Patience

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Practicing What I Preach

VA Hospital - Seattle

This evening my nephew Keith McMahon brought his family up to Whidbey from Seattle for a visit, and gently pointed out to me that it has been a week and a half since I made a blog entry. Point well taken. As I come into my summer season of explorations, I'll try to include more regular entries, and also add some podcasts from the field as I hike, bike and paddle around the Puget Sound basin.

Meanwhile, one day a week through most of this winter and spring of my Circling Home year, I've been making the long commute by bicycle and bus from Whidbey Island to the VA Hospital in Seattle's Beacon Hill neighborhood. I've been teaching an eight-week course with Dr. David Kearney in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The class meets for three hours every Thursday morning, with veterans who often travel several hours distance to attend the class. These are patients referred to the course because of chronic pain or post-traumatic stress disorder (or both), who have tapped out the conventional medical resources and are often trying this class as a kind of last resort. We also have nurses, psychologists and mental health counselors routinely enrolled in the class. We make no distinctions between patients and staff participating in the program. In fact, in our opening introductions we ask participants not to mention their profession or role at the hospital when they share their reasons for enrolling in the class. Our habitual ways of dividing ourselves by profession or rank are set aside right from the beginning. It is amazing what a relief this can be all the way around.

David is a gastroenterologist at the VA, and a Professor of Medicine at UW Medical School, who came on one of my Inside Passages kayaking meditation retreats in Alaska a couple summers ago. Both of us had studied with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the MBSR program, and David had been looking for a partner to help him institute a course at the VA using this powerful teaching model. It has been an enormously satisfying experiment for both of us. Nothing like this has ever been done at the Seattle VA, and the need and demand for the class is huge.

Basically, MBSR is an intensive course in meditation and yoga as tools for stress and pain management. The class meets once a week for three hours over an eight week period, and students make a commitment to work with these practices an hour a day at home as well. It is a big commitment. Our goal is not to "fix" their problems, but to offer practical tools to help them live more creatively and intelligently with those problems, and to learn, through mindfulness practice, how to gain more control over their reactivity to stress and pain. The core of the program is the mindfulness practices themselves, rather than academic study or group therapy. And as we have discovered, the medical professionals who participate in this program are often as hungry for this kind of inner restoration work as the patients themselves.

On Saturday we had our day-long retreat at the VA that comes near the end of each class series, during which we spend seven hours in intensive, silent meditation. It is not supposed to be easy, and it isn't. Many of these patients and staff alike have never engaged in formal meditation practice a minute in their lives before coming into the course, and even though we have worked up to this gradually, a full day of practice is almost always a big stretch. But they do it. With dogged determination they do it. Some are in wheelchairs, some have walkers, most live with some kind of chronic pain that is a constant reality in their lives. Some can't do even the simplest yoga postures, but we each do the best we can with whatever capacities we have. Sitting and walking meditation, yoga, Qi gong, and mindful eating of their lunch in silence - few of them would have been caught dead doing this prior to coming into the course. But if there are no options left, they will try anything, and I am always moved and inspired by the tenacity of their efforts once they realize the freedom and power that these practices offer them to change their relationship with their own suffering. It is humbling to watch people who have been given up on by the system waking up to this freedom they didn't know they had, a freedom to live into the reality of their lives just as they are, a freedom that is not dependent on circumstances. This is a radical experience for them.

At the end of this unorthodox day of mindfulness, buried in the bowels of the VA Hospital, as the group broke silence and shared about our experience of the day, several acknowledged that it had been very hard at times to stay with the effort. It was one thing to hold silence for half an hour at a time, as we've been doing in our class, interspersed with conversation and teaching. But no one in the class had ever done anything like this for a whole day. 

Yet one by one, the stories came out about how moving this had been for them. "The day went much faster than I expected." said one. "Even though it was hard, I've never felt this calm or centered before. I really get how this works much more now. Sitting at home for a half hour a day will be much easier now." Another said, "The pain in my back is always there, and it was sure there today. But it didn't bother me nearly as much. There were times during the day when I forgot all about it. During one meditation I realized I'd forgotten all about the pain, like the pain had disappeared from my mind completely, even though I realized it was still there. I didn't think that was possible for me." Another said, "I live with anxiety all the time. The smallest things can set me off. There were times today when my anxiety almost overwhelmed me, but when I looked around and saw everyone else doing it, I just came back to my breath like you've been teaching us, and I got through it. I've been seeing this happen more often in my daily life too. When the anxiety attacks come, I don't react to them nearly as quickly. Sometimes I don't react at all. I see it for what it is, and I let it just be there until it passes. This is a new thing for me, and today really helped me gain confidence that I can live with this anxiety a lot better than I have before."

Being invited by David to help him launch this program at the VA has been a real privilege. As I head into my summer of explorations around the Sound, I won't be able to continue with this work for several months. But I look forward to returning when the year is over. It has been a grounding experience for me to be with people who live with obvious suffering every day, and to see the courage they are finding to face into the suffering in more creative, self-compassionate ways. I know for sure that I've learned as much as any of my students. Watching the sincere efforts of these vets, I always come out feeling more hopeful about our human capacity to face into the difficulties of our lives. And this capacity is something we need now more than ever. Practicing alongside these vets pulls the plug on any of my own excuses when I feel tempted to give in to discouragement or despair. It is a great reminder that I need to practice what I preach, and start over with a fresh mind in each new moment of my own life.

  

Coming Home To Ish River Country

North Fork of the Skagit River

Along the Columbia,

three more hours and I'm home.

But first

I close the car door

and walk in a field of mountain grass.

I lie down, drink

clear water, dream of old rituals

and what it feels to be pure of heart.

When I get back home to Ish River Country,

I'll open the barn door

and see the hides of white horses

shedding rain.

- Robert Sund, Ish River

Robert Sund was a poet who lived in the Skagit Valley. I met him just 

one time, briefly, back in the mid-70's, at a wilderness hearing in Port 

Angeles on the Olympic Penninsula. With his gray beard he looked 

ancient to me at the time, a young buck myself fresh out of the blocks. 

He had a gentle way about him. We both testified on behalf of a 

proposal to turn most of Olympic National Park into Wilderness. I 

was more than a bit in awe of him. I remember he congratulated me 

on my testimony. That was a big deal for me back then. Not long after, 

the Wilderness Designation was granted - a big victory - including 

Shi Shi Beach out on the northern Washington Coast. Those were 

heady days in the wilderness movement.

I stumbled on Sund's collection of Ish River poems again recently. Ish 

is the Salish word for river. Sund died in 2001, but his words live on. 

His poetry oozes sadness and nostalgia for an older, wilder Northwest, 

harking to the time of his own youth in Elma, when working the land 

and sea was still the main mode of existence in these parts.

This poem of his brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. There are 

tears in my eyes right now. What is it? If you have grown up here as I 

have and watched this great tide of change, it is hard not to feel 

this sadness, this longing for a stronger chord to tie self to land, and

community to place.

I lie down, drink

clear water, dream of old rituals

and what it feels to be pure of heart.

When I get back to Ish River country . . .

When I get back to Ish River Country . . .

Duwamish, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Skokomish . . .

Where have these rivers gone? Where have the salmon gone?

Where have the old rituals gone that anchored us in place, brought 

us home to our selves, home to the land that fed us and kept us

whole?

Now even the climate is changing. Maybe this is a last-ditch effort by

the earth to bring us back to our senses, to get our feet on the 

ground again. Maybe it is our final homecoming invitation.

Here's a Curve Ball

When I was writting the rule book for this year, I was clear that I needed to take my car out of the formula as completely as possible if this was going to work. There would just be too many times when I'd be tempted to fudge if I left it as an option. And I'm sure that instinct was on the mark. The further I get into my car-free year, the stronger my motivation has become to stay with it, mainly because the benefits have been so great, but also as a matter of pride. I have so many probation officers watching my progress that I'd be busted in a heartbeat if I decided to cheat.

I did write in a couple exceptions to the rule. This is, after all, completely voluntary, and I didn't want it to stray toward dogatism. The exceptions are medical emergencies, or if someone from my wife's family dies, and I need to go to their funeral on the East Coast. I would suspend the rule for one of those situations.

But now something has come up that has me stumped, and more than a little bummed out. My doctor has ordered a colonoscopy, and they won't perform the procedure unless I have someone to drive me home. I begged and pleaded with them to let me take the bus, but they just won't do it in that case. It's not a medical emergency, but there are reasons why I do need to have this procedure done. The clinic is four buses and a two mile walk from home. I sure can't ride my bike. I'll be heavily sedated coming out of it. I have no choice, it turns out, but to accept a ride home if I'm going to do this.

It's a legitimate exception to the rule, but I'm finding it surprisingly hard to make peace with this unexpected twist in the road. I guess my pride really is wrapped up in it now, after not getting in a car for over four months. I don't want to do anything that might compromise my efforts.

So this will be a good exercise in non-attachment. Discipline and perseverance are essential to what I'm trying to do this year, and I think I have plenty of both. But resistance to things I can't control is something else, and I need to let go of the effort at that point. There is no need for this to hinder my larger intention, and I'm not worried that it will. So if I'm a little embarrassed or self-conscious to find myself in a car under these circumstances, it's my attitude I need to work on, not the circumstances that make this necessary. It's just what is needed in this moment, that's all. I'll be right back into the stream that I have chosen for this year when this is over. In fact, this is part of the stream. Maybe I can bring a little more sense of humor into the whole too-serious process. 

You Can't Go Home Again

Most of us have at least some ambivalence about the places we grew up. I'm no different. At age ten my family moved back down to Puget Sound after several years living in Vancouver, B.C. We landed in Bellevue, on the east side of Lake Washington. At the time, Bellevue was asserting itself as Seattle's sprawling new bedroom community. I basically grew up in that explosion, and when I left for college, traveling all the way across the lake to the University of Washington, I might as well have moved a thousand miles away. I've avoided Bellevue like the plague ever since. 

So naturally, as an honest pilgrim, I figured I needed to aim one of my pilgrimages there during my Circling Home year, and see for myself what has become of the old town. There were several reasons I wanted to do this:

1. I have an aversion to the place, and I've learned that I need to pay attention to aversions. They are there to tell us something important about ourselves.

2. I know I have a lot of memories still stashed there that even I don't suspect.

3. Most of my cousins who grew up with me there never left, following that vein of wealth, while my siblings and I all fled into less economically viable lives. The gulf between us has grown wide, and I wanted to see if there are any bridges left that might hold my weight.

4. My grandparents are buried there, and I've never even visited their graves.

5. My 40th class reunion is this summer - never a fact that one wants to be too public about. I've never been to a class reunion, and I've decided to go, but I didn't want to show up cold turkey.

So last week, after teaching my class at the VA Hospital in Seattle, I jumped on my bike and rode the I-90 bike trail from downtown Seattle across Mercer Island and into Bellevue, then plunged headlong into the nearly forgotten neighborhoods of my youth. Here's a bit of what I found, including what I found in myself.

Once, when a student asked the famous Zen Master Suzuki Roshi to sum up Buddhism in one phrase, he answered without hesitation, "Everything changes." 

He wasn't kidding. 

When I left Bellevue, it was already a place defined by wealth, though my family came in through the back door of the modest middle class neighborhoods that still existed there in the 60's. Riding my bike along the trail my family left, through bouts of hail and snow (in late April no less), I found a few clues that we'd been there before, but damn few. I rode by our first house in Bellevue, which actually still exists, though it is hiding in a corner of the neighborhood that is now lined with much larger houses, including one under construction next door right now. It looked lost and forlorn, much smaller than I remembered, and I suspect it also is not long for this world. Archeologists in the Middle East and Meso-America know that over the course of millennia, whole cities get built on top of older cities. There is nothing new in that. But Bellevue has gone almost all the way through that process in the course of one generation. I have no idea how many times it has reinvented itself in the years since I left, because I frankly haven't been paying attention. But the layers of change are staggering.

It's not my intention to whine or complain, or even cast aspersions. That's not the point. I actually found the experience fascinating. But I might as well have been visiting one of the sudden cities that have sprung up in Dubai or China in the last handful of years. This phenomenon is happening all over the world at a breakneck pace as wealth gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. But maybe nowhere in America is it happening more graphically than in Bellevue. I won't pretend to have figured out what the lessons might be in this, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions about the trajectory of our American culture in general.

When Microsoft landed on the eastside of Lake Washington in the early 80's, the lakeside mansions were the first to be torn down and replaced with the mega-mansions that now line the lake shore. Bill Gates is the signature example of that, building a 30,000 square foot complex on Hunts Point, right across from my more affluent cousin's lakefront house where my siblings and I spent countless summer days swimming and water skiing. That house was sold in the early 90's and also torn down to make way for a larger mansion. And believe me, there was nothing humble about the older place. What I thought were new high rise apartment complexes across the bay from my house on Meydenbauer Bay turned out to be single family residences. The house we bought on Meydenbauer for $35,000 in the mid-60's recently sold for several million dollars. Apparently the house is still known in the neighborhood as the "Hoelting place" all these years later, to the consternation of the new owners, who would like to think that it now belongs to them. Our family must have left quite an impression. We can't really know what kind of wake we leave behind us.

I spent my first night with my cousin Jenny, who I see occasionally at weddings or funerals, but whose house I've never visited in Bellevue. I've always liked Jenny. She seems to have managed to live in Bellevue without being of Bellevue, if a little of my habitual stereotyping can be allowed to slip in here. She and her husband Joe are down to earth, live in one of those remnant modest homes, have raised three great kids, and are about to flee the condominium units that have taken over their neighborhood. They've just listed their house for sale. Most of the places that have sold in their neighborhood recently have been bought for cash by Chinese investors, who then do what others have done before them; tear down the house and put up something bigger and fancier. Same story, different players. 

Jenny referred jokingly to my old grade school as "Medina University" rather than Medina Elementary, and I soon found out why. When I rode through that part of the city, not a fragment of the old school was there. In its place was a luxurious campus that only excessive private wealth could have conceived of. The parking lot was lined with Yukons and Hummers. How a public school could be allowed this level of separation from other schools in the district is a question I'm sure others in the city are asking. 

From there I went to the site of my Junior High School, which also no longer exists. In its place is a large city park next door to Bellevue Square. As a teenager in the mid-60's I spent a summer working as a groundskeeper in Bellevue Square. I could not find one single building, tree or shrub that would tell me I'd ever been there before. Downtown Bellevue has its own forest of skyscrapers now, and I counted six mega-construction cranes currently at work building new ones. Not a single one of those existed when I left. Again, I found this more fascinating that disturbing. The change is so total that there is nothing left for grief to push off from.

After a long ride out toward Lake Sammamish I finally found the cemetery where my mother's parents, Grandma Julie and Grandpa Charles are buried, along with my Uncle Stewart. After some searching, I found their shared grave marker, which simply stated "Together Forever". They died in 1970 and 1972 respectively, and while I attended their funerals, and loved them dearly, it took me all this time to visit their actual gravesite. I think it was seeing the lavishly decorated graves on the Swinomish Indian Reservation during my walking trip this winter that made me think I maybe owed them a visit.

I've never had much use for cemetery's, is the truth of it. I've always imagined that when it's my time to die, and if I have anything to say about it, I'll wander off into the forest and die like any other self-respecting higher mammal. I'll return the favor to all those fish and cattle who have fed me for so long, and let my body feed a few critters back for a change. Still, I was glad I came. I sat with them for awhile, calling up images of the abundant life we shared during my youth. When it was time to go, I pondered what I might leave for them. In the end I recited the Heart Sutra and did three prostrations in front of their grave. Something honest and true from the person I have become to the people who nurtured me long ago. I don't think I'll need to go back anytime soon, but at least now I have a picture in my mind of where their ashes lay.

That night I stayed with my friends Ron and Eva Sher at their home on Meydenbauer Bay, enjoying the kind of warm hospitality that makes any place a place worth living, and reminding myself that there are still a lot of things about Bellevue worth liking. When I woke up in my lakeside cottage it was blowing and snowing hard. I still had a long way to peddle, and the weather was far from ideal for biking, but Ron (at age 66) took off on a sixty mile training ride of his own, so who was I to complain.

My brother Kim and I both ran track at Bellevue High School. I was a good runner, but Kim was a genuine track star who inherited the genes of our Grandpa Charles, who ran the 10,000 meters in the 1908 London Olympics. For old time's sake, Kim came down from Whidbey to join me at a big invitational track meet that was happening that day at our old Bellevue High School stadium. Between snow squalls we watched some of the races and bragged to our fellow spectators about our old track prowess (mostly his). It was fun to be there. Jenny and Joe came too so they could see Kim. I think that connection has been renewed for sure.

When we'd had enough of the track meet, I jumped back on my bike and rode up through Kirkland and Kenmore for my last stop on this oddball trip - the Acadia Cemetery in Lake City where my other grandparents are buried. While my mother's father was attending Columbia University and running in the Olympics, my Granpa Al Hoelting quit school after Junior High and headed West from Galena, IL to homestead in Montana. After proving up on the homestead, he brought his bride out to join him in Roundup, MT. That's where my father was born. 

I grew up at Grandpa Al's feet listening to stories about his homesteading days. He was a great storyteller. Something in the stark contrast between these two men has defined the lives of both my brother and I, leading us on a lifelong quest to straddle both worlds. I found Granpa and Grandma's cripts in the mausoleum, paid respects, sent some waves of love back their way, and left them with another rendering of the Heart Sutra. I'll leave it to them to make whatever sense of that they can, but I hope they know I meant well. I rode on in the freezing rain north toward Whidbey Island. 

It was a strangely satisfying trip. I can feel the ripples of it sloshing around in my gut still, searching out points of intersection. I'm not tempted in the slightest by what I saw in Bellevue, but I feel I can go back there now with something approaching curiosity and equanimity. I was shaped by this too. I don't understand these forces of wealth that seem to have no upper limits, and are causing such grief to the planet, but there it is. It's all one world.  

Sally had a hot bath and a halibut dinner ready for me when I got home. It was good to see her, and good to be back in my world. I was super tired, and slept really well that night.  

Earth Day Talk

Holly Hughes is a poet and writer who, like me, fished commercially for salmon in Alaska and draws much of her inspiration as a writer from those experiences. She also teaches English at Edmonds Community College, and this week invited me to speak there as part of an Earth Day series of events at the college. Holly is one of my favorite people. In fact we will be co-teaching a retreat on writing and meditation next October at the North Cascades Institute, something I'm really looking forward to.

The talk was a lot of fun to give, and a good way for me to take the pulse of what younger people are thinking in relation to climate change and personal lifestyle choices. I've been touched by how many high school and college age kids have thanked me for what I'm doing this year with my car-free experiment. It seems to compute for them, and seem less onerous than to older Baby Boomers. I suppose it's something about being at a time in life when choices still feel more open. It's an attitude that is refreshing to be around.

I opened with a joke about the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, one that is having far more success at the box office. This new movie is called A Comforting Lie. Too often we think our only choices are denial and despair when we come up against something like climate change. But each of these false choices are their own kind of comforting lie. Denial is a comforting lie because it allows us to pretend we don't see what is right in front of us. Despair is a comforting lie because it lets us believe we are powerless to do anything about it. Rebecca Solnit has written, "Despair is a luxury. When I despair I can drive a Yukon and watch bad TV. Despair demands nothing of us. Hope demands everything."

Returning our focus to the power we have to make changes in our own lives, without waiting for others to make those changes first, opens a third path that doesn't have to get stuck in denial or despair. That is what I'm trying to do this year, turning necessity into a virtue by getting ahead of the curve and discovering the benefits of embracing changes that ground my life more deeply in my local terrain, and that turn the act of traveling back into an adventure that nourishes both me and the place that holds me.

One kid asked me afterwards if I thought I'd ever do anything this big and bold again in my life. I told him I hope to do something this big and bold every day of my life from here forward. Why not? What are we doing here anyway? What are we waiting for?

500 Year Plan

My recent bike trip through the Duwamish watershed in Seattle's industrial corridor was a humbling wake up call. The original home of Chief Seattle's tribe, and of the early farms that fed Seattle's growing population in the early days of our city, the Duwamish is now one of the most toxic Superfund sites in America, an estuary so thoroughly ruined by industrial abuse that, even after seventy million dollars in clean-up effort, it remains one of the most complicated toxic messes ever taken on by the federal government (see A River Lost in the Seattle PI). 

I'm as guilty of denial as anyone. I grew up here. I've driven by this paradise-turned-wasteland a thousand times on I-5. This is not an encouraging reality from any angle, and entering the belly of this beast is one of the more discouraging assignments I've given myself during my Circling Home year. If it took a century to inflict this damage, it may take 500 years to even begin repairing it. And of the original tribe that lived here, only a few dozen are left. One has to hunt hard for traces of the old sloughs and side channels that made up this signature delta of Seattle's youth.

Yesterday the Dalai Lama spoke at Seattle's Quest Field, situated on part of that same lost river delta. A Lumi elder helped introduce him and welcome him to Seattle. This elder's first words were in thanks to the Duwamish people for letting us gather on their land. For me, this trumped anything the Dalai Lama and other dignitaries had to say. There was something audacious and defiant about this gesture of respect and courtesy toward a lost tribe, this refusal to acknowledge that this land is anything other than their's.  

And in fact, the most potent witness to hope that I've encountered on my travels so far this year may be the building of a new ceremonial longhouse on the Duwamish River. The recovery of the longhouse tradition at tribal centers around the Salish Sea speaks to this refusal to accept the current bleak state of affairs on ancestral lands as final or permanent. In the case of the Duwamish, this pittance of ruined land, granted to them by the city of Seattle in the middle of a five mile-long Superfund Site, is almost laughable. But if one digs deeper it takes on a mythic significance in the life of the city and the region, and certainly of the tribe. These are the people among us endowed by culture with the longest view. These are the ones whose ancestry in this place goes deepest, and who are best equipped to reinvigorate the land with exactly the kind of cultural and spiritual resilience that we will all need if we are going to begin the long journey back toward ecological health and restoration.