Book Report: "Butterflies on a Sea Wind" by Anne Rudloe

I just finished reading "Butterflies on a Sea Wind" by Anne Rudloe, who with her husband, Jack, ran the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Panacea, Florida (she died in 2012). What I did not know is that Anne was also a dharma master, Ji Do Poep Sa Nim, in the Kwan Um School of Zen!...and Abbot of the Cypress Tree Zen Center in Tallahassee.

"Butterflies" carries a "Beginning Zen" banner on the cover, which--along with the fact that I recognized her name--caused me to pick up the book at Book Gallery West in Gainesville. Anne Rudloe also has another book, "Zen in a Wild Country," that I will now search out. I don't know why it surprised me to find a Florida woman environmentalist with a Zen background, but it did.

I was particularly struck by this passage from "Butterflies," in which Rudloe is describing her experiences at a Zen retreat:

"Then a mental image arose of an underwater sand fountain in a spring back in Florida. The water jetting out of a crack in the limestone kept the sand above it in a constant cascade. Endlessly cycling in its silvery plumes, the sand fountain had no beginning, no end, no going anywhere. There was just a perpetual moving round and round in a balanced, harmonious, and beautiful way. It was a model of the universe, and it was also a model of human existence. Each journey of a grain of sand up and down equaled a lifetime. Each grain's trajectory was determined by all the forces that were, or had been, or would be, present and acting on it. My life was one cycle of one of those sand grains....There is only what is happening at any given point in time. We continue the process of being aware of the cycling and remain in harmony with it day by day and moment by moment. When I first saw it, I had known immediately that the sand fountain in the spring was sacred, and now I understood why." (pp. 163-164)

Rudloe also includes this wonderful quote from Zen Master Dogen:

"From ancient times wise people and sages have often lived near water. When they live near water they catch fish, catch human beings, and catch the Way. For long these have been genuine activities in water. Furthermore there is catching the self, catching catching, being caught by catching, and being caught by the way."

I thought that the last chapters of Rudloe's book, in particular, did a great job of revealing the whole "point" of Zen and Buddhism, which as I understand it is to let go of the fixation on a permanent "self" as something that is separate from reality as we usually perceive it.