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 15 Apr 2004 @ 02:21
Cold geese calling in the sky.
Leaves tumbling over the empty hills.
Day is dwindling on the dark village road.
Alone, I carry my empty bowl home.
---Ryokan
Vast solitude
My thinning body
transparent autumn.
---Soen Nakagawa
Worldly acquisitions of wealth and the need of clinging to them, as well as the pursuit of the Eight Worldly Aims, I regard with as much loathing and disgust as a man who is suffering from billiousness regardeth the sight of rich food. Nay, I regard them as if they were the murderers of my father; therefore it is that I am assuming this beggarly and penurious mode of life.
---Milarepa
The picture is of Maureen Dowd receiving a Pulitzer for Commentary in 1999. Sometimes her columns in the New York Times are so insightful, precise, and brilliantly written that the reader actually is moved to take some responsibility for citizenship in this shaky republic. And in an age of Virtual Reality and It's All About Me, such an accomplishment is heroic.
I mean, I know a guy who recently spent $70,000 on a unique red Hummer. It gets 8 miles to the gallon. He spent $200 on gasoline just going to pick it up. He parks it where surveillance cameras provide an image of it at all times to his office---and remote screens at home. If anyone else drives it or fools around with it, computer codes let him know this has happened. He tells people he always wanted one, he had the extra money, so he bought it. Simple as that. I mean, there's a war on, so why not celebrate the advantages? I will not reveal what this man does for a living...unless you ask me privately.
But I digress: back to Ms. Dowd. To most conservatives she is among the most loathsome of individuals, and I must confess sometimes her work turns me off too. But not lately! She has been mightily up in arms about President Bush and his administration...and rarely more so than in her column this morning. More >
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 5 Apr 2004 @ 03:28
An intense love of solitude, distaste for involvement in worldly affairs, persistence in knowing the Self and awareness of the goal of knowing---all this is called true knowledge.
---The Bhagavad Gita
In the blue heavens,
cold geese calling.
On the empty hills,
leaves flying.
---Ryokan
Again the blackbirds sing; the streams
Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams,
And tremble in the April showers
The tassels of the maple flowers.
---John Greenleaf Whittier
Dancing to the Big Band sound at the Penn State Senior Ball of 1936
I have reason to believe and report to you that the disappearance of the art form and social occasion known as the dance band now is complete. It has been the duty of my generation in America to preside over this evolution, and I have embraced it lovingly hoping hard and often I would not witness extinction. The final struggle took 50 years, which is not long in social or species history---but of course nearly a lifetime for this man. I have evidence, however, it has breathed its last.
There was a simple notice in the Events Calendar in Thursday's The Athens News that the Ohio University Jazz Ensemble would perform for dancing at the Athens Community Center on Saturday night. The band is made up of around 15 students playing the traditional instrumentation of this music (3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 5 saxes, 4 rhythm) and I was unaware they had developed a dance repertoire. In most parts of this nation, an opportunity to invite your partner to an actual dance in a ballroom is so rare that I jumped at the chance. I marveled at the wisdom of a teacher/leader to attempt to teach this tradition to a new generation of young people. When we got there, a table was set up at the door and they wanted $25 to get in---but "String Of Pearls" was playing inside, so I plunked down the cash and we walked through the door. More >
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 29 Mar 2004 @ 01:08
Looking for serenity
you have come
to the monastery.
Looking for serenity
I am leaving
the monastery.
---Soen Nakagawa
I want to sing like birds sing
Not worrying who hears or
what they think.
---Jelaluddin Rumi
Vladimir: Did you ever read the Bible?
Estragon: The Bible... (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it.
Vladimir: Do you remember the Gospels?
Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.
---Samuel Beckett
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI (1876-1957)
The Prayer , (1907)
patinated bronze
Do you believe that if you do something wrong God will punish you, and that if you're good He will reward you? Do you think if your nation easily takes over an oil-rich country somewhere, it's proof God is on your side? If I envision myself healed and if others gather themselves together to pray for me to be whole and happy, will it happen? I've always wondered about these kinds of things, and lately I've had occasion to try to pull together some conclusions.
I got an email the other day from an Internet friend in Houston. She had forwarded my writing "A Date With Surgery" to a cancer survivor friend of hers. He had written back that my article was an attempt to "justify" my position, and that in his opinion I failed. He said, "Your friend would have to be taught and accept the underlying emotion that is causing his dis-ease. To do that he will have to be receptive. Reading his 'excuses' tells me he has delegated his health to a white jacket and chooses not to accept responsibility for his own health." He said he'd never "go near a doctor with a knife in his hand." This man claims healing is not medical but spiritual, and that is how he accomplished his own. More >
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 25 Mar 2004 @ 03:59
...and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.
---Jean-Paul Sartre
When you get there, there isn't any there there.
---Gertrude Stein
God never appears to you in person but always in action.
---Mohandas K. Gandhi
Bernard Safran: A Surgeon Working
1982, 37" x 48", oil on masonite
In some ways this article will not be typical of my writing. In the first place I shall begin with a caution about reading it at all. The main information about what I'm doing and what is happening to me---hopefully in some kind of equal balance---is simple and I can tell you that right away. As a routine procedure for prostate cancer, which we have reason to believe I have in a very early stage, I received a total body bone scan last Friday. The results were shared yesterday and they were excellent. We see cancer has not moved into the bones...and there are not other marked abnormalities. It's time to take the next step and that is selection of treatment, and I have done that. We have a date for surgery to remove the entire prostate gland on May 3rd. My urologist, with whom I have been working for a year, will perform the operation.
Some may want or need to read no further. This situation is all about male anatomy of the most personal kind. Surgery is not the stuff for a morning read over your first coffee either...at least for most of us. I'm going to talk about the operation and why we selected this option. I'm going to write about the risks and what may happen to me. You may not be interested in knowing any of that. I certainly never wanted to...until my time came, as I guess in one way or another it comes to us all. I shall not be insulted in the slightest if you simply X out this item from your screen and move on to something you like better. You're now aware that from here until the operation I shall be preparing, and afterwards I'm going to be laid up for a few weeks. That may be enough of an alert. I would appreciate if someone would volunteer to Ming to, or if Ming himself would, edit the Logs for Front Page placement for a couple of months, beginning in May. More >
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 20 Mar 2004 @ 03:41
Endless is my vow
under the azure sky
boundless spring.
---Soen Nakagawa
I wish we were not so single-minded about keeping
our lives moving, and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves and of threatening
ourselves with death.
---Pablo Neruda
Cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words, and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.
---Dogen
A couple of times during my life, circumstances have forced me to accept quite atypical work off the beaten path of success for my career plan. The first time was in the late '60s, following a devastating (for me) divorce, when I became a glorified attendant of some sort in a private psychiatric hospital outside New York. The second time was more recent, after we'd moved to Ohio and I took a bureaucratic job with the Social Security Administration. Both jobs involved receiving considerable hostility from the people I was supposed to serve. But I think of those times fondly because I learned so much. More >
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Comments made herein are available for view and appreciation to members and the general public. JazzoLOG also is open for comment contribution to all who are willing to identify themselves in the usual ways.
I don't know about you, but sometimes I work a long time, cumulatively for hours, on comments I make on these News Logs. I plan to edit this Log regularly and delete things. Before I do that, I want to assure you, I shall notify each commentator of such an amendment so you may have time to copy anything you wish to save and paste somewhere else. Create your own News Log in your profile. |
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