I made it to Kansas City, where I will be speaking tomorrow night. I'll be at Unity Temple 707 W. 47th St. (47th & Jefferson) Kansas City, MO 64112 from 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm. The event is sponsored by the Kansas Zen Center. Get info by writing to info@kansaszencenter.org. The next day — my birthday — I will be in Cedar Rapids speaking at the Paul Engle Center, 1600 Fourth Ave. SE Cedar Rapids, Iowa at 7pm. For more info on that you can contact the folks at the Cedar Rapids Zen Center. All of this and more can be found on my spiffy new tour page. I'm adding more gigs in Baltimore, MD and Richmond, VA. Details will be forthcoming when I get them.Oh! And by the way, the issue of Monster Attack Team to which I contributed an article is now available. Click on the link to order. You can even see a photo of my article on the webpage.
Much of my trip across country has been made possible by kind people offering me places to crash and I wanted to thank them for it. The photo above is of the folks I stayed with in Las Vegas, Kristina Intinarelli and her dad Mike. In Denver I would have stayed with Eric Shortridge but I just couldn't make it. I'll tell that story in a sec. Here in Kansas I'm staying with Blake and Shari Wilson and their dogs Lilly and Sawyer, and cats Smeagle and Flea, and five finches. Thank you to everyone!
So I started off on Sunday in Santa Monica with my friend Svetlana who helped pack my PT Cruiser with scientific attention to detail such that everything fit without blocking the mirrors and with the important stuff all accessible. I couldn't have done it without her. It took till about 4 in the afternoon before I was ready to leave. I made Las Vegas by 10. I'd never done that desert trip. It was pretty spectacular.
But things got really wild when I crossed the border into Utah. Man, that is one psychedelic state! As a weird experiment I made a playlist for my iPod containing all of the Beatles' 213 commercially released songs in the order in which they were issued (including the five times when they released two versions of the same song -- Love Me Do, Across the Universe, Revolution, Let It Be and Get Back). Just as I got to the Revolver era, their most LSD-drenched years, the scenery out my windows turned crazy.
Utah along Interstate 70 looks like the Land of the Lost or maybe the Forbidden City from the Planet of the Apes. It feels like you're driving through a Lava Light. The desert keeps throwing up rock formations of bizarre shapes and colors. At one point it looked like the highway was about to run straight into a mountain. But at the very last minute it opened up into a narrow canyon between two gigantic rocky mountains. Every time the road turned there was something else amazing up ahead.
It was getting dark by the time I reached the Rockies. But lucky for me it was a full moon. The mountains looked even weirder in the moonlight. And there were several times when some huge craggly summit was illuminated from behind by a red full moon. Unbelievable. Then there was this tunnel that went on forever. In the middle was a sign that said "Continental Divide."
Other notable signs:
•"High Winds May Exist." Is that so! Or they may not. Or they may both exist and not exist, or neither exist nor not exist. So nice of the Colorado Highway Commission to get philosophical.
•"Beaver: Mountains of Fun!" I always thought so! This was in front of a town called Beaver, Colorado.
•A chain of gas station/convenience stores called "Kum and Go." Ah yes!
By the time I got deep into the mountains, though, I'd been on the road for about 12 hours. I was losing it. I had a place to stay for free in Denver. But once I got just over an hour away according to the GPS (yeah, I gave in and bought one of the fascist things) I knew I wasn't gonna last even that much longer. So I called Eric and apologized and got myself a room in a Super Eight motel, lest I run over a cliff or something.
I woke up and started for Kansas City. Oddly enough the flat expanses of Kansas were as fascinating in their own way as the weirdness of Utah, though far less exciting. It really is just plains of brown grass as far as you can see. Everywhere looks like an Ansel Adams painting where you see a lone leafless tree on the horizon far, far away silhouetted against an endless blue sky.
Vegetarian options are few and far between on America's highways. So I mostly ate Subway for lunch and Taco Bell for dinner. Gak! But I survived it.
Been thinking hard as I drove about the idea of Zen teaching as art rather than as religious instruction. Zen doesn't fit any of the ordinary categories. Unfortunately it's far too often lumped in with religions and approached as such. The modern Soto-shu, though Japanese, is just an Asian imitation of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In the West we've unfortunately been trying to institutionalize things in the same fashion.
I don't know exactly what Zen is. But if we're gonna liken it to other existing categories of human endeavor, I think art is a far better model than religion. Each Zen teacher needs to be free to find her or his own best way of expressing the philosophy and teaching it to others. Attempts to standardize things are wrong-headed.
Of course, there are some standards. But these should not be held to rigidly. Even Nishijima Roshi, Master Dogen's biggest fanboy, admits that Dogen made a mistake by trying to adhere too closely to the Chinese way of doing things. This, he feels, led to Dogen's untimely death probably of tuberculosis. Master Dogen, Nishijima said, attempted to model his monastery too closely on the Chinese ones. But China is a very dry country and Japan is very humid. This caused Master Dogen's health to decline and eventually led to his death.
But it's not just that we need to Americanize or Canadianize or Germanize... etc. Each teacher has to find his or her best mode of expression, just like any artist. The standards are there in the form of the art itself. Painters use paint, guitarists play guitars, etc. But within that form the variations are endless. We have to be careful not to kill that aspect.
See ya tomorrow in Kansas! Carry on my wayward sons!
