Sun painting, part 1

Yesterday I tried a technique called sun painting (there's a bit on it here at Dharma Trading). Basically, it's solar-sensitive paint that you can put on wet fabric. Then you stick things on it to selectively block the sun-- flowers, leaves, paper cut-outs, your cat's tail-- and wait for the paint to dry. The blocked parts end up white, while the rest of the paint fixes in the sun. Iron it to set the paint against future washings, and you're done.

It's neat. I tried lots of things and found some worked better than others. I was just practicing on some cotton bandanas.

The tip on the Dharma Trading page about not using more than two colors is a sound one; it would look too busy. But I think their warning to leave no white places is unfounded. I deliberately left some unpainted areas and even draped some of the sun-blocking shapes across these areas. The effect was good.

I also discovered that liquid amber leaves look exactly like pot leaves!

As for the colors surviving the wash.... eh. They did fade a bit the first time, so I recommend being bold and bright with the paintbrush. The areas that really had deep paint color were fine, while the pale regions got even paler.

I don't think you're limited to a foam brush as they recommend, either. The paint is pretty liquid (two parts water to one part paint), but I think it could be made thicker with no ill effects. Maybe I'll try that next time. A good watercolor brush would allow for finer strokes, although it would important to make them dark enough.

Finally, I had a cool moment of synchronicity. I brought a book out to the pool area where I was sunning the bandanas because I figured it would be about as exciting as watching paint dry. And what was I reading? A book about Henrietta Leavitt, who discovered Cepheid variable stars (these enable a measure of astronomical distance based on the period and brightness of the variable star). She made this discovery... analyzing photographic plates from the Harvard Observatory!

Developing plates, developing sun paint.....

Now I'm almost ready to move on to the project I had in mind-- making a unique pillow cover for a meditation cushion. Honeysuckle flowers worked really well, and they won't be in bloom much longer. I also liked the effect from some clusters of little berries and from fern fronds. Let's see what I can cook up....

The importance of King Tut

Ah, the ironies of history. Every elementary school kid in America has heard of King Tut-- the famous Egyptian "boy king" whose tomb yielded important cultural relics along with the jewels, art, and food with which the Egyptians regularly armed their deceased royalty for the voyage to the Underworld.

Ever wonder why Tut's tomb was so well preserved when many of the pyramids were ransacked centuries earlier?

It's because King Tut was considered pretty minor and unimportant among Egyptian leaders. Hence, other tombs were built on top of his when it turned out desert property in the Valley of the Kings was at a premium. This protected The Boy King's small haul, with the unintended side effect of enhancing his apparent status. We think he was important because we know the most about him.

Funny how that works.

Be Quiet

Aldous Huxley on Silence:

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire -- we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but usually create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ear, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose -- to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine Ground.

— from Silence, Liberty, and Peace (1946), also in The Perennial Philosophy (1944)

Nor'Easter - from beyond?

I just spent the week in Boston, where I experienced the coldest May storm on record (ie, since 1873). It was 45-50 degrees and raining. As I was going to sleep each night, I heard the wind whipping outside and the rain pounding the windows.

Not typical for late May!

OK, so freak Nor'Easters happen. But the most interesting tidbit I heard was that some climate scientists had linked this particular storm to a series of atypical weather events that had been set in motion by the tsunami at the end of 2004. Wow.

It's certainly plausible-- that tsunami changed the rotation of the Earth, for goodness sake. It's yet one more reminder that Nature is linked together in both space and time, and often in ways that we can't predict. Expect the unexpected, and go humbly before the power of the natural world.

National River Clean-Up Day

That was today, May 21! There was a local effort at a creek near where I live-- three hours of cleaning up, where the county water district supplied gloves, trash bags, water, and granola bars to keep us going.

It was tiring, but fun. About 18 people contributed along a stretch that was perhaps a mile long. One woman was Japanese, from Kyoto, who just read about this in the paper yesterday and came out. There was a guy who has come for 3 or 4 years in a row, and acted as a leader, getting rope and organizing people to pull up two shopping carts from under one of the bridges. Even a couple of high school girls came, getting community service points for a class.

Some of us worked in groups, chatting as we picked up trash. Others of us found our own rhythm in a solitary communion with the water, grass, weeds, and wildlife.

It was a little sad finding homeless encampments. Other hideouts had a few beer cans, perhaps some condoms or even a pair of panties. The creek bears witness to many human frailties.

There was a contest for the weirdest item found-- entries included a pogo stick and skateboard wheels (winner to be announced later). Apparently there were 30 sites like the one I went to, which must cover nearly the whole length of the creek.

As I directed my physical body toward service work on the planet that sustains it, I learned a few simple things.

• I got to explore how my eyes scan for trash. It turns out that shininess is the number-one feature of non-organic items, from aluminum to mylar. Next is gaudy color, like bubble-gum pink and turquoise, followed by many bright colors together, like on a Cheetos package. Surprisingly, white is often an indicator of refuse-- bits of paper or styrofoam. Beyond color is also size and shape-- the eye catches on items that are too large and/or regular (like a flattened-out moving box).
  
• What counts as trash? Most things are either obviously trash or obviously not, but I found myself pausing over a charred stick that had been burned in a campfire. Clearly organic and "natural," but also clearly rendered by human action.
  
• There came a moment when I caught myself hating humans. Everything was so "natural" and perfect, except for that glaring candy-bar wrapper mucking up the scene. It's true that humans dirtied the river with cast-off junk. But humans have always cast off their junk. We value that junk when it litters an archaelogical dig site. Pottery just looks more picturesque than a Pringles can. And besides, why hate all humans-- it was humans out there volunteering to help clean it up.
  
• I learned that I needed to protect myself even as I sought to serve. Sure, I was out there helping as much as I could, but I didn't try to get pieces of trash where it would have been dangerous to get to them. I was wary of handling items carefully since they are dirty and could be contaminated (people use drugs down by the creek, and besides, everything no doubt had a thick layer of bacteria on it). I stepped cautiously so as not to turn an ankle, and I took rests when I felt tired.
  

And perhaps most importantly:

• I learned that there is always one more piece of trash in the world, but also that every one picked up makes a difference.
  

The topological human

You know, we are not simple beings in a topological sense. We have a hole down the middle-- called a "handle" in topology-- like a piece of macaroni. In a topological sense, your food, gorge, and feces are not inside of you; they are outside. The gut is a specialized fly-by zone for these items to interact with the porous "skin" called the intestinal wall.

The image gets weirder. How small does a body opening have to be to constitute a closed surface? If your urethra is a true opening, then the contents of your bladder are also topologically outside the body. If the vagina and cervix are openings, then a fetus develops topologically outside the mother's body.

What is inside and outside of you? Where is the surface of your body? Humans, and indeed all objects, have rather fuzzy edges, eh?

From the depths of silence

I have just returned from a 4-day silent meditation retreat. This means I and a group of 20 others, along with a teacher, spent four days together in silence (no eye contact either). We alternated sitting meditation with walking meditation from early morning to late evening (with breaks for meals and some "free" time too). Once a day, we listened to a talk by the teacher, and once during the 4 days, we each got one 15-minute time slot to speak privately with the teacher about our practice.

I tend to get two reactions from people about this:

"Wow, that sounds boring! How did you survive without going nuts?"

or

"Wow, that sounds so blissful and peaceful. It must have been so relaxing!"

In fact, it is neither. It is really far from being either boring or blissful, but this is very difficult to understand unless you're a meditator and have done this. When the mind slows down and shrugs off the pace of the world, sitting still and simply paying attention to things ceases to be boring. However, the things you must pay attention to are certainly not blissful; you discover the contents of your mind, and most people have at least some inkling that everything in their head is not blissful.

But it's certainly interesting! It's a whole new world in there.

In August I do my "big" retreat-- 10 days. That's even more intense. One aspiration is to do a really long one, like some number of months. Of course, that takes a lot of planning and arranging, so it may be a while before I can pull it off.

I've left one question here unanswered: Why?

I'll just let T.S. Eliot have the last word:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Guessing why

I am often reminded just how infrequently I really know why people are behaving they way they are, even though my mind always leaps in with an explanation.

Can't you just hear your brain?

That woman must be checking her teeth because she's heading in for an interview-- no one would wear those shoes if it weren't for an interview.

The cashier didn't touch my hand when he gave change. I wonder if he's afraid of my race.

My friend didn't want to go out for lunch because she's too busy today. I bet she just slept late this morning.

I was reminded of this concept of guessing why upon hearing a story the other day. It was about a Zen student studying at the San Francisco Zen Center. He had a habit of always explaining things to people, sometimes when they didn't want it. All the time, telling people why things were true, or how they worked, or how they came about. He had no idea he was doing it! So his teacher pulled him aside and gave him one instruction: For one year, he was not allowed to explain anything to anyone.

This caused immediate problems. He worked in a bakery, and people would stop by and ask for directions. He wasn't allowed to answer, so he got very skilled at finding someone else to answer, or otherwise deflecting the question. (He was not allowed to lie and just say he didn't know).

[He said this was a great lesson, by the way. He learned a lot about himself].

When I heard this story, I was reminded of a dark night in Texas a few months ago. I had rented a car and was trying to get to my hotel, but I got lost. I pulled into a gas station to ask for help, and the cashier refused to give me directions. He shrugged and looked out the window and otherwise indicated that he couldn't help me. I judged him to be lazy, or else acting on some command from his boss not to give away valuable information when they could be selling maps.

In desperation, I said, "Please! I really need help. Can't you help me at all?" He pointed vaguely toward a woman (customer) walking up the soft drink aisle. So I asked her, and she directed me back toward the right freeway. Then she bought her soda, got into the SUV next to me, and drove off.

I'm not saying the cashier was actually a Zen student practicing not explaining things to people. But I am saying that I really don't know why he wouldn't help me that night. There are a zillion reasons-- so many I can't even think of them all. And I can't judge him for my lack of imagination or knowledge.

Mysore sludge

Ouch. I just made my first attempt at cooking mysore pakku (there are many ways to spell that)-- which is basically Indian fudge but without the chocolate. It's cooked in a similar way, where you heat a sugar syrup to the soft ball stage, then add melted butter (ghee, actually). It also has besan (chick pea flour) to thicken it. It comes out with the consistency of fudge, but very creamy and rich, like solidified condensed milk.

Or, it does if you do it right. Mine didn't really set, so it's more like butter sludge. Clearly it needed more cooking at the final stage when it is thickening up and setting. But I had to cut it a little short because the pan was ejecting spatters of hot grease all over everything, including me (yelp!).

Next time I need a larger pan to cook it in. Also, I will spread it into a 9x13, rather than an 8x8 pan. It would help if it were thinner, and I didn't realize how big the recipe was going to come out.

Trial and error cooking! It's the historical way. :-)

Save the Wales

I knew one of my dearest friends was really happy yesterday. How did I know this?

She called me, and when I picked up the phone, all she did was scream, "YOU BITCH!" That's when I knew she was really, really happy.

You see, this friend has been working her butt off to learn Welsh over the past year. That's right, Welsh. Just because she wants to. She found a real, live Welsh tutor who is also in the clothing business. This has resulted in some design projects for my friend, and now there is the possibility of expanding the business back to Wales.

Not to mention the fact that there is a contest every year in Wales for the best speaker who learned the language from a standing start (it doesn't count if your great aunt spoke only Welsh, and you visited her a lot as a child).

The tutor has lined up places for my friend to stay in Wales, if she wants to compete in the contest, and if she wants to scope out the business prospects there-- which could result in her getting hired in a business development position.

One problem: she is responsible for getting herself to Wales. And she can't afford it.

Or can't she? A bunch of us got together and chipped in to get her the ticket. This week, she was up visiting me, and all week I knew she could go to Wales, but wasn't allowed to say! I even had to sympathize when she said with resignation that she just didn't think she could get there right now.

Heh.

She just found out. And she called me a bitch. Oh yeah-- she's happy. And so am I.

Have a great trip, hon!

Self-serve hell

Would you rather do it yourself, or have someone do it for you?

Most Americans have a default response of wanting to do it themselves. And there's real value in that-- most people want to be self-reliant, and enjoy figuring out how things work. And there's freedom in the competence of being able to look out for oneself. There's also the working-person sentiment that it's a little soft to have people catering to you-- a bit snooty to have Johnson bring the car when you can darn well do it yourself. All these things mix together in the American attitude of self-service.

But I am starting to chafe against this notion when it comes to doing mundane tasks that keep business flowing: Checking myself in at the airport, buying theater tickets online, booking a campsite for 4th-of-July weekend, buying my stuff at Home Depot, doing bank transactions, signing up for classes.

Why can't I just talk to a human who will take care of it for me? I don't want to spend 2 hours a day on the Internet, filling out online forms. Nor do I want to be greeted at a store, hotel, airport, or the Post Office by a kiosk rather than a person. I feel like all of society is becoming automated, including our interactions. It feels like a waste of my time when I have to punch the buttons myself, whereas I wouldn't feel that way if I spent 2 minutes chatting with a service person during the transaction.

I was just reading an article about how your real estate agent might not be working as hard for you as they claim, and to avoid being shafted it was best to do a lot of online research, or even decide to sell your home by yourself. While I certainly agree that the Internet is democratizing information flow, I cringed at the notion of spending all the time and effort needed to properly sell a house by myself. There's a reason why we hire experts! They spent that time learning and training so that I don't have to. It's not that I couldn't do it-- I'm perfectly intelligent enough to understand how to sell a house-- but maybe I'd rather put my attention elsewhere, like on having a life.

When will fans of do-it-yourself-online realize that their time is valuable? More valuable than becoming their own glorified check-out clerk for every standard task that needs to get done in the world?

Others are starting to notice this trend. Check out this article: Service gets lost in self-serve world. [Thanks, Faz]. There are a lot of important themes that just barely get touched upon in it. For instance:

But with the explosion of self-serve options, some question what the effect has been on one of mankind's most important attributes--the ability to communicate. Cherie Kerr, a public speaking and communications consultant for ExecuProv, a Santa Ana, Calif., firm, expresses amazement at the number of people she deals with who would rather exchange e-mail than talk on the telephone.

"People are just not connecting as much as they once did, or as they should," said Kerr. "A lot of people do not want to talk to people anymore."

Yeah. And you can tell. People have fewer basic communication skills than they used to. I have never been fond of the phone-- it requires real-time responses without all the visual cues that you get in face-to-face interactions. But I do miss actually interacting with humans sometimes. (Or even if there are humans there, sometimes they are too spaced-out to really talk to the customers they are dealing with, but that's another issue).

And many observers fear that new developments in do-it-yourself technology will exclude the elderly or the poor, especially as companies start charging customers a premium for doing business the old-fashioned way.

This is quite important also. Senior citizens and poor people already feel alienated from regular society. And with the pace of life getting ever faster, they often can't keep up. Now we are going to remove the humans from their lives too? That will only increase the isolation. It's just sad.

As I have begun to tune into these problems with the Internet world, I have found some positive responses. I now make more of an effort to smile at people, make eye contact, and even chat a bit if it's appropriate. I practice being right where I am, not thinking about the next place I'm rushing to.

I try to see the people I meet-- like the check-out person at the grocery store-- as people, not as tools performing a function for me. Now that we have computers replacing them in some cases, it is all the more abundantly clear to me that humans are not computers. They're a lot better to deal with in many cases. (Not always! But you might be surprised how often).

These are simple things that anyone can do. I encourage you to adopt the practice of looking at people, smiling, etc. It's a healthy response to the ever-increasing mechanization of society.

And better yet-- it's something you can do all by yourself, without having anyone do it for you. :-)

Ads that stick

Advertisers are almost willing to kill to find out what will stick in our minds. I was just reading an article complaining that people won't watch 30-second ads anymore, so they have to find sneakier ways to implant messages in our brains, such as by including them in video-enabled shopping carts.

But you know what? There is actually an ad that I remember clearly from the 1970s. And it's not one of those famous ones like "Mikey" or "Where's the Beef"-- so listen up, all you brainwashers.

This ad is for Skippy dog food, a tiny brand that no one has ever heard of and is probably long out of business. It was a short ad with a single, simple set: just the standard white countertop in front of a white background. In the opening scene, a dog dish sat on the counter, filled with canned dog food. An off-camera voice said, "Skippy dog food tastes as good as it looks." And then a hand came from stage left and put down the can of Skippy food on the counter, with a metallic crung.

That was it. It probably cost the company all of $300 to make that ad.

But I remember it 30 years later. Here's a novel concept: maybe simplicity sticks. Instead of yelling louder and louder, like at the proverbial cocktail party, try speaking softly for a change.

NetFlix for books

A friend of a friend caught herself lamenting, "How come there isn't a NetFlix for books?" And then it hit her--

It's called the library.

OK, so they don't deliver (unless you've got a Bookmobile, and it stops close by). But you can't beat the monthly rate! "Free" is far cheaper than NetFlix.

I have recently begun taking books out of the library rather than buying them from Amazon, Powells, or something similar. In fact, I even sold a bunch of books-- my old sci-fi collection, back from the high school/college days when I read sci-fi. That seemed to represent an earlier stage of my life, and I have a longstanding pattern of erasing my past behind me (perhaps I'll muse on that more someday).

My shelves were cluttered with stuff that was just sitting there, and I thought, Why? Why buy books to put on a shelf? Sometimes I lend or give them to people, and very occasionally I look something up or even reread a book. But mostly they just sit there. I don't care about using them to impress people, so I might as well just get them from the library.

Ah, the library! The San Jose Public Library is a wonderful thing. The main branch is also the library for San Jose State University, so it is very well stocked: about 8 floors of books on all manner of subjects, from Etruscan history to cell biology to Chinese politics. The architecture is stunning also, giving the sense of physical spaciousness, which couples nicely with spaciousness of thought.

There are many satellite branches too, spread around the community. I even checked out a book from one recently because it was already borrowed from the main branch. The satellites are much more like local libraries. The Calabazas branch looks like a converted house, with one floor of creaking shelves, a cute play area for kids, a few computer terminals, and-- yes-- a paper card catalogue.

Remember the card catalogue? I remember from elementary school. When I started using it, I wasn't even tall enough to peep over the edge of the top drawer of index cards. Everything was filed by the Dewey Decimal System, for which there was a huge chart hung on the wall. I used to study that chart, fascinated that you could organize books by numbers. I wondered if they would ever run out. Not yet, apparently-- the Calabazas branch actually still uses the Dewey Decimal System to file its books.

Of course, large libraries (and many small ones now) use the Library of Congress system. It sounds a lot more impressive, doesn't it? Oh, this is the system they use at the Library of Congress-- it must be very sophisticated and important. Not that it isn't. It works very well. But I will forever think of it as "the other system"-- not the "original" one, the Dewey Decimal System. It was sort of a shock to learn that there might be more than one way to organize all those books by numbers. It was an early realization that numbers are arbitrary, as are our organizational systems (in some sense; certainly some work better than others).

The San Jose Library is not just a walk down memory lane, however. New features abound. It has a coffee shop on the first floor that serves sushi, espresso, smoothies, and nachos. It has security guards posted at the exits who actually search people when they set off the alarm. It has an entire section devoted to bilingual children's literature (in California, "bilingual" usually means "English/Spanish," as if those are the only two languages. This is ironic given the vast Asian popuation, but Spanish is indeed the largest single non-English language in the area).

My favorite part of the library is the giant LED display that is counting, incrementing up by one unit every few seconds. It was in the tens of millions when I saw it. What could it be counting? I speculated a bit-- babies born? Books checked out? Actually, it's fairly mundane-- it's the number of people who have gone through the electronic turnstile to enter the library.

Or perhaps it's not so mundane. So many people have come to the library! Many are students, of course, seeking a quiet place to study. But that is a key function of the library in our loud, fast world: it provides a respite from activity and stimulation. In fact, that may be just as important as the books themselves.

NetFlix for books? Actually, the library is much more. Rediscover the one near you!