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 14 Feb 2006 @ 09:08
All the way to Heaven is Heaven.
---St.Catherine of Siena
If only I may grow: firmer, simpler---quieter, warmer.
---Dag Hammarskjold
Since everything is none other than exactly as it is, one may well just break out in laughter.
---Long Chen Pa
Dana in courtship decor, 1981. Somehow my escape plan never materialized.
The marriage had lasted but 5 years. The exterior usually was ideal. Photos of us look perfect. Wonderful job, nice home, great friends, and most important 2 magnificent children. But there was discontent---unacknowledged, and it had spread fatally. The year was 1968, the sexual revolution just had begun, and there had to be a first victim. We were it.
I didn't take the divorce well. I didn't think it was right. I was ashamed. There never had been divorce on either side of my family---that I know of. That's the point: where I came from, dairyfarming and grapegrowing Western New York, such a thing was a disgrace. She was from Connecticut, where you took "incompatability" in your stride. When she remarried 4 years later she said cheerily, "Now the children will have TWO fathers." I didn't look at it as a grand opportunity. I was bereft not to be raising those kids under my own roof.
My journey of wild wander and mythic monsters had begun in a Bridgeport courtroom. Fifteen years later I was wreckage on a distant shore. There had been tumultuous relationships, all failed. Jobs came and went. In 1974, I found myself in Houston, at John Lomax Jr.'s funeral, sitting in a corner on the floor, weeping. I wanted to go home. I did. More >
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 12 Feb 2006 @ 10:42
The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn is you're the same fool. Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.
---Ray Bradbury
I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector.
---William Stafford
One day a student asked Taiga, "What is the most difficult part of painting?"
Taiga answered: "The part of the paper where nothing is painted is the most difficult."
---Artist Zen
Graduating from Middle School last year, Ilona and Keenan, with one of his sisters Ameena.
Yesterday I was sitting around the faculty lounge of one of the Ohio University colleges with a friend. He's a professor and director of graduate programs there. We were drinking some coffee, eating chocolate, and watching the Winter Olympics. Mostly we were talking though. Maybe that combination got us into the topic of early love affairs, but that's what happened. We were comparing our high school experiences. They were rather different, as he was born in Bangladesh.
This morning I'm trying to think back to my very first days of spending time with girls. One time, possibly during the summer vacation between 4th and 5th grade, I went over to see what my little blue-eyed, blonde-haired girlfriend (that my mother approved of a lot) was doing...and as usual her kinda large, faithful, possessive friend Jeannie was there. They were playing house. Being the open-minded, already-liberated guy you know, even in the late '40s, I offered to play. Well...I asked if I could play. Carol and Jeannie whispered together a while, and then said yes. They said I should get up on the porch railing and stand there. I could be Air.
One autumn day in 7th grade social studies class, Miss Weatherly seized a note Carol was passing to Jeannie...and made her stand up in front of the class and read it. She turned the color of a strawberry and with trembling voice did so. It said that her mother didn't want her to be my girlfriend anymore and that she was making her break up with me. Mom feared it would get too serious and we were too young. Then she sat down, put her head in her arms on her desk, and wept ferociously. I was shattered---and part of me still is. Carol married a guy from West Point...and I don't know what happened to Miss Weatherly. More >
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 9 Feb 2006 @ 09:33
There's no need to discuss the principles of koan study;
just listen carefully
to the wind outside
the pines and cedars.
---Ryonen
Someone else
looked at the sky
with the same rapture
when the moon
crossed the dawn.
---Izumi Shikibu
What silence can there be,
What lack of sound compare
to a snowfall from dark air
falling quietly to sea?
---H. D. Eshleman
The lovers last summer, together in Kinzua, Pennsylvania.
Yesterday a letter arrived from Espana. It is from a university student who has become very dear to our family these past several months. She is my son's young lady, finishing her advanced degree in Pamplona. He remains here, helping to manage his business. They both are 22.
How well I remember separation at 22. I was at Harvard and she was in Maine, not so far apart as Jeroch and Karen (pronounced KARR-in, as they do in Norway---although few in her life have learned to say it that way). There was a 4-lane highway a few miles outside Cambridge that went right up there. Maybe that made it worse. I only had a bicycle though. Some nights I used to ride it all the way out to that road, and just stand on an overpass, looking North...howling at the moon. More >
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 25 Oct 2005 @ 07:29
Pride means the end of wisdom.
---Japanese proverb
It is just like learning archery; eventually you reach a point where ideas are ended and feelings forgotten, and then you suddenly hit the target.
---Ying-An
We find great things are made of little things,
And little things go lessening till at last
Comes God behind them.
---Robert Browning
Rosa Parks, 1913 - 2005
"I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die — the dream of freedom and peace."
[link] More >
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 5 Sep 2005 @ 09:24
We sit to settle the self on the self and let the flower of our lifeforce bloom.
---Dainin Katagiri
You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
---Niels Bohr to Albert Einstein
A monk was asked, "What do you do there in the monastery?"
He replied, "We fall and get up, we fall and get up, we fall and get up."
---St. Benedict
The body of a victim of Hurricane Katrina floats in floodwaters in New Orleans September 1, 2005. Up to 300,000 survivors from the hurricane still needed to be evacuated out of disaster zones in Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco said Thursday.
American humorist Harry Shearer devoted his entire hour to a loving portrait of New Orleans last night. If you've never lived there, which is probably the only way really to know this uniquely diverse gumbo of a city, this show might be the best way to get inside. It will be available for streaming sometime this week at his site [link] by clicking Le Show link. He said, "Here is a city, known throughout the world for its cuisine, on its knees begging for food."
The lead story featured by Google News at the moment is a feature from BBC News that went up an hour ago. Its author is Matt Wells, a journalist uniquely qualified in the UK to write a story like this. More >
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