Catrike

I spent so many years of my life riding a motorcycle that some folks have reasonably inquired whether I have anything but saddle sores to show for the first half of my life. Motorcycle riding requires total concentration, and as such serves as a meditative therapy, a shortcut to states of mind that otherwise require the sort of quiet disciplined work that now engages me. I racked up hundreds of thousands of motorcycle miles around the country and around the world, contributed bike reviews and travel pieces to a several top motorcycle rags, and kept right on riding until my son reached his third birthday. At that point the risk/benefit analysis said quit, so I did.

I’ve been looking for a good substitute ever since. The speed of a bicycle is closer to the stop-and-smell-the-roses pace of life I prefer, and in that way suits me better than the speed of a motorcycle these days, but while I love bicycling it doesn’t love me. My neck and elbows hurt (perhaps it’s all those crotch rocket miles) and my nether regions grow numb. All the same I embrace the simplicity of cycling and the peace and quiet and the efficiency, the exercise, and the “greenness” of the whole activity. I see human power as one good answer to many of the world’s energy ills, not to mention what it does for the cardiovascular system and the waistline, so I’ve tried paddle boats and kayaks and recumbent bicycles and rowing shells all in quest for the right machine for my needs. These include a relaxing riding position, a light, responsive machine, and something that is just plain fun to ride.

I finally found the ideal get-out-there tool—the Catrike. It’s a tricycle, but any similarity to a child’s toy ends at the third wheel. It’s a high-tech, lightweight piece of equipment built around a simple aluminum frame, a go cart you power with your legs. The components are top-shelf bicycle bits, and the fit, finish and design are absolutely brilliant. There are several variants to choose from, emphasizing speed, practicality, touring, etc. I chose the best handler of the lot, the Speed model. I researched human powered vehicles extensively before choosing it. It’s not cheap—about the cost of a better quality mountain bike but thousands less than a competition machine for on or off-road—but you get what you pay for. Relaxing the upper body really allows a focus on the muscles being worked, and pushing it to a brisk pace sure gets your heart pumping.

In the short time I’ve owned it, I’ve been on it every single day, riding around the neighborhood and on the city bike paths. I’ve not done more than 20 miles at a sitting yet, but I plan to work my way up to more and faster miles, smiling all the way.

The Shift

I’ve been thinking further about the exchange begun with the post Cigarettes, Killers and Zen. The idea there is perhaps the most interesting and important one that has come to me over the years, and represents a synthesis of my study of Chinese philosophy and my background in biological sciences. The notion, quite simply, is that the evolution can work on consciousness—an attribute of our structure and function, in precisely the same way it can work on our height, our toes, our lungs, or our teeth—and that such an evolutionary change must happen if we are to survive.

Our form came to be what it is, both mentally and anatomically, as a consequence of the characteristics and pressures of the world around us affecting us through the process of natural selection. We gained opposable thumbs to manage grasping tree branches and then began using it to wield tools (or perhaps it was the other way around. . . .) We gained an upright posture to allow us a better vantage point over the tall grass of the savannah, thereby enhancing our ability to see predators sneaking in and prey sneaking away.

We gained the mental ability for language because it was selected for over time pursuant to the advantage conferred (hunting, warning, survival) to those early members of our tribe who could communicate with each other. The structure, actions and capabilities of our brain have a long history of responding to environmental pressure. Now, in our eleventh hour on Earth, the pressure is mounting for a mental response (one could argue for more clearly physical ones too, perhaps the ability to eat plastic or breathe toxic gases or drink fouled water or survive comfortably in seawater or extremely hot temperatures) that will change our behavior in order to change our environment.

This shift is fascinating, because we have always responded to environmental pressure with genetic response and now, having created our environment ourselves, we have to respond to the changes we ourselves have made in order to survive. Nature, fighting back, has its finger on the doomsday switch I wrote about in The Crocodile and the Crane. As the deep ecologists say, the Earth needs to rid itself of the infection called humanity if it is to survive. The balance of a billion years or more of evolution is now tilting against us because of what we ourselves have done. If we don’t want nature to erase us we must evolve once again.

I believe that evolution will take the form of a shift in consciousness. No mere physical change will be enough. Right now our consciousness leads us—as a species—to kill each other and every other living thing on the planet, to rape and pillage and destroy every resource around us. A shift away from the duality of us-and-them, human-versus-the planet point of view to a caring, awake, sensitive consciousness could change all that, and it could happen within the time span of a single generation. Recently I came across a video about a movie being made around this very shift. There is even mention of evolution. It excites me to see others thinking this way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOzGoz1K3Do&feature=related

Book Literacy, Web Literacy

Sunday’s NY Times article Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? probes the difference between reading a book and reading online, and brings up the definition and importance of literacy.

I can’t help but think that both forms of reading are important. I think that hyperlinks and surfing have organically developed as a consequence of a particular form of brain activity—the gathering of information from multiple sources to reach a quick conclusion. We were capable of this function long before the Internet arrived; in ancestral days we took stock of the look of the sky and the smell of the air and the worried look on village elders’ faces before heading out for the hunt or a warring raid. Nowadays we scan sites and pull in bits and bytes to reach some conclusion in a short time.

This talent is useful for quick assessments, and at times it is necessary, but it has become the equivalent of a fast food addiction, or substituting pornography for a relationship, intimacy, and lovemaking. What was once rapid information evaluation aimed at crisis management has become an everyday affair. Because of our speed-and-greed culture, may folks live in a stressful, hypertension-inducing, obesity-creating frenzy wherein deep thinking and thoughtful consideration have become rarities.

Reading a book represents not only the old style of learning but the old pace of learning too. Done more slowly and at greater depth, it leads to critical evaluations that take place away from the book as the subconscious, intuitive mind ponders those things fed to it over a period of contemplation. As a person who alternates between writing novels and blogging—and who turned to martial arts and meditation to quiet a hyperactive mind—a lack of ability to consider things deeply is a scenario familiar to me. I know it is easier to skim, or to take someone else’s word for things.

The free flowing thought processes that the Net empowers can be good and creative and liberating. The Internet unlocks information and enhances communication, and in that it can contribute to the awakening of the world. A loss of ability to think deeply and critically, however, means that our children and theirs may not know what to do with the information they find. Unable to separate fact from fiction, they may become easy pretty for manipulation from authorities, even totalitarians. Real knowledge is a form of freedom, which is why I believe cultivating BOTH forms of literacy is key.

Science, Religion, and the Dao

Wired Magazine issue 16.07 has an interesting article on the Petabyte Age by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Teased by the cover copy “The End of Science” and titled The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, the fascinating article explores the fact that posing hypotheses and testing them as a method of exploring the world has been supplanted by simply harnessing the enormous power of supercomputers to crush gigantic quantities of data and answer whatever questions we may have. I liked Anderson’s presentation (the magazine’s creative graphics, use of pull-outs and overall smart tone makes it one of my favorites) and I found the piece thought provoking, but I couldn’t help feeling there was another way of accessing what makes the world go around.

That same feeling filled my high school years at the Dalton School in New York City and my undergraduate years at Yale; post-graduate work at the University of California and veterinary school at Cornell only made the conviction stronger. Some folks interpret these sentiments as evidence I was too weak-minded to understand the scientific method. Others took my sentiments as evidence of religious faith. I can’t speak to the first notion, as a fool who knows he is one isn’t, but the second misses the point that my discomfort has a very rational basis, namely that the wonderful instrument we call the reasoning side of the human brain will never be able to grasp the broad strokes of the universe—even brilliantly augmented by powerful tools to increase the depth and range of our vision and interpret the results through artificial intelligence—because in the end we cannot see from any vantage point but our own. What’s worse, religion of the Judeo-Christian stripe has very nearly destroyed the planet by using science and technology to express dominion over it. Despite our blinding hubris we are nothing but one more in a long line of soon-to-be-extinct species, and history is littered with the casualties of our countless misunderstandings of the way things work.

What was once disquiet has now grown to grave concern, but I find a ray of hope in the Daoist arts of meditation and tai chi. Daoism is an ancient art not limited to accepting only those phenomena that can be recognized by the rational brain. Daoist practices yield a world rife with subtle forces not yet recognized by science. In much the way science did not recognize x-rays or atomic forces a century ago, we will in time come to discover what Daoists—who do not put the bit of reason into the tender mouth of intuition—already know, which is that much information about the world and our place in it is available by turning the ray gun of the mind inward rather than outward. The mental and physical Daoist arts of meditation and tai chi cohere to create a sense of belonging and power. I am grateful to have spent the better part of the last 30 years using them to discover a beautiful, natural balance between intuition and logic that does not obviate or render useless the tools of technology or the rigors of science, but lends a sensitive and responsible framework to them.

Meridians, Canine-style

I’ve been allergic to dogs all my life. When I was a child, my parents euthanized Danny, the family’s Westhighland White terrier because his dander caused me to suffer severe asthma, and told me the poor little guy had “gone to a farm upstate”. Before they figured out the problem, we also had Mickey, a Toy Manchester terrier, and Digo, a Chihuahua who left no square inch of carpet untainted. Unable to bear life without a dog, my mother soon replaced Danny with a series of large, prolific shedders, German shepherds all—Christopher, Bacchus, Porthos and more—and I endured their presence by living on steroids and antibiotics and antihistamines, going from one life-threatening asthmatic episode to the next. Asthma medications today are rife with dangers and side effects, but they were even worse back then, so in terms of my health my childhood was not pretty.

Despite all that, I shared my mom’s love of dogs and as I got older and my immune system grew a bit stronger, I tried some of my own, including: the bullmastiffs Lendl and Marlys, Elias the apricot toy poodle, Rafaelo the rescued mutt, Shayla and Galen the whippets (Galen a jet black beauty), Yuki the English bull terrier, Iago the toy Mexican hairless (his tongue always hanging from his mouth for lack of teeth), Karpfinger the Chinese Crested, and my prized Chihuahua, Napoleon Bonesapart the Wimperor of France, who was stolen from my front yard but was also the king of my days and my constant companion even though I had to wash up every time I touched him.

I tolerate the hairless breeds a bit better than the shedders, and powder puff Chinese Crested dogs (the breed’s non-shedding, haired variety) best of all. I have a pair now, Wallace and Wanda. There are days when I’m so sick or depleted that playing with them raises welts and fills my sinuses and irritates my lungs, but tai chi practice has bolstered my immune system so strongly, (I even re-grew my excised tonsils) that most days we all get along just fine. Recently I noticed something very interesting while playing with Wallace, a growing puppy with an aggressive mouth. He is teaching me about acupuncture meridians!

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) asserts the existence of a life force called qi, which nourishes our skin, organs, extremities and viscera by flowing through channels the way water flows through a garden sprinkler system. “Watered” by qi our systems flourish, but when the flow is reduced or blocked our body parts or systems sicken. The notion of meridians is an old one and not confined to TCM. Indeed Otzi, the 5300-year-old “Ice Man” found frozen in the European Alps some years ago, bore tattoos all over his body marking the very same meridians. You can read more about Otzi here:

http://wilderdom.com/evolution/OtziIcemanAlpsPictures.htm

My Daoist practices (tai chi and qigong) enhance the flow and keep my “hoses” open. As a result I am more aware of the meridians than is the average Joe. Many of these pathways end in the hand. Whether it is because Wallace’s jaws are getting stronger or because of my skin’s sensitivity to the allergenic proteins in his saliva, when the little puppy nips me I can feel the channels even more strongly than I do upon the introduction of an acupuncture needle. When he attacks one spot, I feel it in my groin; when he grabs another, I feel it in the back of my neck; when he chews on yet another point I can feel it down my leg or in the small of my back or in my stomach or even in my lungs.

Then again, maybe it’s just those atomic teeth of his. . . .

Daoist Travels

I wrote my first book, Exotic Pets, using a pencil on a yellow legal pad, sitting at a bar called The Blue Max in Lahaina town on the island of Maui. It is long gone now, but the bar had a nice view of Lahaina harbor and I watched the ships come in and, mostly from memory, chronicled my love affair with parrots and fish and turtles and snakes while sipping the odd tropical rum drink. I’ve been going to Hawaii on a regular basis ever since, even though the Caribbean is much closer for me these days. There’s just something about the Hawaiian culture, with its Polynesian roots and splashes of Asia thrown in that combines with sheer middle-of-the-ocean isolation to generate energy I find unique and fantabulous. I write well when I’m there and I write even better when I come back.

Jetlag aside, I find that travel is an absolutely necessary lubricant for my inner muse. Big trips across the ocean are getting harder to pull off these days, what with hyper-vigilant airport security and nearly five-buck-a-gallon gas, but even a weekend away helps shift my perspective and adds new zeal to my work. Sometimes I travel with my Daoist teacher—we know Daoism these days as “the force” of Star Wars fame—and he and I have gone to China together and across this country too. Even when I travel alone, however, I am in the company of hundreds of old Chinese masters I’ve never met. These sages tell me that there are three reasons a follower should travel: to further cultivate the self, to meet new masters, and to explore the workings of nature.

I just returned from Hawaii yesterday, and while I was there I did, in fact, do some self-cultivation in the form of meditation longer and deeper than I can usually manage in the face of the distractions and responsibilities of home. I found a beautiful garden on the island of Kauai in which to stand quietly amidst rare local flora—most of Hawaii’s indigenous plants have fallen prey to the rapacity of introduced species—and discovered a new way to exhale through my skin, something I’ve been working on for a while without success.

As for meeting new masters, I was introduced to an elderly couple that had been practicing tai chi for fifty years. While their physical techniques were of a different strain than that espoused by my own martial lineage, I found them to be living a very Daoist life. There is tai chi ch’uan the martial art and there is tai chi the way of life, and from the standpoint of going with the flow and living simply and modestly in the embrace of nature, the couple and their children were masters of the latter and an inspiration too.

As for the workings of nature, I got to spend two days and one night atop Kilauea, the Big Island of Hawaii’s active volcano. I will put images up on my website shortly, but suffice to say the plumes and the lava flows and the earthquakes are at a historical high. Watching the Hawaiian fire god Pele belch sulfurous gases up into the stratosphere was as humbling and magnificent a vision of nature at work as can be imagined.

A Daoist trip indeed!

A Model for Food Sustainability

Hawaii is abuzz with sustainability talk, fueled by the high price of importing food, the special challenges the recession brings to a community dependent upon tourism. Our consumptive, speed and greed culture is going through the world’s resources at an unprecedented rate. People are starving in huge numbers globally, and things are only going to get worse. I am very eager to see what the small, affluent island community does with the opportunity. There is plenty of arable land in the state; indeed there is a great deal of agriculture there already. Hawaii’s second largest city, Hilo, is abuzz with fresh, locally grown food, which is one of the city’s biggest draws and the reason I purchased property there years ago. You can learn more about Hilo’s food resources...

Hawaii’s climate makes possible growing a wide range of crops, including papayas, bananas, tomatoes, ginger, avocados, lettuce, sweet potatoes, oranges, lemons, garlic, onions, peppers, cucumbers, jackfruit, breadfruit, lychees, pineapple, rambutans, and more. There are also specialty crops like cacao, coffee and macademia nuts. In addition, of course, Hawaii is smack dab in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and whatever difficulties that location creates in terms of imports is more than offset by the riches of the local ocean, which draw fisherman from the entire Pacific Rim. While that ocean’s fisheries are in a dreadful decline, there should still be enough to feed the islands if conservation laws are enacted and enforced.

An interesting dimension to the Hawaii sustainability issue is also the plant wisdom of the Polynesians. It turns out that the Polynesians who populated the island were master gardeners and botanists. They knew how to keep seeds such as breadfruit alive for months during an open ocean canoe voyage, and how to graft plants, enhance growth, and most importantly how to utilize the botanical resources of their islands to maximum effect. In addition to finding survival value in a wide range of fruits and plants, they made sails out of pandanas leaves and used bamboo for building beams, walls and more.

The state of Hawaii is remote, small, and blessed with a 12 month growing season and a climate suitable for a wide range of food plants, but perhaps just as interesting is the fact that it is part of the USA. Watching the local population overcome their justifiable resentment toward their Caucasian conquerors enough to join with American immigrants (haoles) and rebel constructively against our mainstream anti-culture is going to be fascinating to see. The conservation movement is alive and well in Hawaii, and with any luck sustainability will soon rise from a grassroots to a popular movement. When it does, it will provide a model for the rest of us, and one which I can already sense will be right in line with the Daoist precepts of taking no more than we need, using our resources in an equitable fashion, and living in harmony with nature rather than in dominion over it.

Cigarettes, Killers and Zen

Five years ago or so I had a “cosmic” breakfast with some Zen friends, among them the distinguished roshi (master) and National Book Award winner, Peter Matthiessen. What started out as a conversation about everyone’s favorite flavor of bagel turned into a profound discussion of Zen principles. Our host, my good friend Mitchel Doshin Cantor and another respected Zen teacher, is fond of saying that everything is happening right on schedule, and everything is just as it should be. This principle, according to my limited understanding of Zen, is an important concept in the practice, right up there with being present, and bearing witness.


I remember bringing up an experience I had in the Galapagos Islands in 1980. Travel to this remote destination off the coast of Ecuador had not yet become the commercial enterprise it is today, and the islands were pristine and unmolested. Walking the lava amidst the blue-footed boobies and the ground iguanas and the nesting albatross and the penguins, I could easily imagine a tyrannosaur suddenly appearing from behind a hill, or a plesiosaur surfacing just off the rocky shore. Entranced by a landscape so thoroughly untouched by human hands, I was shocked to discover a cigarette butt lying in a shallow depression in the hard black ground.


I mentioned the experience at the cosmic breakfast and was told that the sight of the cigarette shouldn’t have disturbed me because it was just as it should be and right where it belonged. I said no; it was offensive. That’s why I picked it up. I further proposed that if the cigarette’s presence was perfect, so was mine, and that my action was fully as “correct” as that of the person who dropped it there. Someone said no, because my action was filtered by my beliefs and judgments. I responded that the act of dropping the cigarette flowed from a set of beliefs and judgments too. Someone said no, the discussion heated up, and soon I found myself defending morality and ethics. I proposed that murderers and rapists and child molesters were not acceptable either, and the police needed to “pick them up” too. The argument took off from there, but I can say I was not satisfied with the idea of accepting that anything and everything we see no matter how disturbing.


While I admit that there are plenty of things in the world that I cannot abide, in recent years I have come to a better understanding of the high standard set by the Buddha regarding withholding judgment and preference, and indeed I find at least the latter presaged in early Daoist thought. Today I suddenly understood the whole issue in terms of balance rather than right and wrong, in terms of yin and yang rather than perfection or scheduling. Perhaps the cigarette represented the yin, my act of sanitation the yang. I portray this dynamic in my novels about Xenon Pearl, the neurosurgeon vigilante, a man who both heals and kills. It’s all about balance, and the ongoing and hopefully harmonious interplay of opposing forces. Seen this way, there is no argument, only the Dao—in literature and in life.

The Yin and Yang of Waking and Sleeping

All creatures above a certain phylogenetic level sleep. This means that once the nervous system develops a brain and reaches a certain level of complexity, it shows the obvious yin/yang of wakefulness and sleep. I’m interested in this from a Daoist point of view, as Daoist theory, which presaged binary theory, can apply directly to our state of consciousness. I’ll call sleeping yin and waking yang, because from a Daoist point of view the former is quiet and dark and the latter is loud and bright. This same concept applies to the rational versus the intuitive mind, as well as the left and right sides of the brain.

One of my students has had a long-term sleep problem. She has tried pharmaceutical sleep aids, aromatherapy, craniosacral therapy, massage, exercise, professional talk therapy, anti-depressants, white noise machines and more—pretty much exhausting the gamut. Today we discussed the idea that her yang, conscious, waking mind was somehow intruding on her yin, quiet sleeping mind and rousing her repeatedly in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.

I suggested that she might try to address what’s bothering her. She said there was nothing in her conscious mind that seemed an issue. I asked about her career, her family, marriage, health, finances—in short all the usual suspects. She replied that although no life was ever perfect, she did not feel she had any big, pressing problems. From a Daoist, or tai chi perspective it sounded as if her yin and yang were not in balance, that something that belonged on the yang side (wakefulness) had migrated over. The obvious question was how to get those two halves/sides back in equilibrium.

In the traditional tai chi world we often discuss the concept of wuji, which is a Chinese philosophical term that strictly speaking means emptiness pregnant with infinite possibility, but in a more nuts-and-bolts way means keeping your balance. Tai chi practice specializes in developing this balance on a physical level, while our Daoist meditations help on a mental/emotional side; in a sense they are analogues.

I suggested she slow her physical practice down to focus on the meditative side of things (we can get a bit carried away with swords and halberds and spears in my little corner of South Florida) and create a bit more discipline around daily meditation practice. More on this as we see how increasing meditation time helps her sleep.

Welcome to My New Blog

Hi,

This is exciting! I'm entering what folks term Web 2.0 with this new blog. I hope you'll join me here and share your comments, insight and direction as well.

Arthur