[Image at right: the so-called “Big Tree” in Redwood National and State Park, California. My camera has a Panorama mode, which normally requires you to swing the camera from left to right, keeping the shutter open, to give you about a 180° field of view; I thought I’d experiment with doing a “vertical panorama,” swinging the camera — turned on its side — from treetop to base. (My phone’s camera has a Panorama mode, too, but it’s much harder to get it right with the phone.) Of course, with a subject this tall, what we call the “top” is a pretty arbitrary point in space… The tree, by the way, around 286 feet in height, is only the sixteenth tallest in the park. The tallest, at around 380 feet, is a tree named Hyperion — at a secret location somewhere within the huge park. Hyperion is actually in fact the tallest tree in the world.]
We’re in Reno, Nevada, today, the California leg of Road Trip 2021-22 behind us, and a couple thousand miles of eastward continent ahead. With luck, we’ll be able to unload the car — for at least a few months, anyhow — by September, somewhere in one of the East Coast states. The prospect makes me happy, which is slightly absurd: we’ve seen so many extraordinary things — shouldn’t I be sad to be imminently leaving all that behind?
Well, I don’t know… My Instagram account, such as it is, celebrates something I’ve been calling “the extraordinary commonplace.” (I don’t know where I picked up that phrase but I’m certain it can’t be original.) And I think that phrase may point to the source of my elation: if every day delivers to me remarkable, unfamiliar experiences, maybe it’s simply that I miss the unremarkable — the experience of opening my eyes and seeing the same things, at the same times, that I’ve been seeing them for years.
This all plays into the same general theme of my Friday posts here in recent week: how to be happy in a world which, well, seems to discourage happiness (to put it mildly). I found echoes of it in whiskey river entries of the past week, unsurprisingly. Echoes like this:
There Are Mornings
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
(Lisel Mueller [source])
…and this:
Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we’ve utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can, serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.
So, let us reflect what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities—warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful–happier.
(Dalai Lama XIV [source])
I encountered an echo, too, in a non-whiskey river source. This comes from a book which I’ve been reading, intermittently and a bit at a time, for probably the last four or five years — as I’ve puzzled over what it means (to me, to anybody) to be living now:
My dog, fully in possession of the Buddha nature, has some lessons for me about the sacred in the secular. He wants to go out twice a day, and I live in New Hampshire, where the winters are usually snowy and bitterly cold. I walk out on a clear, dark night. My dog shoves his snout deep into the snow, apparently catching the scent of a deer or a neighboring dog. I look up and see Orion brilliant against the dark blue-black of the sky. Coming out on a cold night I’m well aware of my earthly existence and yet I’m pulled out of myself into wonder, once again, at the brilliant stars. Who am I in this tremendous context, and what is my fate and what do I mean in the huge expanse of galaxies and multiple universes? My mind can’t hold the vast openness and complexity, and I can’t twist my imagination to fit myself into such a place. And yet, here I am with my dog, waiting for him to do his business in the snow that mirrors the Milky Way, one of the great mysteries of my existence. Orion’s two dogs, Major and Minor, are up there, too, probably taking similar advantage of the milky-white galaxy.
(Thomas Moore [source])
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