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 7 Jul 2006 @ 12:24
Let's have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not FUTURE ourselves so much. We should NOW ourselves more. "NOW thyself" is more important than "KNOW thyself." Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It's crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of the future. Listen, NOW is good. NOW is wonderful.
---Mel Brooks
The cloud is free only
to go with the wind.
The rain is free
only when falling.
---Wendell Berry
A monk asked Chao-Chou: "What is zazen?"
Choa-Chou replied: "It is non-zazen."
The bewildered monk said: "How can zazen be non-zazen?"
"It's alive!" was Chao-Chou's reply.
---Zen mondo
The author attempts to capture the poet at CAV in Providence, July 1st.
John Tagliabue, the late poet, spoke of The United Nations of Poetry. He created the term sometime in the early 1960s. I don't think he ever wrote a poem about it...or defined exactly what it was. It didn't seem to have an organization or charter or official members. Occasionally, in the early days of its non-existence, he said certain events or readings were sponsored by or part of the activities of The United Nations of Poetry. As the years went by, and there were more poems about "current events" turning up, he mentioned The United Nations of Poetry more and more. Many of us students and friends presumed, I guess, we were members of it...though John never said we were, and I know of nobody who ever asked for a meeting, Maybe I'll learn there were meetings somewhere. There was one on July 1st, however, in Providence, Rhode Island. More >
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 8 Apr 2006 @ 08:06
No matter how much I contemplate this tea bowl
It is still---a tea bowl!
THUS I arrive in San Francisco.
---Soen Nakagawa
At first you will think of practice as a limited part of your life. In time you will realize that everything you do is part of your practice.
---Baba Ram Dass
Living beings are numberless; I vow to serve until all are liberated.
Ignorance and grasping is boundless; I vow to transform and uproot it all.
---Vows of the Boddhisattvas
Chris Mackler / Senior Photographer / cm285504@ohiou.edu
School nurse Janalee Stock administers a color blindness screening to Jared Ricadonna, a student at Morrison Elementary. Stock has been a nurse for the Athens’ City Public School system for 13 years. Stretching her skills among seven schools, Stock spends much of her work week juggling medical emergencies with everyday scrapes and bruises.
Wow, this must be the season of features about esteemed friends! I hope this auspicious Spring is the sign of a stirring and fertile change. First it was a treat to see the article in the Athens News about Elisa Young, and her struggle to farm simply down on the Ohio River in the shadow of more and more power plants crowding the territory. [link] The very next day, yesterday, Ohio University's daily The Post ran a front page story on Janalee Stock, whose nursing serves the Athens School District.
One becomes friends with Janalee in a very practical way. You could be doing almost anything...as long as it is a help somehow to someone else...and you look up, and there she happens to be, doing it too. It could be washing dishes after a community dinner of some kind. It could be setting up for a bake sale or selling the cookies on a street corner. It could be putting away folding chairs from a town meeting. You exchange pleasantries to ease the work, and before you know it and if you discover each other this way enough times, you're friends.
But there's a mystery of some kind to it, a spiritual quality to what Janalee does and how she does it. In the dozen years I've known her, I doubt I've ever talked to her about religious things. She even may shy away from topics like that a bit. (And I mean "shy" in a very good way.) If you say something "spiritual" to her she usually definitely gets it. Mostly she is very down to earth and practical...but in an impressively spiritual way. Let me explain that: as my mother-in-law, Esther Kuhre, and I were talking about Janalee and this article last evening at dinner, I found myself saying, "Janalee never complains." She states facts, she emphasizes goals and objectives, she plans for change...but I think she feels inherently nothing is accomplished by complaining. In fact, that activity can only be negative, spread more exhausting negativity, and ultimately alienate people with its destructiveness. And she just goes around living that way! I look at her do that, and I think, "Janalee is a miracle of some kind!" I hope you take a look at this very impressive piece and feel inspired too~~~ More >
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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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