ken-zen ichi nyo

Bill McKibben wrote the amazingly insightful and equally terrifying The End of Nature.

This excerpt came from his next book, entitled Enough; Staying Human in an Engineered Age published by Times Books.  Bill is clearly a smart, thoughtful, centered advocate for the human spirit coexisting in the natural world.  I suspect a couple hours in his company as he talks to a group would be enlightening and inspirational. 

CHAPTER ONE   Too Much

For the first few miles of the marathon, I was still fresh enough to look around, to pay attention. I remember mostly the muffled thump of several thousand pairs of expensive sneakers padding the Ottawa pavement-an elemental sound, like surf, or wind. But as the race wore on, the herd stretched into a dozen flocks and then into a long string of solitary runners. Pretty soon each of us was off in a singular race, pitting one body against one will. By the halfway point, when all the adrenaline had worn off, the only sound left was my breath rattling in my chest. I was deep in my own private universe, completely absorbed in my own drama. 

Now, this run was entirely inconsequential.  Read the rest of this entry »

So how does one approach coming back, and equally so, moving on.

When young, the body is Mission Control while the brain tags along and hopefully sponges up all there is to learn from the journeys.  In time, the mind becomes the training partner of the body, not setting the pace, but at least in stride.

Then as we age, and the body, in turn(s), relies on the mind to prompt the body, based upon years of experience so that we can be in the right place, make the right moves, and stay in the game.  That’s when the teeter begins to totter the other way.

So the hard line to cross is not the next finish line, but the next starting line.  At what point should I make stubbornness step down?  Read the rest of this entry »

    The weather ’round here this time of year is spotty: spots of rain, spots of sun, spots of warm, cold, wind, gray, all patched together like a teenager’s jeans.  The local wisdom is “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes, it’ll change.”  I suspect that line is said in many places, but it sure works in the Ohio Valley in spring.          

   Even though the forecast last weekend called for thunderboomers on both days, thankfully Saturday and Sunday instead bloomed brilliant blue and stayed that way, with some high, puffy clouds added late in the afternoon to add an artistic quality to the skies. Fair weather being our friend, the St. Mary Cub Scouts and their posses (thirty+ folks in all) took on the Little Miami River.           

     The river had been at flood stage a couple days before, so the crew at Morgan’s Canoe decided the water was still too high for canoes or kayaks and wisely shuttled us into the large rafts, ideally suited for nine paddlers per craft.    

      I’ll attest that watching a pack of 9 and 10 year old boys try to synchronize their paddling is akin to watching a drunken centipede walking Spanish down the hall; but on this day, the strong current was more of a deciding factor in our steering than was the erratic and intermittent paddle strokes.           

     As long as we avoided the strainers (i.e., the trees whose roots had been eroded by the high waters and toppled into the river, their branches then combing and catching the unwary), it really didn’t matter if we unintentionally covered more distance side to side rather than upstream or down.  It was a splendiforous affair.         

    Hawks shadowed us at times, their wide wingspan  silhouettes and near motionless thermal-surfing made them resemble kites attached to strings as they floated overhead. We didn’t see many turtles as the high waters had submerged most of their favorite sunning logs.  But there was a family of duckling that raced alongside for the last quarter mile or so…and the little fuzzy kids entranced the boys.            

     The best part was that for over five hours, these boys were unplugged from electronic anything and plopped down in the midst of natural beauty.   Read the rest of this entry »

This from the man who brought you TrekAlong - we love Travis 

Idea to sell books via cell phone wins Birmingham Startup contest as reported in Birmingham Business Journal - by Jimmy DeButts

      A Birmingham entrepreneur’s plan to make books available via mobile phone was selected as the top business idea introduced in the second installment of Birmingham Startup. Travis Bryant’s vision to provide small and medium-sized publishers with an alternate avenue for distribution beat four other entrepreneurs who competed over two weekends to launch their own business.  

Bryant, who works for Birmingham’s Menasha Ridge Press, said making novels available digitally was inspired by seeing publishers holding onto manuscripts with no quick way to distribute them.”I’ve been looking for a print-to-digital option,” Bryant said. “This will be the first solution. Birmingham Startup helped me craft a business-to-business mindset. We’re sitting on the content. We can respect the authors and publishers and get it out there.”

Birmingham Startup is a collection of professionals who gathered over consecutive weekends listening to business proposals, helping entrepreneurs shape their business model and exiting the second weekend with a new company. The first Startup was held last fall. Finalists presentations were held at Burr & Forman LLP on May 12 and were judged by Innovation Depot CEO Susan Matlock, Jemison Investments CEO Grey Wood and DAXKO CEO David Gray.

The last month was certainly one of reaching many goals. Yet what martial arts training reinforces with its Zen underpinnings is the concept of balance, that within every victory is a bit of loss, within the dark is a spot of light.  

The following is from Clearing Away Clouds; Nine Lessons for Life from the Martial Arts by Stephen Fabian: 

The soft and yielding yin must be balanced by a hard, forceful yang.  Patience must be balanced by perseverance, the active principle of continually putting one foot before the other.  Inevitably, you will stumble while on your Way.” p. 125    

As the pace picked up and I didn’t take the time to metaphorically catch my breath, sooner rather than later my body stopped responding to the internal call of more, now, faster, harder, just once more… After fifty trips around the sun, you’d think I’d know this by now.  So when my back bucked and my knee buckled, anxious to maintain the mind-body balance while recuperating, I’ve read a lot to keep up the engagement quotient. 

Here are a few passages that took me back to playing fields of a lifetime ago and the search for the coach who cares more about the kids than winning.  Michael Lewis, the wonderful author of many award-winning titles, went back to his high school in New Orleans (the same school from which the Manning boys hailed), to re-connect with his former baseball coach as controversy surrounded him.  His words capture it better than mine: Coach; Lessons on the Game of Life by Michael Lewis 

HE WILL NEVER BE A TOUGH COMPETI-TOR.  HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH BEING UNCOMFORT-ABLE: quote from Lou Pinella p 54 

“By ‘it’ he did not mean the importance of winning or even, exactly, of trying hard. … ‘It’ was the importance of battling one’s way through all the easy excuses life offered for giving up.” p 54 

“Fitz’s office wasn’t the office of a coach who wanted others to know of his many triumphs.  There were no trophies or plaques, though he had won enough of them to fill five offices.  Other than a few old newspaper clips about his four children, now grown, there were few mementos.  What he did keep was books—lots of them.” p 55 

“…some of them will never understand the responsibility they have to their teams and themselves…He was running an organization that , like the Franciscan order or the Marine Corps, depended on a more difficult system of values than that of the greater society.” p 62 

“What it means to be a man was that you struggled against your natural instinct to run away from adversity.” p 77 

“We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone.  Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone.  Not how to win, though winning was wonderful.  Not even how to sacrifice.  He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure.  To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both.  What he knew—and I’m not sure he’d ever consciously thought it, but he knew it all the same—was that we’d never conquer the weaknesses within ourselves.  We’d never drive the worst of ourselves away for good.  We’d never win.  The only glory to be had would be in the quality of the struggle.” p 82-83 

“One of the goodies about athletics is you get to find out if you can stretch.  If you can get better.  But you got to push.” p 87 

“ ‘Do you really thing there’s any hope for this team?’ The question startled him into a new freshness.  He was alive, awake, almost well again. ‘Always,’ he said.  ‘You never give up on a team.  Just like you never give up on a kid.’  Then he pauses.  ‘But it’s going to take some work.’ ” p 90

There were two particular intangibles, not noticed in the first half, that made these individual and team contests so memorable. And as with everything else in my knucklehead life, they run counter to what I perceive others are getting out of them. Or at least counter to what I hear on the news or read in the paper.

What seems to be reported on most in terms of college basketball is the office betting pool. Maybe this year that will go away as all the #1 seeds advanced to the Final Four, but probably not because I think this was a dodge story anyway.  It’s not the presence of the illicit water cooler pool that’s important — that’s just the March Madness version of a fantasy fan league compressed into three weeks time. 

Instead it seems the real story is the occasional David knocking off a Goliath. And “Foul!” cries the hardcore hardcourt zealot who picked G’town all the way, “What real fan could have seen that upset coming.” he laments as he tears up his picks, “except unbelievably lucky Betty down in accounting who picked her teams based on whether her cat blinked when she read the brackets aloud.”

And flipping to sport #2 - what’s most reported in ballet? Nuttin’.  Ballet never gets reported on, at least not in the mainstream media.  Pas de deux and plies never garner many inches in the daily fish wrap or snag any minutes on the air.  And if I have to renounce my membership in the manly-man club after seeing these versatile and talented and tenacious performers, so be it, because that’s just as wrong as the lip service given to the women’s basketball.  It seems most games during the season are played in relatively empty gyms, with most of the fans in attendance being relatives or dorm roommates.  The women’s college tournament is their three weeks in the sun and they couldn’t be more deserving.  

So what are the instrinsic qualities that make both the basketball games and the ballet so compelling?  It wasn’t, frankly, the final scores for the former, nor the tony setting for the latter.  Thankfully, there wasn’t any sense of celebrity being attached to either; heaven knows we’ve all suffered enough of that blather.

Instead, what was so remarkable in these performances, at least to this observer, was the precision of the movements, the clean lines and clear sweeps of legs and arms and bodies being flung through space in an exact arc from point A to point B, uninterrupted by any opposing physics.  

Not being of the shiny shoe social set, I could sit there in the dark and just be astounded by the moves.  Reminiscent of ice skating and gymnastics, the performers even seemed to be the same body type.  Think tiny ectomorph — little lithe thin people with incredibly strong toes.  But I have no doubt they’d whup butt in virtually any pick-up contest where there was a premium on dexterity and stamina.  

Without a horse in the race, I was the perfect spectator - watching in wonder. Here’s where my twin moments of illumination came in… But, there’s the buzzer, folks - we’re out of time in regulation.  

Stay tuned–there’s lots more action to come in this one.  

On page A6 of this morning’s New York Times, the caption of the photo appearing there reads: “A police officer tackled a man at the Olympic torch relay in Paris on Monday.  Some French athletes may be under review for seeming to join in the protest.”  The issue at hand is real and important — human rights violations in China (home of this year’s Summer Olympiad and finish line for the torch relay). Every one of us should consider and draw his or her own opinion on the matter — to each their own, as the saying goes.

Aside from that weighty debate, on a less serious, in fact, semi-delightful front, if you look at the photo for a few moments, you’ll notice that all the policemen accompanying  the torch relay members are wearing in-line skates.  Voila - an ingenious way to keep up with the runners carrying the torch.  Also, the wee wheels give them the ability to spurt ahead to intercept confrontations, as obviously needed.

But before any of us think this was an easy assignment, notice too that they’re skating over a cobblestone street. That’ll loosen a few fillings in their teeth by day’s end.

Maybe the escorts have been on rollerblades for years now and this is just the first time I’ve noticed.  Regardless, kudos to the smart folks who thought up this novel way to maintain the cavalcade.  One has to also admire the stylish, seemingly tailored jumpsuits (the cuffs of which snugly and smartly fit the boot), of the gendarmerie - even in moments of conflict, the French are always on the cutting edge of fashion.

I work for a publisher, actually I work for a couple publishers: Menasha Ridge Press and Clerisy Press, with offices in Birmingham and Cincinnati, respectively.  Great place(s), even greater people and books.  I’ve worked in book publishing for 25+ years now, and this is the best yet.  Even better, the potential’s there to be amazing.  More on this in posts to come.

When you work in the world of books, there is always something to read: manuscripts of works in progress, magazine articles that might be developed into books, e-mail, books we’ve published in the past and new books which are just hitting the market.   With all that available, the way we play hooky is to read other publishers’ book.  

My current guilty pleasure is A Leaky Tent is a Piece of Paradise; 20 Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World, published by Sierra Club Books, edited by Bonnie Tsui.  Reading one essay takes (relatively) a smidgen of time.  This literary voyeurism I rationalize as taking a one-a-day vitamin—a quick shot of a new voice and/or a fresh take on a familiar subject.

Yesterday, the piece just blew me away. Written by Nathanael Johnson, and entitled “Putting In,” he reflects on what he learned as a rafting guide.  He does a masterful job of splicing the retelling of one trip with a perspective gained from the amalgamation of all his experiences on the river.     

I offer up these quotes with reverence and respect – coming across his musings felt as lucky as finding a gold nugget in the same river he’s rafted down, Is it because coincidentally, I’m searching for answers and meaning in the same areas?  Is it being thankful for his and his publisher’s willingness to shares them?  Or is the phenomena that happens on those rare occasions when you saved up all your shekels and bought a new or used car/clothes/bike and suddenly it seems there’s a million people surrounding you driving/wearing/riding the same thing? 

Regardless, following are some of the passages of N. Johnson’s work that are too good not to broadcast.  I suspect that I’m slightly botching the rules of grammar here – our editor, Jack Heffron, could surely correct me as to whether this should be presented in block quotes or otherwise, how to handle paragraph breaks within the original text as then carried over to the quote, how to reference page numbers, etc.  But it’s the middle of the night as I write this and I strongly suspect he’d not warm to my asking relatively minor stylistic questions.   So here you are—enjoy:  

I was proud of this work, of being capable, of being part of such a crackerjack team—each member knowing his job so well that we could work together silently.  I think this was also why I had come to be a raft guide.  I was tired of being a student and wanted to be useful.  It wasn’t enough to be a standout in the gerrymandered, inflated ways all high school kids are standouts.   

It’s a rare thing to be truly tested.  And at seventeen, I needed to see what I was made of.  These days, people who are wrapped up in graduate school and internships can reach thirty before they have the chance to be a professional.  I knew that I couldn’t want that long to know.   p. 127 

More than one guide has since told me that there are two types of people in the world.  When I was working in Alaska one summer during a college, a guide explained his dualist conception of universal order using the opposing terms guide and wad.  And this sort of philosophy made perfect sense to me.  I had already begun to fear that the plasticity of my childhood was disappearing, and that my life was hardening to the form of the lackluster middle-class landscape that surrounded me…I’d sworn that I would struggle against the forces that would gently prod me down the path to mediocrity.  And I knew my time was running out.  The mortar was setting.”  p. 132  

I liked the idea of ‘putting in.’  Sailors go out to sea and come into harbors, but for guides, the river is in.  It’s home.  p. 133 

Of all the perks of guiding, this deepening of the perception satisfied me most.  In the time since I’d first come to the river, the rapids had changed from illegible spray and tumult to an ordered set of signs, indicators of the hydraulic forces at work.

This sharp-focus world, so drenched in meaning, stands in stark contrast to what I remember of high school.  The terrain of my adolescence was pretty boring.  In that world, it was unclear what, if anything, was at stake.  There were no constraints, no limits to push against.  Technology had freed us from the constraints of nature, providing climate control, cheap energy, and abundant food.  As for the constraints of morality, they seemed laughably vaporous.

Anything could be justified, and they tyranny of this unrelenting freedom left me without anything solid that I could use to distinguish up from down, success from failure.  In zero gravity, muscles atrophy.  And without use, the senses go dull.  Without unbreakable laws, there are no needs, and without needs, perception fades.

The river’s rules, on the other hand, are absolute.  If you mess up, you drown.  When I went to the river, I exchanged a world without necessity for one where the need for food, the need to read water, and the need for executing a strong J stroke at just the right moment demanded real attention.  And with such demand came a sharpening of perception.”  pp. 135-136 

I thought growing up would mean earning a place in a sort of riverside Valhalla, where life was full of glory and brotherhood and honor and righteous rebellion.  But at some point, I realized that I was standing in the shoes of the men Id idolized and I hadn’t passed into another realm.  Instead, I was still looking at the same world through the same eyes.  It’s a world that offers no godly invulnerability to river runners, but metes out death. Alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies, and arthritic shoulders to guides and wads alike.  And I’d say guides suffer more than there share of all the above.

I suffer only from arthritic shoulders, but the river gave me more than my share in return for this offering of pain.  The simple joy of those summers would have been bargain enough, but in that time, as water and sun seeped through my skin to cure my hide, a little faith seeped in as well.  Even in this age so skeptical of certainty, my time on the river gave me faith in a few undeniable truths: that there’s pleasure in work well done, that the universe runs on a handful of simple rules, that most restrictions are self-made and false, that the mind requires contact with the unbreakable laws—those prescribe by nature—and that these laws serve as a whetstone for consciousness.

More important, the river had sharpened my perception until I could see through my own childhood fantasies.  And though this disillusionment wasn’t what I’d expected, it was ultimately the thing I’d been looking for all along.  The river had shown me how to grow up.

A bounty of spectator sports this past weekend.  Along with millions of other viewers,  we spent some tube time watching the NCAA college basketball tournaments (F&M).  Plus, friends had kindly given us their tickets to the Cincinnati Ballet’s performance of “A Thousand and One Nights.”   

Not unexpectedly, the breadth of athleticism, balance, and grace under pressure was fantastic.  What was surprising, though, were the similarities between the two sports (or actually three, but more on that later), which began as  counterpoint, then morphed into counterpart.  

There are plenty of soapbox sermons by pundits who wax long-winded with their compelling,  convoluted, contradictory, and cornball views about inequality between men’s and women’s sports, as well as the virus of professional skullduggery in the amateur arena.  Surely too much time and empty oratory has already been spent on this, so I’ll not add any wind  to the debate.  

As those on the hardwood know, you can say whatever you want, but the only thing that really matters is what happens when the whistle blows, the curtain goes up and the lights go on.  Everything else is just crowd noise. 

What wowed me then, and has stayed with me since, was the sheer beauty of it: the individuals’ speed and jumping ability, the teams’ timing and coordination, and the level of concentration, body control, and competitiveness exhibited in all three venues. For anyone who has competed (even at levels three or four notches below), we intuitively ache when recalling the extraordinary amount of practice needed to develop those skills and the countless hours of training required to build that stamina.  Just watching the moves play out in front of us, I could feel the pounding heart, the heavy legs and the burning lungs of hours in gyms gone by. 

And yet, somehow, they made it all seem effortless.  Each time, watching one of the performers elevate from the floor and seemingly hang in mid-air — he or she moved like a shadow cast against a wall, weightless and waiting there, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, then touching down again, almost without a sound, before bounding away.All we mortals need to do to gain perspective on how hard it is to be anti-gravitational is to simply jump.  Or try to.  Just once.  Humbling.  And they did it again, and again, and again. 

When the coach, or the artistic director (and the coaches are indeed artistic directors as well)  then melds these remarkable talents into a team, endlessly practicing the cuts and the picks, the cues and the pirouettes, and synching it all together so fluidly — it makes the rest of us feel like the beasts in the field.  

So we’re thankful for the opportunity to glimpse these gifts…and to have our hearts lifted as well.  There surely was a lot of ice and tape applied when the action paused…and we’re only at halftime. 

Call it cabin fever…or maybe it’s just advancing age.  Whatever it is, the jones for getting back outside after four months of cold, dark, and sloppy is undeniable.  I suspect that deep down at the cellular level, this is a call of nature–to push up the activity meter after pseudo-hibernation.  All I know is that it’s time to burn off the winter wait [sic]. 

 The streets in our neighborhood are filled with folks essentially duct-taping on extra layers so they romp around in the elements.  On an given early morning, you’ll find a dozen runners lapping the slumbering masses still tucked in their beds.  In the evenings, packs of 20 to 40 move out down the sidewalk.  Most of that organized activity is due to the success of the Team in Training program that Bob Roncker’s Running Spot, the local independent running shop, hosts in preparation for next month’s Flying Pig Marathon. 

It’s therapuetic to see folks proactively finding ways to ward off the winter blues.  The Bard tagged April as the cruelest month, but personally, February and March have always represented Mr. & Ms. Nasty, the couple who just won’t leave the holiday party. 

This year has been especially trying as the midsection of the country has been besieged by wacky weather in the last month–blizzards bookmarking the errant balmy day–with Midwest monsoons drenching us on a weekly basis.  Yesterday it was raining so hard…again…that we could barely see the spire on the DeSales cathedral which is a short city block away. 

 What seasoned sloggers know is that it’s really not the cold  (because once you’re outside and moving, unless you’re wearing boxers and flip-flops, you’re warm enough, but it’s the inertia that saps your spirit.  The slush and the muck and the gray can be overcome with a dollop of energy - but it just seems next-to-impossible to muster the mojo sometimes.  Yet once you’ve girded yourself in terms of clothes and fortitude, you feel like a kid again, splashing through the rain (beware of the year’s new crop of potholes, though, which is turn your ankle), having snowflakes slide around you.  It’s all such a delicious re-charge that those 30 minutes fuel the whole day.

The sweet part, that little sliver that keeps us from going completely crazy, though, is that each day there’s another couple minutes of daylight, and that, my friend, is enough hope to hang your hat, or helmet, on.   The other gift is when there’s an hour of spare time on the weekend to squeeze in a ride or a hike.  As Doug Hall (one of the smartest and most inspiring people I know) always says, “Get up, get out, and get going.”   Hopefully this weekend will present at least an hour of weather relief; if so, that window will be gratefully received like the gift it truly is.  Off we go…