photo - Henry Gilpin - "Highway 1, 1965" Background http://www.johnsexton.com/Henry_Gilpin_remembered.html http://redwoodgallery.co.uk/photos.cfm http://www.freestylephoto.biz/board/gilpin/gilpin_bio.htm http://www.russlevin.com/gilpinthms.html
Jack Gilbert – A wonderful American Poet – Visions of California, Greece and Linda.
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 …
Literary Estimations – Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino
Gore Vidal has always been highly intelligent, disciplined and cranky, and as this video shows, has left himself open to being dismantled due to his use of crude attacks on literary colleagues - not only attacks, but outright belittlement. No one can relish the idea of going up against his sharp tongue. However, by doing …
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Back To The Emerald City
Pacific Northwest Connections Are Critical to Orcas
Wind & Rain
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) – America Breaking Away To Find Its Voice.
Rick Simonson – Seattle 100
Louise Erdrich
Louise is a very powerful woman, speaker and individual. In twenty minutes she is able to frame a profile of the Native American expereince.
La Mer
The San Francisco Renaissance – Kenneth Rexroth
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 …
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To Robinson Jeffers – Czeslaw Milosz
To Robinson Jeffers If you have not read the Slavic poets so much the better. There’s nothing there for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood prolonged from age to age. For them, the sun was a farmer’s ruddy face, the moon peeped through a cloud and the Milky Way …
Hunter Thompson – Writing & Transparency
This is Hunter Thompson reporting on many things from Key West, Fl as he pens an article for the Rolling Stone in 1976. Reading Thompson reminds me of his colorful journalism that borders on genius. He took Tom Wolfe's devices and made them his own - he is certainly unique and how he manages to …
Seattle Spaces
The Third Mind – Asian Influence of the American Perception
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.
Gary Snyder – Thoreau Prize
Zen & The Heart Sutra
The Heart Sutra Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, meditating deeply on Perfection of Wisdom, saw clearly that the five aspects of human existence are empty*, and so released himself from suffering. Answering the monk Sariputra, he said this: Body is nothing more than emptiness, emptiness is nothing more than body. The body is exactly empty, …
Think of Nothing – Alan Watts
An Opportunity To Serve
Hanging Out On The Saratoga Passage
Its sort of boring here, good boring. Earthquakes north at Queen Charlotte Islands and the hurricane back east. Its raining and fifty here. So much to do. Its Sunday and we have a full house, isn't it wonderful?
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent
The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Resource A painting of 17th-century Venice, with a view of the banks of the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace, by Leandro Bassano. <nyt_byline> By CHRYSTIA FREELAND Published: October 13, 2012 IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the …
THE VEXING SIMPLICITY OF NEIL YOUNG – Alec Wilkinson
OCTOBER 17, 2012 THE VEXING SIMPLICITY OF NEIL YOUNG POSTED BY ALEC WILKINSON I was a little surprised when Neil Young published his memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace,” because he is the only artist I have ever encountered who is proud of not reading. Reading would distract him from writing songs, he once told me, meaning interfere …
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Ai Weiwei – Never Sorry
Seattle and Its Mayor, Mike McGinn – Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World?
Seattle and Its Mayor - Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World? Seattle, like the rest of the nation, has decided that cordiality - respect of opinion and differences - is yesterday's practice. Several months ago a local journalist said this: "I honestly believe that Mayor Mike McGinn is the worst office …
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Carmel Point – Robinson Jeffers Tor House
Lead Illustration: Tom Killion BY ROBINSON JEFFERS The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on …
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One-Straw Reveloution – M. Fukuoka – Zen
A Village Without War and Peace A snake seizes a frog in its mouth and slips away into the grass. A girl screams. A brave lad bares his feelings of loathing and flings a rock at the snake. The others laugh. I turn to the boy who threw the stone: “What do you think that’s …
Obama’s Way – October 2012
“There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing,” he said. “For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m …
Just Want to See The Magic
Inmost Request – Suzuki Roshi
Suzuki Roshi San Francisco Zen Center July 15 1965 Originally offered: July 15th, 1965 | Modified October 27th, 2009 by korin July 15, 1965 Rev. S. Suzuki’s talk on Great Prajna Paramita Sutra This morning I want to explain the attainment…the attainment here…it means to resume to our true nature is actually attainments. To attain …
Scientists Adopt Tiny Washington Island as a Warming Bellwether
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times Cathy Pfister is part of a team of scientists conducting research on Tatoosh Island, Wash. By STACEY SOLIE Published: October 6, 2012 fi Scientists Adopt Tiny Island as a Warming Bellwether By STACEY SOLIE TATOOSH ISLAND, Wash. — From a stretch of rocky shoreline on this tiny island, one …
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A Day Looking – Northern Whidbey Island
Chief Seattle’s 1854 Speech
AUTHENTIC TEXT OF CHIEF SEATTLE'S TREATY ORATION "CHIEF SEATTLE'S 1854 ORATION" - ver . 1 Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion upon my people for centuries untold, and which to us appears changeless and eternal, may change. Today is fair. Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds. My words are like …
THEREFORE, YE SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON – ECHOVAR
PHOTO BY AP PHOTO/PAUL SAKUMA
Poem – Living Beings – Near a Western Red Cedar
we are the same as those who came before. yet our distance from our kind is great. do we not see that we the living, all of the living, are a clan? each with natures unique but living and this simple fact: our being. existence is a bond so great in this vast universe of …
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San Juan Islands in Winter
This is a series of photographs taken in the winter of 2012. The San Juan Islands rest between Seattle and Vancouver, BC in the Salish Sea. The Salish Sea is part of a body of water that extends the inland sea of the Pacific from Olympia, Washington to Haines, Alaska.
James Hillman – Dream’s Language
Dreams follow their own logic. And the use of logic is a poor choice of words. Is there a beginning, middle and end? Or does our waking mind force the linear script onto the contents? Dreams often do not recognize time and therefore a linear story line is not the point. What is the point? …
Gabrialle Bakker – East & West
Gabrialle Bakker is a Seattle artist who this year was awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant ( http://www.pkf.org ). Her work often shows the confluence of the euro and the orient. This cultural struggle is at the heart of the west, from Vancouver, BC to San Diego. Many of the western artists, writers and thinkers have …
Walt Whitman’s Advice to Poets
From the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat …
MIYA ANDO – Zen & Art
The following link is to an interview which allows for a short discussion of nondualism applied to art and painting. https://news.artnet.com/market/interview-with-miya-ando-334259
Richard Avedon
"You can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. The surface is all you've got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surfce. All you can do is to manipulate the surface—gesture, costume, expression—radically and correctly. And I think Schiele understood …
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 …
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Northwest Sea Wave
Northwest-style breakers - rugged, choppy, lacking the elegant form of their brothers in the south. But they are orderly, waiting their turn in rows to slam the beach, expressing their power and force. One after another, after another. Defining rhythm, expressing the forces of depth and wind and rise.
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 …
Home Away From Home
Half Moon Bay, CA
America’s Literary Critic – Louis Menand
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 …
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