Tag: buddhism

Coyote’s Basket

Coyote walking on the Inverness Ridge Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore. Robin L. Chandler, 2025.

“One day Old Man Coyote was bored, and so he decided to have some fun and made a basket. A big basket, round like an acorn storage basket, only much bigger and rounder…..he wove his tracks into the pattern to give a hint who’d made it. When it was finished, he put everything People would need, forever, into the basket. And then he put the basket by the trail to see what would happen.

Sure enough, along came some People, and when they saw the big basket they said ‘Hey? What’s this?’ They knew it was a basket, but they had never seen any basket this big before…..when they looked inside and saw that it had everything they needed, they said, ‘We can live in it!’ So they did.  

Well. Old Man Coyote had put everything We the People would need into that basket, but he never imagined that there would someday be so many of us, and some of us would invent needs that Coyote could never imagine we needed! Pretty soon he began to hear lots of fighting and arguing in the basket. And before long some of his strongly woven strands began to tear, and the basket got holes in it, and some of the People who went in together got thrown out through the holes! Just imagine!

Well, again. Old Man Coyote wasn’t really surprised. He’s not surprised at anything, of course. Being a Trickster, he just wants to try something and see what will happen – which is why he put the big basket by the trail that day when he was bored in the first place. But…Coyote was a bit sad anyway, seeing that his gift basket had become the place for a big fight among the People. That’s why you sometimes hear him crying and singing to himself at night.” (p.178-179)

…..David Hinton, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, argues in his book China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen that Ch’an began during the Tang dynasty of ninth-century China as an intellectual and cultural rebellion. Ch’an practice was seeking to recapture the feeling and experience of immediacy and wholeness of the Paleolithic human mind and to overcome the alienation of humans from the world that resulted from the agricultural revolution and its modus operandi of humans taking control of wild nature. (p.195)

…..Shunryu Suzuki wrote in the prologue to his 1970 book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, that ‘if your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.’…..The bottom line would be that language and it’s constructs can get in the way of nondual, holistic perception and experience, of what Suzuki Roshi called beginner’s mind.” (p.196)

Excerpts from Bruce Byer’s Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere form the California Coast

…

“it’s not what you look at, but what you see”

Wit-Sa-Nap Creek Winter Sunset. Robin L. Chandler, 2024

“[According to the Avatamsaka Sutra,] Indra’s net is pictured as stretching indefinitely in all directions, and at each of the knots of the net is a glittering jewel. All the other jewels in the net are reflected in each individual jewel, and each jewel reflected is also reflecting all the other jewels. This metaphor describes what was called, in Pali (the original language of the Buddhist canon), paticca samupadda, “dependent co-arising.” Modern Buddhist teachers have called it “interbeing,” or “the harmony of universal symbiosis.” This is a theory of mutual intercausality, interconnectedness, and interdependence. It is a worldview from the same ecophilosophical galaxy as Alexander von Humboldt’s “kosmos,” the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation’s principle of hisuknis cawaak, and the “everything is connected” view at the heart of ecology. When Thoreau wrote that humans need to “realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations,” he had this kind of idea in mind.

We think in metaphors, often — and even scientists do. Metaphors are the templates of pattern, and having those templates helps scientists — and everyone — “see” the patterns and relationships underlying the superficial “data” of experience, which often appear chaotic. Thoreau wrote in his journal on August 5, 1851, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Seeing deep patterns needs a metaphoric, poetic mind.” (p.166)

The Sierra Nevada Red Fox pictured in my painting is endangered; there are less than forty of these beautiful creatures remaining in the California counties of Alpine, Fresno, Inyo, Madera, Mono and Tuolumne. As an artist, I choose to make art that fosters kinship with the earth by capturing glimpses of the world’s beauty. I hope that inspiring others to understand our interconnectedness with nature will help preserve the earth- and in this case, the Sierra Nevada Red Fox – for future generations. 

Excerpts from Bruce Byers’ The View From Cascade Head: Lessons for the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast

ripples of healing

Sierra Sunrise. Robin L. Chandler, 2023.

“So is ecology a kind of art? And, of course, art, like anything humans (or members of other species) do, is one kind of “interaction” between us and our environment. The logical conclusion from these definitions is inescapable: art is one aspect of human ecology, and ecological science is a kind of art. And since art is a kind of behavior, it may be an example of ecologically adaptive behavior…..if the art of Audubon and the Hudson River School painters has helped save parts of our biosphere, I’d say they are contributing to human survival – and that’s by definition, adaptive.” (p. 63-64)

“Most forms of Western ethics view persons as independent egos, centers of individual choice and action. But the Buddhist “dependent co-arising” view doesn’t see persons in that way. Ecology and evolutionary biology don’t either. The ethics that inspired these differing views – the Western ego-self view versus the Buddhist eco-self view – come out to be quite different. Aldo Leopold argued articulately, from an ecological perspective, for this broader view of self and community. He believed that ethics depend on the premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His “land ethic” enlarged the concept of this “community” to include soils, waters, plants, and animals.” (p.174)

“When it comes to actions and lifestyles, a world of total interdependence has both a negative and a positive side. On the negative side, anything that a person does can affect the whole system. Our ego-selfish actions have a global reach. But the positive side of total interdependence is that our actions and our choices, no matter how small, can send ripples of healing through the whole system.” (p. 175)”

Excerpts from Bruce A. Byers‘

The View From Cascade Head: Lessons for the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast

a geography of grace

Walking along Division Creek near the Sawmill Pass Trailhead. Robin L. Chandler, 2023.

“Away from the sounds of roads and the glare of carbon-arc streetlights, it is quiet here. Some would say it is peaceful, but that is not the right word. This land throbs with life in every season and at every hour. And the quiet itself is not truly quiet. In the absence of the noise of jets and air conditioners, internal combustion engines and recorded music that blankets our perception in most of the human environments of America, ten thousand subtler voices may be heard.”

Excerpt from Joseph Bruchac’s book At the End of Ridge Road.

gazing in reverence

Walking the Owens River waking Mt. Tom. Robin L. Chandler, 2023

Tracing the way back home here,

I might round North Mountain

on roads hung along cliffwalls,

timbers rising in switchbacks,

or I could take the watercourse

way winding and circling back,

level lakes broad and brimming,

crystalline depths clear and deep

beyond shorelines all lone grace

and long islands of lush brocade.

Gazing on and on in reverence

across realms so boundless away,

I come to the twin rivers that flow through together.

Two springs sharing one source,

they follow gorges and canyons

to merge at mountain headlands

and cascade on, scouring sand out and mounding dunes

below peaks that loom over islands swelling into hills,

whitewater carrying cliffs away in a tumble of rocks,

a marshy tangle of fallen trees glistening in the waves.

Following along the south bank that crosses out front,

the snaking north cliff that looms behind, I’m soon

lost in thick forests, the nature of dusk and dawn in full view,

and for bearings, I trust myself to the star-filled night skies.

Poem 36 by Hsien Ling-yun (385 – 433) a buddhist poet who loved mountains and streams

from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China

Translated by David Hinton

for our Grinnell

fragile and fleeting. Robin L. Chandler, 2022.

To live to mourn an ancient woodland, known

Always, loved with an old love handed down,

That is a grief that will outlast the griever,

Grief as landmark, grief as a wearing river

That in its passing stays, biding in rhyme

Of year with year, time with returning time,

As though beyond the grave the soul will wait

In long unrest the shaping of the light

In branch and bole through the centuries that prepare

This ground to pray again its finest prayer.

An excerpt from Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir, 1987: III

Today March 31, 2022 our beloved Grinnell, peregrine falcon and mate for seven years to Annie, passed away. Thank you Grinnell for gracing our lives and for giving us so many treasured moments. Life is so fragile and so precious. You will soar always in our hearts.

ex voto

Souls of Birds. Robin L. Chandler, 2020.

Thank you for the hummingbirds…a glimmer of hope we cherish in our gardens.

Hear our votive prayer for the bird souls, thousands dead in New Mexico, victims of the wildfires fueled by climate change:

“And when bird song is gone will earth be the only witness?

Will only rocks grieve the absence?”

Do we pray for a miracle

or…

awake from the dream that our world consists of disconnected beings?