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Goodnight Sweet Prince

2012-02-03T00:54:00.002-05:00

Youth is not just a chapter in your life, but a state of the soul: consisting of a certain form of will power and preparedness to dream and fantasize. It's an emotional power that lets courage prevail over timidness and cowardice. It's not the fact that you've lived a lot of years that makes you feel old; but that you might have given up your own ideals in life. Like the years that are carving their traces in our bodies, its the renunciation of enthusiasm that carves lackluster mediocrity in our souls. The young needs to preserve a sense of awe and wonderment for life and what it has to offer for the one who seeks. You'll stay young as long as your heart can communicate, and receive the messages of beauty and courage."

--Klauss Hoffman Houch

Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid Master who said, " When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you."

A. Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Frazer's first law of magic then is that "like produces like," an effect resembles its cause; and his second, that "things which once were in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

--Myths to Live By
Joseph Campbell

* *
I am stuck , and at a loss for words to do Jim Carlson justice.

Just got off the phone with my friend and onetime college roomate and sometime partner in crime and theater as well as mutual friend with dear Professor Carlson.

I wrote this to her after hearing of his passing:

" I think our teachers paid us the compliment of constantly raising the bar and making us reach upwards for the teaching. Knowing that it would take us the rest of our lives to understand what they were teaching us.

I thought about all the plays we were in with him - the first one I was in was Michel de Ghelderode's "Women of the Tomb" done with giant masks where I had to walk downstairs in a long dress carrying a lit candle. I was 17 and it was completely terrifying. Just praying to not fall downstairs while onstage. But the presence of Jim Carlson was so compelling, I felt as though I was being initiated into a strange secret society. In a way I guess I was.
We thought we were all grown up - of course now we know that we were the strange mix of child and adult that college students are. In a way, I think of Jim as my first teacher who accepted me as an 'adult' - who didn't predigest the teaching or talk down or interpret. He asked me to do that for which I am grateful.

After my mother died, I read something the Joseph Campbell wrote about his mother. He talked about "eternal time" not as infinite or endless time, but a quality of time that is outside of time. He said that he had spent a lot of "time eternal" with his mother when his mother was alive so that now that she was gone, he still had her.

I think of friends like you, like Jim and so many from FPC. We did share "eternal time" together. Maybe that's what theater is. So that this is something that we always have with us even though our day to day lives don't intersect. We remember and honor those who taught us that it was possible to walk between worlds."
* * *
Epilogue | James Richard Carlson

James R. Carlson, who founded the Eckerd College theater program, dies at 94

By Andrew Meacham, Times Staff Writer

In Print: Thursday, February 2, 2012

ST. PETERSBURG — Long before he started throwing up stark sets for the abstract European plays he directed at Eckerd College, James Carlson preached the gospel of theater as an arena where big ideas clash.

He called it the "engaged theatre" (always with the British "-re"), and maintained that there was no better place to practice it than a college. Though widely praised for getting fine performances out of actors, he emphasized depth of understanding over technique, and preferred avant-garde works.

"They seemed to be disguised rants against communists, Nazis and dictators — against authority," said Peter Meinke, a retired Eckerd professor and St. Petersburg poet laureate, who credits Mr. Carlson with recruiting him to Eckerd. "They were highly subversive in certain ways. Not obviously, but they made everybody think."

Mr. Carlson, who founded Eckerd's theater program and designed its physical core, the Bininger Center for the Performing Arts, died Saturday of congestive heart failure. He was 94..

“Jim saw the theater as the center of the college community," said novelist Sterling Watson, a former student and longtime Eckerd professor. "Whether he was right or wrong about that, he believed in it passionately."

Mr. Carlson grew up near Staples, Minn. He studied at Hamline University, the University of Minnesota, the Shakespeare Institute in England and Columbia University. A religious scholar and devout pacifist, he obtained status as a conscientious objector during World War II.

He directed the theater program at Hamline from 1947 to 1964. He came to Florida Presbyterian in 1964, where he joined an interdisciplinary program that encouraged students of other disciplines to act in plays. In 1969, he opened the brand-new Bininger Center with the first American production of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan, about a woman whose generous nature threatens to put her out of business.

The same commitment that brought Mr. Carlson to the college ultimately caused him to leave it. In 1978, after Eckerd's trustees moved to allow an ROTC program on campus over the objections of students and faculty, Mr. Carlson resigned.

"He stood for his principles, even when it would hurt him professionally, and he did it publicly," said Glenn Powell, a former student and high school drama teacher in Jupiter.

After leaving Eckerd, Mr. Carlson ran an art gallery in Gulfport for a while, but did little teaching. He remained in touch with former students, who remember him as an engaged thinker.

"He was constantly rubbing around his eyes and his ears and his head," said Greg Lawson, a cartoon animator and film director living in Amsterdam, "as if he was thinking so hard, he had to push the brains around a little bit."

Andrew Meacham can be reached at ameacham@tampabay.com (727) 892-2248.

* * * * *
.Biography
James Richard Carlson
Born: Dec. 16, 1917
Died: Jan. 28, 2012
Survivors: sister, Marge Wolf
Service: 2 p.m. Feb. 25; St. Petersburg Religious Society of Friends; 130 19th Ave. SE.

For the Almost Blind

2012-01-27T22:29:00.002-05:00

“Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone.”
—Tomas Tranströmer

[Thanks to Crashingly Beautiful ]

* *
Only after philosophy will he live. Only when he has brought philosophy to an end.

A little kindness. That's what he looks for.

What he wants: simple, direct communication, he says. To speak of ordinary things.

He is touched by platitudes. The porter says, 'How are you today, sir?', with a friendly wink. The cleaner: 'Am I disturbing you?' There is nothing more moving, he says.

Wittgenstein Jr: Normal people are are a balm. And on another occasion, We must be normal, normal.

Life is very close to us, he says. It is almost here.

- Wittgenstein Jr

* *
Got to doodle
by Kim Fabricius

If posts are getting longer, that might be because bloggers are spending less time writing them.

I’ve got the attention-span of a mayfly. That’s why I pray: to upgrade to a gnat.

That’s also why I write. If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t notice a damn thing.

On Moby-Dick: Does Moby-Dick symbolise God, evil, chaos, blind fate? Yes. Here’s how great a book Moby-Dick is: God symbolises the White Whale.

In his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened of, Julian Barnes says, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” Shoot, I believe in God because I miss him.

It has often been observed that Milton’s God in Paradise Lost is insipid, his Satan grand and dynamic. And that, of course, is because it’s much harder to draw enthralling virtuous characters than wicked ones. Compare the main problem that pacifists face: namely, convincing people that nonviolence is more noble and compelling than the inferno of war.

Flannery O’Connor, describing her literary style, famously said that for “the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Her mentor was the Creator: hence Moses, Elijah, Jesus and the saints.

Mary Magdalene: Hey, Jesus, what’re you rebelling against?
Jesus: Whadda you got?
(From The Wild One, 1953.)

Hastening and waiting are the two poles of Christian existence. Waiting prevents hastening from becoming hurrying; hastening prevents waiting from becoming loitering.

For the pastor, preaching is the hastening, praying the waiting.

Any preacher who doesn’t think he’s a fraud is – a fraud.

I like the idea of Liquid Church – as in liquid lunch. And Messy Church has got to be better than the usual anal retentive one. But the church patterned on saints I love and admire is Circus Church (William Stringfellow) – a travelling freak show.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the issue of women priests is gynaecological, in the Orthodox Church pogonological.

Basically, the Church Dogmatics is two things: Barth’s album of love-songs to Jesus, and a long pastoral letter to Christians in via, his Epistle to the Roaming.

The tragedy of much Christian witness is that the accused seem to think they are the Judge.

The demons recognise Christ when they see him. Which can’t always be said of Christians.

What are the debates of presidential candidates if not demonic forms of glossolalia?

The optimising of the optional is as old as Judges 21:25. Except that in Israel it was a sign of national chaos, whereas in the US it’s called freedom.

Beware the patriot who doesn’t have a passport.

I once heard someone say that if you want some idea of the reality of systemic racism, consider a woman in a wheel chair on the fourth floor of a hotel who sees a sign by the elevator: “In Case of Fire, Take Stairs”.

What is Facebook but a form of mass electronic cosmetic surgery?

Have you observed that while bad times may drive a person to lose faith, good times rarely move a person to gain it? And that while undeserved misfortune may drive a person to lose faith, underserved good fortune never seems to have the same effect? That’s lose-lose, Lord.

How does one prevent oneself from lying to oneself? Sages say by trying to lie to oneself. Bachelors all. More effectively, try lying to your wife.

Tim Tebow claims to be an evangelical, but I reckon he’s half-way to Rome. After all, the quarterback prays on one knee, and every pass he throws is a Hail Mary.

Poor Tom Eliot clearly didn’t care for baseball, otherwise he would have chosen a different month than April for the first line of The Waste Land. As his family was originally from the Boston area, surely September.
Posted by Ben Myers

Sign of God's Pity

2012-01-27T21:11:00.004-05:00

"While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.
Paperclips
in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks
longingly
of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.
Out
the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,
love
of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling
faster
now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I
want
to tell her—sign of God’s pity. She won’t keep me
she says, she
won’t run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The
paperclips
are immortally aligned. God’s pity! How long
will
it feel like burning, said the child trying to be
kind."

Anne Carson, “Lines”

* *

“
“Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.”
”
— Groucho Marx, American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit (1890-1977)

Obsessed By A Fairy Tale ....

2012-01-23T22:22:00.004-05:00

"And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me."
-- William blake from "Broken love"

* *
“My mother lives in the panhandle of Maryland, near West Virginia. I visited her not long ago and we went to her small hilltop Methodist church. The service was halfway between evangelical (PowerPoint) and mainstream (hands clasped, not raised, in prayer). The minister spoke against internet pornography and warned of the unchecked rise of godlessness. Darwin was not in fashion there. The pews were half-full. When they passed the plate I put in $5. It’s not atheism keeping people at home.”
-from “Just Like Heaven” by Paul Ford
* *
“Wisdom is bright and does not grow dim … and is found by those who look for her.”
~ Wisdom 6:12-13
Wisdom is not the gathering of more facts and information, as if that would eventually coalesce into truth. Wisdom is precisely a different way of seeing and knowing the “ten thousand things” in a new way. I suggest that wisdom is precisely the freedom to be truly present to what is right in front of you. Presence is wisdom! People who are fully present know how to see fully, rightly, and truthfully.
Presence is the one thing necessary for wisdom, and in many ways, it is the hardest thing of all. Just try to keep 1) your heart space open, 2) your mind without division or resistance, and 3) your body not somewhere else—and all at the same time! Most religions just decided it was easier to believe doctrines and obey often-arbitrary laws than the truly converting work of being present. Those who can be present will know what they need to know, and in a wisdom way.
Richard Rohr: From The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 59-60
* * *
from: Dennis Lewis
"The straightjacket of a tense, controlling mind filled with expectations and assumptions knows neither how to breathe nor how to live. Let your thoughts and feelings loosen up through awareness and your life will be transformed."

and

"For several breaths when you remember, exhale your habitual sense of self and return home to the silent, peaceful spaciousness underlying all experience."

and

"Do you live in front of or behind yourself most of the time. Or do you occupy the infinite space that is zero distance from yourself? Take a look!"
****
“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.”
—
Eugene O’Neill

What Do We Know ?

2012-01-18T21:47:00.003-05:00

“ Our real journey in life is interior”
—
Thomas Merton; “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton” p.296

**

What Do We Know Of The Universe?

Carl Zimmer profiles astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Here’s Tyson explaining the problem of dark matter to a young boy:

[E]verything we’ve ever seen in the universe has gravity—Earth, the moon. And you can tell how much gravity something has by how fast something moves around it. … Add it all up. We’ve done this. Add it all up and say that should give me this much gravity. But when you look at how fast things are moving, you get six times as much gravity as the stuff that we know about is generating. It was originally called the missing matter problem. Where is the matter that’s making this gravity that we see? Because everything we do count up doesn’t get us where we need. We now call this the dark matter problem.

But really we have no idea what’s causing it. We so don’t know what’s causing it that we shouldn’t even call it dark matter because that implies we have some understanding that it’s matter. We don’t know what it is. I could call it Fred. Eighty five percent all the gravity in the universe comes from something about which we know nothing. …

[Add that to dark energy and] it is ninety six percent of the universe. Everything we know and love—electrons, protons, neutrons, light, black holes, planets, stars, everything we know and understand—occupies four percent of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy is everything else.

(“Cluster Crash Illuminates Dark Matter Conundrum” from NASA)

What Do We Know Of The Universe? - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast

* *

“Introspect daily, detect diligently, negate ruthlessly.”
— Swami Chinmayananda

* *

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”
— D.H. Lawrence

Why Add Another Horse?

2012-01-08T15:04:00.005-05:00

photo by Ben Heine

* *

“ It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible.
[Suzuki Roshi, on questioning one’s life and purpose.]

* *

"Isa (Jesus), son of Mary said: 'The world is a Bridge , pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer for the rest is unseen.'"

Original Persian:
-"عیسی پسر مریم (در آنان می شود صلح) گفت :' جهان است پل ، عبور بیش از آن است ، اما هیچ ساخت خانه بر آن او امیدوار است که برای یک روز ، ممکن است برای ابدیت امیدواریم ، اما ماندگار جهان اما ساعت آن را صرف در دعا و نماز برای استراحت است نهان ".'

* *

[via am: http://oldgirlfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com/]

* *

Living in the second half of life, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to–from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, “to live simply so that others can simply live.”
-Richard Rohr: From Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. 121

* * * *

“And now I think the things that matter are unfinished paintings that everyone creates and no one owns. Rather we are created each time we touch the breath of being, and we are connected to everyone who ever lived each time we add a stroke. And sometimes we are briefly aware that we are living parts of the most elemental community of all, the community of life force that moves through everything.”

—Mark Nepo: “The Unfinished Painting,” from Parabola, Volume 36, No 4., Winter 2011: “Many Paths, One Truth.”[Thanks to Parabola Magazine and Luke Storms]

* *

“... I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply moulding one's inner life. And that too is a deed."

—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, p. 87
[Thanks to Parabola Magazine and Luke Storms]
[Who might be one and the same - right? Have you ever seen them in the same place at the same time - like Superman and Clark Kent? They keep reminding me of books that I both want and need to read, but it's so great to catch a glimpse on the web]
AND FURTHERMORE.............

"....even if endorphins did mediate some kinds of placebo analgesia, that analgesia was not thereby explained […]. Endorphin release, rather, became just one more placebo-generated phenomenon to be explained—and we still did not understand the processes whereby a person's belief in a sham treatment could send a message to his or her pituitary gland to release its own endogenous pharmaceutics."
Harrington [1, p. 5]

I now return to my studies. Anatomy Trains !!

Let Me Respectfully Remind You

2012-01-08T11:31:00.003-05:00

The Super heated imagination of Ben Heine
Ben Heine - Art + Pencil

* * *
“If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
The only usefulness of map or a language depends on the similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map-languages.” ”
— Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered most for developing the theory of general semantics (1879-1950), Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

* *
“Wondering” is a word connoting at least three things:
Standing in disbelief,
Standing in the question itself,
Standing in awe before something.
Try letting all three “standings” remain open inside of you. This is a very good way to grow spiritually, as long as the disbelief moves beyond mere skepticism or negativity.
When Scholastic philosophy was at its best (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), the development of an idea proceeded by what the great teachers called the questio (Latin, “to seek”). Our English word “quest” comes from that same understanding. The systematic asking of questions opened up wonder and encouraged spiritual curiosity, refining the question itself instead of just looking for the perfect answer. I am sure the Magi’s questions changed before, during, and after their epiphany.
Richard Rohr: Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 46-47
* *
[RISING TO THE CHALLENGE: Filling the Well with Snow by Bonnie Myotai Treace in Tricycle Magazine]
"We have this challenge right now: As we practice in these dangerous times, how can we be at peace? How can we become a source of compassion, and let our lives be a clear expression of wisdom? I find that so many of the traditional teachings are suddenly hitting home in fresh ways, as if they were designed for this particular moment in history. When we chant the evening gatha—the traditional verse that closes the day of training—it seems as if the ancient teachers had gathered that very day to write these words:
Let me respectfully remind you:
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken!
Take heed—do not squander your life.
When I’m working with students who feel trapped in their anger, fear, or hopelessness, instead of trying to talk them out of what they’re experiencing, I often simply point out that they’ve arrived at the stark reality of the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: Life is suffering. There are three more Noble Truths, and that’s where we can lean in, aware that our experience is the necessary first step toward coming to peace.
We’re all prisoners of life and death. The question is: What kind of prisoners do we want to be? We have beautiful examples of people who have literally been prisoners, yet who found reasons to be loving, compassionate, strong, and at ease with the reality of their lives. Not that they didn’t feel grief and anguish, but they were able to access something else as well—the human spirit. Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Gerda Lerner—these are just a few examples. You can look at many others who have faced “inescapable” trauma of all kinds. Over and over in human history, people have accessed this well of strength and peace.
To me, one of the great lies is that fear is the only natural response. Without denying our fear, we can keep going deeper. We can stay in basic attention and explore: Who am I? What’s the possibility here? This takes diligence, so that we don’t slip into letting others define our reality and falsely limit the possibilities that are always present. That diligence is the practice of responsibility that the evening gatha implies. Too often we get hung up on the exhortation “Do not squander your life” and interpret it as a scolding, as if we were naughty children caught wasting time. I see the teaching “Be responsible” more as an expression of absolute trust in the possibility of awakening. The message is “Hey, you! You can do it. You can respond. You’re capable of the perfect living and dying of this moment.”
I’ve been asked if I think the world is getting worse. That, to me, isn’t the point. However the world is—whether there are swirling forces of confusion or immense waves of clarity around us—we’re still responsible. When we turn diligence into an intellectual process, we end up feeling exhausted by the intensity of the obligation. But if we just respond the way the eyelid responds to a dry eye, then the work of peace naturally arises out of our innate wisdom and compassion.
When we’re afraid, the mind tends to dart away instead of diligently and deeply entering the fear. It gets confused and thinks, “Let me take care of myself first,” as if it weren’t responsible for the whole world. Part of what zazen—sitting meditation—does is to help us settle down into gentle, unswerving attention and peel away that false sense of separation.
Rage—whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us—is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion. However much we disagree with those we have decided to call our enemies, our task is to identify with them. They, too, feel justified in their point of view. Everybody protects what they value and see as important. If we fail to recognize the universality of that basic impulse to protect and defend, we just perpetuate the urge to create a false enemy and eliminate it. We’re now at a point where human survival depends on letting go of that urge and realizing our common bond. Attention opens the mind to intimacy. And from intimacy, a very different sort of action can arise.
But why is it so hard to practice this sort of attention right now? Maybe because we want answers—and there are none. It is impossible to know what to do. The old standards don’t apply: going out and protesting, for example, doesn’t have the impact it once did. We need a kind of attentiveness that is more than just being present. It means being available in an unconditioned way, not knowing what action will be required or how much patience will be called for.
Intense times call for intense practice. But in the world, as in the zendo, intensity does not mean straining or pushing; rather, it is a willingness to begin fresh. To feed that willingness, we use the tools of practice: Work with a teacher. Have spiritual friends. Create situations where you have permission and support to go deep, so that feelings of fear and anger don’t just build up until you find you’ve gone numb. Much of my work right now is just getting people to show up for each other and for their practice. Once they do that, a reservoir of peace and wisdom is right there. But they don’t know that till they show up.
I think the palliative for fear and anger is to stand firmly and wakefully in the moment. It’s like the old Zen master saying, “Come with me. Let’s fill the well with snow.” It’s a hopeless task: The snow melts; the process is endless. We don’t take action because we expect a certain result; we do it because it needs to be done. We pick up the shovel not because we’re going to fill the well with snow but because shoveling is the dharma activity of that moment. We show up for the impossible. Is that so different from saying, “Come with me. Let’s be peacemakers”?
Bonnie Myotai Treace is spiritual director of Zen Center of New York City, Fire Lotus Temple, in Brooklyn.
Image: © James Welling. Courtesy of the artist and Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York.
* * *

I Said To The Sun ....

2012-01-03T19:02:00.002-05:00

photo: via
missfolly:

Richard Pare: Shábolovka’s Radio Tower, 1988

Zen Won't Solve Your Problems (and Doesn't Have To)
dasdingansich
In “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (Genjokoan), Dogen Zenji writes:

Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. Further, there are those who continue realizing beyond realization and those who are in delusion throughout delusion.

When we first come to Zen practice, we hope it will solve our problems, make them better, make us better. It often seems to make our problems worse - but only because we become more aware of them.

If you are not gentle before practice, then practice won’t make you gentle - but you will become aware of your lack of gentleness (at first painfully aware), and will know how to take care of it. If you have an anxious or angry personality, practice won’t make you tranquil or calm; you will see your anxiety or anger more clearly, and, when you see it, you will know what it is and what to do (often, nothing). Obsessive thoughts don’t diminish through practice; they are just seen for what they are. Enlightenment is seeing clearly what is going on. Delusions don’t disappear, and may not even diminish, but, seen as delusions, they lose their power over us.
— Barry Graham, Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky.
Posted on December 30, 2011

* *
“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.’”
— Andrea Gibson

Something To Be Grateful For

2012-01-03T12:27:00.002-05:00

Silence Is Golden
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Hello chatter, my old friend.

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.

As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”

“In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video,” said Ed Schlossberg, the artist, author and designer who runs ESI Design. “Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.”

Schlossberg said that, for a long time, art provided the boundary for silence, “but now art, in some cases, is so distracting and intense and faceted, it’s hard to step into a moment. Especially when you’re always carrying a microcamera and a screen all the time, both recording and playing back constantly rather than allowing moments of composition and stillness when your brain can go into a reverie.”

In an inspiring throwback, art once more offers a chance to step into a mute and vivid moment of being in “The Artist,” the new silent movie that hit the Cannes Film Festival like a thunderclap.

First, an American writer and director, Woody Allen, created a gorgeous homage to vintage Paris in “Midnight in Paris.” Now, a French writer and director, Michel Hazanavicius, has created a gorgeous homage to vintage Hollywood.

Not being a silent movie buff, I was trepidatious about “The Artist.” And a 23-year-old at the Motion Picture Association of America screening here puzzled over why it needed to be silent. But I loved the clever evocation of a primal fear featured in the many iterations of “A Star Is Born,” as well as “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “All About Eve”: Will you get to the top, only to be devoured by the hot new thing?

“More and more people have that fear because of the financial crisis and how fast the world is changing,” Hazanavicius told me. “You’re at the top one day and very quickly you can fall. In the generation of my parents and grandparents, people worked in the same factory all their lives. Now people work there two months and they put it in China. Now you’re born into one world and you die in a very different world.”

It turns out that all the skeptics were wrong, and it was clever to do a silent movie in 2011, as an antidote to our modern plague of pointless chatter. It’s a weird paradox that the essential feature of technology is talkativeness, but usually without the sound of human voices attached.

In the case of “The Artist,” silence is not only golden, it’s a reminder of how much you can articulate without words. If you take away the language, green screens and 3-D glasses, the feelings — pride, vanity, envy, fear, love — can be more primary and fascinating.

Hollywood rarely makes great movies anymore. They make comics, phrases (“Friends With Benefits,” “He’s Just Not That Into You”) or holidays (“New Year’s Eve,” “Valentine’s Day”) and attach scripts that are often dreadful.

Hazanavicius has made a witty, moving and joyous romance about a dashing silent movie star, George Valentin — akin to John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks — who can’t accept talkies and a jazz-baby starlet who rises as he falls, and loves him as he crashes and literally burns.

The theme of silence is used ingeniously throughout, in Valentin’s relationship with his loyal Jack Russell terrier, in his “Citizen Kane” silent breakfast table tableau with his farbissina wife, and in the climactic Fred-and-Ginger tap dance that substitutes, as it did for Fred and Ginger, for a sex scene.

A moment where the starlet, Peppy Miller, luminously played by Bérénice Bejo, the real-life partner of Hazanavicius and the mother of his two children, sneaks into Valentin’s dressing room and role plays with his jacket is more romantic than anything Hollywood dreams up.

Hazanavicius recalled that at a French screening of the movie, a group of teenagers approached him. “They thanked me for letting them hear the silence,” he said. “It was touching to discover that these young people, always with their iPods, could like real silence.

“I compare it to the zero in mathematics. People think it’s nothing, but actually it’s not. It can be very powerful.”
* * * *
Effortlessly

Effortlessly,
Love flows from God to man,
Like a bird
Who rivers the air
Without moving her wings.
Thus we move in His world
One in body and soul,
Though outwardly separate in form.
As the Source strikes the note,
Humanity sings -
The Holy Spirit is our harpist,
And all the strings
Which are touched in Love
Must sound.

—Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210-1282)
* *
[link via Whiskey River]

"To be born as a human being is a rare thing, something to be grateful for. But being born as a human being is worthless if you spend your whole life in a mental hospital. It is worthless if you worry about not having money. It is worthless if you become neurotic because you cannot get a prestigious job. It is worthless if you weep because you lose your girlfriend."
- Kodo Sawaki
* *

Thank You

2012-01-02T23:18:00.003-05:00

Just taking a New Year's moment to voice a little appreciation of facebook and blogging for the friendships that these pursuits have afforded me this year. It has put me back in touch with my dear friend Candace C., has re-connected me with my college chums, Aline, and Diana S. and given me new friendships with Sharon, Luke and Stephen -- and then , there is am.

So many more..

My brothers and sister, particularly and especially my sister Julie, whose birthday it is today.

*

“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting. - Haruki Murakami”

*
Thank you to the followers of this blog who I have never met and who have still enriched my life in many ways. With whom I surf the Mystery.

Thank you.

The Difficult Simplicity

2012-01-01T13:56:00.002-05:00


























The Difficult Simplicity of Certain Contemplations
     Tapping a tarot card with her dusky finger,
                             the woman tells me
sit with your emptiness,
   in time answers will come.
She says I know them all and only must remember.
My friend tells me I must decide what is enough,
                         then live with it.
Even my shiny-suited banker waxes wise, asks me
            if I think rich people are happier than I.
But always there's the knowledge
   of how all this will end.
                         In between
we try to love a life that's like a man who carnt commit-
              a little restless, always vague
when someone asks when are you going to....,
a life that's like the ragged, feral cat
                         mewling at the door,
insinuating with its cheek and hunger.
         We give it mercy or rough blame.
I'll tell you what love of this life is. It's looking up
         through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
         a broken line of white stars
             stretching out across the sky.
It's thinking,
        this could almost be enough.


Elbe, Susan / Light made from nothing: poems

   (2003)

But Now I Know

2012-01-01T13:36:00.003-05:00

Dragon

septagonstudios:

Ian Kim
* * *
“Song: Now That She Is Here” by Hayden Carruth, an American poet who died in 2008. It caught my attention, both for its lyricism and its honesty about the learning that remains.
Song: Now That She is Here
for Joe-Anne

An old man now, who’s learned at last
What it means truly to be in love.
Ah, all those years of the past -
I used to think I knew but I didn’t know.

Like a neophyte in the school of lust,
Struggling with shame and doubt,
I fell and lay low,
Because I thought I knew when I didn’t know.

Old age is failure. Natural
Exhaustion, mind and body letting go,
Words misremembered, ideas frayed like old silk.
But I am in love now,
In it totally all the time.
I have nothing else, I have forgotten my name,
I live on taters, whiskey, and goat’s milk
In a little house by the wood
While a cold wind rises and the night fills with snow,
Who used to think I knew. But now I know.

Poem from Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, by Hayden Carruth

Thanks to “Ox Herding Practice and Daily Life”

* * * *

Tanka

She’s too far away
this biting cold New Year’s Eve.
Twenty tolls into
the temple bell’s midnight song,
I’ll no doubt be fast asleep.

—Michael Boiano
[via journalofanobody]

* * * *

“How can a heart be illumined when the forms of created things are imprinted in its mirror? How can it travel to God when it’s tied down by its vain desires? How can it be avid to enter the Divine Presence when it hasn’t purified itself from the impurity of its heedlessness? How can it hope to understand subtle secrets when it hasn’t repented from its errors?”
— Ibn Ata’illah al-Sakandari (via theconsciousmuslim)

* * * *

“ “Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.” ”
— Lynn Margulis, American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1938-2011), What Is Life?, University of California Press, 2000. (via amiquote)

* * * *
“ “In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.” ”
— Alan Lightman, American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Einstein’s Dreams, London, Vintage, 2004. (via amiquote)

Chew Your Way Into A New World

2012-01-01T13:16:00.003-05:00

photo from my flickr page

* *

Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
- Amy Gerstler
Advice from a Caterpillar
Dearest Creature [thanks whiskey river]

* *

No Meat, No Dairy, No Problem Yunhee Kim; food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Megan Hedgpeth. By MARK BITTMAN Published: December 29, 2011 (via No Meat, No Dairy, No Problem - NYTimes.com)

* *

December 29, 2011
By MARK BITTMAN
Among your other resolutions — do more good? make more money? — you’ve probably made the annual pledge to eat better, although this concept may be more often reduced simply to “lose some weight.” The weight-loss obsession is both a national need and a neurotic urge (those last five pounds really don’t matter, either cosmetically or medically). But most of us do need to eat “better.”

If defining this betterness has become increasingly more difficult (half the diet books that spilled over my desk in December focused on going gluten-free), the core of the answer is known to everyone: eat more plants. And if the diet that most starkly represents this — veganism — is no longer considered bizarre or unreasonably spartan, neither is it exactly mainstream. (For the record, vegans don’t simply avoid meat; they eschew all animal products, including dairy, eggs and even honey.)

Many vegan dishes, however, are already beloved: we eat fruit salad, peanut butter and jelly, beans and rice, eggplant in garlic sauce. The problem faced by many of us — brought up as we were with plates whose center was filled with a piece of an animal — is in imagining less-traditional vegan dishes that are creative, filling, interesting and not especially challenging to either put together or enjoy.

My point here is to make semi-veganism work for you. Once a week, let bean burgers stand in for hamburgers, leave the meat out of your pasta sauce, make a risotto the likes of which you’ve probably never had — and you may just find yourself eating “better.”

These recipes serve about four, and in all, the addition of salt and pepper is taken for granted. This is not a gimmick or even a diet. It’s a path, and the smart resolution might be to get on it.

* *

“As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.”
— Psalm 103

History Of The Universe

2011-12-31T02:17:00.003-05:00

The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less

The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less

Quantum fluctuation. Inflation. Expansion. Strong nuclear interaction. Particle-antiparticle annihilation. Deuterium and helium production. Density perturbations. Recombination. Blackbody radiation. Local contraction. Cluster formation. Reionization? Violent relaxation. Virialization. Biased galaxy formation? Turbulent fragmentation. Contraction. Ionization. Compression. Opaque hydrogen. Massive star formation. Deuterium ignition. Hydrogen fusion. Hydrogen depletion. Core contraction. Envelope expansion. Helium fusion. Carbon, oxygen, and silicon fusion. Iron production. Implosion. Supernova explosion. Metals injection. Star formation. Supernova explosions. Star formation. Condensation. Planetesimal accretion. Planetary differentiation. Crust solidification. Volatile gas expulsion. Water condensation. Water dissociation. Ozone production. Ultraviolet absorption. Photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Oxidation. Mutation. Natural selection and evolution. Respiration. Cell differentiation. Sexual reproduction. Fossilization. Land exploration. Dinosaur extinction. Mammal expansion. Glaciation. Homo sapiens manifestation. Animal domestication. Food surplus production. Civilization! Innovation. Exploration. Religion. Warring nations. Empire creation and destruction. Exploration. Colonization. Taxation without representation. Revolution. Constitution. Election. Expansion. Industrialization. Rebellion. Emancipation Proclamation. Invention. Mass production. Urbanization. Immigration. World conflagration. League of Nations. Suffrage extension. Depression. World conflagration. Fission explosions. United Nations. Space exploration. Assassinations. Lunar excursions. Resignation. Computerization. World Trade Organization. Terrorism. Internet expansion. Reunification. Dissolution. World-Wide Web creation. Composition. Extrapolation?

Copyright 1996-1997 by Eric Schulman
via harvestheart

* * * *

End of the Year Poems, 3

Earlier this year I heard Billy Collins, a former poet laureate of the United States, read a selection of his poems. Of course, I had no prior idea what he would read but I was delighted when he read “Japan,” the only one of his poems that I have (nearly) memorized. And I’ve nearly memorized it because it’s on my short list of favorites.
Japan

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It’s the one about the one-ton temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it at the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

From Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Billy Collins

Ox Herding: End of the Year Poems, 3

* * * * * * * * *
Snow
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
- David Berman”
— whiskey river

* ****
“Time passes, and the system turns on you. When
all is sacred, nothing is safe: silent lampposts suddenly
pipe up in irresistible colloquy a tone too high, the sky
calls you but does not want your replies, and
water-bound birds decline pronouns in Latin. It is a hotbed
that cannot stand the addition of an offending
presence; it whispers until you are well on your way.”
— Rachel Wetzsteon, from “The Other Stars” (via proustitute)

I Am Running Into A New Year

2011-12-31T02:10:00.002-05:00

I am running into a New Year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that I catch in my hair

like strong fingers, like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what I said to myself

about myself

when I was sixteen and

twenty six and thirty six but

I am running into a New Year and I beg what I love and

I leave to forgive me

~ Lucille Clifton ~ " I am running into a New Year"

* *

"Keep fresh before me
-
The moments of my high resolve
-
Despite the dullness and barrenness of the days that pass, if I search with due diligence, I can always find a deposit left by some former radiance. But I had forgotten. At the time it was full-orbed, glorious and resplendent. I was sure that I would never forget. In the moment of its fullness, I was sure that it would illumine my path for all the rest of my journey. I had forgotten how easy it is to forget.
-
There was not intent to betray what seemed so sure at the time. My response was whole, clean and authentic. But little by little, there crept into my life the dust and grit of the journey. Details, lower-level demands, all kinds of crosscurrents–nothing momentous, nothing overwhelming, nothing flagrant – just wear and tear. If there had been some direct challenge – a clear-cut issue – I would have fought it to the end, and beyond.
-
In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading Presence of God, my heart whispers: Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in fair weather or in foul, in good times or in tempests, in the days when the darkness and the foe are nameless or familiar, I may not forget that to which my life is committed.
-
Keep fresh before me
-
The moments of my high resolve"
-
Howard Thurman
via “Lassie and Timmy”

God Does Strange Things

2011-12-26T09:15:00.003-05:00

Edward Pfizenmaier. Wollman Rink, Central Park, New York, 1954
[via firsttimeuser]

* ** **** *******

“Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies.
—Matthew Fox”

* * *
A Poem For Sunday
From the final two sections of “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” by W.H. Auden:
Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully -
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The poem continues.
(Photo: A Christmas ornament reflects St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City before the lighing of the Christmas tree. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)
* * *
Walker Percy Interviews Himself
A reflection on faith on the day we commemmorate the birth of Jesus:
Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A. Bad.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means … . Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.
I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q: Grabbed aholt?
A: A Louisiana expression.
Q: But isn’t the Catholic Church in a mess these days, badly split, its liturgy barbarized, vocations declining?
A: Sure. That’s a sign of its divine origins, that it survives these periodic disasters.
Q: You don’t act or talk like a Christian. Aren’t they supposed to love one another and do good works?
A: Yes.
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellowman or do many good works.
A: That’s true. I haven’t done a good work in years.
Q: In fact, if I may be frank, you strike me as being rather negative in your attitude, cold-blooded, aloof, derisive, self-indulgent, more fond of the beautiful things of this world than of God.
A: That’s true.
Q: You even seem to take certain satisfaction in the disasters of the twentieth-century and to savor the imminence of world catastrophe rather than world peace, which all religions seek.
A: That’s true.
Q: You don’t seem to have much use for your fellow Christians, to say nothing of Ku Kluxers, ACLU’ers, northerners, southerners, fem-libbers, anti-fem-libbers, homosexuals, anti-homosexuals, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, anti-hippies, senior citizens.
A: That’s true – though taken as individuals they turn out to be more or less like oneself, i.e., sinners, and we get along fine.
Q: Even Ku Kluxers?
A: Sure.
Q: How do you account for your belief?
A: I can only account for it as a gift from God.
Q: Why would God make you such a gift when there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellowman?
A: I don’t know. God does strange things… .
Q: But shouldn’t one’s faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?
A: Yes. That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.
Q: You believe that?
A: Of course.
(Photo: Detail from the side facing the apse of the so-called “Sarcofago di Stilicone” (“Stilicho’s sarcophagus”), an Ancient Roman christian sarcophagus dating from the 4th century. It is preserved beneath the pulpit of Sant’Ambrogio basilica in Milan, Italy. Picture by Giovanni Dall’Orto, April 25 2007.)
via the dish
* * *
“The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.”
— T. S. Eliot, from “Gerontion

Something That The Whole Universe Is Doing

2011-12-14T22:33:00.003-05:00

Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravity field, and we so organize the body that the gravity field can reinforce the body's energy field. This is our primary concept.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.

As people come to Rolfers with their aches and their pains, we can see where their bodies are literally offering blocks to the gravitational forces. The gravitational force is immense, and their resistance isn't much good except to close the body down, compress it. Sometimes the block has been put into the physical picture by a physical traumatic episode -- a fall down the cellar steps, out of a tree, out of a high chair, off a tricycle or bicycle, out of a speeding automobile, etc., etc. This block is in the actual structure, in the flesh of the body. Then there is the kind of block that is basically emotional. Little Jimmy loves Papa. Papa goes along bent over, so Jimmy goes along like that because this allows him to be Papa in his mind. And by and by Jimmy gets a set into his muscular body which he cannot let go of. To get it out, he has to have help.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.

I am dealing with problems in the body where there is never just one cause. I'd like you to have more reality on the circular processes that do not act in the body, but that are the body. The body process is not linear, it is circular; always, it is circular. One thing goes awry, and its effects go on and on and on and on. A body is a web, connecting everything with everything else.
Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.

"In the first hour, the fact is that a Rolfer is working only superficially, but his is not what the man's body tells him. It's telling that individual that we're working down to his soul. We're not: we're working on the superficial fascia. The reason for his feeling of depth is that the superficial fascia gets reflexes from everything that's gone wrong inside his body. So if there is something that's wrong in the stomach, there will also be something strained in the overlying superficial fascia. As the structure of the superficial fascia is changed, both the structure and the function of the deeper-lying organs will be influenced."
-- Ida Rolf from "Rolfing and Physical Reality"

"Feldenkrais called attention to the fact that all negative emotional expressions are accompanied by a shortening of flexor muscles. Therefore, about the time that someone gets overly interested in negative emotion, he begins to get chronic shortening of the flexor muscles. The energy in a chronically flexed body has to work just to hold it up; the man continuously has to add energy to that body to keep it going. Such chronic flexion gives a feeling of tiredness, of "depression."
-Ida Rolf [Rolfing and Physical Reality]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * *

“You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.”
—
Alan Watts

and via Whiskey River,

link

"It comes, then, to this: that to be "viable", livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game - and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your side. The lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earth - "paradise" being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition, are able to keep their conflicts within bounds. This recognition is the absolutely essential chivalry which must set the limits within all warfare, with human and non-human enemies alike, for chivalry is the debonair spirit of the knight who "plays with his life" in the knowledge that even mortal combat is a game.
No one who has been hoaxed into the belief that he is nothing but his ego, or nothing but his individual organism, can be chivalrous, let alone a civilized, sensitive, and intelligent member of the cosmos."
- Alan Watts
The Book on The Taboo against knowing who you are

History Of My Stupidity

2011-12-04T11:44:00.003-05:00

[via crashinglybeautiful]

Hypnos, the Greek personification of sleep. Thank you, lunar-danse, sugarmeows & b-sides.
* *

A Partial History of My Stupidity

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge

and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn’t know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn’t relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn’t have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought—
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

—Edward Hirsch

crazysalad: A Partial History of My Stupidity
**

Account

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own — but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

—Czeslaw Milosz

(Trans. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky)

[via Crazy Salad]

* *
Mystery Itself
By Flannery O’Connor

It is what is left over when everything explainable has been explained that makes a story worth writing and reading. The writer’s gaze has to extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm of mystery which is the concern of prophets…. If a writer believes that the life of a man is and will remain essentially mysterious, what he sees on the surface, or what he understands, will be of interest to him only as it leads him into the experience of mystery itself.
Colorado Quarterly Spring 1962 via Inward Outward
* *

An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity

[from Whiskey River]

“A while ago I gave a public lecture at a university. The speaker who preceded me talked for about an hour and a half, running over his allotted time. The break period between our talks was shortened, and I was called to the podium right away. Concerned for the audience, I opened by asking, “Did you all have time to urinate?”
Apparently this was not what the audience had expected to hear. Perhaps they were particularly surprised because the person standing before them, talking about pissing, was a monk. Everyone broke into hearty laughter.
Having started out on this note, I continued to drive home the point, “Pissing is something that no one else can do for you. Only you can piss for yourself.” This really broke them up, and they laughed even harder.
But you must realize that to say, “You have to piss for yourself; nobody else can piss for you” is to make an utterly serious statement.

Long ago in China, there was a monk called Ken. During his training years, he practiced in the monastery of Ta-hui, but despite his prodigious efforts, he had not attained enlightenment. One day Ken’s master ordered him to carry a letter to the far-off land of Ch’ang-sha. This journey, roundtrip, could easily take half a year. The monk, Ken, thought, “I don’t have forever to stay in this hall practicing! Who’s got time to go on an errand like this?” He consulted one of his seniors, the monk Genjoza, about the matter.
Genjoza laughed when he heard Ken’s predicament. “Even while traveling, you can still practice Zen! In fact, I’ll come along with you,” he offered, and before long the two monks set out on their journey.
One day while the two were traveling, the younger monk, Ken, suddenly broke into tears. “I have been practicing for many years, and I still haven’t been able to attain anything. Now, here I am roaming around the country on this trip; there’s no way I am going to attain enlightenment this way,” he lamented.
When he heard this, Genjoza, thrusting all the strength he had into his words, put himself at the junior monk’s disposal: “I will take care of anything that I can take care of for you on this trip,” he said. “But there are just five things that I cannot do in your place, I can’t wear clothes for you. I can’t eat for you. I can’t shit for you. I can’t piss for you. And I can’t carry your body around and live your life for you.”
It is said that upon hearing these words, the monk, Ken, suddenly awakened from his deluded dream and attained a great enlightenment, a great satori.”
- Soko Morinaga
Novice to Master: an ongoing lesson in the extent of my own stupidity

Escape From Anguish and Ignorance

2011-11-30T21:18:00.003-05:00

Soichi Sunami, ”Man-Eater with Pennants” by Alexander Calder, ca. 1950

(via journalofanobody)
* *
"I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them."
- Henry Miller
Reflections on Writing
The Wisdom of the Heart
via whiskey river
* *
“The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.”
— T. S. Eliot, from “Gerontion”
* *
"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said,"That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. you could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation."
-Alan Watts, "In My Own Way." (via Parabola Magazine)
* *
Enlightenment - that magnificent escape from anguish and ignorance - never happens by accident. It results from the brave and sometimes lonely battle of one person against his own weaknesses.

Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano.
*
Link to Leonard Cohen's new song "Show Me The Place"
**
link [via Whiskey River]

"Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later - the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
- David Foster Wallace

Ideal and Beloved Voices

2011-11-26T01:19:00.003-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

I am attending our annual family Thanksgiving ReUnion in Fla. I have 5 siblings, and this is the only time in the year when we all get together.
It feels particularly graced this year, because as near as I can calculate, everyone is attending this year -- my nieces and nephews and their kids, all the brothers and sisters.
Thanksgiving night, out on the dock in the river, the wind whipped up the palm trees and the water churned, but it was still warm-ish and velvety with starlight and the lights across the water reflecting.
It seemed like our mother and our father were near, although they have both been dead for years. This was really their place. This river, and these kinds of nights. I guess we love it because they loved it. All the loss and shattered dreams they suffered and we all suffered together as a family have passed into history and events are presenting themselves to the current crop of descendents. It's different to reflect as a group on all the events that we shared - different than thinking or writing or talking about them as a solitary voice rather than a chorus.

* * *

Voices

Ideal and beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life --
like distant music that dies off in the night.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

* *
“Every creative event that ever happened in the world was an interruption. Unexpected. Unplanned for. The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost. That’s why the planets are so much better company than the stars — they keep wandering back and forth across the sky and you never know where you’re going to find them.”
—
The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail

Our Enemies Are Not Demons

2011-11-20T14:16:00.003-05:00

OW Portland Iconic photo

* *
"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors."

Adrienne Rich

* *

The Tools of Fear

By Tao Te Ching

Weapons are the tools of fear.
A decent person will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint….

Our enemies are not demons
but human beings like ourselves.
The decent person doesn’t wish them personal harm.
Nor do they rejoice in victory.
How could we rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of people?
Enter a battle gravely
with sorrow and with great compassion
as if attending a funeral.

circa 550 BCE

The Tools of Fear | Inward/Outward
* *

"Everything you can imagine is real."
Pablo Picasso [Fr] (via artchipel)

Whatever It Is You're Seeking ....

2011-11-14T19:20:00.003-05:00

crashinglybeautiful:

Paramahansa Yogananda. A great photo. Thank you, towardtheone & buffleheadcabin.
* *
“Silence as a spiritual practice is much more than being able to sit still without talking for thirty minutes or longer. Instead, silence is a quality of presence. The silence we search for is an overall state of being. it is not something we achieve with great effort, either, but something we uncover that is inside us. Somewhere at our core there is a reservoir of silence . . . To return regularly to this depth, whether in cloistered silence or in line at the grocery, is called “a habit of silence.” It is not duration that is important, but the returning time after time to the source within us that, in time, shapes who we are.”
--Marv Hiles, in “The Way Through” No 37, Spring 2011 [thanks to "Friends of Silence"]
* *
Another word to describe mystical moments is emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of newfound freedom, I don’t think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than we imagined, expected, or even hoped. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether the practices, sermons, sacraments, or liturgies are opening them to an authentic God experience.

All of these words describe mystical moments: enlargement, connection or union, and emancipation. You may not use the same words, but on a practical level mysticism is experienced as a new capacity and a new desire to love. And you wonder where it comes from. Why do I have this new desire, this new capacity to love some new people, to love the old people better, maybe to enter into some kind of new love for the world? I even find my thoughts are more immediately loving.

Clearly, you are participating in a love that’s being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself, and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.

Richard Rohr: From Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate …
Seeing God in All Things (CD, DVD, MP3)
* *
The cross is how to work for the answer without becoming part of the problem. The cross is about how to stand against hate without becoming hate yourself. How can you stand against hate without letting it frame the question? How do we oppose the evil, the hurts, the betrayals, the abandonment, the rejections, and the disappointments in our lives, the people who let us down, the people who turn against us, and the people who tell lies about us? How do we stand against that in a way that we do not become a mirror image of the same thing? In the end, this is the essential spiritual question.

The cross is a geometric image that you can hold onto and draw life from, a visual metaphor for the paradoxical nature or cruciform pattern of reality. Reality is filled with contradictions. Jesus was killed on the collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests and half-truths that all of life is. The people who live and hold the contradictions, in fact, are the saviors of the world! These are the people who are the agents of all true transformation, reconciliation and newness.

Richard Rohr: Adapted from Hope Against Darkness:
The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 33-34
* *
“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting. - Haruki Murakami”
— Twitter / Search - riskywiver
* *

Warriors

2011-11-09T21:14:00.003-05:00

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
Adrienne Rich

**

Courage is the most important thing…Wake up yourselves and others. Control your mind and have firm determination… Be firm like a rock, deep and serious like the sea. Think of the earth as a mother. Have great courage and patience - and be not afraid of water, fire or great storms - face them bravely. Face the fire and it will turn to ice. This requires control of mind and a firm determination.”

— Haidakhan Babaji

* * * *

Congratulations to my youngest kid for his first Muay Thai win. Way to go MAX!!

Energy Is Eternal Delight

2011-11-09T07:19:00.002-05:00

WILLIAM BLAKE:

.”All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the
following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2 That Energy. calld Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. calld Good. is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

1 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3 Energy is Eternal Delight”

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1789

William Blake, Behemoth and Leviathan

Watercolour (by Jonathan Walker 1)

"If I Can't Do What I Want To Do"

2011-11-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

* *
BILL MOYERS: Read “Everything Good Is Simple.”

NIKKI GIOVANNI: “Everything good is simple: a soft boiled egg…toast fresh from the oven with a pat of butter swimming in the center…steam off a cup of black coffee… John Coltrane bringing me ‘Violets for My Furs’

“Most simple things are good: Lines on a yellow legal pad… dimples defining a smile…a square of gray cashmere that can be a scarf… Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue’

“Some things clear are complicated: believing in a religion…trying to be a good person…getting rid of folk who depress you…Horace Silver ‘Blowing the Blues Away’

“Complicated things can be clear: DvoâÙà∞k’s ‘New World’ Symphony… Alvin Ailey’s ‘Revelations’… Mae Jemison’s riding in space… Mingus ‘Live at Carnegie Hall’

“All things good are good: poetry… patience… a ripe tomato on the vine… a bat in flight… the new moon…me in your arms… things like that”

Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS

* *

“if i can’t do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don’t want
to do “it’s not the same thing
but it’s the best i can
do “if i can’t have
what i want then
my job is to want
what i’ve got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more
to want “since i can’t go
where i need
to go then i must go
where the signs point
though always understanding
parallel movement
isn’t lateral “when i can’t express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal
i know
but that’s why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry”

-Nikki Giovanni
“Choices”

* *

“I refuse to do drive-through. I am not a grazer, I am not a cow. You eat. You sit down. You put a napkin there. And it has to have the colors. If you’re having a steak then you’ll have a little carrots because it’s really yellow, and it looks good. And maybe a little broccoli. So that the plate — first, you plate it. And my aunt, because my uncle died, and she’d been very sad. And I had to call her and say, “Ag, what’d you have for” — you know, because she didn’t have any daughters, right? And so I said, “Ag, what’d you have for dinner?” She said, “Oh, I just had a bowl of cereal.” I said, “You can’t do that. You have to plate your food.” You have to take of yourself. I’ve started to have massages because it’s like, I have to make time to have a massage. It feels great, somebody just rubbing oil in your back. Where’s the downside? You have to do things to remind yourself that it’s a really good idea to be alive.”

-From Bill Moyers’ interview with Nikki Giovanni
*

A Compassion - Generating Machine That Saves Us From Sloth

2011-11-07T08:00:00.003-05:00

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle Earth.
"

George R. R. Martin

* *
Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.

George Saunders

* *
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Steve Jobs (via designed-for-life)

The Gate Of Heaven

2011-11-07T07:47:00.002-05:00

“The gate of heaven is everywhere.”
— Thomas Merton

* *
"Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales. Woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings. Mysterious life filled the night. With new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him."

P. D. Ouspensky.
via whiskey River

What Can My Enemies Do To Me?

2011-11-07T07:36:00.002-05:00

“What can my enemies do to me? I have in my breast both my heaven and my garden. If I travel they travel with me, never leaving me. Imprisonment for me is a chance to be alone with my Lord. To be killed is martyrdom and to be exiled from my land is a spiritual journey”

[Shaykhul-Islaam Ibn Taymiyyah]

Taken by Steve McCurry
* *
What a stunning thing, in this time of loss and diminution.
"I have in my breast both my heaven and my garden."
What can my enemies do to me indeed?

All Things Are Born Therefrom

2011-11-07T07:24:00.008-05:00

Angela Bacon Kidwell
Photographer

Perfect Yin is stern and frigid;
Perfect Yang is bright and glittering.
The sternness and frigidity come forth from
Heaven, the brightness and glitter emerge
From the earth; the two mingle, penetrate,
Come together, harmonize,
and all things are born therefrom

~ CHUANG-TZU

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.

Anna Akhmatova, from “A land not mine, still”
(translated by Jane Kenyon)
“A land not mine, still”

The Gods Themselves Are Later Than Creation

2011-10-30T21:16:00.003-05:00

(via mudwerks)

* *

“The wild geese do not know where they are but they are not lost. Knowledge can lift the veil. It can also become the veil. “In the pursuit of knowledge every day something is added,” Lao Tsu declared. “In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.” This is not mere anti-intellectualism; it is a recognition of both the importance and the limitations of knowledge.

--James Carse from “Breakfast at the Victory”

**
“For whoever seeks God in some special Way,” Meister Eckhart said, “will gain the Way and lose God who is hidden in the Way.”

-- "Breakfast at the Victory" by James P. Carse

**

“Sufis speak of their nafs, or the false self that takes the place of the soul. somewhat more complicated than the concept of the ego, the nafs refers to all that in ourselves which has become an object for others or for ourselves. it is our visible self, the tangible, public aspect of a personality. it is what we see when we look at ourselves, it is what we present to others to be seen by them. it is what stands in the way of our oneness with others, with ourselves, with the Divine. the nafs in each of us has a life of its own, logical, powerful, real. Sometimes the Sufis describe it as a hungry yellow dog that stays begging at our side until we learn to drive it away. Sometimes it pops out of our throats in the form of a mouse or a young fox.”
--from “Breakfast at the Victory” by James P. Carse

*
“The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate shall be ghosts. And there will be nothing but eternal dancing, dust on dust, everywhere you look.”

-The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

**
“She’s stood in rooms like this before, in the time on her own, before Jorge Castelan, and then even afterwards -- though afterwards, for just a little while -- because nothing, no one, ever came close to Georgie. In halls and rented lofts, in unheated buildings, in basements and converted storefronts, she was watching, looking, listening, searching for whatever someone smarter, more spiritual, more magical, more powerful, more thoughtful, stranger, older, odder, born far away or supposedly much longer ago said there was something to search for. And now she’s doing it again, open to it again, the possibility that maybe there is something else, something important she could find if someone would show her where it is; she is feeling it again, that lost sense -- a youngster’s yearning that Georgie said returns as you grow older -- of wanting to be taught, to be told secrets, to be initiated into whatever there is to be initiated into, to be pushed through a door, a passage, to see a light, a sign, a spark, to find that inner muscle, that hidden heart, second sight, third eye, lost chakra, past life, that will explain who she is and why she is and what it is that she is supposed to be doing with her spirit, her soul, her life.

from “Janet Planet” by Eleanor Lerman

* *
A Deeper Dreamer
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
Then there was neither death nor immortality,
nor was there then the touch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
In the beginning desire descended upon it --
that was the primal seed, born of the mind.
The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom
know that which is kin to that which is not.
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truely whence it has arisen?
Whence all creating had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows -- or maybe even he does not know.
Rig Veda, X:129
**