Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

This post first appeared on my Patreon page, which is home to more musings, some zen ideas, and many more photos than I post here:

The Ferry Building is an icon of San Francisco – a city not short of icons. Currently, it is shrouded in scaffolding and wrappers while it is being worked on, and as a consequence the clock is out of commission for several months.

I generally rely on the clock, and its chimes (apparently merely a recording of the Big Ben chimes) in a couple of different circumstances: when I am riding to catch the morning ferry, I can usually see the clock face from several blocks away on Market St. I always leave myself plenty of time to get there, but it is assuring to see. There are other clocks along Market St, though not all of them work; it took me a while to realise that one of them was stuck at 8:40 (if that clock had been working, I would have been late for the ferry). These days, as I arrive at the waterfront I have to pay attention as to whether the 8:35 Oakland ferry is still at the gate, or if the Alameda Ferry has already pulled in.

We were also dependent on the chimes to start and end the Monday sitting – and a few times previously had been thrown off when they weren’t working. Now, I have to remember to bring my bell, and have my phone in clock mode. On the current schedule, there is a ferry that steams off just a few minutes before 1:30, so that also helps.

On a wider scale, I am typing this on the day of the Champions’ League final, which traditionally brings to an end the European club football season. It is several weeks later this year, owing to the World Cup having been unusually sandwiched into the winter months. After today, the only sport I will be watching will be the Tour de France, which in theory frees up many hours until August, when it all starts up again.

And then on a global scale, there was a strange synchronicity in breaking news events on Friday – most of which I missed while I was out for lunch with a couple of other zen teachers: Boris Johnson resigning suddenly as an MP rather than face the results of an inquiry into various breaches of Covid protocols while he was the British Prime Minister, and that act sharing the headlines with Trump’s indictment. There was also this strange pairing of sacred and profane in a New York Times headline that same afternoon as well:

I have often opined that, being old enough to remember the last years of the post-war consensus before Thatcher and Regan ushered in the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School that has wrought huge inequality and much misery, I have been hoping that one day the pendulum would start swinging back the other way. Maybe, just maybe, it has.