Inside Passages

Patience

2008-05-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

Please be patient with InsidePassages, we are going to migrate to slightly different version. The transfer shouldn't take more than a few days.
Thanks for your understanding!

Practicing What I Preach

2008-05-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-27T16:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-24T19:13:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-17T18:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

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.

KUOW Interview - Part Two

2008-04-08T17:33:00.000-07:00

Duwamish Watershed - Harbor Island

Last Friday I was interviewed a second time on Seattle's NPR affiliate KUOW by Megan Sukys for her Sound Focus show. Megan is following my Circling Home journey this year on a seasonal basis, so this is Part Two of a four part interview series.

Megan picked up on an important topic that surfaced during my bike tour of the inner Sound a couple weeks ago. What about the parts of the Sound whose beauty has been squandered or obscured, given over to industry, or left for dead? How are we to relate to such places? It has been said that we will not work to save that which we do not love. What might it mean to love these discarded and contaminated parts of our region too? Is real restoration possible if we fail to do so?

You can listen to my nine minute response to this question here.

Loving The All Of It

2008-04-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Commencement Bay and Tacoma's Industrial Waterway

Day Three of my bike trip last week through the inner Sound was a full immersion in the industrial corridor between Tacoma and Seattle - fifty miles, to be exact, of uninterupted industrial sprawl and development. It was a wild ride.

My day began with a ride down Colvos Passage along the west side of Vashon Island. I took a ferry from Vashon to Point Defiance in Tacoma and headed into a very differnet world. Residents of the islands in the sound, when they catch a ferry to the urban corridor, will often say "I'm going to America." This is usually not meant as a compliment. Any satellite image from space of the Puget Sound basin makes it graphically clear. The east side of the sound from Tacoma through Seattle and Everett is overwhelmingly concrete and urban development, while the islands and the west side of the sound remains predominantly rural and green.

Seattle is often touted as one of the most livable cities in America, with its proximity to the picturesque waterways of Puget Sound, stunning mountains and nearby wilderness. People keep pouring into the region from all over the United States because of its natural beauty and robust economy. But increasingly, that beauty is deceptive. An additional 1.5 million people are expected to move here in the next three years alone, adding a city the size of Portland to an already overtaxed urban infrastructure. And despite its picture post card reputation, the region is in serious trouble ecologically.

Puget Sound's orcas, a prime indicator species, have been listed as among the most contaminated animals on the planet. Most of the Sound's wild salmon runs are seriously depleted, and some are extinct. Thousands of acres of commercial shellfish beds are closed because the clams and oysters are unsafe to eat. Many beaches are off limits to swimming because they are so contaminated with bacteria. Two million acres of forest have been turned into pavement in less than one generation, with toxic runoff from homes, industry and automobiles slowly choking the life out of the Sound. As one who grew up here, I've watched these tides of change endlessly rising. Climate change is merely the exclamation point on a host of threats that can no longer be ignored.

I've said that one of my goals of my Circling Home year is to fall back in love with Puget Sound, to rekindle a love affair that goes back to my childhood growing up by the shores of this inland sea. The easy way to do that is to travel only to places that exemplify its natural beauty. But what kind of love affair is that? It's like always trying to re-live your first date, stuck in a shallow infatuation that can never result in true intimacy.

So today's ride through the industrial corridor was an act of defiance against superficial love. It was my first serious expedition, outside my car and off the freeway, into the underbelly of Puget Sound's industrial sprawl that I've avoided most of my life. What might it mean to include this in my affections, to turn toward that which is most unlovely in my home region as a first step toward a renewed commitment to restoration. For five hours I rode non-stop through a network of former estuaries and fertile valleys that are now carpeted with industrial development, almost completely buried under concrete. From Tacoma to Puyallup and Sumner, Auburn and Kent, along the ghost path of the old White River drainage, diverted a hundred years ago into the Puyallup River, past the unmarked grave of the Black River that once drained Lake Washington until the ship canal and Ballard Locks turned it into a dead river, and down the Green River into Seattle's infamous Duwamish estuary, the former home of Chief Seattle's tribe, now one of the most toxic sites in America. Call it a blind date with the darker sides of Puget Sound's troubled legacy. I arrived finally in downtown Seattle exhausted from the effort of dodging semi-trucks on roads with no shoulders through tens of miles of industrial sprawl. This too is Puget Sound.

Along the way I conjured up images of Chief Seattle, whose ancestral house and grave lie close to where I grew up near Poulsbo. Words from his 1854 speech echoed in my mind; "To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. . . Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see." How could he have imagined how far we would sink before the truth of his words caught up with us.

We have a lot of work to do.

Hidden Temples - Day Two of Exploring the Inner Sound

2008-03-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

Alex and I found an inn in Poulsbo to spend the night, a good restaurant, and finished with a soak in the hot tub at the inn. After that we slept hard. Being with my son in this way reminded us both how much we enjoy each other's company when we can get away from the endless stream of home chores and family obligations. I felt renewed in my connection, and proud of the young man he has become.

In the morning we parted ways, with Alex riding on to Seattle across Bainbridge Island to meet up with some college buddies (I was grateful I got as much time as I did!), while I headed south down the Kitsap Penninsula along Liberty Bay and Port Orchard to Bremerton, and ultimately by ferry to Vashon Island.

For the first few miles it seemed like every street and mailbox had a Scandinavian name. Poulsbo holds on tight to its Norwegian heritage and identity in spite of all the changes. It is a lot like Petersburg that way, my Alaska home that calls itself "Alaska's Little Norway". both towns were settled about the same time for similar reasons. Lots of fish to catch and a landscape that reminded these tough immigrants of home.

It's amazing how many different worlds have tucked themselves away on the backroads and backwoods of rural Puget Sound - Scandinavian farmers and fishermen, organic farmsteads run by aging hippies, the rural poor with their decomposing trailers and rusting auto bodies littered through the property, military veterans with American flags proudly flying, survivalists with barbed wire compounds and large snarling dogs, and along the view bluffs and waterfront, rows of enormous new mansions for the wealthy retired and recent winners of the high tech sweepstakes. Most of these mega-houses sit shuttered and empty all but a few weeks or months of the year, their owners back and forth between the Northwest in summer and the Sunbelt in winter. And then there are the hidden temples.

In Bremerton I caught a vintage passenger ferry across Sinclair Inlet to Port Orchard, and peddled a long and beautiful shoreline around Sinclair Inlet and Race Pass to a view across the water on downtown Seattle and the Cascades. This is part of the Sound I've never seen or explored, with small beach hamlets like Manchester, Colby and Harper that I've never heard of. The road that skirts this penninsula is definitely off the beaten path, so there was almost no traffic along this inner

coast. Eventually I made the Southworth ferry to Vashon Island, and another kind of adventure.

Once on Vashon, and after a killer hill from the ferry landing, I found the home of Jyl Shinjo Brewer, a good friend from my Zen monastery who spent eleven years training full time in Japan at Harada Roshi's home temple of Sogenji in Okayama. "Jo san" took full vows of ordination four years ago, and has recently come to settle on Vashon after a year of living in a Zen center in Paris. She has landed in an amazing situation as caretaker for a temple that was moved here from Indonesia by David Smith and reassembled on Vashon Island. I knew from her description that it was a pretty cool place, but I had was not prepared for what I saw. Leaving the highway I wound a fair distance back into the woods past the usual generic homes tucked away on generic parcels of land. When I turned into Jo san's driveway I passed through a magic gate and entered another world. I was stunned.

The house where Jo san is living also came over from Indonesia and is beautiful but completely unheated. We bundled ourselves up in sweaters and jackets in her bascially-outdoor kitchen as snow was beginning to fall, and enjoyed a fine dinner of locally made nettle pasta, warmed by stories from Jo san's various adventures in the Zen worlds of Japan, Europe and America. In the morning I was up at 5:30 to join Jo san for her meditation practice in the temple, and we shocked to find fresh snow on the ground. Another woman named Karen from the Vashon Zen sangha also came in to join us. It was a wonderful way to start the day.

After morning zazen meditation we picked up on threads of our conversation from the night before over breakfast. It is such a fascinating time in our culture to be working with these tools of Buddhist practice in a society that is only beginning to understand what this way of life might be good for. Especially to take full monastic vows is swimming against a heavy current in the American swirl of culture. This is a lifestyle that is common and well integrated into the culture in much of Asia, but still has precious little purchase here in the West. It is a courageous and often lonely path for Jo san to take this on here in the U.S., and to be such a pioneer in charting the way for a practice-based life.

In the end we resolved to co-host a retreat at her temple later in the summer for members of our Seattle One Drop sangha community to explore just these kinds of questions. What does it look like to choose a path of serious meditative training in our culture? What might it be good for? What fits and what doesn't from the traditional forms of training that have come over from Asian? How does one make a living when there are no societal mechanisms of support for this way of life here? Buddhist forms of practice have made huge inroads into our culture in recent years, but we are only beginning to sort out what that might look like as a mainstream staple of life here in the West.

Exploring the Inner Sound - Day One

2008-03-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

My son Alex is on his spring break this week from Western Washington University, so I blocked out this week for a kayaking trip around Whidbey Island, hoping he might join me. He did join me, but not for a kayaking trip. Winter returned to the Northwest this week, with cold temperatures, rain, and worst of all for kayaking, plenty of wind. Plus we are in a Full Moon mode, with big tides. This mix might appeal to extreme kayakers, but I don't fall into that category.

Whidbey Island has some of the biggest tides and remotest stretches of water anywhere in Puget Sound. It is considerably more challenging, in that sense, than the trips I lead in Alaska's Tebenkof Bay Wilderness. It is nothing to mess with casually.

So instead we're doing a bike trip that I had planned for next month. Even this has turned out to be a challenge, but a good one. It's been months since I've spend any good one-on-one time with my son, and it has been very restorative for both of us. Yesterday we headed north up Whidbey Island and caught a ferry with our bikes over to Port Townsend on the Olympic Penninsula. Conditions weren't ideal, with temperatures in the forties, and plenty of rain and wind in the forecast - even snow as a possibility. As I've discovered so many times, if I go anyway it's rarely as bad as I expect, and often much better. We did face a cold, stiff wind for much of our ride the first day, which made it challenging, but the rain never materialized until a couple miles from our destination for the day. We made it to our home for the night just as the rain really started to crank up.

From Port Townsend we rode south on a hilly route along the shores of Admiralty Inlet through Hadlock and Port Ludlow, then crossed the floating bridge across Hood Canal to the Kitsap Penninsula. The wind really blasted us on the bridge with almost no shoulder and lots of traffic, so we were really glad to reach the other side. From there we rode south again along Hood Canal to the old fishing community of Poulsbo on Liberty Bay. Even though it was a modest day distance-wise for a trip like this - we peddled 43 miles - we were both pretty wasted from the effort of traveling most of the day into a headwind, and some pretty nasty hills we had to climb. I had a hard time keeping up with Alex, but I guess that's fair. I'm thirty five years older than him.

I spent most of the summers of my youth in a beach cabin on Liberty Bay near Poulsbo, so it is filled with images and deep memories from those wonderful summers of beach combing, fishing and tree-house building. A small commercial fishing port in its youth, settled by Norwegian immigrants, Poulsbo still has a bit of that flavor, but now primarily serves as a suburb of Seattle and as the home of a large nuclear submarine base on Hood Canal.

Today Alex will break off and ride across Bainbridge Island to catch a ferry to Seattle, and I will continue south through Bremerton and down Vashon Island to Tacoma. We'll see what the weather dishes up today, here in the blustery early Puget Sound spring.

Transition Whidbey

2008-03-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

My friend Vicki Robin is a Whidbey Island neighbor who is quite an inspiration. Her book Your Money Or Your Life was one of my main inspirations a decade ago for some big changes in my own life that got me on the road to a more grounded lifestyle and a better sense of right livelihood. She is also the creator of the Conversation Cafe, a fun and innovative model of local community-building that gets people together across ideological divides.

Lately Vicki is putting a lot of creative energy into Transition Whidbey, a local initiative to make Whidbey Island a model community for low energy and carbon footprint living. Accustomed to a lot of travel in her work, she has taken my own Circling Home commitment to heart and is cutting way back on her air travel this year. This is not an easy assignment when one's community of work is global in scope. Her efforts, in the face of these challenges, are in turn inspiring me and we are starting our own conversation about what we are learning, where we are benefitting from the effort, and where we are running into real obstacles and challenges.

In her latest Transition Whidbey bulletin, Vicki points out how quickly issues of energy transformation are moving to the front burner, raising the stakes on our need for personal transformation in response. Oil prices have risen from $80/barrel to $110/barrel in just a few short months since Transition Whidbey was formed. Gas prices are pushing $4.00/gallon. Food prices are also skyrocketing as a result of the falling dollar and as an unintended consequence of the shift to bio-fuel production on much of our agricultural land. The words "recession" and even "depression" are being spoken openly in reference to a teetering global economy.

Like me, Vicki is determined to look for the opportunities and the silver lining in these troubling trends. As she says in her post, "We are IN the transition, and together we can use the push of necessity and the pull of opportunity to stimulate our rising springtime energies to dream - and do."

Where are YOU finding cause for hope and opportunity? - not necessarily within these mega-trends, but within your own life, and within your own efforts to respond creatively with changes large and small? Where are you finding success in your effort to reign in excessive or unnecessary travel, and what vistas is that opening up for you? Where are you finding unexpected new opportunities for community and recreation (re-creation) closer to home. I'd love to begin harvesting your stories, and adding them to mine.

Equal Night

2008-03-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the spring equinox ("equal night" in Latin), the midway point between the shortest and longest days of the year when for a brief moment - tonight at 9:48 PDT to be exact - daylight and darkness are of the same duration all over the planet. Saturday I will lead a Day of Mindfulness retreat at the Whidbey Institute Sanctuary to commemorate the change of seasons, and Monday (weather permitting), I head off on a week-long kayaking circumnavigation of Whidbey Island. I have much to learn, because there are some fierce tides around this island, and there is little margin for error.

Since I began my Circling Home commitment on the winter solstice three months ago, this also marks the first quarter of my year of living without a car, inside a 100 km radius of home. Much has changed in my life in these three months. A trip of more than five miles is a journey that requires planning and some effort to pull off. So I'm more careful about where I go and when. The bike and bus have become my new "normal", instead than the old rare exception. Taking my car completely off the table has held my feet to the fire, bringing these changes into the marrow of my life in ways that wouldn't have happened if I'd kept my car in the formula as a fall-back option. Now it doesn't even cross my mind to use a car. Instead I think, "How can I consolidate my chores into fewer trips?", or, "Is this event important enough for me to make the effort to get there?", or "God, I love my new bike! Where can I ride today?" I drop in on friends and neighbors near at hand more, rather than spending all my time in virtual community through email networks. (I still do plenty of that though.)

I don't think, "Why am I doing this?" I know why I'm doing this, and I haven't found any reason to question the basis of that choice. If climate change really is "the defining challenge of our age.", as U.N. Sec. General Ban Ki-moon has called it, and if "What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future.", as Rajendra Pachaouri, who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said, then my efforts to reel in my carbon footprint start to seem modest, and anything but extreme.

Yes, there are days when I feel constricted by my choice, when old patterns and habits rear their heads, or I am visited by the viral restlessness of our culture. There are days when I question my own sanity, knowing that none of my friends seem to consider what I'm doing a realistic option for anyone but me. It's not easy to stand by the tracks and watch the train keep roaring by, packed to the gills with people who act as if nothing were amiss. I'm just trying to keep my own eye on the ball, and remember why I'm doing this, and for whom. My life is measured in just a handful of years, and those years are flying by. My children's lives, and the lives of all their children, is measured in countless millennia yet to come.

As I reach the one quarter mark on this year-long experiment, I continue to learn a great deal from the experience. The richness of the world that lies right beneath my feet is slowly unveiling itself to me. In the same way that I have a TV sitting in my family room, and almost never think to turn it on (Where do people find time for that?), I also have a car sitting idle in my garage, and can begin to imagine a life beyond my own addiction to independent mobility. And while most people seem to think I'm a little bit crazy, I'm still waiting for anyone to give me a compelling reason, in this age of climate crisis, why I should be doing anything else.

Ways of Seeing

2008-03-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Cascades from Double Bluff on Whidbey Island

There are lots of ways to go local. As I've been discovering on my recent walkabouts, having a camera along offers an additional way of seeing where we are with fresh eyes. I'm no pro, and my camera is nothing special, but it is a window into what Mary Oliver calls "the untrimmable light of the world".

I recently was introduced to a fellow Northwest explorer and photographer named Kurt Smith, who does this on a serious level, producing amazing photographs that probe the beauty that lies all around us here in the Puget Sound region. He anchors his images in some darn good stories, too, that follow the changing Northwest seasons near his home in Kingston. Check out his blog at Seeing Small: A Photographer's Journal of the Everyday.

County Buses Really Work

2008-03-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

Last week my wife and I traveled by local bus to Bellingham to attend a choral concert with my son Alex, who is a student at Western Washington University. Bellingham is just inside my 100 km circle, but since I'm not using a car this year I haven't been up to see him since Christmas. I thought it would be just too much of a hassle to get there without a car. I was wrong.

I've been really impressed by the recently initiated County Connector bus service that now links Island, Skagit and Whatcom Counties. For 75 cents apiece, Sally and I traveled from right in front of our house on South Whidbey all the way to Bellingham on express buses that now link the three counties in a Tri-County Connector service. We transferred in Oak Harbor and again in Mt. Vernon, but the connections were very good, we were free to really enjoy the scenery, and it didn't take that much longer than it does to drive.

I also really benefitted from this service last month when I needed to get home from Stanwood, near Camano Island, after finishing the first part of my Skagit walking tour. I thought it would be a long, convoluted process getting home, but discovered a regular express Island County bus down to Everett and Boeing that serves commuters coming from Camano Island and Stanwood. I was back on Whidbey before I knew it.

This is a really great service that people in this community need to know about. And it is mirrored by similar links in other Western Washington counties. Cars and trucks account for 50% of the Northwest's contribution to Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Not to mention the economic impacts of $4.00 / gallon gas. When there is a viable alternative to driving, why wouldn't we want to use it. Now that I know how practical this one is I'll use it a lot, even after my car-free year is over.

Circling Home on King 5 Evening News

2008-03-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Today I spoke with Jane McCarthy, a reporter from Seattle's King 5 News, about Circling Home. With gas prices edging toward $4.00/gallon, the quest for alternatives to cars is suddenly in the news. Check out Jane's report about my Circling Home efforts, which aired tonight as a featured story on the King 5 nightly news.

Could You Be Carless?

2008-03-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

Fellow Whidbey Islander and journalist Sue Frause covers Whidbey culture for the Seattle PI. Her blog recently ran a piece on the experiences of several people who are going car-less.

Check it out.

Low Carbon Eating

2008-03-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

My car-free year is proving to be about more than just my own travel. It's true that transportation is the biggest contributor to global warming in the Pacific Northwest. But it's also true that "we are what we eat", and that we need to pay closer attention to how far and by what means our food is transported. What we eat, it turns out, is as much a "transportation choice" as how we get ourselves from Point A to Point B.

I learned a lot about the importance of food choices to climate change in an article by Natalie Reitman-White and Sarah Mazze called Global Warming & Food Choices: A Guide to Low-Carbon Eating. The concept of "food miles" puts a new wrinkle in my notion of what constitutes a "travel fast". I may be staying put, but if the food I eat comes from halfway around the world, and especially if it is flown to me, my food (to paraphrase Michael Pollan) is marinated in crude oil by the time it reaches my table.

I didn't realize until recently what a huge ecological issue industrial food production actually is, and what a major contributor to global warming. Here are a few facts from the article:

Fossil fuel is involved at all stages of food production, from plowing and fertilizing to processing and packaging of food - and every phase of transportation from field to consumer's table
Agriculture accounts for a whopping 7% of total Greenhouse Gas Emmisions in the U.S, not counting food transportation
Organic farming techniques have the potential to use 30 - 50 % less energy than non-organic farming
Airfreight has the highest carbon emissions of any form of transport, generating up to 177 times the emissions of shipping the same goods by freighter
Livestock add about 80% of agriculture's total contribution to GHG emissions
23% of energy used in food production is for processing and packaging

As important as my personal transportation choices are, this tells me it's time for me to think a lot harder about the carbon footprint of my eating choices as well. It's added impetus for me to get out and pitch in more with my wife Sally in our family vegetable garden too!

Circling Home in the Media

2008-03-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

Circling Home continues to draw local media attention as a practical, on-the-ground response to the challenge of climate change.

A Fresh Squeeze - Seattle recently featured Circling Home in an issue on car-free living in the Seattle area.

And last week, the South Whidbey Record ran a front page feature article on Circling Home entitled "One Year. Without Getting Into a Car. Seriously."

Check them out.

Homeward Bound

2008-03-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

The more I walk, the more my body thanks me for doing what it is designed to do. Little by little I'm breaking the trance that says we have to travel to distant parklands and wilderness areas if we want to walk, and that where we live is the exclusive domain of cars. Thoreau wrote, "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you."

From the vantage of our physical bodies, and what we need to maintain a healthy balance between body and mind, Thoreau's observations are as relevant now as in his own day.

This week I walked the final 50 mile leg of my Snohomish / Skagit Valley / Whidbey Island walking pilgrimage, this time from Oak Harbor home along the length of Whidbey Island. The above photo shows me heading south from Oak Harbor, with Mt. Baker in the background. Baker is the most prominent sign post on my 100 km boundary circle, and I never grow tired of seeing it from all the varied angles. My wife Sally again joined me for the first part of the walk. We took a beautiful nine mile hike down the bluffs from Oak Harbor, with the Skagit delta and North Cascade range spread east across Skagit Bay, then traced the north shore of Penn Cove around to the Captain Whidbey Inn near Coupeville.

Along the way we passed the site of the largest native village of the Cokwlo'a Skagit, the tribe now based on the Swinomish Reservation that once occupied the Lower Skagit delta and the area of Whidbey Island from Dugualla Bay and Oak Harbor to Penn Cove. This is the historic terrain of my friend Ray Williams, who I visited during the Skagit portion of my walk. The site is now a private vacation beach on North Penn Cove, with a plaque that tells the thread of this now invisible story. It is amazing how quickly history buries the memory of those who come before when a new culture gains ascendancy. The highway up Whidbey whizzes past not far from this spot, yet this is the first I've heard of this village that dominated central Whidbey for centuries before contact with the new Euro-American settlers. Will history deal as kindly with us as we have dealt with them?

After spending the night at Capt. Whidbey, Sally caught the bus home in the morning and I continued on my way. I headed across to the west side of the island on a trail over Ebby's Prairie to Ebby's Bluff, a National Historic Preserve that is still dominated by working farmsteads. I visited the grave of Isaac Ebby, the namesake of this Preserve, who was murdered by a group of Haida Indians who paddled four hundred miles from the Queen Charlotte Islands in the mid-nineteenth century to exact revenge for the death of one of their chiefs who was murdered by a resident of Whidbey Island. In the strict traditional code of Northwest Coast native justice, a person of equal rank from the offending tribe was the one who had to pay the price, rather than the person who actually committed the crime. Isaac Ebby had the unlucky distinction of being the Territorial Representative of the young Whidbey community, so he was identified as the "chief" whose death would even the scales. The raiding party cut off Ebby's head and returned with it the four hundred miles by canoe back to the Queen Charlottes. He paid a big price for lending his name to this place.

Once at Ebby's Bluff, with its expansive views over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic mountains and Vancouver Island, I turned south and walked all the way to Greenbank along the deserted beaches beneath a long series of bluffs. I had covered nearly twenty miles by the time I finally made it to Lagoon Point, where I stopped for the night with friends David and Cynthia Trowbridge. This was the longest single days' walk of the trip, and probably of my entire life. I have seldom been more ready to take off my boots. I was welcomed with warm hospitality and a fresh blackcod dinner. It was fun over dinner to tell them stories of my days fishing commercially for blackcod in the Gulf of Alaska.

David is a fellow student of Harada Roshi, and both Cynthia and David are founding members of the Enso House Zen Hospice that adjoins the Tahoma Zen Monastery. David is also a PhD physicist with a passion for astronomy who has built a remarkable observatory on his property from which he participates in astromonical research with professional and amateur astronomers all over the world. Being a clear night, he fired up the observatory for me, with a retractable roof and telescope that pivots on request from a laptop to point exactly at the star or galaxy he happens to be studying. That night he was measuring the variations of light from a double star that spins in a strange orbital dance. The duration of the orbit can be determined exactly by the variable intensity of light that the star gives off over time. He also gave me my first-ever direct look at the planet Saturn with its rings. Not only did I get to see parts of Whidbey that are new to me, I got to see parts of the heavens that are only beginning to be understood by modern astronomy. To think that this could happen from a back yard observatory was quite a revelation.

I broke the final twenty miles of my journey home into two easy ten mile days. Back in my home terrain, I took my time, stopping for tea at friends homes that happened to be along my route past Bush Point, Mutiny Bay and Double Bluff, then stopped for the night to participate in the evening and morning meditation schedules at Tahoma Zen Monastery.

My last morning brought me across the dike over Deer Lagoon to Sunlight Beach, then on to my home in the Maxwelton Valley. I got home just in time to join my friends Dan Kowalski, Rick Jackson, Doug Kelly and Steve Boyd for a waffle breakfast at Doug's house, a short walk through the woods from my place. I ate three waffles before I lost count. It was a great welcome home.

Dates of My Excursions

2008-03-04T10:30:00.000-08:00

I'm well into my third month of living car free and within my 100 KM circle from home. I wanted to post the tentative dates of my planned excursions, so you can have an idea where I am on the journey. I have one major excursion per month, woven into my ongoing writing projects and my work at the VA Hospital. I've also scheduled, as you'll see, three seasonal Day of Mindfulness retreats that I will lead at the Whidbey Institute Sanctuary (all welcome), and four week-long intensive Zen retreats that I will be participating in, one for each season, to help anchor my outward explorations of the region.

Here they are:

January - Skagit walking circuit (120 miles)
February 16 - 23 - Intensive Zen retreat at Tahoma Zen Monastery
March 22 - Lead Day of Mindfulness retreat at Whidbey Institute
March - Paddle around Whidbey Island (120 miles)
April -Bicycle circuit of Whidbey / Port Townsend / Kitsap / Vashon / Tacoma / Seattle
May - Bicycle circuit of San Juan Islands / Victoria / Olympic Penninsula / foothills of Cascades from Olympia to Bellingham
June 14 - Lead Day of Mindfulness reteat at Whidbey Institute
June 20-27 - Intensive Zen retreat on Samish Island with Norman Fischer
July 3-10 - Climb Glacier Peak from home to summit and back under my own power
July 20 - August 20 - Kayaking circumnavigation of Puget Sound and San Juan Islands
Sept. 5 - 12 - Intensive Zen retreat at Tahoma Zen Monastery, Whidbey Island
Oct. 4 - Lead Day of Mindfulness Retreat at Whidbey Institute
Oct - Nov. - Commercial gill net fishing on Puget Sound
Dec. - Rohatsu Zen retreat at Tahoma One Drop Zen monastery
- Intensive Zen retreat