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.

Breakfasts of Champion

Up until now, my breakfasts have mostly consisted of oatmeal (cooked in the winter, raw in the summer) with fruit (raisins, prunes, jujubes, bananas, persimmons, whatever else is around), nuts (peanuts and almonds), ground flax seed, cinnamon, and some soy milk, black bean milk, or home made bean milk yogurt.

Tasty? For sure. Healthy? Pretty good. Food miles? Leaves a little to be desired.

As always, I've been thinking about other ways to reduce my footprint, and have been thinking about trying to cut down on eating imported foods. Part of me says "I already eat vegan 99% of the time, buy organic as much as I can, buy local when it's available, don't have a car, ride my bike around, and almost never buy any non-food items. Isn't that enough?" But, for some reason, no, it isn't.

I noticed that my lunches and dinners mostly contain local stuff and that breakfasts are the big killer. Oatmeal, almonds, prunes, and raisins from the states, bananas from the Phillipines, soy milk probably from China. But I didn't really know what else to do. I didn't really want to bother with tofu scrambles and all that morning vegetable chopping hassle.

But the I went to Vipassana and had awesome vegan Korean cuisine every morning for 11 days. No way to tell how local everything was, but anyway, all of it can be procured locally. Surprisingly, I didn't really miss the almonds, fruit, or richness of my standard breakfast. Instead, I enjoyed a different variety of rice porridge every morning, along with rotating side dishes. Various varieties of salty or spicy Kimchi, some crunchiness provided by fried peppers, and sweetness from sugared peanuts or beans.

So, since the Vipassana course, I've been trying to do similar stuff for myself. I biked over to the market with some tupperware, visited a banch'an (side dish) lady, and stocked up on black beans, lotus roots, and kimchi:



The long green ones are young radish, the thicker ones are cabbage.

Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, the lotus roots had lots of mini-shrimp in them. I couldn't handle the taste and tried to give them away, but my friends couldn't handle the taste either, so they wound up getting tossed. Poor guys.

Here's a tour of my week:


(Plated side dishes, peppers just for decoration. Also, I made that plate!)


(Black rice and other mixed grain porridge, with pumpkin seeds (not recommended) and sesame (pointless))


(Mixed grain and split-pea porridge)


(Put the sesame right on the sides! This one also has some stir-friend kimchi from a friend)


(This morning's read bean and mixed grain porridge.)

Funny story about the red beans:
I bought them a long time ago at a local organic shop. I made a few rounds of burgers with them, then stowed them away and forgot about them. When I next looked, there were little flies inside of the sealed bag; I suppose there must have been eggs on the beans or something. I didn't want to throw away the beans, but I didn't want to let the flies out, so I just left it there. Then when my parents came, my dad suggested I just throw it in the freezer. The flies would freeze and then I could pick them out. Crafty! With some apologies to the bugs, I gave it a try.

Result, after a good 30 minutes of picking through:

Wisdom #1

"There is surely a word—in German, most likely—that means the state of active non-accomplishment. Not just the failure to reach a specific goal, but ongoing, daily failure with no end in sight. Stunted ambition. Disappointed potential. Frustrated and sad and lonely and hopeless and sick to death of one's self.

"Whatever it's called, this is what leads people to abandon their goals—people do it every day. And I understand that decision, because I lived in this state of active non-accomplishment for many years."

From the Slate article "What Took You So Long?The quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing" by Susanna Daniel

New Blog Category: (Wisdom 0)

Perhaps I just have way too much time (5 posts in 2 days?), but I've decided to put a new category up on the blog: quotations.

I can't count the number of posts that are inspired by some quotation I see, but which wind up either being nixed or left in perpetual limbo because I don't have the time, energy, honesty, ability to decide whether my take on the post is straightforward or ironic or only faux-ironic, or whatever, to explain what exactly draws me to it and what I think it means. Add to this the number of posts that start off strong and then dwindle/piddle/whimper to a close, often with a remark like "I'm sorry to have wasted your time with this," and you have a whole ouvre of stuff that would have been better off simply presented in the nude.

While I am aware that this will throw off the post count (since it's not fair to count these things as real posts, due to the fact that I didn't even write them), I think it's worth it in terms of bringing quality content to the blog. Solution: I will number each post in the title so that future yearly post symmetry inventories are not disturbed.

I think I will deem the section "Wisdom." Enjoy.

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: