"WHERE IS YOUR HOME?!" the Zen master thumped his staff solidly against the floor and demanded, angrily this time, it seemed to the new student. After several tries to answer this "koan" – one of those non-logical questions given by teacher to student in the Rinzai branch of Zen – I did finally break through to a quiet ceasing of mental struggles during the week-long "Sesshin" retreat back in 1970. It was the type of answer that the Roshi was looking for, and both question and answer come back with value over the years.
I was just getting more seriously interested in Zen when another alternative presented herself, hitchhiking in to the freshly-established backroad New Mexico center. She "couldn't get her knees down" for the serious sitting position up on cushions and a pad, and neither of us proved very serious about her making that effort. We found a classic campout a half-hour's hike up a side canyon for a first wildwood home. A mountain lion, the only one I've ever heard, screamed from the cliff above one night like a woman being murdered.
Later we bought and remodeled and sold five houses in five years – me working weekends and evenings after a carpentry job – sheet rock dust in the soup, a bed on the kitchen floor for starts, that kind of thing. Home is where the heart is? Home is where the woman is – the basic nature of a man.
The remodeling money saved went to buy three acres of land in Colorado and put me through a summer course at scribed log-building, "Scandinavian style" in Canada. Absence made the hearts grow fonder. She came up after the course. We had a second honeymoon and I got a son out of the deal. Sure, I got the easy part o' that job.
Our son was born as the dream house was almost done. It was my design, and took a year of work with a single helper. Sweetest "big cabin" you ever saw! And the life! With a daughter born three years later.
I had the best house in the world. That's how I see it, and what I tell people along with how I'm travelling nine years now, my South American "Social security retirement plan." Life is about lessons, ain't it? We learn from everything, if we can. If we can't, surely we're about finished?
The Dream House – twenty-four by thirty-six, all wood inside beginning with the beautiful big logs hand-fitted, lofts at each end connected by an interior balcony, open beam ceiling, heated well by the wood stove with fire-glass door even without the solar greenhouse on the south – was a perfect model for my business, too. People put on brakes from out on the highway to come have a look. One old guy retiring strolled through it all without a word and said back out in the yard, "I want you to build me a house just like this one."
You don't know what you got 'til it's gone. Sure. That’s one way we learn. But what good's it do then? "All for demonstration," my favorite web-writer says. Truth is not just another point of view but reality finally serving notice. If you didn't "get it" in time, maybe someone else will?
Oh, the house never woulda' existed without the woman. That's part o' the story. Along with how she took it away, but doesn't even have it any more. God knows why she wanted another guy. Was it the nonstop powers of suggestion from the Hypnovision Machine? "Popular" songs and all teaching promiscuity and do whatever you want (Buddha woulda' said the opposite: "All life is suffering caused by ignorant desire")? Bolshevik family law (divorces with no cause for divorce – woman takes all. Man pays "support" or goes to jail)? Was it "Karma" – my own doings – those horrid incidents when I first met her parents, all those years before (God, don't mention that)?
It was her parents I'd built another log house for, ten years later, on the adjoining property. Seemed a fair reason she had to get the house, without much reason for the divorce. I got some chunks o' what they call "money" over the next few years. What for? Just to spend. But – bless her! – she saw it fair to offer me custody of my son. He "raised himself" with never a rule, went to a great Ivy-covered college, and medical school, all with scholarships – imposserous!"
The daughter stayed all weeks and half o' the weekends with that "wicked stepfather" may I say? Sure. He can't argue. No friend of the police, dead now from "a gunshot wound not typical of suicide" (coroner's verdict). My daughter just started a one-year jail sentence, at age thirty, for repeat offenses like drunk driving, driving without a license, drug laws, petty thefts – what do I know? -- fifteen years o' that stuff now.
This little story is not fiction. "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? asked Mark Twain. “Fiction has to make sense."
We learn from everything if we keep up constructive approaches. What I've mostly learned has a lot to do with how little I know. No one could make this stuff up. Not with a little mind like mine, anyway! There must be a bigger mind in the universe that makes this stuff up! These are very valuable lessons, finding out what you don't know and will never know, that kind o' thing.
Ultimately, we don't know anything (just don't say that too loud). You're in the company of a lot of people who don't know and don't know that they don't know. A great many don't want to know that they don't know, either. And too many are ready to know enough to control you.
Now – just day before yesterday – I got back in the tepee again! First time since last leaving Quechualla three months ago – that dearest place of these nine years – at the deep point of the Cotahuasi Canyon in south Peru. I've returned to a tepee camp there so often these past six years now that people say I "live” there. Everything grows – bananas next to apples next to corn next to potatoes. Mangos, oranges, and avocados – the main crops in the "fruit forest" family farms – along with grapes (foot-stomped wine time comin' up in February and March). Water you can drink comin' down the irrigation creeks. My friend there has been keepin' my burro these past years, but will anyone need a burro if the road's there now? No need for the peaceful old life of walking a few hours to sell fruit in town, like the tourists from all those overdone places who drop in to taste a simple, natural life. My best home there has "Earth Mother" Pachamama's bed: the ground.
Now progress finally seems to've found the place. Damn.
"Simplicity is natural wealth,” according to Socrates, while “Luxury is artificial poverty." Electricity on the big grid from forty miles away came six months ago. Maybe the road just arrived for a place that really doesn't need it?! It could have a proper version of "development" all its own if not fer more gold mines someone wants to put farther away. But the people buy it right off, “Oh boy! Here comes progress, buy a TV and watch it!”
Shit.
Oh God help us all! Family Farm University and Art School and Meditation Retreat could all be right there, if the profound silence was allowed to stay. Most kids go to city schools for an "education" about how to live in a city.
I had another travel tepee – basically a big semicircle of waterproof cloth – made just this past week down here in northern Patagonia (the Chile side) – with help from a seamstress, like most o' the other tepees on my nine-year wander. I left two doubled up, since one layer wasn't waterproof, at the canyon "home" in Peru. I carried another travel tepee that just needed one pole, or a tree to hang it from, and rocks or other weight around the sides. I always felt like it was the difference between "homeless" and "at home anywhere." But in overdeveloped Patagonia sleepin' with Pachamama is not an option most places anymore. Prices for "camping" (with kitchen, showers, and toilets) are near' as expensive as a hotel room. I'd carried it so much for so little use that I left it at Lake Titicaca in Bolivia this time.
The hundred bucks this tepee cost bought the heaviest fabric, strong enough to cut the semicircle out and sew a hem and use stakes. And it’s well tested already – having housed me last night with some hours of rain and wind, but no leaks.
"Where Is Your Home?!" returns again and again, doesn't it? Lines from an old hymn come to mind: "Ain't got no home in this world anymore."
The final journey leaves from wherever you are whenever your ticket comes up. The body is not material, but energy. And neither matter nor energy can be destroyed, just changed in form. Sasaki Roshi left his body home a year and a half ago at the age of a hundred and eight. In the other branch of Zen – Soto – you just look at the wall. Maybe a wall o' waterproof white cloth.
Some translations of the Tao Te Ching say, "You can know the whole world without going outside." Who says you got some place inside? Maybe you can know the whole world without going anywhere? Maybe you can even know that real world (inside) while you keep goin' everywhere you can?
I was just getting more seriously interested in Zen when another alternative presented herself, hitchhiking in to the freshly-established backroad New Mexico center. She "couldn't get her knees down" for the serious sitting position up on cushions and a pad, and neither of us proved very serious about her making that effort. We found a classic campout a half-hour's hike up a side canyon for a first wildwood home. A mountain lion, the only one I've ever heard, screamed from the cliff above one night like a woman being murdered.
Later we bought and remodeled and sold five houses in five years – me working weekends and evenings after a carpentry job – sheet rock dust in the soup, a bed on the kitchen floor for starts, that kind of thing. Home is where the heart is? Home is where the woman is – the basic nature of a man.
The remodeling money saved went to buy three acres of land in Colorado and put me through a summer course at scribed log-building, "Scandinavian style" in Canada. Absence made the hearts grow fonder. She came up after the course. We had a second honeymoon and I got a son out of the deal. Sure, I got the easy part o' that job.
Our son was born as the dream house was almost done. It was my design, and took a year of work with a single helper. Sweetest "big cabin" you ever saw! And the life! With a daughter born three years later.
I had the best house in the world. That's how I see it, and what I tell people along with how I'm travelling nine years now, my South American "Social security retirement plan." Life is about lessons, ain't it? We learn from everything, if we can. If we can't, surely we're about finished?
The Dream House – twenty-four by thirty-six, all wood inside beginning with the beautiful big logs hand-fitted, lofts at each end connected by an interior balcony, open beam ceiling, heated well by the wood stove with fire-glass door even without the solar greenhouse on the south – was a perfect model for my business, too. People put on brakes from out on the highway to come have a look. One old guy retiring strolled through it all without a word and said back out in the yard, "I want you to build me a house just like this one."
You don't know what you got 'til it's gone. Sure. That’s one way we learn. But what good's it do then? "All for demonstration," my favorite web-writer says. Truth is not just another point of view but reality finally serving notice. If you didn't "get it" in time, maybe someone else will?
Oh, the house never woulda' existed without the woman. That's part o' the story. Along with how she took it away, but doesn't even have it any more. God knows why she wanted another guy. Was it the nonstop powers of suggestion from the Hypnovision Machine? "Popular" songs and all teaching promiscuity and do whatever you want (Buddha woulda' said the opposite: "All life is suffering caused by ignorant desire")? Bolshevik family law (divorces with no cause for divorce – woman takes all. Man pays "support" or goes to jail)? Was it "Karma" – my own doings – those horrid incidents when I first met her parents, all those years before (God, don't mention that)?
It was her parents I'd built another log house for, ten years later, on the adjoining property. Seemed a fair reason she had to get the house, without much reason for the divorce. I got some chunks o' what they call "money" over the next few years. What for? Just to spend. But – bless her! – she saw it fair to offer me custody of my son. He "raised himself" with never a rule, went to a great Ivy-covered college, and medical school, all with scholarships – imposserous!"
The daughter stayed all weeks and half o' the weekends with that "wicked stepfather" may I say? Sure. He can't argue. No friend of the police, dead now from "a gunshot wound not typical of suicide" (coroner's verdict). My daughter just started a one-year jail sentence, at age thirty, for repeat offenses like drunk driving, driving without a license, drug laws, petty thefts – what do I know? -- fifteen years o' that stuff now.
This little story is not fiction. "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? asked Mark Twain. “Fiction has to make sense."
We learn from everything if we keep up constructive approaches. What I've mostly learned has a lot to do with how little I know. No one could make this stuff up. Not with a little mind like mine, anyway! There must be a bigger mind in the universe that makes this stuff up! These are very valuable lessons, finding out what you don't know and will never know, that kind o' thing.
Ultimately, we don't know anything (just don't say that too loud). You're in the company of a lot of people who don't know and don't know that they don't know. A great many don't want to know that they don't know, either. And too many are ready to know enough to control you.
Now – just day before yesterday – I got back in the tepee again! First time since last leaving Quechualla three months ago – that dearest place of these nine years – at the deep point of the Cotahuasi Canyon in south Peru. I've returned to a tepee camp there so often these past six years now that people say I "live” there. Everything grows – bananas next to apples next to corn next to potatoes. Mangos, oranges, and avocados – the main crops in the "fruit forest" family farms – along with grapes (foot-stomped wine time comin' up in February and March). Water you can drink comin' down the irrigation creeks. My friend there has been keepin' my burro these past years, but will anyone need a burro if the road's there now? No need for the peaceful old life of walking a few hours to sell fruit in town, like the tourists from all those overdone places who drop in to taste a simple, natural life. My best home there has "Earth Mother" Pachamama's bed: the ground.
Now progress finally seems to've found the place. Damn.
"Simplicity is natural wealth,” according to Socrates, while “Luxury is artificial poverty." Electricity on the big grid from forty miles away came six months ago. Maybe the road just arrived for a place that really doesn't need it?! It could have a proper version of "development" all its own if not fer more gold mines someone wants to put farther away. But the people buy it right off, “Oh boy! Here comes progress, buy a TV and watch it!”
Shit.
Oh God help us all! Family Farm University and Art School and Meditation Retreat could all be right there, if the profound silence was allowed to stay. Most kids go to city schools for an "education" about how to live in a city.
I had another travel tepee – basically a big semicircle of waterproof cloth – made just this past week down here in northern Patagonia (the Chile side) – with help from a seamstress, like most o' the other tepees on my nine-year wander. I left two doubled up, since one layer wasn't waterproof, at the canyon "home" in Peru. I carried another travel tepee that just needed one pole, or a tree to hang it from, and rocks or other weight around the sides. I always felt like it was the difference between "homeless" and "at home anywhere." But in overdeveloped Patagonia sleepin' with Pachamama is not an option most places anymore. Prices for "camping" (with kitchen, showers, and toilets) are near' as expensive as a hotel room. I'd carried it so much for so little use that I left it at Lake Titicaca in Bolivia this time.
The hundred bucks this tepee cost bought the heaviest fabric, strong enough to cut the semicircle out and sew a hem and use stakes. And it’s well tested already – having housed me last night with some hours of rain and wind, but no leaks.
"Where Is Your Home?!" returns again and again, doesn't it? Lines from an old hymn come to mind: "Ain't got no home in this world anymore."
The final journey leaves from wherever you are whenever your ticket comes up. The body is not material, but energy. And neither matter nor energy can be destroyed, just changed in form. Sasaki Roshi left his body home a year and a half ago at the age of a hundred and eight. In the other branch of Zen – Soto – you just look at the wall. Maybe a wall o' waterproof white cloth.
Some translations of the Tao Te Ching say, "You can know the whole world without going outside." Who says you got some place inside? Maybe you can know the whole world without going anywhere? Maybe you can even know that real world (inside) while you keep goin' everywhere you can?
Header photo by T. Guzzio.
CONNECT WITH RICK:
Born with the A-bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in l944, escaping both the Vietnam draft and a college grooming in 60's Berkeley, learning candlemaking from Quakers and logbuilding in Canada, sharing long foreign travels with one or both kids after seeing the hand-built dream house slip away with the woman in divorce, Rick sees himself now as some canary fleeing the mines and finding lots of fresh air and homegrown food on little family farms for the past eight years in South America. You can reach Rick via email at [email protected].
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