, I in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, America. It is here that I chose to live out my life in the world, not of it.

 

 

han shan

 

 

70

 

Talking about food won't make you full,

Babbling of clothes won't keep out the cold.

A bowl of rice is what fills the belly;

It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm.

And yet, without stopping to consider this,

You complain that Buddha is hard to find.

Turn your mind within! There he is!

Why look for him abroad?

 

                         ----Han Shan

                           tr Burton Watson

 

 

han shan

 

Han Shan has been my companion in these hills. Many others too, Robert Bly, John Berryman, Henry Miller, Tu Fu, a long list of good reading, Julio Cortazar, Naguib Mahfouz. I have a way of seeing other people's stories, poems in relation to mind, heart and spirit. I like my scriptures to have all three. Poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, histories, I read in the same spirit as reading scriptures. I say, why do a select number of books about God take precedence over a story of someone's life, the poetry of Nirala, Rumi, Hafiz, Rilke, Yeats? Possibly that a scripture is something one can read many times and see new meaning every time as one advances along one's path. The Gospel of John is about as incredible as scripture gets, and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist Sutras, discourses of masters who have reached enlightenment. What I mean by mixing poetry and fiction and stories of people's lives with scripture is the subject of all the scriptures is the human heart. The people I know, I know by their hearts. Since letting go of desires, I have unfolded to know the people I know by their hearts.

 

 

brice marden

han shan series

 

It's not like I see good and evil in somebody's heart. Not at all. The heart is where the other is coming from. I don't mean heart like purity or perfection, but heart as in where we're coming from on the inside. Everyone else is coming from the same place in themselves. Some may have the energies blocked off and don't flow so well emotionally. I see what we call good in everybody's heart. I see the heart of everyone I know is where the real individual is. That's who I like to connect with in people I know. Somebody whose heart is not open is of no interest to me. I like to know real people, people who live their lives as themselves without masks. My friend Lucas, retired English professor, once said, "When I see a guy with his ballcap on backwards, I know he has nothing to say that I want to hear." When I need a good laugh, I don't need to rent a Marx Bros movie. Only need to remember Lucas saying that. I have laughed over this sentence a thousand times, at least. I think it every time I see a backwards hat. It comes to mind and I laugh sometimes out loud. I know he knows what he is saying. He's talking from experience.

 

 

 

My experience with ballcaps backward is mountain boys who drive pickups, work construction jobs, a style of a given generation, the tattoo generation that listens to heavy metal. Them and guys in punk bands are the hat-on-backwards people of my experience. I think they're cool people. It is as in-yer-face an anti-intellectual statement as The Sex Pistols. It's a style, like long hair is a style, short hair is a style, hat forward is a style, hat backward a style, brim straight across a style, brim bent in a curve a style. Milly Richardson wears ragged old tshirts with holes in them. It's her style. Ross, her brother, wears cammo pants all the time. It's his style. Justin wears a tshirt, the image a deer head with big rack. It says, White Tail Hunter. It is truly Justin's style. Kid Rock is Justin's style. If I looked askance at Milly's ratty tshirts I'd take her for nobody home. But when I know Milly and Justin by their hearts, who they are, I see full human beings, the whole person present, people I'm happy to have the opportunity to know.

 

brice marden

han shan series

 

 

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DONKEYS IN THE MIST

jenny and jack

 

New changes in the donkey meadow suggest that Jenny might actually be pregnant. It used to be when I went outside that Jenny would be the first to see me. The last few days it has been Jack who notices first and Jenny goes on acting like she didn't see a thing, same as Jack before. I'm looking for explanation for the change in last 4-5 days. Jenny's jealousy has waned. Jack's attentiveness has increased. The mornings I go out with carrot, Jack sees me first, tears out running and braying, Jenny looks up and walks toward the gate. Jack was maybe twenty feet beyond Jenny when I appeared. He started running. He stopped beside Jenny and looked at me quizzically, not certain of his perception. I've found he does not recognize my face beyond fifty or so feet. He looked like he was questioning. I called his name twice and held the camera up to take a picture. He started braying and ran to the gate in full bray. Jenny raised her head and took her time. She had a new demeanor. I've wondered if her foot hurt again. Doesn't appear to. Finally, it came to me that Jenny might be going into a new phase of her pregnancy. What she's feeling going on inside, I presume she does not understand, though donkeys have a complexity of knowing that I'm not able to understand. I dare not presume. Nonetheless, she's deferring Alpha to Jack, which I've only seen her do when she's not feeling right. She was gentle toward Jack over the carrots, didn't blow, grunt and dive at his neck with her teeth for receiving a chunk of carrot. She acted like it was ok for him to have all the carrot he wanted. I think I've detected a part of her belly showing some expansion, but don't know donkeys well enough to tell with any degree of certainty. Time will answer the question. The only way Jenny could not be pregnant would be if she or Jack were infertile. My thinking is she possibly conceived in February, the coldest part of this winter, meaning baby donkey will arrive in February. It takes twelve months for donkeys.

 

 

jack starts to run

jack brays

 

Jack has become my friend. In the three months before Jenny's arrival, I took my time getting acquainted with Jack, a little at a time. I was wary of him for awhile and he was wary of me. We learned to trust each other and he became my friend. He learned to trust my hands. Jenny's arrival took all Jack's attention. I left them alone for a month. They rampaged all over the meadow. Jenny did not know me. I assessed the safest place was my side of the fence, so I let them fight it out. It's been slow getting to know Jenny due to her circumstances of being taken away from her life before and muscled, against her will, into a strange meadow with a sex-crazed wild ass. I respected her grief and did not push her, let her come to me in her own time. That time is long past and by now my relationship with Jenny is equal to my relationship with Jack. Only difference, we have different histories and the donkeys have different personalities. Having seen Jenny's relaxation with women she meets, I wonder if Jack feels identity with my gender, too. We do have a personal feeling of friendship I don't yet have with Jenny. It feels like I have mutual affection with Jenny. I've only known Jenny as Alpha, which I've learned by now is not who she is, but a role. Jenny without the role is as calm as Jack. The Alpha in Jack appears to make him protective of Jenny. His attitude toward me seems friendlier in his Alpha role. Before, we were friends across a divide, and now it's like the divide has narrowed considerably. Jack has a happy demeanor about him in these days of feeling protective with Jenny. It was love at first sight for Jack when he met his babydoll. He's been smitten since their first night together. I wonder, too, how much of his apparent delight has to do with Jenny falling in love with him. She still kicks at him when he's a nuisance, though she looks at him now with affection. Asked how I know, I don't know. I feel it, sense it, interpret observation.

jack

jenny

 

Today is the third day of all-day fog. It is a cloud passing over the mountain, a very long cloud. Fog is one of my favorite features of living on a mountain. Sometimes it looks like landscape drawn on white paper with soft graphite lines. I like being inside a cloud. I loved flying through canyons of boiling cumulus clouds and I loved flying through cloud on ascent and descent. I'd feel a very minor reverie for being inside a cloud. Working on the farm, I found when tired and needing a break, I could lie on the ground on my back and watch the clouds until I see them moving. I would lie there and watch the clouds move for a few minutes, then get up and go back to work refreshed. Watching clouds move was refreshing as watching a waterfall. Seeing the fog, I feel the minor reverie as dreamlike where only the subject I'm looking at is visible, all around it, in Shakespeare's words, circled in sleep. I also think of Chinese poet Han Shan when fog is on the mountain.  

 

 

               75

 

          I wanted to go off to the eastern cliff---

 

          How many years now I've planned the trip?

 

          Yesterday I pulled myself up by the vines,

 

          But wind and fog forced me to stop half way.

 

          The path was narrow and my clothes kept catching,

 

          The moss so spongy I couldn't move my feet,

 

          So I stopped under this red cinnamon tree.

 

          I guess I'll lay my head on a cloud and sleep.

 

 

                                               ---Han Shan

                                                   tr Burton Watson

 

 

rhododendron leaves

 

 

 

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HAN SHAN #68



     han shan by tj worthington


                      
                           #68


          Would you know a simile for life and death?

          Compare them to water and ice.

          Water binds together to become ice;
         
          Ice melts and turns back into water.

          What has died must live again,

          What has been born shall return to death.

          Water and ice do no harm to each other;

          Life and death are both of them good.


                                   ---Han Shan
                                   tr Burton Watson

    

COLD MOUNTAIN

waterfalls creek, air bellows gap

We're in the zone between Christmas and New Years where nothing gets started, very little gets done and party hardy is the spirit. I like stay at home hardy. Full moon for the First. Years of working in Sparta, being away from my mountain all day every day, then staying with Jr and rarely at home, I came to miss home until it became an ideal I looked to at some point in the future. Now I'm at home, have been almost 2 months, gradually feeling in place. I had to start my own momentum here in the place that had gone static. All I want to do is watch movies, read, sit at the computer and write to you, go over emails, feed the cats and sleep. I'll do this until something else happens. I could stay this way the rest of my life and be happy.

First years in these mountains I read frequently and identified in a fantasy kind of way with Chinese poet Han Shan from the period of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Not much is known of his life but what he wrote in the 100 poems of his small book Cold Mountain. Han Shan was a Buddhist monk who left home and took up on Cold Mountain, a mountain remote and difficult for any transport but walking. I identified with him leaving the world of commerce and going to the mountain for a solitary life in simplicity among the clouds. The simplicity I sought could not be as extreme as his; I needed to work to make a living, and needed people to know.

My solitude then was knowing less people than before. I have strong leanings toward being solitary, but not one for all out solitude. I like the company of other people too much. Donna Shumate told me not too many months ago that I'm a people person, which I'd never thought of myself, but when I look, there it is. I think it's always been this way, but it took to a certain point in the life to be able to appreciate other people to the point I pay attention with interest instead of duty. Now that I've got there to some degree, I've come to see it doesn't matter at all if I can't like everybody and everybody can't like me. There's always that, no matter what. It's learning to live with it so it's not a passion in the mind or a guilt to carry, just how things are. Some dogs have spots. Some don't. No big deal. The people I think of as my friends have the highest value of any treasure.

49

As for me, I delight in the everyday Way,

Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves.

Here in the wilderness I am completely free,

With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever.

There are roads, but they do not reach the world;

Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?

On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night,

While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain.

-Han Shan

These poems have been with me the whole time in these mountains. I step into them when I walk in the woods among rocks, water, trees, a carpet of leaves on the ground, birds, the self-sustaining world where self-consciousness is unknown until somebody like me walks through with a head full of electrons jumping out of their orbits. Han Shan in a simple hand-made robe as monks wore in his time, me in my sweatshop made in Asia discount store American casuals, bluejeans and tshirt. Han Shan walking in straw flip-flops, me in LLBean sale walking shoes with good tread.

Perhaps it's from Han Shan I learned to take an interest in the everyday Way, everyday life as spiritual path. For years I read scripture and studied. Then came the day, 10 or more years ago, I said it's time to start practicing what I've been studying. That sounds easy until I ask, How? How now brown cow is the answer I get. Find it for yourself, in other words. Like Jr with his banjo, pick it up and figure it out. How to practice what I'd learned, I waited for, let it come forward of its own when it was ready, instead of charging ahead using unreliable mind for navigator. It's not a workshop or a church thing. It's standing at the checkout register in the grocery store, talking with my friends, sitting with a cat on my lap.

I think it has to do with the present moment, being in it. It's whatever I do, whatever I say, whatever I think about being in the present moment, flowing through time with it, not locking down in a belief system following the rules of supposed-to. That gets techous, mountain for touchy. You'd be surprised at the particular people you know who get upset over you not adhering to the unwritten rules. It can alienate a lot of people, especially people who entertain notions of control; in hindsight, people it doesn't hurt to see go away, and sometimes it does hurt. I experienced a big shake-up when I stopped allowing myself to be manipulated by somebody with control issues. People who like to believe they control you, seriously dislike you when they find out they can't. I like to leave the control freaks to people who want to be told what to do. Plenty are about.

Back on my mountain, I feel enriched by the experience with Jr. I feel changed by it. I don't know yet what kind of changed, my reason for sitting back without worries about what's next. I gave myself a new Atlas for Christmas, one with all the -stans below Russia, Waziristan, Kazakhstan, like that, places the Silk Road went through that carried the plague from China to Europe in the 14th Century by fleas, which caravans carry more than anything else. This Atlas has the composite images of every continent from satellites, as well as what they call "political" maps with countries delineated. I can be entertained by an Atlas for a very long time. Things going the way they are, which they're doing, it won't be long before Greenland is prime tropical real estate with reggae and hula girls.