propositions press... 2.0

a retreat report

A few years ago I participated in an eight-day “social justice leadership training” retreat offered by the Rockwood Institute, divided into two sessions over two long weekends a couple months apart. Though there were the expected trust games, ice-breakers, and listening exercises I was familiar with from years earlier, the training centered Rockwood’s own techniques and lingo. A noteworthy moment came at the very end, just before the gathering broke. Our trainers left us with a word of parting advice. Be careful about your re-entry, we were told. For some people it can be easy to return to their organizations and spout Rockwood methods and terms. For those who have not been through the training, it may sound peculiar or even cultish. This was a good piece of wisdom.

crescent moon and joshua tree at dusk 

I heard it again four years later, this time from the Against The Stream instructors upon completion of an eight-day meditation course held at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. As is the ATS style, the advice came in plain speak: upon returning to regular life be cautious about what you share because, really, nobody cares. This is the problem with having experienced something profound or transformative, even in a minor way. One wants to share something about it, partly to help oneself process what they went through and partly because it is simply good news. But taking up oxygen with one’s conversion tale risks turning it into an unwelcome voice of recruitment and proselytization. In other words, just another ego trip.

Offering this report goes against advice. Nevertheless, I feel a responsibility to document my experience for those who fund the program. After all, I was on scholarship. The Hemera Foundation, at least, will care. At a deeper level, putting reflections into writing is a way to acknowledge that analysis and meditation are complementary, not mutually exclusive.¹ Finally, perhaps this reflection will reach somebody with the curiosity that I had, people who for whatever reasons of their own are considering paths involving Buddhism and contemplative practice.

Let me describe the course in outline and structure. Since I am but a novice, and on top of that working from memory, I am sure there will be inaccuracies in description. Also, since ATS is somewhat ecumenical in its evolving school of Buddhism (one of my attractions to it), I may mash up concepts originating from different schools of thought. I welcome corrections and suggestions, and beg forgiveness in advance for distortions and omissions.

I think of the course as having been structured in two ways, internally and externally. Internally, there is the structuring of behavior and thought through the adherence to the precepts of “right practice” so as to form sangha, an association of practitioners for the duration of the course. In combination, the dual structure enabled us to open ourselves to insight meditation as it has been traditionally practiced over the centuries. The precepts include a slate of renunciations. They went as follows:

No killing.

No stealing.

No intoxicants.

No sexual activity.

No impure thoughts—envy, lust, hatred.

Noble silence: no speech, no social media, no reading, minimal writing.

Committing to these precepts—to the point of treading softly to avoid killing insects—released oneself from toxic behaviors and mentalities. Without any of the harm or confusion caused by such simple acts as talking, eating meat, or allowing oneself to fantasize sexually—much less giving in to the cacoethes—a mental structure remained through which a fullness of mind could be cultivated.

The external structure was the daily schedule. The course divided days into repeated sessions of sitting or walking meditation broken only by meals, morning instruction, and evening dharma lectures. Meals were taken in silence. We were each also assigned a camp job, kitchen work and cleaning, mostly. There was an afternoon optional qi gong session for people who needed some low impact body work. These too were performed in silence. Students took shared rooms in either the dorm or the villas. Some paid extra for single occupancy and another contingent saved money by camping. Waking bells were tolled at 6 AM with our morning sitting session beginning at 6:30. Twice over the week, participants were broken into small group meetings with an instructor for verbal check-ins. These 45-minute respites from total silence were either a welcome break or an interruption of the flow. For myself, I appreciated them. They were a chance to momentarily detach from the detachment, to reorient my focus according to a verbal description of my psychological state.

The ATS retreat was not as strict as others I’ve read about. Although spare and monastic in routine, ATS, with its School of the Dharma Punx identity, draws people who are anti-authoritarian by nature; I felt at home among the rule breakers. Also, with over a hundred retreat students, there seemed at all times a few people quietly accomodating themselves according to their own limits. It helped that the only mandatory sessions were the morning instruction and dharma talk.

I found the sitting and walking to require such concentration that for several afternoons I skipped a session in favor of a nap. And once, in favor of a swim. Perhaps thanks to this self-regulation, I never fell victim to the struggle that some novices feel while meditating, that of fighting torpor and drowse. I lost count of how many sittings I performed over the week. It was between thirty and thirty-five. With such intensive practice one is bound to “get somewhere” even if sitting still. Especially, as I learned, if sitting still.

The most meaningful renunciation for me was that imposed by noble silence. Being an artist and writer, there is constant pressure to produce work, to “say something.” With a professional world that bleeds heavily into social media, there is very little space for measured speech, much less silence. Renouncing speech and social interaction immediately cleared space, as is the intended effect with all the renunciations. That space was just as quickly filled by my inner thoughts. Dialogues with myself crowded out inner silence. After several days of practice I learned to return to breath quickly enough to calm the inner noise. It was finally during sitting sessions on the last day that I realized an extended inner silence. Ah, mindfulness—for many years, I realized, I had known no such thing.

Unlike scripted religious services that deliver social but constrained experiences, this course opens doors, doors some of us novices did not even know were there. But little is said about what is inside, only that what one finds is oneself, whatever that is. Or is not, in the event that one goes down the path of confronting emptiness.² Given our extremely individuated lives in contemporary society, a retreat like this one will be experienced differently for everybody. I expect to experience a future retreat differently yet again, as circumstances both personal and global will have changed between now and then. An important thing to note is, even though I got “better” at meditating every day, my struggles and insights did not occur in linear progression.

To close I present my random notes, jotted either during the retreat or shortly after.

• For best sitting, hips above knees. Repeat, hips above knees.
• Though Joshua Tree was surely much quieter back at the time of Gram Parsons’ demise, it remains a mystical place. Even with the eighteen-wheelers barreling down Twentynine Palms Highway within earshot, the magic is sometimes overwhelming. The nightly howling of the coyotes is a perfect balance of desperation and exuberance. The joshua trees themselves exude a frozen kineticism.
• The emphasis on renunciations says something about who participates and why. Many of my fellow practitioners seemed to be on a path of recovery. They are the ones who have gone over the edge and lived to tell about it. Or they would, were it not for Noble Silence.
• Sitting in a chair for meditation, as opposed to the floor, does not produce second-class mindfulness.
• Instructor and founder of ATS Noah Levine seemed to put special attention to the hindrance that is lust. This spoke to the relative nearness many of us had to chemical abstinence as compared to celibacy, particularly in a situation of mixed company.
• The easiest way to ruin a sun drenched Lloyd Wright/Frank Lloyd Wright desert masterpiece is to install vertical blinds.
• Back jacks and retreat centers go together like peanut butter and jelly.
• The t-shirts sported by students made visible an unspoken renunciation, no music. They also painted a picture of the subcultures feeding the growing ATS scene: Neurosis, Sleep, New York Dolls, Bad Brains, Megadeth. The award for Band Seen On Most T-shirts goes to the good old Grateful Dead.

carpool gang upon the return from Joshua Tree to LAX

I post this report with a profound sense of gratitude. Special thanks go to the Hemera Foundation for its visionary Tending Space Fellowship.

*

NOTES

1. Paul Williams notes that though many, particularly from the West, tend to assume a separation between meditation and analysis, “Analysis, investigation of the way things really are, is an activity forming the principal ingredient of insight meditation (vipasyana), which leads to the different degrees of prajna.” Williams, p. 72.

2. According to the instructors, the concept of annata typically popularized in its Zen form as no-self is a misreading of the original teaching. The lesson is not that there is no self, but rather that the true self is not that which we commonly perceive. Only through deep and prolonged practice is the true self, connected to things both eternal and impermanent, encountered.

towards home, but still drifting

The China Drift continued even as the traveling group fractured and parts went in different directions. Wuhan was the place from which the big group, which grew over the first week to twenty-two or so, started to lose members. Xiao, Qu Ge, Orienna, Michael, Emi, Desiree, Jing, and Gordon all caught Thursday night trains back to Beijing. Gao Bei stayed to visit her family and I think SiSi went to another town to see hers. Elaine returned to Beijing the next night.

From Lashihai it was I who fell behind first. After two days together at the Lijiang Studio, I waved goodbye to Jay, Sarah, Ula, Claire, Brian, Stephanie, and Mai Dian as they rode off in the studio’s van, bound for Wumu on the rainy third morning. After another two days with just myself and the neighboring He family for company, I flew back to Beijing, rejoining Jing and Gordon. One night later, Ula and Stephanie caught up to Gordon, Joseph, and I for food and beer in Caochangdi. Stephanie and Ula brought stories of mountain liquors and pictographic scripts from Wumu, the remote Naxi mountain village. I wished I had gone with them until I heard about the rain and stomach bugs.

I had to get back to Beijing a day before them in any case. I needed a day to visit a future niece at the Shepherd’s Field Children’s Village way out of the city, practically in Tianjin. The outing mixed family stuff with research, which is to say, I was quite curious about Shepherd’s Field. It is a full service foster home for Chinese orphans with special needs that grew out of the Philip Hayden Foundation, a fifteen year-old service organization founded by an American couple dedicated to helping orphans in China. I was told that there are currently some 75 children in residence. A minority of them will be adopted into forever families (that is the lingo of American child services culture, something we’ve learned as we have gone through that culture ourselves). Some children will live at Shepherd’s Field for years.

Where would China be without all these Christians helping out? I am sure the society would be worse off, and that there would be many fewer social services than exist now. But I don’t think there would be any hugely increased number of Christian converts. I know that there are intense cultures of Chinese Christianity in both Taiwan and Singapore, as well as overseas. And yes there have been religious movements in China, some of them quite potent on a political level, from the Taipings to Falun Dafa. But I simply cannot imagine a faith like Christianity (which, let’s face it, is founded on some pretty outlandish stories) gaining serious mainstream traction in post-’89, post-idealism mainland China. After all, the missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not manage to reshape China in any ultimately significant way, even though they fed millions of poor and hungry. My bet is, to most Chinese Christianity is, in the end, something that will always seem foreign. And therefore irrelevant to them, but for the concrete contributions the Christians can make.

More universal, and deserving of more effort to connect and weave narratives are the analysis of and the shared discontents around the concrete conditions of life. The Drift, at its best as an encounter-based research method, extends odd and specific strands of connection, far beyond the convoluted theologies of the proselytizers. So as the China Drift participants went off on our separate ways, I am sure many of us continued to draw connections. That was the case for me when I found myself eighteen hours beyond Beijing, traveling by pick-up from the Bainbridge Island ferry landing to to the Poulsbo home of climate and conservation scientists Jennie Hoffman and Daniel Froehlich, on the Kitsap Peninsula across the water from Seattle. My first stop: the grave of Chief Seattle, he of the famous words that laced a requiem for his land and culture with the biocentrism we dream of today. What place to kiss the ground of my country could be more American–and more global. And true to the experience of drifting over histories, places and cultures, thoughts about common fates and all the rest, I was just a little surprised to find that Chief Seattle had been, according to his gravestone, baptized. Those Christians again. Maybe they'll get us all in the end, Chinese or not.

Later that evening Dan continued telling me about the local history, Poulsbo’s Norwegian heritage, the raising of Seattle, and so forth. In the process we came across this photograph by Asahel Curtis documenting the flattening of old Seattle’s Denny Hill, a project also known as the Denny Regrade. The earthen towers visible in the photograph are the property owner holdouts who demanded better compensation or maybe just refused to leave. Having just returned from the land of the nail house, I thought I was seeing double, through time and space.

The part of Seattle that was reshaped by the Denny Regrade eventually became known as Belltown. Decades after whatever upheavels caused by the Denny Regrade had been settled or forgotten, artist Brett Bloom documented the neighborhood’s recent creative efforts to humanize the available public space. I remember learning something about Belltown when Brett and Ava Bromberg released the book seven years ago. But it was not until this trip, with China’s nail houses, big hydroengineering projects, and, most of all, the report we received while in Wuhan about the property megadeveloper OCT’s plans for an amusement park on the shores of Wuhan’s jewel, Donghu, fresh in my mind that the work in Belltown resonated. Now I wonder, after the futility of a last stand, whether in the face of corrupt developers or unstoppable eminent domain, what are the struggles and achievements to come, even on the same piece of land? What the Denny Regrade showed is that after the development happens, other problems and challenges emerge; it is always a matter of spatial politics in the end, and there is never a perfectly satisfactory (or even minimally functional) spatial arrangement for every stake holder. There is only another political problem.

I spent my first night back on North American soil managing my jet leg constructively—a 3:30 AM departure for the backlands of Fort Lewis and McChord AFB, to help out with some bird banding. It was the first session of the season for this particular station, one of several maintained by the Puget Sound Bird Observatory.
The data collected is given over to the MAPS program of the Institute for Bird Populations, one of the only continent-wide research programs that allows for a large-scale picture of bird populations, without which conservation management would be comparatively blind.

Dan told me the story of how the MAPS program came to be. It had to do with the timing of radioactive releases from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the suspicion that catastrophic breeding failures among certain West Coast raptors that year were linked to the April 26 disaster, but then not having the data to conclusively determine whether the radioactive iodine cloud could in fact be counted as the aberrant factor. Thus the MAPS program was born, to build a global perspective on bird population trends across species, through continental units. Obviously, with the Fukishima disaster still unfolding, not to mention the acceleration of climate change and habitat destruction, the work of collecting data is more important now than ever.

That said, it is science, meaning, attachments to presuppositions must be held minimal, even if those presuppositions are somewhat operational. There are simply too many factors at play at the level of detailed interaction between organisms and environment. Dan himself offered that the data collection helps with the broad outlines of what’s going on, but in the end the whole effort is still an educated gamble. While the physical laws point us toward definite conclusions (ie greenhouse gases work in a known way, therefore the planet is warming), the complexity of the planet’s natural systems makes management often less than straightforward. To the politically minded inhabitant of planet Earth and the politically-minded experimental artist, it is where our work exists: careful diagnosis, experimental strategies of response, and uncertain outcome.

 

 

the mysterious fdl initiative movement, on black friday

The fdl initiative movement has come to life. The photo evidence comes in from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.  

A mess of students from UW-Fond du Lac with shared concerns and curiosities about their city and fellow citizens got organized, got smart, and got motivated. There were about thirty in all, led by the art students. Specifically, they wanted to creatively address the anxieties felt by some elements of the citizenry regarding the spectre of rising demographic heterogeneity. How to raise the issue while wearing an ideological poker face was part of their challenge.

While I have already related some of the recent happenings in town, a number of Wisconsin's other campuses have lately been hit with incidents of racist and/or homophobic vandalism. Beyond that, it is also important to remember that this part of Wisconsin has long been deservedly known as a conservative part of the state. Joseph McCarthy, from outside Appleton, is the area's most notorious conservative son, but in the general achievement category we would do well to remember that Ripon, just a few miles from Fond du Lac, lays a credible claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party. So when it comes to addressing these issues, the fdl initiative movement is on the front lines in ways the critical artists of Chicago are not.

It being November, they decided to bring three questions to the public assembled in advance of Black Friday shopping. 

On t-shirts.

  



 They found large numbers of these People (Who Shop) exactly as they had known they would, outside big box stores in the early morning hours of Friday, November 26. fdl initiative movement workers invited persons who had nothing to do but wait, to consider the questions. Those who were willing wrote answers on the shirts.

I have not seen the t-shirt responses. As they'd expected "some are great, some funny, and some stupid," said John Scotello. Where the fdl initiative movement goes now is unclear, but at some point we need to see the t-shirts with responses. Though maybe it is premature to decide how, where, and when to show them, it is fun to think about. But the group has not put much attention to those questions just yet, having prepared for another venture out, as of tonight. Not Black Friday this time, but a regular Friday night. That means they likely will encounter the more familiar assemblage of the weekly Friday night watering hole rather than the once-a-year gathering of the People Who Shop. 

Earlier today I met with my language tutor. He is an anthropologist. During our practice session, in which I tried to explain the fdl initiative movement, it occurred to him that the exercise sounded like a kind of activist poetic anthropological research. If there is a creatively rigorous process of analysis after the "data" has been gathered, that may be an appropriate description. How and when the "researchers" make their agenda more apparent is what we now await.

All photos courtesy of fdl initiative movement.