Author Archive
Kurt’s Year-End Solstice Talk
On one of the snowiest nights in decades here in Puget Sound, 75 hearty souls braved the icy roads to gather with me at the Whidbey Institute to mark the end of my Circling Home year, and to celebrate a glorious Winter Solstice. Here is the audio of my year-end talk that evening.
A Year In Circumference Comes To An End
Kurt’s House – Winter Solstice 2008
My Circling Home year ended on a dramatic note on the Winter Solstice, December 21. We had the biggest snowstorm in over a decade, but that didn’t stop the celebration I had planned from taking place that evening at the Whidbey Institute. Almost all other events around the community had been cancelled, and many people had to cancel their plans to come, but 75 hardy friends and neighbors from the community walked the half mile hill down to Thomas Berry Hall for a memorable evening.
We began with a salmon feast of Skagit River chum salmon that I caught along the shores of Whidbey Island earlier in the fall. Afterwards I shared a slide show with highlights from my year, along with reflections about what I’ve learned from the experience. Several local artists offered solstice music, while others shared poems and reflections, then we danced late into the snowy evening to the Marimba band Nzira.
It was without a doubt the most memorable Winter Solstice of my life, capping an unforgettable year.
Here are some of the “gifts” I’ve taken from my Circling Home year:
- If we decide to do something, and if we decide that everything worthy of our love hangs in the balance, its amazing what we’re capable of.
- Living without a car is challenging, but completely within our capacity.
- Making these changes has been easier than I expected. Many new habits that seemed daunting or unrealistic before I started feel simply normal now.
- The benefits of this experiment have exceeded the costs by a country mile.
- Staying close to home and actively exploring my home terrain has vastly increased my sense of connection and belonging in this place.
- My inner life feels richer and more grounded than it did a year ago.
- My sense of connection to my neighbors and gratitude for my community is much stronger.
- I’m in better shape physically than I’ve been for years, and I’ve hardly even been to the gym.
- The daily act of moving from place to place is lived time now, rather than lost time. I’m not checked out when I’m traveling. I’m much more fully engaged.
- I am far less prone to seasonal depression and feelings of despair about the world. I am more open to the truth of what we face, without being so overwhelmed by it.
- I am much more willing to share my gifts and talents without the burden of feeling that my actions are continually out of alignment with my deepest values and convictions. I have a long ways to go in that re-alignment, but I feel I’ve made an honest start, and I’m very encouraged by that.
- I’m far more hopeful that serious change is possible, that we each have it in us to make real changes on a scale commensurate with the challenges we face.
- I am more willing to take additional risks now, and I’m not as afraid of what the future might hold.
I have confidence that I will be able to maintain many of my new lifestyle patterns well beyond this year, including primary use of bus and bicycle for day-to-day transportation. I will resume occasional use of my car, but will carpool whenever possible, and use other forms of transport whenever reasonable alternatives exist (which, as I’ve learned this year, they almost always do.)
Though I will again be traveling outside my 100 km circle for occasional work and pleasure, I remain committed to ground transportation even for longer trips (trains are the most efficient by far), knowing that a single jet flight across the United States uses enough energy (per passenger) to heat my house for a whole year, or fuel my hybrid car for many months. Besides, I have fallen back in love with my home terrain, and have dozens of additional local excursions waiting in the wings. My adventures this year have hardly left me wanting, and my need to travel for its own sake is much diminished. All I need are my boots, bicycle, or paddle, and I have a lifetime of adventures right close at hand.
I have made my peace with taking longer to get where I’m going anyway. It is part of the adventure. Whenever I face an inconvenience because of these choices, I simply ask myself how convenient a 20′ rise in sea level by century’s end is going to be? That is the current prediction by climatologists if we stay on our present course, which keeps my motivation strong to continue doing my part with as much commitment and integrity as I can muster.
Most of all, my year in circumference has taught me that the necessity for change can be embraced with an open heart and a spirit of adventure. I look forward to seeing what form the adventure will take as I live my way beyond the boundaries and limitations I set for myself in the extraordinary year just completed. They were not nearly as limiting as I imagined when I began, and that gives me much hope and energy to continue my journey into 2009.
Thoughts on the Economic Crisis
In her December Vision Arrow Newsletter, Trebbe Johnson, author of The World Is A Waiting Lover: Desire And The Quest For The Beloved, interviewed a few colleagues and friends around the country to get their thoughts on the current financial meltdown. She wanted to know how this crisis was affecting them philosophically and practically.
I was one of the people she interviewed. Here is the link if you want to read more:
Alaska 2009 Kayaking Retreats
View from Keene Channel Lodge, Southeast Alaska
Alaska 2009 Kayaking Retreats
After a year-long sabbatical in 2008, Inside Passages will resume its popular kayaking meditation retreats in Alaska during the summer of 2009. Trip dates will be:
July 17-24, July 27-August 3
The retreats this year will be based out of the Keene Channel Lodge on the Wrangell Narrows, a secluded former sport fishing lodge located fifteen miles south of Petersburg at the junction of Beecher Pass and Duncan Canal. Keene Channel is five miles from the nearest road, with access by boat and float plane. The combination of seclusion and ease of access makes it an ideal launching pad for explorations of the surrounding islands and waterways.
The lodge provides an excellent setting for day and overnight kayak trips in sheltered waters, and offers rustic but comfortable accommodations. Retreats will begin and end at the lodge, and will include a multi-day overnight kayak camping trip during the heart of the retreat. As with past Inside Passages retreats, the opportunity to explore meditation practice in a wilderness setting offers a superb chance to experience presence, both inner and outer, through a variety of contemplative disciplines.
The forests and waters around Keene Channel are home to many species of wildlife, including wolf, black bear and Sitka blacktail deer. The local waters harbor plentiful salmon and halibut, seals, porpoises and Stellar sea lions. The nearby Wrangell Narrows form an important link in the Inside Passage route from Puget Sound to Southeast Alaska.
Your Guides for the 2009 Season
As Head Guide, Kurt Hoelting brings fifteen years experience as a wilderness guide in Alaska. He has led over forty kayaking retreat expeditions in Alaska, and has taught meditation for many years to groups as varied as clergy and rabbis, environmental activists, health care professionals and veterans at the VA Hospital.
In 2008, Kurt took a year-long sabbatical, vowing not to get in a car for a full year, or travel more than 100 kilometers from his home in Puget Sound. In an effort to both lower his carbon footprint, and become more intimate with his home region, he traveled over 1000 miles on foot, 3000 miles by bicycle, and 400 miles by kayak, all within a 100 km circle drawn around his home. He is currently at work on a book chronicling his experiences.
Kurt will be joined once again in Alaska by Emi Morgan as assistant guide, cook and logistics coordinator. A recent graduate of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, Emi has worked as a kayak guide and outdoor educator from Alaska to Costa Rica. She brings an exceptional combination of warmth, enthusiasm and skill to her work.
Emi currently works for the San Juan Initiative, helping improve shoreline protection in San Juan County, Washington. She also has a passion for organic agriculture, and works to connect local farmers with local markets and restaurants in the Puget Sound area.
Back by popular demand to join Kurt as co-facilitator of the
Alaska retreats is Gordon Peerman. Gordon is an Episcopal Priest who teaches meditation at Vanderbilt Law, Medical and Divinity Schools in Nashville, TN. He has for many years taught MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) at hospitals in the Nashville area, and leads a popular Buddhist meditation group in Nashville weekly with his wife Kathy.
Gordon is the author of Blessed Relief: What Christians Have To Learn From Buddhists About Suffering.
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Cost: $1,975 (airfare to Alaska not included)
For more information, contact Kurt at insidepa@whidbey.com
Sit, Walk, Write: Nature & the Practice of Presence
Last weekend I took a break from salmon fishing to head up to the North Cascades Institute to lead a retreat with poet Holly Hughes at the beautiful NCI Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake. It was a long journey for me by bicycle, bus and special NCI van, but I’ve never seen the Skagit Valley more beautiful, or our Northwest autumn colors more spectacular. My several trips to the Skagit have been high points of my Circling Home year.
It was the first retreat of this kind to be hosted by NCI, and was filled above capacity with over 40 participants. Holly and I had a great time working together – our first time as co-facilitators of such an event, though we have long talked about how much fun this might be. We were gratified by the enthusiastic response of participants to this blending of meditation and writing in an extraordinary natural setting.To quote the North Cascades Institute eNewsletter from this week: “Sit, Walk, Write: Nature and the Practice of Presence” with Kurt Hoelting and Holly Hughes was the Institute’s final adult program at the Learning Center for the year, and it filled our wilderness campus with a great assembly of people from all over North America. Uncovering and appreciating the surprising interconnections between meditation, writing and close observation of nature was an inspiring way to bring a successful year to a satisfying conclusion.”
The response was so positive that Holly and I are already on the calendar to do this retreat again at NCI a year from now on Oct. 23-25, 2009.
Salmon Nation
Last year I bought a commercial salmon gillnetter with my friend Dave Anderson to fish the fall chum salmon run here in Puget Sound. After years of fishing commercially for salmon in Southeast Alaska and Bristol Bay, I wanted to learn the fishery here on the home grounds, and to keep my connection alive with the fishing culture that still thrives in Alaska, but is almost gone here on Puget Sound. Dave has fished the Sound for thirty years, and is a helluva great guy, so how could I hope to find a better fishing partner? Last year we bought a 32′ Bristol Bay gillnetter called the Martina, and had it barged down to Puget Sound from its home in Naknek, Alaska. I’d always thought of salmon fishing as something I did only in Alaska, forgetting that Puget Sound was once at the heart of Salmon Nation.
When I made the decision to go car-free for all of 2008, and to stay local, I faced a number of dilemmas. One was what to do with my fishing season now that I couldn’t use a car? How would I continue to make a living? And would fishing pose too much of a contradiction to the rest of my low-carbon diet?
All valid questions. But as the architect of my own experience here, I didn’t want to bury my good intentions in an overbearing idealism. I couldn’t expect to tackle every contradiction of my life at once, and I wanted my efforts to be grounded in the reality that we have to make a living, even as we try to transform the way we live. So I decided to include the short Puget Sound chum salmon season that runs from mid-October to mid-November as part of my plan for the year.
Fishing is deep in my blood, after all. It has provided my primary livelihood since I was in college, and has helped to pay my bills so that I could pursue my other vocations as a meditation teacher and wilderness guide that are much less lucrative financially. I love working on the water. I love the vistas it offers into a sense of place that mere recreation can’t duplicate. I love the fact that fishing for salmon, in one form or another, has sustained the cultures of the Northwest Coast since the retreat of the last ice sheet. I love this direct link into the food chain that has been severed with most contemporary work and life. My spirit of connection with this amazing totem animal continues to inspire me and haunt my dreams even after all these years. I think it’s important to continue using the skills that I have spent years developing and that bring me the most pleasure. The chum salmon run, unlike other species of salmon, has remained relatively healthy in Puget Sound, a reminder that there is still a lot of wildness in these waters.
We’re fishing in Possession Sound near Whidbey, in Hood Canal, and off of Seattle and Kingston. It’s strange to be hauling in salmon at night with the Seattle skyline easily in view, and with freighters and barges bearing down on our little boats and nets. So like and unlike the experience of fishing in Alaska. I just throw my bicycle in one of the fish holds so that I can ride home, or bike/bus, from wherever we end up on a given opening. The pace of life on a fishing boat is actually very compatible with my slow-travel pattern for the year, moving around the Sound always at a very slow pace, getting out in the elements, and seeing where I live from an entirely new set of angles and vantages.
KUOW “Sound Focus” Interview #4 – Paddle to Cowichan
This past Friday, Oct. 3, I was interviewed once again by Megan Sukys of KUOW’s Sound Focus program. This was my fourth interview for Sound Focus, following the progress of my Circling Home year on a seasonal basis. This time we chatted about my 200 mile round trip kayak paddle to Cowichan Bay in August to witness the 2008 Tribal Journeys Canoe Rendezvous.
This was a fun interview to do, and a great opportunity to give much deserved attention to an important event in the life of our region. My nine minute conversation is the final segment on the show.
Autumn Day of Mindfulness – Saturday, Oct. 4th – join me
A reminder to my Northwest friends that I will be offering a Day of Mindfulness retreat on Saturday, Oct. 4th, at the beautiful Whidbey Institute sanctuary on Whidbey Island. I have marked the seasonal changes through my Circling Home year with this Day of Mindfulness, including introductory sitting, walking and Qi gong meditation, and an opportunity to hike on the Whidbey Institute trails. The retreat is by donation only, and a great opportunity to enter the fall season in a spirit of gratitude and contemplative silence.
The retreat will begins at 9:30 AM and concludes at 4:30 PM. Please bring comfortable clothes for sitting, good shoes for hiking, and a sack lunch. No experience in meditation is necessary, and all are welcome.
Deception Pass or Bust
Paddling the Strait of Juan de Fuca
Last weekend I took a break from writing to complete the second half of my circumnavigation of Whidbey Island. Joining me on this 45 mile paddle along the exposed west shore of Whidbey was my daughter Kristin (left below), Emi Morgan and Noel Stout.
It was a great group of competent paddlers and a memorable trip. Emi was an assistant guide with Inside Passages in Alaska last summer, and will be working with me again next summer when I return to the north country after my year of local living. Emi and Noel have guided in Costa Rica and the San Juans as well as Alaska.
We left from Maxwelton Beach at the south end of Whidbey on Friday morning, Sept. 19th, with calm weather and rain, paddling north past Double Bluff, Bush Point and Lagoon Point to Hancock Lake where we camped for the night. It was a fine day for paddling in Admiralty Inlet.
From our (stealth) camp at Hancock Lake on Saturday morning, we noticed that the current was flowing north along the beach, opposite the main stem of the flood flowing south down Admiralty Inlet. It turned out that the tide forms a giant back eddy through Admiralty Bay, a conveyor belt we climbed on to cross the five miles to the Keystone Ferry Landing and on up toward Pt. Partridge along Ebby’s Prairie and Ebby’s Bluff. At Pt. Partridge the tide splits coming off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, flooding south and north along the shores of Whidbey. We got to Pt. Partridge and Fort Ebby State Park just about low slack, so the tide turned back in our favor flowing north again across the wide expanse of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
It was a wet and misty day on the Strait, with clouds pressing down all day to obscure what would otherwise have been an expansive view of the Olympics, the San Juans and Vancouver Island. But we didn’t mind. In fact, we kept remarking that this was the perfect way to spend a rainy day. The rain felt completely natural out here, and the endlessly beautiful dance of expanding ripples on the water was trance inducing. The swell was gentle in what can be a wild stretch of semi-ocean conditions. We were blown away by the scale and wildness of this northwestern coast of our island that none of us had ever experienced before. We saw lots of harbor porpoises and harbor seals, a different composition of birds than we see on the inside, including ancient murrelet, Rhinoceros Auklet, and even a lone brown pelican, which none of us had ever seen in Puget Sound before. (Climate change?)
We stopped at our intended camping spot at Joseph Whidbey State Park to have tea, but with great conditions, a favorable tide and a good rhythm going, as well as a desire to not push our luck with weather the following day, we continued on into the evening, paddling the final ten miles past the strange and lonely fortress of Ault Field Naval Air Station and through Deception Pass to our final destination in Cornet Bay - a twenty seven mile paddle for the day. We arrived at Deception Pass in pouring rain just as darkness was coming on, an hour before high slack water, and had a wild ride through the tidal boils and whirlpools of the Pass, hooting and hollering like kids, which sluiced us through to the narrow opening into Cornet Bay in no time. There we stripped off our wet gear, pulled the kayaks onto the float, and piled our weary and happy bodies into the galley of my gillnetter, the Martina. We lit the stove, cooked up some dinner, opened a cold beer, and shared stories into the evening of our various adventures on the water – some more true than others – after a day we will all remember as one of our best days of paddling ever. What a gift.
With four of us we used every possible bunk in the foc’s'l and galley of the boat, but we all slept like logs. On Sunday morning after breakfast, Emi and Noel headed back down the island with their kayaks and gear, and my neighbor Fiona (bless her heart) drove all the way up the island to meet Kristin and bring our boats back home. (Obviously I’m not completely car-free this year when you factor in this kind of logistical support.) Kristin headed home to Seattle to start graduate school the following day at the UW School of Marine Sciences (What a great way for her to enter her program.) I stayed at the boat for an extra day, because no buses run on the island on Sundays, and I’m still on my car-free diet for another three months. (This weekend, in fact, marked the fall equinox and my turn into the final season of my car-free year, which ends on the winter solstice this December.) I didn’t much feel like walking fifty miles home after yesterday’s long paddle. So instead, I enjoyed a fine day on the boat by myself, using it as a mini-writer’s retreat, and with a book to write by next spring, I have a huge amount of writing to do.
It was a good day not to be out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, too, with gusty winds and rain through most of the day. I enjoyed the hum of the stove, and hanging out in the beautiful Deception Pass landscape. It felt really satisfying to have completed this second half of my hundred-mile circuit around Whidbey Island, something that I have wanted to do for years, and one of my top goals during this circling home year.
The further I get into the year, the more I wonder how anyone could get bored or restless living in a place like this. I bet that’s true wherever one might live, if we turn toward our place on earth with appropriate humility and curiosity. I have a couple lifetimes of plans for more trips like this right inside my magic circle around Puget Sound. My only dilemma will be choosing which ones will make the cut, and how I can talk more of talk my friends into joining me. I certainly count Emi and Noel among my good friends now. They were a complete pleasure to paddle with, and all-pro on the water. And Kristin has now brought her cheerful enthusiasm into several of my kayaking adventures this summer, including the paddle to Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island, something we will treasure as part of our shared life in the years ahead.
Tahoma
With Harada Roshi on Whidbey Island
Seven days in silence with 50 other people from eight countries under the direction of a renowned Rinzai Zen Master from Japan at a small Zen monastery on Whidbey Island is a difficult experience to describe. Here are a few wild stabs: Complex and extraordinarily simple. Serene and turbulent. Rigorous and spontaneous. Confining and wide open. I had it easy though. Unlike the majority of students at the retreat who travelled from Japan and Europe and Mexico and Canada, as well as all over the U.S., I only had to ride my bike ten miles to get there. How lucky is that?
If you want to call it lucky. The bell rings at 3:50 AM and we’re on the cushion at 4:20. Hour after hour of sitting with whatever the mind dishes up – no place to run and no place to hide. A daunting project, this effort to master the chaos of mind that masquerades as a self. Can I navigate the endless currents and eddies of ego without tipping over into judgement or self-reproach? Can I look at my life just as it is, here in this moment, with something like grace and gratitude, no matter how fractured and confused and incomplete?
Who would willingly take on such a task? Who would ever refuse such an opportunity? A thousand rounds of birth and death to come to this moment, in all it’s mysterious joy and sorrow. “Quick, now, here, now, always. A condition of complete simplicity. Costing not less than everything.” (T.S. Eliot)
My father fought in the bitter campaign in the South Pacific in World War II to defeat a nation that has now delivered a fresh assault back across the Pacific, this time wearing the robes of a monk, determined to face down the very forces of greed, hatred and ignorance that drive all nations to war, all people to distraction, no matter what their tribe or religion. It is an irony that is not lost on me. The chords of blessing and curse are tightly wound around each other. In the quest for inner peace no experience is wasted, and there is no time to lose.
On the last day of the retreat, after seven days completely off the grid of conventional media and the routine stew of social engagement, I walked to the bluff behind Tahoma Monastery and looked with fresh eyes on the long view down Puget Sound – all the places I’ve visited during this year of pilgrimage – the Olympics to the west, the Cascades to the East with Glacier Peak looming behind Three Fingers and Pilchuck and Mt. Index, the long reach south to the distant, tiny skyline of downtown Seattle, and the massive buttress of Mt. Rainier looming behind.
By tradition, Zen monasteries in China and Japan have always been named after local mountains, the closest things we have to a symbol of stability and permanence in our ever-changing world. And so Harada named his new American monastery ”Tahoma” – the original Coast Salish name for Mt. Rainier, which meant “Snow Peak”.
By perfect coincidence, Ta-ho-ma in Japanese means “limitless Dharmas”.