mining for good: the act of adaptation

"The Buddha can be found in the machine too" -- my favorite line from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author is responding to the popular sentiment that whatever is spiritual in the world is only found in nature and that the creations of man crudely cover over and destroy all that is good and holy in this world. I found the statement above particularly appealing because it challenged the perspective that I had held for as long as I could remember.

When I was nine years old, my family moved from the woods of northern Minnesota to a bungalow in a Los Angeles suburb. I wasn't happy about the move. All I wanted was to go back home to the trees and the lake, and my grandparents and my cousins and aunts and uncles. But we didn't go back; I stayed in LA for the next ten years. The entire time, I pined for what I had lost, looking back, looking back. The pain of this memory was made more accute by vacations back to the place that I always considered home and my natural habitat. I never felt like I belonged to the city of angels in any way, nor that it belonged to me in any way. We remained strangers, and I must admit, I felt oppressed by this alien world.

Still, Los Angeles was not hell, and I looked, unconsciously, for the Buddha in the machine. What I found was surfing, the church, and some good friends. The surfing that is undeniably a part of Los Angeles became not only a refuge and a joy for me; it became a lifestyle, a force that would shape my identity for years to come. I was no longer an alien in a world of asphalt and smog, displaced from distant forest lands -- I was a surfer. The smell of surf wax and salt water and the posters that covered my walls soothed me more than I even realized at the time. In churches I found idealism that resonated with me; I found community; and I found people who were kind and gentle and genuinely trying to be good human beings. Finally, I had the great joy of close friendships all through those years -- I always had people close to me to sustain me and share life with me. I will always be greatful for that.

LA is not home for me, has never been home for me, never could be home for me, yet I found much there that was good. It is this goodness amidst that which I find undesirable that makes me want to explore the idea of adaptation. I vaguely recall reading somewhere a definition of intelligence that said that its mark is the ability to adapt to new situations. I like this. We adapt; we evolve; discomfort forces us to grow, not only by surviving hardship, but by discovering beauty in places that we never would have thought to look. In doing this, we find parts of ourselves that we would not have otherwise found. We have to dig for good sometimes, to mine it out of even harsh environments, because it is there.

Mining for good has not been an easy lesson for me. I have spent much of my life looking back over my shoulder to places and circumstances that I have liked better than whatever circumstances I may have found myself in at the time. One mistake I've made repeatedly is trying to force a new environment into the shape of another environment. I still wanted to be a surfer in Arkansas. The closest I got was skimboarding a flooded golf course. The tragedy is that in stubbornly clinging to the treasured pieces of past environments, I missed some of the beauty and opportunities of Arkansas. I remember now a friend inviting me to try whitewater kayaking with him. I wasn't interested -- it wasn't surfing. I regret that now.

Years later, when I moved to North Carolina, I took up whitewater kayaking, precisely because I can kayak here -- it's an inherent part of this geographical environment, whereas surfing is three hours away and terribly inconsistent. I love kayaking; it meets some sort of primal need that is close to my soul. Through kayaking, I connect with my new environment intimately. Kayaking also opens up much of the country to me: before, I never wanted to live anywhere where I couldn't surf; now, I could live anywhere where I could surf or kayak.

The examples of surfing and kayaking are subjective, very personal to me, but I believe that there is a more universal principle underlying all of this. Namely, there is joy and light and goodness in every environment. Sometimes it is all around us; other times it is difficult to find, but if we actively dig for good, I cannot help but believe that we will discover positive adaptation.

Immediate Lessons from Nature

What is our relationship with the natural world today? I fear that many of us don't have much of a relationship to our natural environment anymore. Collectively, we seem to know so little about the geography, geology, topography, flora, fauna, and history of the places in which we live. Some of us let the natural world slip by largely un-noticed, a vague prettiness to be visited on occasion. Others have lost contact amidst the great business of daily existence. Many have never really had a chance to know the land because they have been raised in large, urban environments.
Please excuse the long preamble -- what I want to get to is this: what lessons has nature taught you? For me, the great presence of the natural world has always been water. Lakes, oceans, and rivers have been places that I have loved deeply. Lately, I think about water all the time. I think about whitewater. I live near the largest man-made whitewater course in the world (class II - IV rapids). The course is made of poured concrete and deliberately placed rocks and gates, yet the water that flows through the course is as alive and natural as water anywhere else, so I am learning from the water.
One of the great gifts that the water is giving me is the joy of failure: it is teaching me to embrace failure as more than an unfortunate necessity. The water has taught me that the most sure and direct way to find what I want is through failure. In concrete terms, when I paddle the course trying to avoid getting flipped, I am paddling in fear, hoping to avoid failure (and possible injury). When I do this, I progress very slowly, and ironically, the stiffness of fear makes me more vulnerable to getting flipped. Other days, I paddle with the intention of getting mauled by the waves -- on the best days, this is something devoid of fear; it is instead an opportunity for a kind of intimacy with the movement of the water. On those days when I embrace failure, I work through weaknesses and progress very quickly. By embracing failure, one side-steps fear.

religion and higher education

Here's a theory I've been kicking around for a few weeks:

Religion and university education play enormous roles in shaping individuals. A strong religious background tends to create a certain type of person. A university education tends to create a different type of person. A combination of the two seems to create a third type of person. Finally, the absence of either tends to create yet another type of person.

How strong do you think these factors are in shaping a person's identity? If you believe that there is any truth to the basic idea, how would you characterize each of the categories I listed above -- I'm interested in seeing how other people's perceptions compare with my own.

I know this is very clumsy, but I just wanted to throw something out there to get the ball rolling.

how deep the rabbit hole goes

Welcome, friends. This is an experiment that I'm starting. What I'm envisioning is a kind of cyber-tea, a place where we can post serious ideas that we find in books or films or in our heads and talk about them. I just finished reading a novel called Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell. One of the central themes of the novel is the idea that we can only come close to reality by laying our personal perspectives side by side with those of others, because reality is complex and layered. That's what I would like to do here.

I would like to talk about God, politics, literature, psychology, and whatever else may pertain to the human experience and the search for truth. I'm inviting a select few friends to start this to see how it goes.

So, what's on your mind?