Monthly Archives: July 2021

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The climate

In support of my thoughts on the seriousness of the climate change/global warming situation, I’m posting a link to a recent news report from the LA Times. I hope the link works for everyone. If not, Googling “Summer of disaster: Extreme weather wreaks havoc worldwide as climate change bears down” will likely turn it up.

The report links all the recent increasing extreme weather to global warming, and it gives the scientific explanations for how those things are connected. It’s a bit more in detail than my simple notion that heat powers everything, but it bears that core notion out pretty well, I think.

A seminal paragraph:

The scenes of desperation and devastation in Zhengzhou added to a portfolio of disasters this year that have raised the specter of irreversible climate change as never before and offered glimpses of what it means to live on a warming planet where human survival grows more fraught.

LA Times July 21

There are lots of similar reports out there, though your climate denier friends and Congressmen have likely not read any of it. Sorta like the mental blinders that the folks wear who want to claim Jan. 6 Capitol rioters were just a bunch of tourists…

The link:

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-21/extreme-weather-worldwide-climate-change-disasters

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Longleaf Dream (2000)

“Only the rarest of characters have genuine insight into the future or the past, and those seem crippled with grief at what they see.”

Barbara Kingsolver, 1992

I wake to moonlight and wind, old pines soughing in the night.

Three A.M. moon bright through my window, alive through the needles.

I sigh with the trees; I want to sleep but moon and pine song draw me out.

My dreams turn to memories of lost landscapes: the wiregrass prairie, Longleaf’s domain, stretching forever, covering coastal plain.

Like imagined lost lovers grieved for in the night, I grieve with the pines the loss of their mothers, fathers, lovers and friends, the loss of a world rampant with life, our birthright traded for a mess of porridge.

Tears slide slowly down my cheeks, and my chest aches with unreleased sobs.

What madness is this that comes in the night? How can I explain?

Who would believe?

:That I suffer the loss of the old growth forests like the loss of a child;

:That I feel the pain of what has been done like a blade in my chest;

:That sitting here in the moonlight, I feel the the attacks on the long-lost landscape as attacks on my body, as a deep abiding pain, an ache of heart and chest and head;

:That I am “crippled with grief” at what I see, immobilized by rage at what has been lost, at what cost… and at what gain.

How to explain?

Hobbling through life, heart bursting, lips frozen in a silent scream.

But the sweet moonlight pours over me yet like honeysuckle scent. Tears of crystal grief sparkle.

The pines’ sad songs are soft lullaby, and at length, I sleep.

In dreams, I walk along in moonlight down ancient corridors of pine!

(From a journal sometime around the year 2000.)

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How’s the weather?

We who live in the sunny South don’t really worry a lot about the weather, unless we farm or garden.

An old Southern comic, Brother Dave Gardner, made a career out of saying, “Hot, ain’t it!” That’s probably the most common weather-related conversation and concern around here, because it does usually get pretty dang hot here in the summer! So far this year, though, we’ve had a fairly moderate summer here in Southeast Georgia. Of course, as I told my wife today, there’s still August to go. It’s been fairly consistently in the mid 70s overnight and hits 90 during the day, but none of that 97-and-hotter stuff that we often get in July. It has been a little humid, off and on, as we’ve had stretches of too much rain punctuated by stretches of not enough, as is often the case. But even the humidity–“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!” is another common weatherly observation–has not been unbearable yet.

All of which is making many of us Southerners wonder just what is going on. As well we might wonder, given the extremes of weather we’re seeing in lots of other places. I’m a bit of a weather geek, probably because I was a pilot for a few years (during my stint in the U.S. Air Force), and weather is one of the major things you learn about and worry about as a pilot. I took a class in climatology long ago during my preparation for teaching social studies, and that added an edge to my interest in what is one of the most engaging and complex aspects of life on the planet. So, I probably pay more attention to stories about weather, and the actual stuff going on in the atmosphere around me, than most folks.

Which brings me to the real subject here:

hat is going on?

While we’re sitting down here enjoying a fairly mild summer, the folks out in Oregon where I once lived are experiencing heat waves, drought and vicious, terrifying forest fires fueled by the drought and heat. All the northwest is suffering record heat, billions of organisms in the ocean along the northwest coast are dying, and forest fires are raging out of control.

The largest of the Oregon fires is said to be creating its own weather, the heat causing cloud formation and wind. Its smoke is traveling across the continent, polluting the air in New York City. Hundreds of fires are going on from California to near the Arctic Circle, and the firefighting infrastructure is overwhelmed. The consequences of all this seems guaranteed to be dire, thought we don’t yet have an idea of the extent of it.

At the same time, floods are ravaging populations in Asia and other areas of the world, as well as in the U.S. The warming water all around the world (most alarmingly to me right here in the Gulf of Mexico) are giving rise to surges of nasty bacteria that eat humans. (Maybe related, maybe not, but yet another alarming development surfacing as we begin to learn to cope with the COVID pandemic, is a number of strains of resistant fungi in hospital and nursing home environments.)

How can all these diverse and seemingly contradictory phenomena be explained? One of the basic things that I learned about weather is that all the various weather phenomena are powered by heat. It creates the airflow that moves everything around and carries water up into the atmosphere to fall down again as precipitation, and it interacts with the earth’s rotation to create the destructive storms that seem to also be on the increase in recent years. Heat is literally the engine powering everything that happens in the atmosphere.

And, of course, all the data shows that the earth and its atmosphere are heating up. So as there is more heat, even an amount of heat that creates a few degrees of increase in average temperature, all the extremes are pushed further and further. This is the simple, easily understood fact at the basis of the climate science behind global warming as a threat to the stability of our climate. There’s a lot more to the science than that, I’m pretty sure, but that much of it I can understand without being an expert.

That is why even the cold-weather storms and record cold temperatures don’t prove that global warming isn’t happening. They are the result of the extremes of up and down increasing. It’s a simple formula: more heat produces more extreme weather.

Maybe, as the climate-change deniers would say, we don’t have enough data or understanding of the complexities to know what the root causes of this heating up are, and certainly there are a lot of forces interacting there, including the likelihood that we’re still coming out of the last ice age. But we do understand that some things that we are doing are making the situation worse. We need to stop doing those things as expeditiously as possible. Maybe we can’t change the course of this overall process, but, if we can slow it, maybe we’ll have time to prepare to deal with the worst consequences of it.

As a father and grandfather, I reel at the prospects of a degraded natural environment for my progeny, indeed for the human race as a whole. As the natural world suffers, so do we. Our quality of life, the quality of our health and well-being, the quality of our relationships, even the quality of our spiritual lives is directly and materially affected by the conditions of the rest of the world.

We must begin to make choices that reflect these realities. We neglect and deny them at our own peril.

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18. Therapy…

[This is the beginning of the entry in the Pages section titled 18. Therapy and the Wall, about my continuing Zen practice and beginning therapy, a visit to the Vietnam Wall and writing about my Vietnam experiences.]

The long journey that led me to take vows as a Buddhist at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in 1993 had taught me a lot, but the depression at the heart of my emotional/mental state seemed pretty resistant to the meditation and the vows and anything else I was doing.


I was moody and angry, and I wasn’t easy to get along with for my wife and kids. I think the meditation helped me feel better about things, but it didn’t really seem to be helping how I interacted with my family. I think I yelled at my middle school students a lot, as well!


It somewhat seems like it should have been a no-brainer for me to figure out what was going on, considering the traumatic nature of my whole Vietnam experience, which I’ve written about extensively on my other blog, A War Journal, though I’ve only briefly mentioned it in this narrative. That experience and the recent death of my father were both still unresolved for me, but it took me awhile to realize how all that was eating away at me and making it hard for me to relate to life and other people.


I though I had packed it all away in some locked trunk in the depths of my mind.


Eventually, things just got intolerable I suppose, and my wife began to push me to do something, get therapy, take drugs — anything to make it better. We argued a lot, and I always felt that I didn’t know what it was that was wrong.
I went on anti-depressants, which I didn’t really like, and which maybe helped some, but they didn’t seem to fix things either. It was a constant struggle for all of us.


Somewhere in there, my wife’s father, Dr. Pisacano, suggested that therapy would be a good option. I’m not really sure how long it took me to act on that suggestion, given the resistance that I had to letting go of control.
But at some point, I gave in. I had my first session of therapy with Susan in October of 1997. According to my journal, which Susan recommended I resume seriously, I felt better right away, just for having made the decision to start.


It was a long and arduous path, because I had really buried a lot in the past 25-plus years. I was in therapy, at varying levels of frequency, for about five years.

[To read the entire entry, just go to the Page listed in the left-hand column as 18. Therapy and The Wall.]

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My way-finding

The Pages section of this blog ( which show up as the numbered titles in the left panel) is mostly the narrative of my way-finding… the process, halting and flawed as it was, by which I came to finally find my way to acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings as the best fit for some kind of guidance for my very crazy life. This is a work in progress, and I’m about to begin work on the next chapter in the story, so I’m looking back over what I’ve written so far.

The story attempts to explain how someone with a very Baptist background – my grandfather and great grandfather were both Baptist ministers – came to be an avowed Buddhist. Along the way, I relate some of the crazier bits of my life journey and throw in some ideas about what a Buddhist meditation practice looks like.

Reading back over it I came across this section that gives something of the flavor of the narrative. I’ve been trying to be brutally honest and gain some perspective on the whole thing for myself… which I suppose is the actual reason for doing it in the first place:

I thought at the time that I was truly trying to make things work, but the perspective of the years, the experience on the cushion and in life since, have taught me the truth: I was completely consumed by, not just my passion, but by my addiction to self. I think that I must have convinced myself, – and thought I convinced others – using all the deep thinking and fancy words that I had come to rely on, that I was open and kind and compassionate and deeply concerned about deeply important things… and such bullshit on and on as I can hardly even bear to go back and read in my journal!

But the truth is, I was just very self-absorbed and ego-driven, very blind to the truths about myself, very alienated from life and other human beings, extremely ignorant about the causes of my own suffering and the degree to which I was inflicting suffering on all those around me.

In short, I was where most people are before allowing a little light in, but with an extra added dose of over-intellectualized self-righteousness!

I wish I could say that my arrival in Eugene – know locally as The Green Hole – precipitated a sea change in my attitudes and behaviors and I began a serious quest for Enlightenment.

Unfortunately, it took a while longer before light began to dawn in my life.

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Acceptance

What is the real point of a meditation practice? What is the purpose of any kind of activity intended to develop insight, liberation, enlightenment or just deeper understanding of life?

There are probably as many answers to those questions as there are “spiritual paths” or practice methodologies. But I’m trying to push through to some essentials, some underlying basics, some answer that is pragmatic and practical and doesn’t depend on path or method. My recent experience with things falling apart in my life–and how I dealt with that–have me thinking that a very basic thing that my efforts have done for me is to help me be prepared when things come crashing down.

After some years of varied meditation practice and other efforts at grappling with big questions, including working with a teacher on a regular basis, I have realized that there’s not some kind of ultimate goal, some kind of flashing magic experience that will open doors of understanding so deep that nothing disturbs me. It’s just a matter of relying on the experiences and teachings that have accumulated over these years to help me know how to deal with what comes up, whatever that is.

What this most recent crash, this falling apart, has shown me is that acceptance is the key element.

About a week into the crash, which left me alone with my thoughts, memories, tears and depression every day, I tried to sort out why, exactly, I felt so crazy. What I came up with more or less guided me through the next weeks of that ordeal, and though it wasn’t a whole lot of help in making it less painful, it did help me navigate it, survive it, and be open to resolving the issues that led to the crash when that became a possibility.

I learned a lot through it all, and I hope I can share some of that in this venue. The key realization of the breakthrough that helped me find a way forward–which in the beginning seemed like an impossibility–were understanding why I felt so crazy. I realized that most of my agony was because I was resisting and angry about the whole situation.

I was resisting what was happening because I didn’t want it to be happening, and I didn’t want to feel any of the feelings I was going through. And I was angry that it was happening and out of my control. Nothing I could do could make me feel any better about the situation.

It seemed as if I was just going to be sad and hopeless and pathetic for the rest of my life because I had become dependent on others for my emotional stability.

On that breakthrough evening, I realized that the only way to move on was to stop resisting. As much as I hated the thought of “giving up” on things getting better, I realized that I needed to move to–at least begin the movement toward–accepting that this was my life and that I was responsible for my own mental/emotional health and sanity. I had already moved past being angry at anyone else, but as I wrote in my journal that night, I needed to “truly get over being angry” and stop thinking that someone was gonna fix it.

What my Zen practice and other meditation gave me at this point was the understanding that I could embrace this sadness and pain and nauseating depression as just another emotional state no better nor worse than any other. Suddenly all those years of sitting on the cushion, walking and chanting and reading about how it’s all the same snapped into clear relief. Could I really accept that notion?

Well, I didn’t really want to. I wanted to think that if my suffering was big enough, I would be pitied, and it would stop. But I realized that I just needed to be the Zen I had tried to be all these years, to be in it fully and accept that maybe it just takes this much pain to push me through to that state of enlightened mind that could accept what is, “the present moment,” as the teachers say.

Not that suddenly it was all better. Far from it. I spent quite a few weeks more of up and down and “railing against God,” as the Christians say. My depression was still strong most of the time, and I was lost in hog wallows of self-pity a lot of the time. But things never got so bad I couldn’t function, and eventually I began to find a tolerable level of emotional calm.

In addition, I began to have some realizations that advanced my practice itself, as I bit by bit began to understand how to apply that notion of acceptance to what was going on in my life. I began to see that what had happened could be understood as a really big lesson in impermanence, that idea of anicca /emptiness/ shunyatta that I had studied and professed to be pursuing understanding of for all these years. A really big lesson. And the pain as energy for penetrating to the insight of what it means to say that it’s all impermanent.


I had to plow through a whole lot of guilt, self-blame, self-loathing and the deep sense that I just deserved the pain I was getting. Instant karma.

I began to really relate to the old Elmore James song that I had long loved, “Musta Done Somebody Wrong.” I’ve always loved the blues, and now they began to take on new meaning for me. Robert Johnson’s line about “like consumption, killing me by degrees,” was a favorite when I played guitar out on the front porch. But I was slowly working my way through it. As I look at my journal entries, I see gradual progress in understanding.

My actual sitting practice had somewhat declined in intensity over the past few years (that’s another story), but I began to sit daily and seriously again during this incident. In the beginning, I was using sitting as an escape from depression and loneliness. At some point, I had a breakthrough about that as well.

A few weeks into the period of despair, I began re-reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, which I had read many years ago and appreciated. Her analysis and advice was very helpful, and as I began to seriously meditate again, I realized that my approach to meditation was flawed.
I realized that, rather than using meditation as a distraction from the depression and pain, I needed to embrace the pain as a positive thing because it’s pushing me to get serious on the cushion. And to just sit and seriously be with the sitting as what this is all about. In my journal, I articulated it this way:

“…Approach the meditation as what I need to be doing, not as a distraction or escape from the pain and discomfort of the situation, and seeing that why all the other things—TV, music, even reading—just kinda make me feel sick and I don’t want to do them, is because I need to do the sitting and they are just a distraction from that.”

(Journal, June 7, 2021)

This realization opened me up to vast possibilities of increased understanding, compassion and tenderness.