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 1 Jun 2007 @ 07:00
There is not a petal of a flower or a blade of grass that does not configure the Way.
---Bassui
Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
---Richard Whately
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.
---Federico Fellini
Offering of Fruits to Moon Goddess, 1757
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
(b. 1727, Venezia, d. 1804, Venezia)
I have to be very careful here. Here I am offering up an article about a (The?) feminine perspective, and all the quotations up there are by guys. Is it a (The?) male perspective to explain things and solve problems, as those gentlemen are attempting? Women often respond by telling me what's wrong with my thinking and ignoring my solutions.
And of course there is a thin line between reporting and advocacy. I've had a whole life of trouble through advocating things, albeit worthwhile. Civil rights, anti-nukes, peace, organics, education and citizenship, cleaning up fraud and corruption, anti-consumerism. But of all the movements I tried to support, the feminine one has been the trickiest around which to maintain objectivity.
So I'm going to try just to report something here that I think may be significant and of interest having to do with what some call a particularly feminine outlook. Actually Cathy Holt is going to report it, so I'm hoping to get pretty much off the hook. I've subscribed to Cathy's occasional newsletter almost from the first day I got onto the Internet. Originally she wrote about natural foods and the alternative lifestyle, but from the vantage point of someone still struggling in the mainstream. That appealed to me because I try to do that. But a couple years ago, she decided to involve herself in an experimental community of people in North Carolina, who want off the grid and out of the rat race. As far as I know, there she has stayed...and while she doesn't write much about the struggles of such attempts, it seems to be going OK.
This article is a bit different, as she reports on a workshop she attended. Since most of the people who read what I send out---or at least skim through the ones with intriguing titles (before hitting delete)---have an interest in what direction the species seems to be headed, I'm hoping Cathy's effort will be helpful and inspiring toward hope! More >
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 18 Mar 2007 @ 10:46
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.
---Henry David Thoreau
Every morning I awaken torn between the desire to save the world and the inclination to savor it.
---E.B. White
A zendo is not a place for bliss and relaxation. It is a furnace room for the combustion of our delusion. What tools do we need to use? Only one. We've all heard it, yet we use it very seldom. It is called "attention."
---Charlotte Joko Beck
I wouldn't be surprised if more Internet browsers than I found ourselves clicking around the same sites for the first time yesterday. One is www.talkingpointsmemo.com and the other, associated with it, is www.tpmmuckraker.com . My wife gave me the heads-up by sending me their "Canned US Attorney Timeline," which I promptly linked in a comment at another entry [link] . Impressed and curious, I started looking around the site, and before long found myself at the adjoining muckraker blog.
Also yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran a column about these guys, and I think the writing is worthy to share. The article's author is Terry McDermott, who lives in Iowa I think, but is a regular correspondent for the LA Times. A couple years ago he wrote a book, and when Terry Gross interviewed him for NPR's Fresh Air, here's how she led off~~~
"Fresh Air from WHYY, May 4, 2005 ยท McDermott, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times was skeptical of the way the Sept. 11 hijackers were portrayed. So he traveled to 22 countries to research their identities, motives and life circumstances.
"He found that they weren't deeply disturbed. They came from intact families, most were middle-class, few were deeply religious, and none were (sic) abused or estranged. His new book is Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It." [link]
The book still is at Amazon [link] but the essay I'm talking about is a tribute to serious bloggers everywhere. I'll preserve it right now~~~ More >
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 3 Feb 2007 @ 06:59
To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
---Henry David Thoreau
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men would believe and adore!
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
In prayer, come empty, do nothing.
---St. John of the Cross
Photo of Molly Ivins by Carolyn Mary Bauman/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT
The title grows in significance when we learn Molly gave it to her last column in The Texas Observer a week ago Friday. [link] She was writing about "the war" and it was a phrase she found herself using often these past several years, but with her death this week it rings like an epitaph. Of course I could never get "enough" of Molly, and like someone egging on a fighter I usually wanted even more. When Bush was running for president I wanted her to be harder on him, knowing all she did about him as an atrocious Texas governor (who touted educational programs he never funded and used the death sentence on prisoners whenever he could) and also as a fellow teenager in Houston. And now who can possibly take her place? When my wife gave me the news the other night, weeping I lamented, "With Ann Richards gone too, there are no more wild Texas women." I hope I'm terribly wrong about that.
The past few hours I've done the research of mourning by just beginning to ascend a mountain of anecdote and praise written for her by bloggers and fellow journalists. I haven't been able to compile a "best-of" collection for you, because there is just so much. I can tell you there is writing going on everywhere, and I don't remember an outpouring like this for anybody. Maybe I can list a few names and a few sites where I went, in case you want to celebrate her life too. More >
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 3 Dec 2006 @ 12:01
The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
---Henry Miller
Lord, the air smells good today,
straight from the mysteries within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden,
Free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise.
---Jalal Ad-Din Rumi
On the tips of ten thousand grasses
each and every dewdrop contains the light of the moon.
Since the beginning of time,
not a single droplet has been forgotten.
Although this is so,
some may realize it, and some may not.
---Dogen
A View of the Hudson from West Point
(Robert Walter Weir - 1863)
One month after the start of the Revolution in 1776, the Continental Congress declared a fortress somewhere on the Hudson River to be essential. By 1778 it was clear a sharp turn in the river at a place called West Point was the best position from which to prevent British Redcoats from advancing. General George Washington declared the plateau there to be "the key to the continent" in terms of its strategic location for the War. He sent his trusted officer, a Polish emigre named Thaddeus Kosciuszko, to secure the place and build a fort. The British never attempted an attack on these defenses, and when the plot involving Benedict Arnold to betray West Point was foiled, the internal waterway that united the Northeast remained in American hands.
Remembering the importance of this fort, in 1783 Washington proposed establishment of a military academy there for the training of citizen soldiers. Debate ensued about that idea because of a danger of creating a military elite. Nevertheless in 1790, nearly 2000 acres were purchased there by the government from a private citizen for about $11,000, and on March 16th, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law an act of Congress establishing West Point Military Academy.
In 2002, Bill Moyers was making a documentary about the importance of the Hudson to the country's history and environment. I don't know if he made the 4 hour PBS program to help celebrate West Point's Bicentennial or if it was a coincidence, but he certainly included a large section about the Academy. [link] Maybe somebody at West Point remembered that recently, and as a result invited him to deliver the 34th annual Sol Feinstone Lecture Series oration. Dr. Feinstone had endowed the Academy with the lecture series, providing the topic always be about the meaning of freedom. I don't think I was alone in surprise when my wife let me know Moyers had been selected, had agreed, and actually gone before all those cadets (and the public) with a speech on November 15th. Nor has my surprise lessened as I've seen this morning copies and excerpts sprouting up all over the Internet! On the Left and on the Right, the address is being hailed as one of the most important for the current time and possibly among the greatest in our history. So far as I know, TomPaine.com was first to post it [link] but on Friday Army Times put it up too [link] . More >
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 26 Aug 2006 @ 15:33
When a dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today's begging is finished: at the crossroads
I wander by the side of the Buddhist shrine
Talking with some children.
Last year a foolish monk.
This year, no change!
---Ryokan
The temple bell stops
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
---Basho
How do you tell the difference between a member of the Boomer generation and someone from the generation just before? Here's one way: ask if there's a preference toward a trumpet or an electric guitar. If you're a boy 16 or 17 in many cultures, you like things loud and fast. Boomers love a couple guys on stage with amplified guitars let out full. Whatever the generation that came before them is called prefers a trumpet section in a band, no microphone needed. Both sounds make your hair stand on end and are wonderful, but most Boomers seem to have let the wind instruments lapse into near extinction.
Anyone who knows the name Maynard Ferguson probably can tell you what it was like the first time you heard him...and maybe what the song was. For me it was a feature for him, arranged by Shorty Rogers, of the Bob Haggart-Johnny Mercer ballad "What's New." Joe Rico played it on the radio nearly every day out of that little AM station in Niagara Falls. I remember going downtown to the Music Box record shop (I must have been 12 or 13) and plunking down my 50 cents for a 45 rpm recording of it. (The other side was terrible: "The Hot Canary".) It featured a range of the trumpet previously considered impossible on just one instrument. Maynard played low down into a trombone sound...and then all the way up within seconds to an octave and a half above high C, where generally flutes take over. The arrangement started slow, then changed tempo to way up, finishing off with Maynard pasting notes higher and higher until he nailed that last one that made people gasp throughout his 60 year career of doing it.
At the time Maynard (we always called him by his first name) was the high note man with the Stan Kenton Orchestra...but he was just about to leave along with over half the band for adventures on the West Coast. Us guys didn't find that out for a while, and so in the meantime we started collecting all the Kenton records we could find. We thought every high trumpet on them must be Maynard. Capitol put out records then without any dates on them, so little did we know we were listening to Kenton from 10 years earlier when Chico Alvarez, also from Montreal by the way, may have been the guy. Didn't matter though: we were getting turned on to some of the most radical orchestral music (and loudest) of the 20th Century. More >
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