Hello Pencils, Hello Books

Well well. I am writing to you from the airport in LA. My trip is over. I can’t believe how much I managed to cram into this summer:

7 States (and one district)

13 cities (counting LA’s Korea town)

12 close friends (including two phone calls)

Several new ones

2 grandparents

3 parents

8ish friends of parents

5 Aunts

4 Uncles

2 parent’s cousins

9 cousins, 8 cousin-in-laws

15 cousins’ kids

25+ used book / thrift shops

10+ farmer’s markets

11 books (read)

6 buffets (devastated)

5 pounds

3 card games learned

4 cribbage opponents

3 dishes propagated

1 mountain scaled

1 day at the beach

5 plane rides

2 train rides

3 bike rides

4 public transportation uses

2 hitchhikes

1 couchsurf

1 identity theft incident

8 hour spent on the phone resolving it

1 bank account terminated

0 dollars not refunded

1 pair of shorts

Countless (and constant) meals, snacks, feasts, outings, innings, walks, talks, sits, chats, discussions, common interests discovered, BS sessions, debates, catchings-up, reminiscences, what-ifses, and plans.

And, as much as it weirds me out to say it, I felt almost the whole time that a strange series of Karmic alignments was taking place. Friends from far away visiting the same town I’d already be in; other guests departing just before I’d arrive; holes in schedules opening up; vegan restaurants around the corner; farmers’ markets on weekday afternoons; books turning up, and places turning up in them; deja vu concerning beets; and too many others to list. It doesn’t seem possible to explain – someone would have to know every relevant intangible about my path and my hopes in order to decide whether any one event would qualify as extraordinarily improbable or not. Not to mention that a long enough string of slightly improbable events is itself extraordinarily impossible. I am pretty sure that I've stopped making sense.

(Apropos of which, I highly recommend the book "Wittgenstein's Mistress," which David Foster Wallace called the best work of experimental fiction of the 20th century. Having read them all, I concur.)

Back to what it was that I was talking about: It seems to me that the possibilities are: 1] these events are indeed karmic; or 2] the events are not karmic, but I’m more inclined than I used to be to interpret them as such (and to ignore ones that don’t fit the pattern); or, most interestingly, 3] somehow I’ve become better at making things feel meaningful.

Anyway, it feels a bit redundant to be going on about this, given that if you are reading this right now, you are likely one of the people referenced above and don’t need to read up on exactly what you and I did on the trip. But, I assure you, whoever you are and whatever we got up to, it was excellent and I thank you for it.

I would say I’ll be back to do it again next summer, but chances are I’ll be heading to Pyeongyang! Yeah! See you in another couple years. Unless, that is, you’re in the market for some good old South Korean hospitality...

I've also noticed that my blog posts have been few and far between this year, despite/because of/most-likely-due-to how much more intellectually and socially active I've been. I've got a lot I'd like to do this semester - get back into studying Korean, do a little more exercise, work harder on the other enviro blog - but blogging here more is also definitely near the top of the list, thanks mostly to lots of kind words and encouragement from friends and family and friends of friends and friends of family %c.

I will go ahead and suppose that that just about wraps it up.

PS There's a giant mystery rodent marauding about the California countryside.

Finally, congratulations, Andy and Chrissy!

An entirely predictable if unfortunate occurrence.

The whole story isn’t worth telling, but here’s some dialogue, mostly faithful:

Me: Please check the rest of my flights and make sure I’ll have vegetarian meals.

Counter lady: I see the meal requests for the other five, but not for the one you just got off of.

Me: OK, but I wasn’t able to eat on the flight I just took. Can’t I get a voucher or coupon or something?

CL: We don’t do that. You should have requested a vegetarian meal in advance.

Me: I did. I called and they told me I was all set.

CL: Did you call the airline directly or did you do it through a travel agent?

Me: I didn’t use a travel agent for anything.

CL: Well, we're not showing a request for a vegetarian meal on your flight from Busan to Tokyo.

Me: I know. That's exactly the problem! Of course I made the request. Why would I ask for five vegetarian meals and one meat meal?

CL: How would we know what you want?

Me: You are Japanese but have nevertheless learned perfectly the art of stupefying your customers with large amounts of sass. I’ll go slink away and drown my flabbergastedness in fistfuls of banana chips.

In all fairness, before this conversation, the stewardess on the plane had apologized profusely about the mishap and gone and nabbed one of these little goody-boxes from business class.

(Exactly one eighth of a mouthful each of six vegetables/mystery substances.)

I also got a vegan dinner and a vegan breakfast (in that order) on my Tokyo-Dallas flight:

The dinner was one of the lamest curry-biryani combos I've ever had. Neither tasted like anything, nor did the flatbread or iceberg lettuce salad. I've got to give them some credit for the inventive (not quite sure what other word to use) glob of fruits, nuts, cinnamon, and grated coconut

Breakfast was a little on the miniscule side, but I'm not one to complain about artichokes and honeydew. Looking forward to many more varities of splendid produce that for whatever reason don't make it to Korea.

Anyway, my first post from the US in just about two years. Woohoo! I've already heard soldiers talking about impending strip club visits, lighthearted but xenophobic jokes from customs officials, and parents telling their children to shut up and go sit down in arbitrary places. I am pretty sure that my fitful sleep schedule over the past 36 hours, and the ensuing crankiness, are to blame for this selective listening. C'mon homeland, show me somethin' good!

Vipassanagain

Beop-sung (a Korean monk): Silence is the path by which a human becomes himself. For us to become anything at all, we must learn the silence of the seed buried in the ground.

John Taylor Gatto: The children I teach have no time... After television, schooling sleeping, and eating, they have only about nine hours each week to spend on growing up.

Blaise Pascal: All of man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to stay alone in his room.


Like to try a little experiment? Turn off your jukebox. Close your eyes. Direct your attention to your nostrils and the area just under them. Breath slowly, naturally, and see if you can feel the air moving across your skin as you inhale and exhale. No need to count, or visualize, or say "in, out," or anything like that. Just breathe and feel. Try to keep it up. Only for a minute or so. Go!

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Did you try? How long did it take for your first random thought to pop up? What was it about? Some recent conversation? Some person in another place? Some bit of work you need to finish? Maybe something a little more distant in time? How long did it take you to notice that you were thinking about something other than the present moment, and how long did it take you to return to your breathing, if you did at all. How long did it take for the next thought to pop up?

Are you at all curious about, or bothered by, the fact that you don't know how to just sit down and be completely in the present? I am. I have been, ever since my sophomore year of college, when I first ran into Pascal, his Pensees, and the aphorism I quoted above. I suppose there are several ways to take this statement, but what struck me was this: we're always looking for something outside ourselves to provide us with entertainment, or solace, or happiness. Who can even imagine simply sitting, with no books, no TV, no work, no conversation, and simply experiencing being for a few moments? Why is so much of our action at bottom just distraction? What are we distracting ourselves from? Why is it that, even when we are alone, in the dark, in the quiet, our minds insist on jumping back and forth between the past and future, between memories of pain or pleasure, fears of failure, dreams of success, and thoughts of little, banal tasks that we'd rather not be bothered with?

So, yes. If you're curious about this, please read on. I would like to tell you about Vipassana. Again. But better than I did last time. I think I can.

Last time, I wrote a lot of objective stuff - about the place, about the schedule, about the theory. Maybe that's because last time, that's all that I really took in. I spent most of the time shifting around on my cushions, trying to find a pose I could hold for an hour. Any time that wasn't spent shifting around, I spent doubting and debating and disproving the contents of the lectures. By the sixth or seventh day, dismayed by a perceived lack of progress, I felt that the technique wasn't for me and more or less fizzled out. It was too late to go home, but I was too tired to try to meditate, so I mostly just looked out the window and listened to the chickens.

On the final day, once the silence had been lifted, I overheard a conversation between one of the new students (a man in his 30s) and returning student (a guy slightly younger than me). The new student asked the old one why had decided to do Vipassana a second time. The returning student replied "because I had forgotten how much it hurt. This is the last time." I thought to myself, "Wow. What strength. He knows how to differentiate between something being too hard and something being just plane wrong; how look at something and and say 'that's not for me' rather than 'I'm not good enough for that.' He doesn't feel weak or inadequate, and doesn't equate choosing something else with giving up."

That was more or less my mindset when I left the first course; I still felt, for very hazy reasons, like meditation was something I ought to be doing, and something I ought to be able to do, but I wasn't sure if I could. I didn't meditate at all after returning home, let alone keep up a daily practice like the teacher suggested. I felt conflicted about whether or not to do it again, and was relieved to see that the one course offered in Korea this winter had been canceled. I thought I could push off the confrontation for another semester at least.

How wrong I was! As I may have mentioned in mid-February, the manager of Nunbisan Village, where I lent a hand tending chickens for a few days, knew a teacher nearby who was running an unofficial/unlisted course. He offered to call the teacher on my behalf, sign me up, drive me there, and stay for a day or two. I had already been sort of freewheeling around the province for two weeks, bouncing and forth between Nunbi, another research organization called Heuksallim (the subject of an eventual future post), and Heuksallim's farm, sort of sleeping wherever there was someone to host and entertain me. Having sort of already given myself up to circumstance/fate for the duration of my trip, I figured the opportunity was too special to pass up.

It turned out to be a good decision, or rather lack of a decision. My experience this time was completely reversed - rather than fizzling out and going home disappointed and frustrated, I came out of the course energized, lighter, and happier, so much so that friends who saw me upon my return said that my face and voice had both changed. After the first course, I wanted to want to meditate, but didn't; after the second, I just plain want to, and have been. At the beginning of the semester, I managed to wake up at six each morning and do an hour; now, things are in full swing and work keeps me fairly exhausted, which means I only manage to medidate for two or three hours in a good week. Sometimes I'm too tired, and sometimes I forget how nice it is and just let myself get distracted, but when I finally come back, sit down, wrap up, and start to breathe, I think to myself: "Finally. What took me so long?"

I hesitate to talk about it, since I don't think I can really do much to communicate such subjective and internal changes without sounding like I've gone off the deep end. This is particularly true over a distance, when all you've got is my words, and you can't see directly whether or not I've changed in the ways I'm mentioning and in other ways I havnen't. And yet, I want to try, since I think the courses have helped me to feel happier, more stable, more energetic, and more hopeful. After all, what's the point of blogging, if not to share this kind of stuff?

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Vipassana is at once the easiest thing I've ever done, and the hardest; maybe it feels hard because it sounds so easy. No duties, no distractions, no diversions, no mundane concerns of any sort for ten days. Doesn't that sound like a dream vacation? Au contraire - it's extremely tough. Or rather, you let yourself make it tough. In talking with the other participants after the program, I found that not a one hadn't contemplated giving up and going home, whether out of boredom, pain, depression, frustration or something else. I realize this paints a bleak picture, but remember: most people overcome these obstacles, very few leave the course, and many go back for more.

There are two main segments to a Vipassana course. The first, Annapanna, takes up about the first third. Annapanna is what I asked you to do at the beginning of the post: attempt to empty your mind of thoughts by focusing on breathing. Other meditation traditions ask meditators to focus on counting, visualizing, or repeating a mantra; Vipassana, which aims to give us direct experience of the truth about our minds and bodies, asks the meditator not to activate his or her will at all, to only sit and observe the truth of the body in each instant. Is the air passing through the left or right nostril? Is the breathing deep or shallow? Does the air you draw in scratch your lip? Does the air you breathe out warm it up? At first, sensations are faint, if present at all; thoughts pop up and distract you, and as soon as you realize it, you clear them away and go back to breathing. As time goes on (Vipassana meditators do about ten hours of meditation each day), you become more sensitive, feeling differences in humidity, temperature, and forcefulness of breath, in addition to unrelated other sensations: tingles, tickles, twitches, and so forth.

The point of all this is to develop sensitivity so that you're ready for the latter two-thirds of the course, in which you practice Vipassana, the observation of things as they really are. In less metaphysical terms, this means sitting and mind-patrolling your entire body, part by part, for whatever sensations may occur. At first, you notice the things you'd expect, big stuff: cool breezes, flies landing, beads of sweat, your pulse, and, of course, terrible, seemingly unbearable leg and back pains, the kind that kept me squirming throughout the first course. You have to struggle to focus on areas where there's apparently no sensation; but the longer you stay at it, the more sensitive your mind becomes, and the more you can feel things you didn't even know existed. You come to realize that these sensations are always present, on all parts of the body - how could it be otherwise? We all learned in middle school that our bodies are composed of organs, and organs of tissues, and tissues of cells, and cells of tinier parts, and that those parts are composed of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles, which are made of smaller stuff yet. Every single one of these components is in constant action, whether it be physical, chemical, biological, or intentional. Why is it that we don't feel the heart beating, the skin breathing, the mitochondria contracting, the cells dividing, the electrons orbiting, and the quarks blinking in and out of existence a million times a second?

This sounds so odd that I think a little allegory might be useful. When I first started trying to meditate, long before I knew anything about Vipassana or before I had even discussed meditation with anyone, I had some interesting experiences with my pulse. If I tried to focus my attention on one of my fingers, my pulse felt strongest there; if I moved to, say, my kneecap, then after a few seconds, my pulse would move too. No matter where I directed my attention, my pulse followed. I didn't quite know what to make of it, and I didn't know who to ask, so I just kind of let it be. It wasn't until recently that I realized what should have been obvious from the first: my pulse never moved at all. My pulse runs to every part of my body all day, every day, at every moment, and if it didn't, I wouldn't be around to notice the problem. It was only my awareness that had changed; after a few seconds of calibration, of quiet observation, sensations that are usually too subtle to be perceived become easily noticeable.

As with the pulse, so with other sensations, though not all of them are so easy to identify. Parts of the body stretch and compress, heat up and freeze, buzz and go into paralysis. As you learn to pay attention to the sensations, and to ignore the ones that occur on parts of the body you're not focusing on, you feel more and more of them, including ones for which we lack words. You may eventually feel your entire body vibrate, or petrify, or even dissolve. You may be able to observe sensations inside your body, not just on the surface. (I experienced some of these and not others; I won't tell you which. It's not particularly useful to talk about what any given individual felt, since all of us are so different in terms of physical and mental experience. Reading about others' experiences only makes you jealous, which will hamper you from developing on your own. Suffice it to say, I had enough to let down my doubt and let the technique take me where it would.)

You may still be asking, so what? You could probably postulate a good evolutionary reason why we wouldn't want to be aware of these sensations all the time. How could we avoid predators if we spent all day reveling in our particles' vibrations? How could we remember the past and plan for the future if we were completely mesmerized by the present? I constantly asked myself questions like these during the first course, rather than just giving the technique a shot; I still ask them now. But, if you let go of them for a time, you come to realize that it's not an all-or-nothing scenario. Being able to experience your body and mind as they are doesn't mean that you're unable to react to what already did happen or provide for what is likely to. On the contrary, understanding the way your mind has been conditioned to react to sensations like these makes you all the more powerful and effective.

Actually, I've only explained about half of the course so far. A great deal of time and energy is spent on developing awareness of sensory perceptions, but this awareness is not an end in itself. The point of the whole enterprise is to give you direct experience of the transience and therefore absolute arbitrariness of these sensations. Strong or subtle, pleasant or painful, novel or not, all of the sensations vanish shortly after they appear - and this is more true the more time you spend observing them. An unpleasant sensation may be unpleasant, but fearing it, fighting it, and generating aversion towards it only multiplies the effect. Why choose to multiply your own suffering? Likewise, a pleasant sensation may be pleasant, but it's guaranteed to vanish; all the anticipation, expectation, and craving that you generate for it will eventually be for naught. So, when your face starts to itch, don't scratch it; when your mind starts thinking about what you should do next weekend, don't indulge it; when your goes numb and feels like it may explode, don't move it; when you start to feel an infinite number of pleasant subtle sensations all over your whole body, don't get attached. Keep in mind that it will all go away.

If you can learn to treat all sensations with this kind of objectivity, you've already taken the most important steps towards remaining balanced in the face of larger, more complicated, emotional issues. After all, moods and emotions fluctuate every bit as much as the random sensations on your skin. I recall being extremely depressed on Day 2, so much so that I thought of running away from the course and visiting a therapist friend in Seoul; so happy and overwhelmed by gratitude on Day 6 that I couldn't fall asleep; and so angry on Day 7 that rather than meditating I sat with fists tightly clenched for two hours. And yet, nothing had really happened to me during that period, or at least, nothing that could justify jumping around from despair to elation. The dizzying ups and downs were all of my own making. Just like the pain in my right knee, the one the kept me squirming throughout the first course, the one that mysteriously vanished sometime during the second, the one that hasn't come back since.

Treating the pleasant and unpleasant alike may sound like a recipe for total ambivalence - another of the thoughts I wrestled with for far too long - but it's not. It teaches wisdom, understanding, and peace. Longings become mere "would-be-nice-ifs," frustrations become "oh wells," annoyances become trivialities; not all at once, and not all the way, but enough to make a difference in how you feel. Now, personally, I feel more free to go after things I believe are of value and to ignore things that aren't, less hampered and dismayed by setbacks, more grounded in times of conflict, and more patient and compassionate in general. I'll admit that I don't exactly understand how equanimity in the face of low-level bodily sensations is supposed to generate total piece of mind; then again, I don't know how hitting clicking the little orange "publish" button will transmit this post to you. I've just clicked it enough times to be pretty sure it will. Likewise, I've spent enough time meditating to be fairly convinced of its effects.

I don't expect these words to convince anybody of anything. Not only are the words poorly chosen and sloppily organized and incomplete; they're also too distant, too abstract, too impersonal, too forced. I could write on and on, trying to define terms better, give livelier examples, and make tighter arguments, but I don't think it's worth it. Words can only take us so far, and in many cases are even counterproductive. A year ago, just listening to this stuff would probably have turned me off. In fact, I still hold doubts about maybe half of the things I wrote here, probably even more than when I began writing. That said, enough happened to me during the course - from new sensations to extreme mood swings to the total disappearing of what had been such an unbearable pain - to convince me of the soundness of its basic premises. And since then I have felt different, better, more confident, so much so that I wish I had found Vipassana earlier. Had I gone into the first course with even a tiny, vague, endorsement such as this from a person I knew and trusted, I think I could have opened myself up and learned more, and more quickly, saving myself a lot of wasted time and struggle. While in the end the only thing that matters is your own experience, in the beginning, words from a friend can count for a lot.

I'd like to end with one more conversation I overheard. Vipassana meditators maintain silence all day, but have a brief opportunity to speak to the teacher and clarify issues of methodology. I often stayed to talk for a minute or two, and usually the teacher called me first, maybe because I was one of the returning students, or maybe because I was a foreigner, I have no way of knowing. One night, though, he called the guy next to me up first instead. I tried not to listen (as I said above, it doesn't do you any good to know how enlightened or pitiful the next guy is), but I couldn't help it. The man, also a returning student, wanted to go home. He said he was tired, and depressed, and not getting anywhere. Here's what the teacher said:

"You've already come so far. You've finished one course and are halfway through another. Most people live their whole lives not even knowing a wonderful technique like this exists, never having a chance to meet it. Particularly in Korea, where other forms of Buddhism have taken hold, and been degraded. You must have done so much good, built up so much positive Karma in a past life, to have had the good fortune of encountering these teachings in this one. Don't throw it away."

I believe you can take that as a compliment.

12000 Chickens.

2011 has been a slow year for blogging so far! I'd like to think it's because I've been keeping busy...

After the Idli party, I spent a few more days with Sadhana friends, then took a couchsurfer from Colombia, Jorge. A really nice, cool guy. He stayed for a week and we hung out a fair bit; I really had nothing to do except study Korean, write another article for Daegu pockets, translate it, and eat the candy he brought as a gift. After a week or so, he and his friend Isabel (who was staying with another host) found their own place near another university, where they're going to TA for Spanish classes while taking an intensive Korean course. I have already told them that they can repay my kindness by cooking me an occasional vegan Colombian dinner. Next semester is shaping up nicely...

I had planned to head off on my farming excursions around the beginning of February, but as Lunar New Year fell on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, the farmers asked me to postpone my visit until the following Monday. So, I spent Korean New Year alone recuperating from about 5 weeks straight of being excessively social (Christmas group trip, New Year's group trip, continuous Upo wetlands camp prep meetings, early January visit to see friends in Seoul, various environmental things in Daegu, Tobin's visit, Idli party, Couchsurfers), napping and reading and studying Korean and cooking and such goodness.

So, come Monday the 7th, I came out to NunbiSan Maeul (Snow-Rain-Mountain Village), a chicken farm about 3 hours northwest of Daegu. I found out about Nunbi not through WWOOF, but through Seon-ju, a Korean friend I met in Sadhana. She spent most of the last 5 years visiting different kinds of communities - Buddhist, self-sufficient, sustainable, et. al. - in Japan and southeast Asia, and she knows of some stuff here in Korea too. She hadn't been here yet but asked me to check it out.

"Chicken farm" isn't exactly the best way to describe Nunbi, but I don't know what is. I can't post any pictures now, but later I'll show you the 7 buildings, each divided into 10 or 25 smaller rooms, holding a total of abotu 12,000 chickens. You could walk a circle around the whole set of buildings in about five or ten minutes; it's not too big, but it's big enough that the chickens have ample space to walk, jump, exercise, and do their chicken culture stuff.

The design for the coops was apparently invented by a Japanese farmer named (something like) Yamagasi - I've only heard the name in passing and haven't seen it written yet. Wooden beams run the length of the back of each coop; the chickens jump up onto them to sleep, and since they're about a foot off the ground, the chickens can poop without stepping in it and dragging it all around. The water is in a tray at the front of the coop, far from the feces. The space in the middle has some troughts for food, and on the left and right side, hanging off the walls, are big triangular boxes. The base of the triangle is filled with hay, and the hypotenuse blocks out sun and light, so that the chickens have a dark, soft, warm place to lay their eggs. When the farmers/workers/members of the community come in, all they have to do is open up the hypotenuse, grab the eggs out of the hay, and move on. Because the boxes are so nice, the chickens hardly ever lay eggs on the ground, which mean few get stepped on, missed, or wasted.

The eggs that Nunbi produces are fertilized, which means that if they were left alone they'd hatch into baby chicks. This may sound a little cruel - actually, the chairman of the community, when he heard about my veganism, said that he'd rather eat unfertilized eggs than fertilized ones, which is an argument I understand - but the truth is that fertilized eggs mean happier chickens. Here at Nunbi, the ratio of roosters to hens is about 1:12-15, which gives an egg fertilization rate of about 95%. I'm not sure what the "natural" ratio would be, but in many standard (sterile) egg operations, the hens never encounter a male and thus never get a chance to mate or have a child. To me, this looks like their ability to express one of the fundamental traits of animals is being denied. Not only the physical acts of mating, conceiving, and laying, but also the social acts of courting, competing, showing off, or however chickens get on with it. I don't think one has to know the details in order to acknowledge the justice of allowing them some amount of freedom. Furthermore, even if roosters were present in most egg-laying operations, mating would probably be impossible, since the conditions are so cramped that the chickens can hardly move around, let alone strut, play, or mount one another. Fertilized eggs don't guarantee that the chickens have space to move, but they raise the likelihood. Finally, chickens in standard egg operations don't even live through full life cycles. After being caged and manipluated and worn out (by antibiotics, "enhanced" feed, and non-natural light cycles), they're killed as soon as their productivity drops. Most of these chickens, bread for egg-laying ability and not survival capacity, wouldn't even survive if let loose, even into good conditions; their bodies are weak, and since they never saw adult chickens foraging or mating, they have no clue how to get by. Fertilized eggs mean, at least to some degree, that the chickens have been allowed to express some of their chicken-ness. And there's no such thing as animal welfare without this freedom.

So, for 2 days, I woke up at 6:30, put on some nice tall boots, and went outside to pour hot water on the faucets, which freeze every night. Once they faucets are operational, the water is turned on so the chickens can drink. (In the non-freezing months, it's always on). Then I went through the coops with the young chickens, who haven't quite adjusted to the "don't lay your eggs in your own poop" system. I would throw a few handfuls of seed into the corner, and and with the chickens distracted and scattered, I was able to clearly spot and pick up the eggs that had been laid on the ground. If I saw a chicken preparing to lay an egg anywhere other than in the egg box, I picked it up and moved it to the egg box, both for its own comfort and ours. After a time or two, the chickens pick up the habit, and by the time they're six months old, they hardly lay on the floor at all.

Breakfast at 8:00, then back to the chickens at 9:00. We opened up the rooves to let the sunlight in, then one more round picking up eggs from the floor - yes, they lay them that frequently - then gathering from the egg boxes. A room with 100 chickens might produce about 50 eggs overnight. The eggs are set into temporary cartions, and then we drive them down to the little factory, where they are stored for the moment. Then we weigh out a bag of feed for each room (10 to 20 kg depending on the size of the room and the age of its inhabitants) and set it out in front of the door. Then we head in for lunch and a nap.

At 2pm, back to the chickens. They have a special long coo for when they're hungry, which I don't think I can transcribe. The tone is kind of plaintive (maybe that's just me projecting) and moves from low to high. Entering the coop, I'd toss some feed in one corner to get them out of the way, flip over their troughs to empty them out (chickens are not the brightest animals and often stand and poo inside the trough while eating), and then fill them with new goodies.

After that, miscellaneous time. On the first day, we made a special snack out of the eggs that were too ugly or damaged to sell. We boiled several hundred defective eggs, then mixed them (shells and all) with some organic nutrition supplements and some rice husks, and then I donned my boots again and stomped on the stuff until it got kind of pasty-clumpy. It was like taking a bath in a tub of scrambled eggs; I was half salivating and half ready to puke. Then we distributed it to the young chickens as a sort of protein supplement.

The idea of feeding eggs to chickens struck me as somehwere between stupid and inhumane. But, actually, if you watch chickens, you'll quickly see that if you accidentally break an egg in their presence, they race over and gobble it right up; this has been explained to me as an attempt to recover the protein and other nutrients that their bodies jettison each day in the process of laying. They won't break intact eggs open - that would be a truly stupid, maladaptive habit - but eggs that have no chance of developing into chicks are fair game.

The next day, for the older chickens, we fed them something one of the farmers called "corn kimchi." They had grown corn the previous summer and kept it fermenting for months and months, kernels and cobs and stalks and all. The rancid, rotten, stinky smell means that the corn is full of little living bacteria, probiotics, which are good for the chickens' digestion and overall health around this time of year. They loved it.

After that, one more round of picking up ground eggs. Then all the eggs are brought to the factory, which has fifteen meters of conveyor belts that bring the eggs through six or seven different machines. The machines wash the blood, feathers, dirt, and poo off the eggs, sort them according to size, enter all sorts of statistics into the computer, and then drop them into cartons.

While the people in the factory are setting up the eggs for distribution, the people outside get the chickens ready for bed. Turn off the water, close the roofs, lower the windscreens, and coax the chickens into their sleeping spots (stragglers who attempt to sleep away from the flock often catch colds, so it's important to put them all together). Once the sun sets and the chickens are OK, the workers can head in for dinner.

Nunbi has an interesting dynamic. About ten or twelve people work here; some of them are alone, living in the dorm, eating communal meals, while others live nearby with their families. Together they produce between eight and ten thousand eggs a day, all of which are sold to Hansallim ("One Life," or maybe "Korean Life"), an organization that runs a chain of environmentally-friendly supermarkets. Regardless of his or her role, each worker receives an equal share of the profits, after some has been set aside to donate to local causes and for the development of the facilities. The people who stay in the dorm - actually, "research center" - hang out together in the evenings, drinking tea and chatting and reading and practicing "Guk-seon-do," a reportedly ten-thousand year old Korean style of Tai-chi/yoga/martial arts/meditation on Wednesdays.

I've only spent 3 of the last 10 days at Nunbi and have a lot to write about Heuksallim (Saving the Soil), the organization where I spent the rest of my time. But, it's nearly lunch time, and after I eat, I'm heading off for another ten days of noble silence. That's right, my second Vipassana of the year! I didn't think I'd have another chance until next summer, but the founder of Nunbi knew about an unlisted course happening not to far from here and set me up. I'm not sure whether I'll volunteer (i.e. cook, clean, etc, meditating only about 3 hours a day) or whether I'll full-on participate (ten or twelve hours of meditation daily), but either way, I won't be back until just about March. See ya then...

WJWD on New Year's Eve

2007: Alone in my studio watching someone ring a big bell in the giant plaza in Seoul.
2008: Clubbing around Hong-ik University in Seoul. Lots of Vodka, then fried chicken, then maybe an incident in the restroom, fighting with George about the right way home, getting lost, finally getting back to the hostel, then maybe have another incident in the restroom.
2009: Watching a big TV in the central square in Kuala Lumpur, then taking a taxi with a local to a restaurant at the top of a hill outside of town and watching 3 or 4 fireworks displays at once.
2010: Dressing up in forest garb, listening to shirtless people in baggy pants playing drums and guitar, looking at the moon, sitting in a giant circle and OMing for an hour.
2011:

Note the time on the picture: 2011/01/01 00:01 Awesome, eh?

Where am I? At a little temple on top of Namsan (Mt. Nam / South Mountain) in Gyeongju.

What was I doing there? Sitting around with friends and strangers eating rice cake soup and drinking quince tea and chanting the same Buddhist sutra - "The Great Darani" - 108 times.

How the heck did I get there? I was asking myself this same question the whole night - here's the rundown:

Not too long ago, I briefly mentioned the Vegan Potluck Gorgefest I attended for Thanksgiving. I met some really cool people there, by which I mean people who think more or less like I do about food and food politics. Many of them knew each other from a Yoga camp that had gone down sometime in October.

The VPG was such a smash hit that we decided to follow it up with a Random Vegan Smorgasboard for Christmas. Eight of us rented a "pension," which in Konglish means a vacant country house, for the reasonable price of about 90 bucks a night. We all brought backpacks full of fruits, veggies, nuts, powders, cookies, squash, noodles, teas, spices, and whatever other edibles we had on hand, along with a few computers, mp3 players, speaker sets, a dwarf Christmas tree, and of course my trusty projector. We spent two nights and three days drinking tea, enjoying fine cinema (Home Alone and the animated Grinch), playing card games, drinking wine, lazing around on the hot floor, and cooking whatever we could, which included a pumpkin/noodle/perilla powder mash, a spinach-ginger-tomato-coconut milk soup, curry, bean burgers, flat bread, crepes with blueberry jam, and homemade fig jam on toast.

On our last morning, we decided to go out for a stroll. After passing some shacks and traditional tile-roofed houses, we wound up walking through a field of completely dried out red pepper plants and then somehow found ourselves heading up a mountain path. We heard some click-clocks and a weird droning, which turned out to be coming from a lone man, reciting some sutra and syncopating on his mok-tak (Mahayana Buddhist fish-shaped wooden percussion instrument) as he made his way up. We followed him for a while, then passed him and continued to the top of the mountain, where we ran into a monk who spoke excellent English and poured us several rounds of green tea to warm us up. She invited us to stay for the Sunday service, which consisted of about an hour of chanting, a few minutes of meditation, and a short dharma talk. She commented that though some foreigners had found the temple and stayed for tea, none had ever sat through a service, and then invited us to come back the following weekend for some mega-sutra action (my words.)

So, the following Friday, a few of us caught a bus to the intercity bus terminal, then another bus to Gyeongju, then another bus to the bus stop closest to the foot of the mountain, then followed the sign to Ch'ilburam.

We arrived around 6, just as it was getting dark and just in time for a bowl of hot rice-flake soup. Promptly at 6:30, the chanting began. One prayer to the triple gem (no clue what that means), then 12 Great Dharani sutras, which took about 30 minutes. Then a 30 minute break. Then 24 Dharanis (one hour) and another half hours break. 24 more, rest. 24 more, rest. 24 more, rest. 12 more, rest, and a closing thousands eyes and hands sutra brought us to about 3:30AM. Though there was barely enough room for all of us to sit, we somehow managed to spread out and catch a few hours of rest.

We woke up again at six, had some more of the same soup, and then headed up to the top of the mountain to wait for the sunrise. The monk said a blessing, then for about twenty or thirty minutes we chanted "Gwan-se-um-bo-sal," a prayer to the Boddhisatva who is supposed to be watching over the world, protecting people and ensuring good fortune. It was a cloudy morning, but we were lucky: the clouds were floating just high enough over the mountains to the East that we were able to get a decent view of the sun on its way up:

After the sun had disappeared behind the clouds again, the monk gave another short Dharma talk. I couldn't really follow it, but it was something about how the sun wasn't really new and neither was the year but in any case it was as good a time as any to try to renew our dedication to living a kind and compassionate life. Or perhaps I'm just projecting what I would like to have heard.

Then the assistant monk insisted we get a picture of all the foreigners together, along with some of the Koreans who had been speaking English to us throughout the night.

In case you're wondering how I got the picture: the photographer, a devotee of the hermitage, posted it on the official website and sent it to me via email.

I can't believe how little I've posted about WWOOFing

You wouldn't know it from the blog, but I've been to visit farmers in Busan four times, in Miryang thrice (I think), in Geoch'ang twice, and in Hwaseong once. I posted the picture pretty soon after the fact, but I've yet to write much about the experiences, mostly because I don't know how to make them interesting.

About a month ago, though, Jade, who works at the Korean WWOOF headquarters in Seoul, sent out an email asking WWOOFers to submit short letters about their WWOOF experiences so that she could combine them into a book. I wrote one. It's a little schmaltzy and I don't entirely like it, but I'll let you have a look anyway:

(Begin)

Wake-up calls at dawn. Vicious ant attacks by day, mosquito swarms arising from the rice paddies by night. Plodding around knee-deep in mud and rotten watermelons. Soybean paste soup with anchovy heads bobbing about. Suffocating dust clouds inside sweltering triple-layered plastic houses. Though a good deal of foreign teachers in Korea choose to spend their vacations at Haeundae [Korea's most popular beach] or in Phuket [the ultimate Korean package tour destination], soaking up the sun, people-watching, sipping cold drinks, and unwinding after several months of hard work, I chose instead to pursue even more of it by visiting Changwon and spend a week at Sweet Persimmon Village. But even if I try to conjure up the most painful-sounding memories I can – perhaps the worst of all was being surrounded by hundreds of trees, tens of thousands of low-hanging persimmons, all of them far too green and bitter to eat – I can’t help but admit that each of them is infused with pleasure and meaning and worth far beyond what I would have found had I just taken it easy.

It seems to me that the people who deserve vacations most are also the ones who are least likely to get them. We all know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that farmers labor year-round, tilling and irrigating, planting at just the right time, weeding and spraying and maintaining throughout the season, waiting for the perfect moment to pick, and then starting again, spring, summer, winter and fall. Even century-old fruit trees require regular, scientific pruning and coercion in order to produce what they’re really capable of – a fact I didn’t know before, but learned in my 10 days working with Mr. Gang and the others at Sweet Persimmon Village. All of this effort is directed towards feeding us, the city-dwellers and travelers and guests of the land, who have an indirect and generally underappreciated relationship with that which sustains us.

I look at WWOOFing as an opportunity to explore and reclaim this relationship, to learn about what I unknowingly require of the Earth, and what the Earth quietly, patiently asks of me in return. I wanted to learn how to listen to the ground, how to give back to it, and how to support the plants and bugs and microorganisms and myriad other lifeforms and systems that make my life possible. It turns out, it’s a lot of work, requiring study, planning, practice, creativity, diligence, dedication, [and] discipline, in addition to incessant bending, stooping, lifting, reaching, and sweating. Thankfully, though, the truth is that the best friendships are forged through work and effort directed at a common goal; even something as mundane weeding under the late afternoon sun, or as filthy as tearing apart a soggy watermelon patch at the end of the season, can bring people of different ages, vocations, skin colors, and nationalities together. Actually, it sort of makes sense - what could unite people better than the work that nobody, no being, can avoid: feeding him- or herself?

That’s not to say that there wasn’t leisure time – on the contrary, when the rains came, when the temperature topped 90 degrees before 10AM, or and [another typo!] when the sun set, we welcomed the opportunity to enjoy a long, slow meal, talk about the environment, about farming, about our homes and our travels, about upcoming events, and about nothing at all in particular. There was no shortage of fresh watermelon (the ones that had successfully dodged our boots) or cold Hite [Korean bear] (our most conspicuous “import”). We spent hours honing our archery skills and teaching each other tidbits of Enlish, Polish, French, and Korean, each release of the bow string and each repetition of a new word helping to build relationships that endure to this very day and now stretch across several continents.

Thank you, WWOOF, for creating the opportunity. And thank you, staff and residents of Sweet Persimmon Village, for opening your fields and homes and tool sheds to visitors from all around the world.

After the Fairy Tale Bike Trip

It occurs to me that I didn't exactly explain why, on that fateful Wednesday a few weeks back when my coworkers stayed home and watched movies and played video games and went out for rice wine and pancakes, that I chose to punish myself by biking for what I thought would be about 110k.

Reason 1) Finding the "real" Korea. One of the great things about biking around is that you notice a bunch of stuff you wouldn't otherwise see or pay attention to. This is true even in your hometown, but truer the farther you go. And exponentially true when you get lost.

Here, for example, is a gem: the bus stop near Cheongdo where I took my first fruit-n-nut break about 45k from my home. Pretty hard not to note the giant plastic persimmon on top, eh?

More than I remember back home, cities here tend to advertise themselves through identification with certain foods, generally fruits*. You see these ads on TV, on the subway, on fliers, and even within the cities themselves. I guess every city, wanting a slice of the famous pie, has to find a way to make itself special. Apparently this works very well - when I tell someone I went to Mungyeong, they say "Wow, did you bring back any apples?" And when I say I went down to Miryang, they ask about peaches and persimmons. I hope you didn't miss the bibimbap in Jeonju.

I don't remember this being so true in the US. The only example I can think of, where we associate a place with a food, is Georgia peaches. But, even then, Georgia is probably twice the size of Korea, and I don't recall seeing billboards and ads for peaches while passing through.

Of course, it's not all golden persimmons. Often, what backpacker-types (myself included) mean when they say the want to see the "real" __________ (insert place name here) is that they want to get away from the factories and malls and modernity (and hostels and bars and all the stuff that backpacking itself has brought about**) and see what the place was like back when it was different from the rest of the globalized world. But there are other things, less pretty things, that are perhaps less elusive and yet are equally "real" - actually, in my view, more real, if you consider that they constitute the essence of our society and indicate the direction it's moving in.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures. But what I'm referring to is all the factories, warehouses, animal feedlots (actually not so bad here compared to US CAFO's), regional distribution centers, junkyards, and dried-out rivers that lie just outside the peripheral vision of most city-dwellers. We all know, subconsciously, that these dirty, noisy, polluted, polluting, despondent places exist, but the people who sell you the end product, be it a fruit or a shirt or a PDA or a Kia, have an interest in helping us to forget. I say "helping" because I believe we too are complicit in wanting to forget, in not wanting to realize what the things we want require, whether in terms of infrastructure, destruction, human life and labor, inputs, byproducts, or anything else. If we knew - if it were even possible to know - our consciences might pressure us into becoming informed (and thus, ideally, considerate and compassionate) consumers.

Of course, I didn't enter any factories, talk to any workers or anything like that. I just passed by. But you don't have to interview a dog on a dog farm, chained to its mini-house, eating a shitting and sleeping within about a 5 foot radius for most of its life, to know that it's miserable. When the factory is several hundred meters from the road and the smell and smog hit you anyway, you know it must not be pleasant to work inside***. When a new building goes up in the city, usually it's replacing an old building, or maybe it's being built on an empty lot, itself surrounded by other buildings. This makes it easy to ignore the environmental toll - the unavoidable fact that huge buildings and deep foundations require us to chop down trees and then often flatten the mountain they were growing on. There's no way to ignore this when you see the HomePlus/TESCO/Samsung distribution sitting in an empty space where the mountain used to be. The dirt that used to be mountain, and which is now, I guess, just in the way, is piled in cones all around, nowhere to go, noway to be used. I doubt anyone wants to live near or work in these places. Certainly, nobody wants to spend their vacation there, basking in the "reality." I hardly even want to admit they exist, and that in many ways, I need them.

End of analysis / diatribe. Enjoy a few more photos!

Having a rest at the border with the next province. 65k or so.

Substantiating at least one of my claims.

The figs that were waiting for me.

And a few more of the many reasons why I love Honorable Older Brother and Honorable Older Sister's house:

And perhaps the coolest flower photo I've ever taken:
(No special effects, unless you count the use of the digital camera itself, which I suppose would be fair enough.)

*Many cities do the same with inedible products and services - Seoul advertises itself as a business and cultural hub, Daegu as a textile giant, Pohang for steel, etc, none of which comes off as quite so quaint or cheesy or charming.

** See this post of yesteryear for a great David Foster Wallace quotation to this effect.

*** Or, if it does happen to be pleasant inside, that means they must be pumping all the nasty stuff out. Not exactly a great alternative.

A Truely Gruling Day; A Truely Splended Eve

Arrive at 6 on the dot to Honorable Elder Brother on the phone in the workshop talking about tractors and Honorable Elder Sister cooking dinner and ushering me in to a hot bath. Oh yes. There are two large bowls (I'm talking 1-foot diameter) of figs, just picked off the tree in the front yard. They are waiting for me to be clean.

Dinner is on the table when I get out of the bath. A hefty serving of rice along with sweet potato noodles (seasoned with sesame oil topped with seaweed) and some old, sour, rinsed, fantastic kimchi on the side. Also, bowls of Sesame Leaf Kimchi and another watery kimchi made of onions and some other leafy green. Also, a humble offering of candied peanuts, which I bought from the organic shop, de-shelled, and then made myself. Two bowls of Farmer's rice wine, which tastes all the better after 7.5 hours on a bicycle. We have a nice chat over dinner about this and that - their gardens, the seeds I gave them, the chicken coop I helped H.E.B. work on, my garden, Basil. H.E.S. says "Wow, it's been such a long time since we ate with Mike, I kind of want to get drunk." For dessert, fresh figs galore. For immediately post-dessert dessert, some sweet roasted sweet potatoes.

Then H.E.S., who is a nurse during the day, prepares some boiling hot water, soaks some towels, rubs some mint jelly stuff on my legs, and gives me a thigh massage. She tells me that 141km is probably too far to ride my bicycle in a day and that maybe tomorrow I should consider just lazing around the house all day. I may just take her up on that. She shows me how to control the electric blanket on the bed and turns it up to 5 out of 7. She sends me to bed. I tell her to wake me up in the morning, that I feel like I should at least say goodbye after receiving such excellent hospitality. She tells me not to be ridiculous, that I can say goodbye next time I come.

_____________________________
Events leading up to the above:

7:00 Wake up, pack, eat a monster breakfast consisting of all the leftovers in my fridge. Potatoes, "deo-deok" roots, hot peppers, dipping paste, lotus roots.
8:35 Depart.
9:35 First 20k done. Good pace.
10:35 2nd 20k done. Good pace.

(Somewhere in between 9:35 and 10:35 I notice that there are persimmon trees all around and that some of the branches are hanging over the road. It occurs to me that I could nab one without even stopping. I grab one off a tree, separate it from the branch and leaves that came with it, and start to much, all while zipping along. Unfortunately, it's rather astringent [a trendy nickname for Persimmons these days is "astringency"] and I wonder whether it's just not quite ripe or whether it's got pesticide all over it. I get all worked up and have to stop, not sure whether or not I'll vomit. Punishment 1. Later, I'm looking at the Persimmon, thinking about the Golden Rule, and wondering if, if I had a farm, I'd be upset if a biker grabbed one of my fruits for sustenance on his trip. I fail to notice a speedbump and almost wipe out. Punishment 2. Then, When I'm done, I chuck the inedible part off to the side of the road. The motion dislodges but doesn't quite knock off my left pannier bag; had it fallen off, I might have gone down with it. Punishment 3.)

10:44 First rest stop at a little bus stand. It's got a large plastic persimmon on top. Snack on some tangerines and almonds.
11:45 60 Km down. Pace is still god - looks like it'll be a short trip. Entering the next province. Have a lie-down on the side of the road under some flags and chestnut trees. Snack a little more, then move on.
12:00 All of a sudden, town with some restaurants. Settle on spicy tofu soup. Rice, soup, 6 side dishes, water bottle refill: less than 5 bucks. Also, 20 minute nap on the grass in the restaurant's front yard.
1:00 Recommence.
3:00 100 kilos. Speed is a little lower. The whole trip is supposed to be 107 or 114, but according to the signs I'm still 30-odd kilos out. A little nervous. But only a little.
Until 6:00 3 hours to finish the last 40 kilos. I stop about 10 times to ask directions, and stop several more to push my bike up hills. Rule of thumb: Walking speed is 5.5 km/h. If the terrain is steep enough that you can't ride at twice that speed, it's not worth it. Consider giving up and asking the farmer to come pick me up somewhere, but I eventually find some flat ground and my 2nd (or 10th) wind. I can see their house from across the river...just gotta find the bridge. Hark!

Summer Reading

At the beginning of the semester I found myself in a reading rut; between when I left the States with a load of linguistics-type books in July '09 and when I returned to Korea from India/Sadhana in late February, my interests had apparently changed dramatically. I could no longer concentrate on reading spiffy things about verbs and syntax and performatives, etc. I tried in vain to get through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and Austen's How to Do Things with Words, but I was nagged by the feeling that, no matter how interesting, linguistics was a somewhat selfish pursuit. What will it matter to anyone anywhere if I can parse a sentence a bit better? I'm not trying to write off an entire discipline, since I of course still find it all very interesting. I just couldn't quite match up the selflessness to which I was aspiring in my diet and actions and the seemingly reclusive, technical, interesting-intellectual-puzzle-but-is-it-really-much-more? aspects of linguistics. So I got frustrated and mostly stopped reading.

But then I bought some used books on Amazon and had my mom mail me a package. I couldn't have known then that Derrick Jensen's Endgame, about which I posted exactly 4 months ago, would send me off on a sort of book-odyssey (made possible by my obliging, library-card possessing friend Daeju Kim AKA Julio at Seoul National Unversity), leading me to question and reformulate my ideas about...education, the environment and man's relation to it, how to live almost-sustainably in Vermont, the nature of schizophrenia, the shortfalls of veganism, the complexity of plants and the dangers of pharmeceuticals, the relationship between the pervasiveness of competition and dissemblance in the industrial economy and the mental health of the individuals and families who participate in it; and the possibility of TV being turned into a healthy, useful medium. I have apparently become obsessed with thinking about how to eat, how to consume, how to medicate, how to relate to the planet, how to teach, and how to entertain myself in ways that are, for lack of a more exact word, nice.

I don't know if I'm just trying to show off, or if I'm making a list for posterity, or whatever else, but in any case, I feel compelled to share the list of the books I've been devouring since spring rolled around. If I had a little more time, a bit more confidence in my newfound (somewhat) radical mentality, and a slightly smaller sense of ever-increasing estrangement, I might write some synopses or reviews or at least provide some quotations. But I'm not quite there yet. In the meantime, check them out on wikipedia or Amazon. That is, if estrangement is something you're looking for.

Derrick Jensen - Walking on Water
Derrick Jensen - A Language Older than Words
Neill Everndren - The Natural Alien
Helen and Scott Nearing - The Good Life
R.D. Laing - The Politics of Experience
Lierre Kieth - The Vegetarian Myth
Stephen Harold Buhner - The Lost Language of Plants
Jules Henry - Culture Against Man
Jerry Mander - Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

I am pretty sure this list is missing a book or two. I think I need to order some awesome not-so-new Undeployed(TM) bookmarks!

(Of course, throughout all of this, I have been consulting my Handbook of Korean Vocabulary: A Resource for Word Recognition and Comprehension and my Korean Grammar for International Learners along with the accompanying Workbook. Not to mention Seoul National University Language Education Institute Korean Level 4 and its own Workbook. But I don't expect these to interest you all so much.)

A Week at 거창귀농학교

Highlights include:

- A rainbow



- (Even if you read it already, click again, there are new photos included.) The 100km or so bike trip out. Actually, the Korean map says 100, Google says 67.3, and I say, based on signs and times, that 90 is probably about right.

- Enjoying three daily meals made almost entirely of hyper-local, organic ingredients. Surprisingly, I was not too bothered by the lack of variety. Rice, some soybean paste soup, and side dishes made of some kinds of leaves, mountain greens, chives, and sauces usually made of some red pepper paste or soybean paste concoction. The side dishes were made in bulk and usually lasted 5 or 6 meals each, but still didn't get boring. Candied peanuts were the best.

- Riding in the back of a pickup truck with 2 ajeossi (middle-aged, married men) and 6 halmeoni (grandmothers), then spending a few hours weeding potato and pepper fields. We stopped for a snack break and the ajossis produced a bunch of bready snacks, among which were pre-made, pre-packed hamburgers and chicken burgers. The grandmothers had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that they were actual sandwiches rather than bread, and they had a harder time trying to figure out how to open up the plastic wrapping.

- Spending a night at an apple orchard (click on the leftmost apple to get to a picture of the farmer and area, and then click the second radio button under the farmer for more pictures of the place) that belongs to a friend of one of the volunteer/apprentices here. He fed me an apple that was picked last September and had been stored in his huge walk-in fridge since then; still crisp and sweet and delicious. The next morning, his parents provided an awesome vegan breakfast, with a nice pumpkin leaf side dish I'd never tried before.





- Twice: Biked about 3 miles and up some massive hills (got up to 58 km/h on the way back down, new top speed) to Dong-seok (the guy from the bus)'s house. Helped with some weeding in the corn and bean patches, and helped to plant some radishes, prepare a field and plant some buckwheat, and transplanted some green onions. Had lunch comprised entirely of things he had grown himself, aside from the rice. Got to see what eggplants, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, beans, chestnuts, walnuts, peanuts, corn, lettuce, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelons, sunflowers, sesame plants, and perilla plants look like up close. Played with his pre-toddler son and, through no effort or fault of my own, terrified his two elementary school daughters.







- Spent a lot of time listening to and chatting with middle-aged Korean guys who had either left the city to return to country life (actually, the Korean name of the school means "Return to farming school," despite the official translation of "Farm School"), or who had come to the school to learn about and prepare for something similar. We shared several reasons for disliking the city - busy-ness, noise, artificiality, competitive education, dirtiness - but most of them weren't as concerned as I am with sustainability and the international and overall environmental effects of consumer culture.



- Made particularly good friends with Jeong-dong, a 42 year-old volunteer who's been at the School for 3 months and who'll be staying for a year, who is also a vegetarian, and who shares most of my feelings about...stuff..and is also trying to figure out how to put said feelings and beliefs into practice. Also became close with 35 year-old Dooboo (which means "tofu" in Korean), who is responsible for the professional looking photos you see and for introducing me to the appleman. Once he finishes at the School, he's looking to buy a house in the same area, bring his girlfriend down from Seoul, and start living the simple life.



- Hung out with two dogs, three ducks, two turkeys, ten chickens, a cat, and a goat.

- Finished two books that my friend Julio at Seoul National University borrowed on my behalf: The Good Life / Continuing the Good Life by Scott and Helen Nearing, along with The Politics of Experiencee by R.D. Laing. I recommend the first if you want to read a lot of details about how to build a wooden frame to support stone walls while you're in the process of cementing them; I recommend the second if you want to re-evaluate schizophrenia and maybe even give it a try. (Honestly, they're somewhat related and both worth reading. One is a critique of the way we view and treat each other, and one is a memoir of people who abandoned the wage economy and all that goes with it in order to live a simple, useful, and satisfying life. )

All in all, I didn't learn a whole lot about farming - I think you really have to spend several months or seasons or years on a farm to learn enough to run one - but I got a bit of a feeling for somewhat-close-to-sustainable country life and spent a lot of time talking to people who had been living it for various amounts of time. I also feel a bit closer to my food now that I at least know what it looks like and have tried a least a few of the varieties of work that go into producing it. It's also possible that I'll be able to set up a sort of CSA program, either for me and my coworkers who live in my apartment, or for a friend who runs a mostly-organic, mostly-healthy restaurant/used book shop downtown. I've made a promise to come back at least once in September, and perhaps once a month after that, to visit and to check out the farms in a different season. Next up: September apple and corn harvest, and planting cabbages and other hardy autumn produce.

The Hardest Things I've Ever Done?

I am fairly proud to say that, between the 10 days of silent knee agony known as Vipassana and the 100ish kilometers of burning thigh agony known as the trip from my apartment to Geochang Farm School, I have accomplished two Relatively Difficult Feats this July. [I am also fairly concerned about what mental issues may lie behind these recent quasi-masochistic compulsions, but I think I'd rather keep such thoughts out of the public sphere.] Given how much I wrote about Vipassana, I'll opt for a shorter, bullet-list style for the description of the voyage.

- 1 hour from my house to the last subway stop in Daegu. Another 20 minutes until I couldn't see any massive apartment buildings. Another 10 minutes before I stopped at a random gazebo and had an apricot.




Another 30 minutes before I hit the first hill I couldn't pedal up. Another 30 before I stopped for lunch (mixed sides with rice cooked in a bamboo tube). An hour to eat and massage my thighs.





Another 20 minutes before I stopped at a rest stop and a Saxophone Instructor/Jehovah's Witness from Daegu asked if I'd give him private English lessons and gave me a pamphlet full of teenagers telling me about why I should avoid premarital sex. Another hour until I realized there were no other cars on the road. Then an hour of alternately biking, pushing, eating apricots and almonds, and lying down on the side of the road wondering if I'd make it. An hour of second wind, strong enough that I decided not to stop despite seeing a hotel with a nice view and a hot stone bowl rice and tofu shop. 20 minutes eating fruit n nuts at another rest stop and begging to fill up my water bottle. Ran into another pack of cyclicsts coming from my destination and was assured that the rest of the way was mostly downhill or flat. About one more hour of closing out the trip, hoping to find a farmer with "We Accept Guests" spraypainted on his wall. No luck. All in all: left my home at 10:30 in the morning, arrived at my penultimate destination at 6:30pm.

- I had heard that Korea was 70% mountains, but I hadn't felt it in my bones until this trip. Some were so steep that even in my lowest gear I couldn't pedal up (I blame the bag of apricots). And in some cases, the wind was so freakish that after panting my way up the mountain, all the while looking foward to flying down, I was met by headwinds strong enough to make my descent even slower than the way up.



- I had heard that a liter of oil contained about as much energy as a man would expend working for 5 weeks. Not sure if that's exactly right, but after experiencing how hard it was to move myself, my bike, a few shirts, a jacket, and a bunch of fruit over that distance, and how it only takes an hour on the bus, I think I have a more visceral sense of how much power sits cooped up in fossil fuels.

- Discovered, confirmed, and had occassion to curse an unavoidable truth about biking: you will spend much more of the trip (time-wise) battling your way up hill cursing yourself than you will ecstatically coasting downwards.

- Despite the things people usually say about driving/drivers in Korea, I didn't have anyone honk at me or come dangerously close. Also, the roads were in really good shape, well-marked, and with good, clear, bi-lingual directions at almost every important intersection and junction.

- The Farm School is about 20km out of town. It was getting late and dark when I got to Geochang, so I decided to stay at a hotel. Had my biggest fight ever with a Korean person: the hotel manager at the motel who kept yelling at me demanding money up front, while I kept asking why he wouldn't show me the room first. It culminated with me saying "That's enough. Don't be so rude to your guests." and biking off to find another spot. What venom!

- Found a hotel and paid about 25 bucks for the night. Not long after I had checked in and showered, the owner of the Farm School called to say he was coming to town and he'd give me (and my bike) a ride back. I checked out of the hotel, received a 33% refund (these places all have hourly rates for special rendezvouses, which explains the mirrors everywhere and jacuzzi showers), and wound up spending about 17 bucks to take a shower and cool off. I was a little frustrated that biking wound up being more expsensive than riding the bus - after all, shouldn't the world be rewarding me for my virtue? - but mostly I was exhausted and happy to have been able to lie down for a while.

All in all, a pretty good trip. The scenery was generally quite nice, and my road ("normal country road number 26") ran next to a river for almost the whole time. I got to see lots of green rice paddies nestled between the mountains, and at one point, a huge field of pumpkin leaves blowing in the wind.



Had a few nice random chats at restaurants and rest stops and received free water from a few people along the way. I hope the trip back is more or less the same, though a little less opposition from the wind this time would be nice.

At long last, a bike trip and some farming

The bike trip that I mentioned in this pre-Vipassana post is officially about to begin!

Actually, I wanted to leave yesterday, but it was rainy all morning and I didn't have a coat. So, instead, I waited out the storm, then looked up the location of a thrift shop I hadn't visited before. I biked out there (25 minutes if I had know where I was going), bought a crappy little rain jacket and a sweet vest, swung by the market for some fruit and nuts (the apricot lady asked me if I was married), and stopped by the bookstore to get an atlas. Did you know that South Korea is small enough that a 1:600,000 scale map, folded up, will fit in your pocket?

After a massive breakfast of leftover kimchi and red bean porridge, along with banana-almond-soy milk-roast grain powder-shake, and maybe all the remaining fruit in the house that I can manage to scarf, I shall attempt my first long-distance bike ride. About 80 kilometers, it looks like. Doable in a day? When I'm prancing around the city, I can usually keep my speed around 20 or 25 (not counting time spent at traffic lights), so I'm hoping that on the flat parts of the country ride, I can maybe cruise along at 30ish. We'll see.

If the ride goes well, then it will be a mere preamble. One week at the Farm School, another week of teacher training (I'm training Korean elementary school teachers...eek), and then my real vacation begins in August. I'm thinking about biking up the East coast of the country, eventually heading West to Seoul to reconnect with a few friends, and then coming south again and stopping at some farms along the way.

Excellence.

Vipassana: Things I Didn't Say Before

So, hopefully you've read the previous three posts about Vipassana and have virtually undergone the experience yourself, with about one percent of the time commitment and hopefully zero percent of the joint pain. Here are some things I had meant to mention, but didn't.

1) Not talking was easy. Much easier than concentrating on my breath, or scanning my body for subtle sensations, or remaining unmoved in the face of knee pain. Actually, I consulted the teacher often, almost daily, so I really spoke about 3 minutes each day. Except for one day, when both teachers and I had a little philosophy chat that went on for almost 30 minutes. I understood that the silence, in addition to keeping us from lying (one of the parts of moral behavior we were supposed to follow) also kept us from asking each other questions about our meditation experiences, which in turn kept us away from feelings like pride and jealousy, allowing us to concentrate solely on our own practice.

2) There was some other communication. One time, three ducks were walking around in the drizzle, waddling and leaving little footprints in the dirt and quacking up a storm. Someone pointed them out to me silently. Another time, I saw another guy squatting in the dirt looking at something. I squatted down next to him and looked at a bunch of ants crawling into and out of holes which had been dug in the middle of the dirt parking lot for no reason apparent to us. Another time, I watched another guy feed leaves and reeds to the poor little goat that was chained up to the tree. Another time, I spotted a frog climbing up the wall of a building. I tried to point it out to another guy, but he wouldn't acknowledge me.

3) Seating. For the first few days, I tried different seating arrangements almost every meditation period. Normal "indian-sitting," seated fetal, extra pillows under my butt or knees, folded pillows, sitting with shins on the pillow and butt on my ankles, etc. I found out that pretty much, no matter what pose I picked, it was acceptable for 30 minutes, unpleasant for 15, and grueling thereafter. I returned to a simple position and accepted the fact that the pain was unavoidable, and that after all, the point was not to avoid the pain entirely, but rather to learn how to note it and react with equanimity. It's there, but you don't have to react to it. While this sounds ridiculous at first - whether because you believe pain serves a useful biological function, or because you value your own comfort - there's definitely some bit of truth in it. The pain eventually becomes less severe, and the need to get up and stretch disappears, and the amount of time it takes you to get back to normal leg consistency after the mediation decreases almost to zero.

4) My monkey-mind turned often to this very blog. I often thought of how I would describe each day or experience, and which experiences I would selectively leave out (that's right, I didn't tell you the full story, only the story that will lead you think what I want you to think). At meals, we often sat four to a table, but just looked at our food and not at each other. One time, though, I watched a guy leave the buffet and try to pick which table to sit at. Of course, it didn't matter, since nobody would talk to anyone anyway, but there's still this feeling like...do I sit next to the person who sits next to me in the meditation hall? Or the guy on the cot next to me? Or that guy who really looks like he knows what he's doing and who's probably half enlightened already? Maybe I can absorb his vibes??? He saw that I had caught him amidst these ridiculous considerations and cracked a big smile and came and sat down next to me. I had to stifle my own laughter for most of the meal and didn't dare look up at him. The point is, maybe even while it was going on, I was thinking about the blog. I thought I'd write that "the laughter was nearly uncontrollable" but that in typical self-slandering, syntax beast style, I would point out that the laughter was in fact entirely controllable. I held on to this idea for several days and am surprised that I forgot to include it.

This brings up an interesting question, one not unrelated to Vipassana. Does the blog, and by extension writing in general (actually, I ask myself this about my travel, photos too), draw me into experience or draw me out of it? Of course, the real answer is somewhere in between the two, depending on the event and the situation and of course the author. On the one hand, I feel like writing after that fact like this helps me imprint experiences in my memory. I can recreate the details that come to mind, and in the process reflect on the sort of things I pay attention to. Not to mention that I can later revisit and relive the experience, or at least whatever partial retelling I gave it.

On the other hand, what moments and things do I miss when I start thinking about what sort of stuff I can post about, rather than about the experience at hand? Is there some sense in which beginning to write the report forestalls further investigation? In which beginning to write about something declares it over, perhaps before it's really finished?

Actually, a year or more back, I watched a TED talk by a guy named John Francis, who stopped speaking for 17 years because he realized that all he did was interrupt people, responding to what he figured they were saying rather than to what they actually wanted to say. But he didn't do it in the context of a monastery. He actually taught classes and somehow managed to (wordlessly) spread the word about sustainability and respect for the planet. Also, he stopped using petroleum-based transportation and walked all over the place. Baller extroardinaire.

5) I had been writing an intro to the post in my head since maybe Day 3, but somehow it slipped my mind. I am too exhausted from all this other writing (good thing I did my bicentennial post in advance - the real occasion passed without being noticed) to recreate it. It was going to compare the Vipassana process to running marathons 10 days in a row, starting with the following picture (yes, I even knew exactly what picture to use and where it was in my web albums - evidence that the blog is borging my mind):

I would that the fellow in the middle (identity protected) has run a marathon in, I don't know, 3 or 4 hours, and that, due to stride length and other distances, it would probably take me 10, which is approximately how much meditation I was (supposed to be) doing daily.

I would also compare the knee pain, endurance, mind-battling, ease-of-quitting, unclear-purpose, and masochism issues.

And it was to end like this: