Desert Solitaire – Edward Abbey

I do not recall if Abbey studied zen. It appears to me that inherent in his craft is the idea that what he does not say is as important as what he does. Each sentence zigs and zags around, over and under so many norms of American society, and he does so with nary a …

Huang Po (Huangbo Xiyun) ~ 黄檗希運 ~ zen buddhist ~ Chinese ~ Tang Dynasty ~ 850AD

Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love Huang Po taught his students they were already enlightened. I know of one student of Zen who threw a translation of Huang Po out of his apartment window, and the book, like a block of wood, made it, on more than one occasion, into an open trash can …

Italo Calvino – Mr Palomar’s Philosophical Book of Mental Illustrations, Or Poets, Take Back The World.

Mr Palomar is an accomplished practitioner of zen buddhism. He is astute at seeing what is before him as it is. Where he gets into trouble is when seeing, or being, is not enough and he needs to develop his strategies and plans together with his angst at trying to do the right thing in …

for this time only

“Ichigo-Ichie ” Once-in-a-Lifetime Ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会, literally “one time, one meeting”) is a Japanese term that describes a cultural concept often linked with famed tea master Sen no Rikyu. The term is often translated as “for this time only,” “never again,” or “one chance in a lifetime.”Ichi-go ichi-e is linked with Zen Buddhism and concepts …

Gary Synder – A Curse

Volcano Woman - Wayne Young - Northwest Coast (Nisga’a / Haida) acrylic on paper 30" x 23" 2005 ----------------------------------------- He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village The Dimensions of a Haida Myth Gary Synder The Curse From the Foreward: "A curse on monocultural industrial civilization and its almost deified economic and political systems that compete, exploit, an …

Bolivia Enshrines Natural World’s Rights With Equal Status for Mother Earth

photo:  Esto es Bolivia Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation John Vidal in La Paz ,The Guardian, Sunday 10 April 2011 13.17 EDT Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all …

John Cage – American Inventor

  Photograph by Vincent Mentzel 1988/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux. " Cage requires a fundamentally different mode of listening: you need to relinquish expectations that successive sounds will fall into familiar harmonic relationships, or indeed relationships of any kind, and instead treat each moment in isolation. You “regard” the sounds as you would objects in a gallery. More …

Czeslaw Milosz – Biography – The Wilno Poet Under California Skies

Czeslaw Milosz - The Wilno Poet Under California Skies November 2012 It is not an anomaly to be transformed by the breadth and scope of the Northern California landscape. To stand on a mountain and look over the rocky shore and the expanse of the blue Pacific is a powerful sensation. While one's awe eventually …

Poem – Now It Is

Now It Is motions today are real,  and yet they house   potentialities   that are full.  They are not present   and yet the scent of them is.  it is the mystery of their  unfolding   that draws me in.

Dongshan’s Five Ranks: A Zen Teaching on Nonduality

http://www.judithragir.org/2012/06/dongshans-five-ranks/ Dongshan’s Five Ranks There is some disagreements over the 5 Ranks of Dongshan within the Soto School. Some people say that it is too much of a developmental step-ladder and loses the “nowness” and immediacy of “each moment is enlightenment”. In my lineage, the labeling of a “kensho” is looked down upon because we …

Two Paths

Expression follows two paths of existence — exterior and interior. Of course in reality they are one, they are the same. We are taught that they are different. Interior existence cannot be "seen" with our senses, nor can others see them. Abstraction and the unconscious make up much of this terrain. Photography captures the exterior …

Lincoln – Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design.

Lincoln - Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design. Upon reading Edmund Wilson's profile of Lincoln in "Patriotic Gore - Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War," I am taken by the literary and poetic drama of the account. Lincoln is shown to be chiefly literary in character — it is what …