Crossing Nebraska

Leaves loosen their grip on life and become blown about by the wind. Trash by the roadside billows up and gets swept along in the wake of the traffic passing by. A tumbleweed bounces and rolls across the emptiness, only stopping when a tangle of brush or a fencerow rises up to halt its wandering. Things that are dead get blown by the wind, things with no mind of their own – lacking in intention. I remember watching the pollen from our backyard Chinese Mulberry seemingly explode into the sunlight to drift like fog upon the barely moving breeze. And the maple seeds… I’d watch them helicopter down from the tree tops, landing nearby or far away as the particularity of their structure and the movement of the air dictated. Yes, and I’ve come to learn that those “dead” tumbleweeds disperse their propagules as they go, or when they’re stopped by something rooted in moist and life-giving soil. Things that bear life get blown by the wind – things that carry in them the intention of somethin...

Dear friend,   You have come to question what all of this means: your life and love, your toil and entertainment; your tears which give way to laughter which give way to tears all over again; the ceaseless frenzied activity that you’ve been invited to join – activity that you fear will only serve to keep you occupied until such time as you return to dust, as all of life, as mighty civilizations, as entire species inevitably turn to dust, over and over again.   Young friend, you now stand peering into the dark, cold abyss of meaninglessness. Congratulations! Yes, congratulations. For you, young friend, are alive – fully and truly alive. Oh, sure, we’re all alive (until, of course, we’re not), but to live nobly on the brink of this cold and dark abyss is to be fully and truly alive. This and this alone will be your rock.       I know, I know..., these words must hardly sound like the kind of rain that can turn the desert that you are fee...

Yesterday was my final day of the Live Below the Line  challenge. Now, I can’t say that I’m unhappy about that, but I do think that I’ll be reflecting upon this week for some time to come. Fact is, I’ve learned a lot – both about what others have to deal with on a regular basis and about myself. I’ll elaborate on that, but let me jump to the bottom line first. It looks like my final tally for the five days comes to $6.90, or about $1.38 per day, “well below” the $1.50 constraint of the challenge. Yeay! But how did that happen? I thought I was going to be using every last penny!       As it turns out, I’ve got about another day’s supply of my soup concoction remaining after today. I simply overestimated my need in that regard. Thus, I gave myself a 1/6 credit on the cost of those ingredients. Likewise, the carrots; I only ate about half of them. Unfortunately, I only came to these conclusions late in the week, so I didn’t have the opportunity to ad...

About a year ago I did a couple of posts focusing on the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi – Can Wabi-Sabi Save the World? & Envisioning a Wabi-Sabi World . I’ll leave it to the interested reader to check those out further, but what is salient to this present post is the meaning of the word wabi . English words frequently associated with wabi are: quietness, solitude, simplicity, and poverty (Iwamoto, 2008; Munsterberg, 1957; Suzuki, 1959). I bring this up in this current context because my experience of this Live Below the Line challenge has, in fact, been very wabi . It has fostered introspection, contemplation, and a deep spiritual appreciation of something that we normally take for granted – the food that we eat.       I wonder, however, if perhaps my previous two posts might have seemed to veer towards the romantic – making extreme poverty seem like a blessed nudge toward deeper spiritual understanding rather than the dire hardship that it is. Indee...

Yesterday was a really good day. My body, for the most part, has adjusted to the Live Below the Line challenge and both my mood and my strength were high pretty much all the way through what was for me the first day of the workweek. It was also a very beautiful warm spring day of a season that has been very chilly and rainy so far. I wanted to garden! I wanted to go for a run! Unfortunately, though, by the time I got home from work my strength was quickly waning and I just didn’t think that my rice and lentils would provide me enough fuel for such activity. I know, I know, that’s highly debatable, and nutritionists and strict vegetarians alike might decry what I did next… I used some of my “banked” money to buy a tin of tuna fish and a slice of bread. I prepared a dinner of half a tuna sandwich and I was good to go.   We don’t usually ponder such things, do we? We eat what we want when we want it. We feel entitled to whatever fuel of whate...

I suspect that most readers of this third piece in my Live Below the Line series will not have all that much experience with going hungry. Sure, we’ve all gotten to the point where we’re just dying for lunch or dinner only to have it superseded by some fairly rare event – we’re in the middle of a project, for instance, or we’re travelling in between towns. And so we become ravenous – feeling as though we could “eat a horse”! Thankfully enough, though, the moment soon arrives when we simply go get something to eat. End of story.   If you’ve ever fasted, you have a little bit more realistic view of hunger. As dinnertime comes around you do indeed feel as though you could eat a horse. But as the karma of your dinnertime subsides so do your hunger pangs, and in their place is that low blood sugar sensation of lightheadedness, weakness, headachiness, and whatever other sensations you might associate with your body tapping into its stored fuel and starting to burn it. If you’ve...

I must admit that I felt just a little bit of trepidation as I contemplated the terms of the Live Below the Line challenge – live for five days on only what food and drink can be purchased for $1.50 per day. What if I totally underestimate my caloric need and end up spending the whole week with plummeting blood sugar levels and gnawing hunger pangs? What if it turns out that I’m essentially clueless as to my nutritional requirements and I end up getting a little loopy by day three? Yes, and as soon as I recognized this most central of human fears – the fear of not having enough – I realized that I absolutely had to accept the challenge. Over a billion people, without having any choice in the matter whatsoever, live day in and day out for years on end or for the entirety of their lives with the uncertainty that I was fearful of experiencing for just five measly days. Okay, then, count me in.   The Buddhist practice that I embrace encompasses the bodhisattva ideal – the vow ...