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 20 Apr 2008 @ 17:08
Lose your mind and come to your senses.
---Fritz Perls
It gets late early out there.
---Yogi Berra
A mystical experience is not any more unique than a modern experiment in physics. On the other hand, it is not less sophisticated, either....The complexity and efficiency of the physicist's technical apparatus is matched, if not surpassed, by that of the mystic's consciousness....A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of inquiries into the nature of the universe.
---Fritjof Capra
I stepped out my front door this early morning and started down the driveway. Head lowered in thought, time to fetch the Sunday paper in the box down by the road, when I heard the first spring song of a wood thrush in our woods. He must have come back yesterday. I notice the juncos are packing up and moving out to the North woods for the summer. I looked around and the world was transformed. There hadn't been much rain yesterday, but it was slow and steady...and enough to bring on the first real burst of new leaves. The daffodils are mostly done, tulips in full blast, and redbud coming on at its usual leisurely pace. I'm sure there's plenty more wild flower action in the forest and by the creeks. But that thrush's song lifted my spirits to a healing high.
I just had read an email from my sister, describing her early retirement from administration in local public health in our hometown. The job had become more than tedious, with constant and increasing mandates "to do more and more with less and less." It had become dangerous to one's health, life-threatening. Retirement at 59, with 32 years of service...and she listed 3 others in community and environmental health who did the same thing in a matter of months. No double-dipping for these people, they've had it. How many others who chose careers of public service, before Reagan declared government work a waste of money and Gingrich labeled its workers bureaucrats to be gotten rid of, have done the same thing over the last decade? How many thousands, tens of thousands, from the top ranks of the CIA through the military and into the social agencies? Every level of government affected by budget cuts and increased paperwork to prove accountability. More >
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 18 Feb 2008 @ 10:26
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
---Rumi
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
---Izumi Shikibu
Ultimately, let’s hope that the nation turns back to the task it abandoned — that of ending the poverty that still poisons so many American lives.
---Paul Krugman, in his column this morning, entitled Poverty Is Poison
[link]
It's so easy to not want the Clintons back in the White House. It's like that temptation to get with your old girl friend again from a few years back. It should have worked out, it could have worked out...but... There was all that nastiness, and stuff going on behind your back. The trust factor. Has she changed? Did she really do anything wrong? Yeah, ultimately everything got ruined. My whole life got ruined! Eight long years of hell while I tried to get over it. Now...do I want to risk going back to that?
We're a forgiving people. But worse, we're a forgetting people! We don't seem to learn from history. And we've become even more loud, pushy and obnoxious than we were accused of when we were only tourists. Now we insist of owning and controlling everything---and we dare to call that condition for others democracy and freedom. We only are interested in getting our own little piece of the pie...and then, shotgun in hand, bragging that America means no one can tell me what to do. The Clintons again? Isn't there another woman somewhere to run for this office?
And so we find ourselves turning around to see what Barack Obama is about. People ask and write What are his programs? Is this happening to you too? I've been replying that I'll wait to see if he wins the nomination and then get after the details. But how many presidents actually do what they say in their campaigns anyway? So what difference does it make? Well, we're having this primary in Ohio in a couple weeks. I've got to vote for one of them. Both families are running all over the state at the moment...but nobody's come down here yet. Bill Clinton was in Marietta last night, but we couldn't get up the stomach to go see him. They've got to get to Athens sooner or later.
And so it's with this kind of anticipation and disenchantment that I came upon a new website for me. It's called the Black Agenda Report, and it looks as if I'll be visiting there everyday from now on. The insolent montage illustrating this introduction comes from there. At the moment it's a place to go where people have had some history with Mr. Obama. The managing editor of the site, Bruce Dixon, has other issues to discuss, but right now he wants to share some concerns he has about this candidate. It think we may be hearing a lot about this site in coming days...and about these concerns. Here's Bruce Dixon last Thursday~~~ More >
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 27 Nov 2007 @ 09:22
Stillness---
soaking into the rocks,
the cicada's cries.
---Basho
The whole moon and sky come to rest in a single dewdrop on a blade of grass.
---Dogen
Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water.
---Chuang-Tzu
I remember my first plastic straw vividly. You know, a straw: what you put in your glass and suck and the beverage comes up through it and into your mouth. It's sort of a toy too; you can blow bubbles into it and make weird noises when the drink is gone down at the bottom. Sometimes they come in wild shapes that you have to suck harder on to get the liquid all through the roller coaster ride and down your throat. You could find them in a container on the soda fountain counter but quickly they came individually wrapped in paper. We'd tear off one end, dip the other into our milk shake, and blow the wrapper up to the ceiling where it would stick...much to the manager's consternation.
Before the plastic straw they were made of paper. And they'd get soggy eventually...and you'd have to ask for another one, and they just weren't pleasant. The plastic straw could endure the rigors of the milk shake of the 1940s and 50s. It wasn't a real milk shake if the straw didn't stand straight up in the middle of it. You wouldn't even go in a place again that didn't make shakes that thick. So the plastic straw filled a need for which the American civilization cried out.
The soda fountain was the center of social activity back then. Kids went there after school. The soda fountain had other concoctions and drinks there besides milk shakes. In fact it was the dairy bar that came along later that really specialized in the milk shake. If you go from a fountain to a bar, obviously you're getting more serious. The dairy bar was outside town and you needed the family car to get there. In fact, our family used to go to Jenkins Dairy after supper as a special treat...usually to sit at the bar and have milk shakes. But sometimes when we were feeling particularly flagrant and sinful, Mom would order a hot fudge pecan sundae...with whipped cream and a cherry.
A bit later, probably after I'd gone off to college and got filled with strange ideas, I began to think about those plastic straws. I thought during the process of manufacture, teeny tiny particles of plastic must have been left on the inside...so that when you sucked on them, those particles would come up through with the beverage and go down into you somewhere. What would become of those particles? Wouldn't they eventually form a glob of some kind...like when somebody dumps a shopping cart into a creek, the sand and stuff builds up all around it? Couldn't that be like a tumor...and maybe be involved in the cancer suddenly everybody seemed to be getting? Mom, a registered nurse, said I was crazy. More >
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 21 Jul 2007 @ 11:21
Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time---that is the basic message.
---Pema Chodron
Awakened, I hear the one true thing---
black rain on the roof of Fukakusa temple.
---Dogen
I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is, and not as a comment on my life.
---David Ignatow
On the set of Shall We Dance, 1936, are dance director Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire, director Mark Sandrich, Ginger Rogers, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin and musical director Nathaniel Shilkret.
Saturday morning, and I'm delighted to read the cover story of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review. Garrison Keillor writing about George Gershwin. I've neglected to report how wonderful I thought Garrison was in the Robert Altman movie about his radio show. I had put off seeing it because Prairie Home Companion can get too cute at times, and I thought a cast of Kline and Streep and Tomlin and Harrelson might be too great a temptation in that direction. And I've heard Keillor personally is pretty aloof and out there, in his own world...so I thought probably this movie is going to be painful.
Besides, for those of us who grew up in front of a huge radio that was bigger than we were---with glowing, radiating tubes in the back that looked like a Flash Gordon outer space city---how many times had we gone to the movies to see an adaptation of a favorite radio show? Yuck! How many were any good? The Shadow? The Lone Ranger? The Fat Man? Arthur Godfrey? A wonderful voice comes out of that dumb guy? Most were about as flat as a Lux radio version of a movie.
But, except when Meryl Streep tries to loosen him up a little, Garrison Keillor is wonderful in the movie. In fact, he makes great fun of himself as someone totally out in his own world. And he nails radio when he tells Lindsay Lohan---who also is wonderful---that nothing ever ends in radio, nobody gets old, nobody ever dies.
But of course the kind of music on the show---oh god, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly singing Bad Jokes is worth the price of admission...and by the way, The Behind-The-Scenes feature on the DVD may be better than the movie---I say, the music ain't exactly Tin Pan Alley. Tin pans galore, but we don't hear In The Still Of The Night. So why does anyone think Garrison Keillor should be reviewing a new book by Wilfred Sheed about Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Arlen, and Kern?
It's probably because, like me, Garrison grew up in the '40s and listening to radio, so what has come to be known as The Great American Songbook is imprinted in our neurons. If we're walking through Central Park with a girl, and Dancing In The Dark begins to play, we may have to turn our walk into a dance that will be legend in the minds of anyone who sees us. Those songs do that to people. They still do it...maybe more than ever. Many rock singers just have to try an album...like jazz players want that one with strings. Opera singers too...and while it used to be horrible to sit through, some of them are starting to get it. I heard Renee Fleming sing You've Changed the other day...and I had to nudge Billie Holiday over in my mind to make room for her.
So Garrison, like Guy Noir, has blues in the night in his sinews. He can set 'em up, Joe, with the rest of us. The rest of us who have heard a tune on the juke box...a tune so devastating there was nothing more to do but get up off the stool, reel toward the door, and out into the lonely night. Maybe she'll be there. More >
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 20 Apr 2007 @ 09:57
Religion is a way of walking, not a way of talking.
---Dean William R. Inge
I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
---Alan Watts
A Zen master's life is one continuous mistake.
---Dogen
God, how this White House loves that word! Everything they do is ROBUST. The Surge is robust, the economy is robust, our schools are SO robust, anti-abortionists are getting much more robust, and the Gun Lobby never has been so robust! Rove is just busting with robust. He and Bush are in Ohio all the time because we brim with robust!
I suspect it may have been Rove (or his people) who came up with "robust." It has the first 2 letters of his name so that satisfies egomania, and of course "bust" is in it...so he can think of breasts and milk as well as allegiance to his President. What could be better?
The only thing better would be if all Repubs use it...and they do (even when wearing the pink necktie of apology and surrender). Yesterday Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson used it against critics who say the Executive's legal people have been using federal attorneys to wipe out the opposition. She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws." The Justice Department not only is robust, it's COMPLETELY robust. It's like Heaven on earth there!
I love this photograph by Doug Mills for The New York Times this morning. There he is, the Attorney General of the United States of America, land of the free, home of the brave. The man used the "can't remember anything" approach to his testimony. At least it's more down-to-earth than the "best-of-my-recollection" song and dance other attorneys general have used. A busy man has to have people on his staff who remember things for him. I understand that. Do you suppose there is someone at Justice who remembers who is supposed to remember the content of meetings? Maybe they can search around.
In the meantime, you might take a look at Greg Gordon's article for the Baltimore Sun yesterday that contains Cynthia's robust remark...and see if you can detect any "legal" strategies in there about crushing free election. And then I guess I have to like best Lara Jakes Jordan's coverage for AP of Gonzales' pathetic appearance yesterday. More >
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