At the Field Museum

Chicago's Field Museum takes you back in time, through its architecture and its organization, to the 19th century and the manic attempt to document and catalogue all natural and cultural artifacts. It is quaint in its showcases of carefully labeled and numbered North American birds, Tibetan clothing, Japanese lacquer pillboxes. Today we spent the afternoon gazing, like penniless shoppers in a strange mall, through windows into another kind of life, as removed and exotic as the furriers and jewelry stores of Michigan Avenue. The big-ticket exhibition was about Machu Picchu, filled with reconstructions of stone walls, ceramic cups and bowls, textiles, murals, videos, and 3-D interactive computer explorations of the ruins. Carefully worded signs and maps recounted the building of massive stone walls and terraces with no mortar, the process of making beer from corn mash that was chewed so that it could be fermented by saliva. It's hard (but funny) to imagine the vast scale of the labor needed to keep up with the demand, considering that beer was a central element of every celebration, ritual, and economic transaction. A stuffed llama cast an amused gaze on the mob of children, grandparents, and tours, providing exhausted parents with a welcome breather the day after Christmas.

The Machu Picchu exhibit documents a culture that was highly evolved, sophisticated, and coherent, a culture where the arts were deeply embedded in everyday life, in the artifacts, utensils, weapons, cookware, clothing, a culture technologically sophisticated in its system of highways, religion, politics, and economics. As highly evolved and coherent as it was, this culture was devastated by the sheer savage violence of the Spanish conquerors. For this reason, it was humbling to shuffle from one display to another, regarding the combs, necklaces, urns, stone walls, and clothing recovered from the first excavations of Hiram Bingham's expeditions of 1911 and 1912. The civilization of the ancient Incas as well as Bingham's world of the Victorian gentleman scholar- explorer have perished as surely as the sun will set on this blighted empire. But the exhibit soberly informs us that traces of the culture of the Incas survive today high in the Andes.

In the same grave tones the museum explains in countless places that exhibits of endangered birds were accessioned many years ago, that new specimens are drawn from animals that have died in zoos, in preserves, in captivity. The earnest language of the signs is intended to comfort and reassure, but instead, it carries echoes of alarm. We are all dying, all specimens of a vanishing way of life, our household fetishes the stuff out of which the future will construct its stories about us. What are we saying about our lives, how we pass our time together, what we build and what we revere? These stuffed snow leopards, Pacific Island outrigger canoes, Tibetan prayer wheels, and dinosaur bones stand side by side with the artifacts of Jackie Kennedy's years in the White House, with the Corner Bakery where we finally sink, dizzy and drained, into window seats with our soup and paninis, the coat check room filled with furs and parkas, and the Museum Store. As the light fails and snowflakes dance and twirl through the Chicago twilight, we fall into a silent reverie.

Some reflections on holiday shopping

There seems to be a manic anxiety that sets in around holiday shopping. It's a complex undertaking that foregrounds family dynamics, psychological systems, cultural expectations, and commercial exploitation. Compared with other cultures, we are crude and unskilled in the simple acts of giving and receiving. We use the exchange of gifts to play out melodramas of identity, relationship, forgiveness, suggestion, instruction, healing, and sacrifice. We often give out of a need for ego gratification and receive out of a sense of appeasement or disappointment. The exchange of gifts can mediate tensions or escalate conflicts. In some families the dynamic is for gifts, no matter how appropriate, to be returned for something different after the holidays, playing out a profound dissatisfaction that perpetuates itself with each new generation. In others, each gift, no matter how ugly, ill-fitting, or unsuitable, is met with appreciation and gratitude.

In my view, this whole process is an excellent mindfulness practice. It begins for me, with reflections on the relationship, and the person I'm shopping for. Here I draw on my memories of what I have observed in our times together, what I know about the person's interests and enthusiasms, what might surprise or delight. I think about their aspirations, secret dreams, their unmet passions. It is a pleasure to recall these dimensions of our relationship. Sometimes I draw a little concept map of their interests to brainstorm. If they are anxious or troubled, if there has been some conflict in our relationship, I focus on gifts that will calm and reassure. If they are stressed, overworked, rushed, I look for ways to provide a moment of relaxation and pleasure. Quite often I tend to look for books that will stimulate or energize, that open new doors of the mind. Still, I try not to be didactic or pedantic, even though my profession is teaching. Gift exchanges are not the place for that. I prefer gifts that connect with creative energies: art supplies, music, tickets to performances. I avoid gifts that suggest needed improvements in someone: sets of dumbbells, diet books, self-help manuals. There's more than enough of that mentality being pushed in the marketplace already. As a Buddhist, I try to avoid gifts that exacerbate unhealthy motives: meat or alcohol, for example, although I admit I have been weaker around exotic chocolates. I also avoid proselytizing by gift, but I will provide an appropriate Zen book for someone who seems to be searching.

Many people imagine that a Buddhist must be opposed to the materialism of the holidays and gift exchanges, projecting the common misunderstanding of Zen practice as ascetic minimalism. I love the festive spirit, bright lights, the bustle and spirit of the holidays. I am very glad that in this self-indulgent culture there is one day a year specifically set aside to think of the happiness and well-being of others. I am sorry that it is often used to aggravate tensions and stress, escalate conflicts, overextend resources, exacerbate loneliness and isolation. Our way is the middle way. Can we bring gladness and cheer where others are troubled or sad? Can we offer and receive modest gifts with love and gratitude? Can we enjoy moments that are quiet and bright as well as those that are crackling with energy? Can we share our deepest thoughts and profound connectedness with each other? Can we return to reverence and awe for the sweet mystery of this greatest gift of all, the life of a human being on planet earth? Can we recognize, at last, our deep interdependence with all beings? And can we look ahead to a year in which we follow with passion the path of our heartfelt aspirations, moving always toward deeper wisdom and compassion? Then I wish you the most joyful holidays.

Chicago turns cold, and bright

Chicago is an embodied practice. Yesterday, it turned very cold, with a high around 10 degrees and a razor-edged wind. When it is this cold, even a 25 mph wind seems like a hurricane. The wind bites down the street and improbably turns a corner where you do. I walk a mile to the train station in Wilmette, catch the Metra to Davis Street stop in Evanston, and then pick up the el to go downtown. These train platforms are bleak in cold weather, but the CTA has installed little heater lamps in sheltered niches. Ben calls them "chick warmers," because they are like incubators.

I am bundled up in a turtleneck sweater, parka, hat, and gloves, but the cold penetrates through every unprotected space, cheeks, nose, chin. Still, there are businessmen wearing only their suits, no coat, hat, or gloves. Teenagers in sneakers with no socks and sweatshirt jackets, unzipped. We pass a woman in a short skirt and light jacket. It is incomprehensible. No human metabolism can compensate for the difference between 98º and 9º. The overcast sky and shortened days mean twilight by 3:30, and the city looks drab and bleak from the el platforms where we shiver and wait. We hurl ourselves into the overheated el cars with gratitude, and study the advertisements for Community Colleges, the Chicago Housing Authority, syphilis testing.

So when we emerge at Grand and make our way up the dingy stairway to the city streets and find ourselves on Michigan Avenue we are dazzled. The broad street is lined with trees glittering with tiny lights and the stores are huge, their vast windows filled with brilliant clothing, exotic games, outdoor adventure gear, diamond jewelry, bestselling books. The sidewalks are mobbed with shoppers: women striding along in full length mink coats, children in candy-colored snowsuits, families stopped to take a head count and gaze at a window filled with computers and cameras. Buses and cars can barely move or turn through this rushing river. In the distance we can see the fantasy of Millennium Park and the Art Institute. Here you can find the perfect chocolates, sweater, party shoes, stereo, pocketknife, sofa, DVD. Everything seems much larger than your dreams, and more beautiful. It is a shared hallucination of a life more gracious, more luminous and spacious than our minds can grasp. Yet that more spacious, brilliant life is all about us every moment. It is there for the taking, leaving our credit cards intact. It cannot be purchased or sold, given or taken away. It surpasses and includes every fevered dream of late capitalism, socialism, fascism, fundamentalism, and every other ism. It is simply this now.

Zen Odyssey

I don't think you can begin at the beginning, because, where is that? I can only begin now. I am a Zen priest, ordained at the Austin Zen Center in August. In January, I will enter Great Vow monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon for monastic training. This blog, if I can keep it, will let me share some of that experience with my friends and family. Clatskanie is a small town in the northwest corner of Oregon, overlooking the Columbia River and Mt. St. Helen's. My plan is to drive from Austin to San Diego, where I hope to visit Joko Beck, my original Zen teacher. Then I'll drive up the coast to Oregon. If I can bring a camera, I will try to post some pictures. Right now I am in Chicago with my son Ben, enjoying the holidays before I leave.