You Can Carve
All You Want

"...even if they manage to avoid the karma of good deeds, bad deeds, and inactivity, if they deceive others with words, their meditation won't be true. It's like carving a turd to look like sandalwood. You can carve all you want, but you can't make it smell like incense." – from Stonehouse, Zen Talks











Aug. 8


We took Cty. Rd F from Fish Creek to Bailey's Harbor, nothing more than a fifteen minute drive through the inland farms and wildflower fields. All the edges of Door are full of every imaginable business, restuarant, cafe, park for observation, but the inland is still a throwback to old times where you can use your imagination again and wonder what it must have been like to farm a piece of land that was, only a few miles away, completely surrounded by Lake Michigan. This is what you find out once at Bailey's Harbor. The Ridges Sanctuary is not something you see often, a preserved and finely trailed (accessible) swatch of land that shows us the various receding shorelines of the lake, beginning somewhere around 1400 to current day. Every new shoreline had left its mark and its residue and has left now terraces called swales – a sort of flat ring of land parallelting today's lake and which grows in a variety of flaura and fauna. We stopped along a boardwalk bench at sandy swale, one of those of a series of four, and looked out onto a brilliant field of high rising grasses, not a single invasive in sight. It trailed off in the distance much like a pond might, its own edges not quite visible, surrounded by the foreignly beatiful and layered Tamarack trees which must feed well near water. Of throwbacks – and who doesn't need to experience things that they have never quite seen before – we get a chance to see a Boreal Forest thriving and virtually untouched. The contrast of this purity, this history by green, tells us immediately a story of encroachment, of course, for, as mentioned, the rest of Door is encroachment, the very essence of it. What is it that works over the mind here? We had just come off the Wintergreen Trail, lined by ground cover Juniper, more Tamaracks, Blackberry bramples and sedges a few feet down. The deeper we got into Wintergreen the less we could hear the traffic. If you make it this deep, the phone in your pocket begins to seem like a disturbance. I believe the mind needs a sort of counter balance at all times in our age. If we are not stunned by what we are doing away from the phone, then we will grab for the phone. The silence here at the Sanctuary, the pristine diversity is very much like walking through a painting of rare beauty and therefore gathers our attention, silences that spinning that always working over us the rest of our lives. I consider it for art and would be inspired to make my feeble attempts at painting. Later in the day, driving away from here, I can actually sense the magnetic beauty of the swales fade some. Could I live here? Could I live in among this natural bath? Love does come in a hundred forms. We spend most of our days thinking it can only come by one form, that of another, a mate, and the conversation and intimacy that comes along. All the while we walk among a earth that constitutes virtually all of our existence. All of it. Everywhere, all the time, bathing us, not asking a thing but to exist. We don't even have to think of it as necessarily giving. It just is. But because our selves have evolved along with this such scenes, we may (and should be I'd say) attracted to it. Instead we live as though the swales and other parcels like it, are something of a traveling minstrel show, only to be loved here and there like visitors. We might just as well uproot our lives, move to a swale, learn to love again all. What would happen then?


1.
I left all my things at my city home
A bed a couch every little kitchen utensel
And filled the car with essential clothing
Then headed out for the town of Fish Creek
With a certain frame of mind nothing mattered
Not the fifty years behind or decade or two to come
I found it a good omen that the sky was cerulean
And that I found my little cottage ten steps from the Lake