Alex and I found an inn in Poulsbo to spend the night, a good restaurant, and finished with a soak in the hot tub at the inn. After that we slept hard. Being with my son in this way reminded us both how much we enjoy each other's company when we can get away from the endless stream of home chores and family obligations. I felt renewed in my connection, and proud of the young man he has become.
In the morning we parted ways, with Alex riding on to Seattle across Bainbridge Island to meet up with some college buddies (I was grateful I got as much time as I did!), while I headed south down the Kitsap Penninsula along Liberty Bay and Port Orchard to Bremerton, and ultimately by ferry to Vashon Island.
For the first few miles it seemed like every street and mailbox had a Scandinavian name. Poulsbo holds on tight to its Norwegian heritage and identity in spite of all the changes. It is a lot like Petersburg that way, my Alaska home that calls itself "Alaska's Little Norway". both towns were settled about the same time for similar reasons. Lots of fish to catch and a landscape that reminded these tough immigrants of home.
It's amazing how many different worlds have tucked themselves away on the backroads and backwoods of rural Puget Sound - Scandinavian farmers and fishermen, organic farmsteads run by aging hippies, the rural poor with their decomposing trailers and rusting auto bodies littered through the property, military veterans with American flags proudly flying, survivalists with barbed wire compounds and large snarling dogs, and along the view bluffs and waterfront, rows of enormous new mansions for the wealthy retired and recent winners of the high tech sweepstakes. Most of these mega-houses sit shuttered and empty all but a few weeks or months of the year, their owners back and forth between the Northwest in summer and the Sunbelt in winter. And then there are the hidden temples.
In Bremerton I caught a vintage passenger ferry across Sinclair Inlet to Port Orchard, and peddled a long and beautiful shoreline around Sinclair Inlet and Race Pass to a view across the water on downtown Seattle and the Cascades. This is part of the Sound I've never seen or explored, with small beach hamlets like Manchester, Colby and Harper that I've never heard of. The road that skirts this penninsula is definitely off the beaten path, so there was almost no traffic along this inner
coast. Eventually I made the Southworth ferry to Vashon Island, and another kind of adventure.
Once on Vashon, and after a killer hill from the ferry landing, I found the home of Jyl Shinjo Brewer, a good friend from my Zen monastery who spent eleven years training full time in Japan at Harada Roshi's home temple of Sogenji in Okayama. "Jo san" took full vows of ordination four years ago, and has recently come to settle on Vashon after a year of living in a Zen center in Paris. She has landed in an amazing situation as caretaker for a temple that was moved here from Indonesia by David Smith and reassembled on Vashon Island. I knew from her description that it was a pretty cool place, but I had was not prepared for what I saw. Leaving the highway I wound a fair distance back into the woods past the usual generic homes tucked away on generic parcels of land. When I turned into Jo san's driveway I passed through a magic gate and entered another world. I was stunned.
The house where Jo san is living also came over from Indonesia and is beautiful but completely unheated. We bundled ourselves up in sweaters and jackets in her bascially-outdoor kitchen as snow was beginning to fall, and enjoyed a fine dinner of locally made nettle pasta, warmed by stories from Jo san's various adventures in the Zen worlds of Japan, Europe and America. In the morning I was up at 5:30 to join Jo san for her meditation practice in the temple, and we shocked to find fresh snow on the ground. Another woman named Karen from the Vashon Zen sangha also came in to join us. It was a wonderful way to start the day.
After morning zazen meditation we picked up on threads of our conversation from the night before over breakfast. It is such a fascinating time in our culture to be working with these tools of Buddhist practice in a society that is only beginning to understand what this way of life might be good for. Especially to take full monastic vows is swimming against a heavy current in the American swirl of culture. This is a lifestyle that is common and well integrated into the culture in much of Asia, but still has precious little purchase here in the West. It is a courageous and often lonely path for Jo san to take this on here in the U.S., and to be such a pioneer in charting the way for a practice-based life.
In the end we resolved to co-host a retreat at her temple later in the summer for members of our Seattle One Drop sangha community to explore just these kinds of questions. What does it look like to choose a path of serious meditative training in our culture? What might it be good for? What fits and what doesn't from the traditional forms of training that have come over from Asian? How does one make a living when there are no societal mechanisms of support for this way of life here? Buddhist forms of practice have made huge inroads into our culture in recent years, but we are only beginning to sort out what that might look like as a mainstream staple of life here in the West.
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