Father's Day Reflections

My father, Charles Edward Johnson, was busy dying of cancer at right about the age I am now.  He was a good person, a great dad and one of the first lessons I had about letting go.

I don't have any pictures of him.  Scouting around in the nostalgia bin that is teh interwebz for other possible Father's Day pictures I looked in the direction of Buti, Italy from whence my grandmama issued.  She wrote a story once about what it was like to live in an echoing palazzo with an incestuous bunch of older relatives who spent their time playing the same card game (briscola) over and over.

Actually, the Bracci-Cambini were historically very active in both Tuscan and Italian civic and commercial affairs.  For centuries.  And they wrote down everything they did.  This is what a blog post looked like back then:

This picture is intensely exciting to me.  I have had dreams about finding the book of answers that tells me who I am and where I come from, that reintroduces me to a large, loving family that has known all along I would come back to join them, that has extensive footnotes hyperlinked to primary sources.  Mysteriously, my dream book leaves out the exhausted, starving Swedish peasants and fleeing Jews from whence I also issued.  On the other hand, it has the nice property of revealing jewels; as I turn its pages, they tumble out and chime as they strike the floor.

Since one dead relative's as good as another, I decided to go with a tribute to Leonardo Cambini (1882-1918), an extremely distant relative.  A writer and a soldier in the first World War, Leonardo gave everything he had to open a school for children.  Apparently he died at the age of 36, probably due to the War.  The school he opened exists today and has a website featuring a page about its founder.  They could only find one picture of this soldier-scholar-writer, but in tribute they made a portrait based on that photo:

You can see the original images here: http://www.ictoniolopisa.it/intestazionescuola.php?idscuo=41

Leonardo opened his school in a palazzo (villa) belonging to the Bracci-Cambini family.  It probably wasn't the same palazzo my grandmother remembered visiting during summers in the countryside town of Buti.  Still, Leonardo is like my other B-C great-grands Atanasio and Lina: when in doubt about shifting winds of political and economic circumstance, open a school and teach.  If nothing else comes of it, you may stay sane and pass the seed of sanity on to future generations.

All hail the Florentines, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  Back then they knew how to write without being wordy.  Probably because they didn't have keyboards, possibly because mostly they weren't literate.

CEJ

Zenkini Koan

During a Zen retreat there is something called dokusan* where the teaching master meets one on one with each person meditating for a short, private discussion.  I generally never know what to talk about during these sessions; even when I have had unusual experiences during meditation, I didn't need a Zen master to tell me the penguins attacking my feet weren't real.

On this particular day, I was having a vivid memory of the day I decided to start training when Reverend Master tapped me on the shoulder to follow him into the dokusan room.  It seemed as good a topic as any, so that's what I went with.  We discussed that briefly and then the conversation drifted toward the zucchini bread I had brought for the morning break.

"I've always wondered," RM said, "since zucchini plants are so prolific  that people are always giving their squash away, why do they cost pretty much the same as other vegetables when you get them from the grocery store?"  Then he laughed uncharacteristically loud and slapped me on the shoulder with tremendous force.  I pitched forward and suddenly snapped awake, still seated on my cushion in the meditation hall.

*Actually it's the Rinzai Zen tradition that calls it dokusan.  My Soto-flavor zendo calls it, somewhat more prosaically, "spiritual counseling."  We also do the Heart Sutra in English (gasp)!